Home Buy Amber Gold and Black , the British beer styles bible FAQ - False Ale Quotes Myth 1: Ralph H

Home Buy Amber Gold and Black , the British beer styles bible FAQ – False Ale Quotes Myth 1: Ralph Harwood invented porter as a substitute for three-threads Myth 2: Hops were forbidden cheap caribbean cruise by Henry VI Myth 3: Medieval ale-conners wore leather breeches and tested ale by pouring some on a wooden bench and then sitting in it and seeing if they stuck to the bench Myth 4: George Hodgson invented IPA to survive the long trip to India Six more myths about hops Myth 6: As early as the ninth century, the Abbey of St Gall in Switzerland had three breweries in full operation
It was terrific to see a positive story on the BBC about beer, with the coverage of the Great Baltic Adventure , the project to take Imperial Russian Stout back to Russia by boat, just the way it was done 200 and more years ago. But what s this claim here, at 1:05 by BBC reporter Steve Rosenberg, talking about the first exports of stout from England cheap caribbean cruise to the Baltic:
Nooooooooooooo! Please, there are enough myths about beer history already, without new ones being started. Let s make it clear, right now: the stout exported to Russia was NOT brewed strong to stop it freezing. If it had been cold enough to freeze the beer, the ocean itself would have frozen over, and the ships wouldn t have been able to get through. It was brewed strong because that s the way the customers liked it.
Actually, and with respect to Tim O Rourke, whose idea the Great Baltic Adventure cheap caribbean cruise was, and who roped in 11 British brewers from Black Sheep to Meantime to supply Imperial Russian Stouts to take to St Petersburg by sea, the Russians also liked another cheap caribbean cruise strong English brew in the 18th century, Burton Ale , the thick, sweet, brown ale brewed in Burton upon Trent and shipped out of Hull. But on March 31 1822 the Russian government cheap caribbean cruise introduced a new tariff that banned almost every article of British manufacture, from cotton goods to plate glass, knives cheap caribbean cruise and forks to cheese, umbrellas to snuff boxes – and Shrub, Liquors, Ale and Cyder . Porter, however – and this included what we would now call stout – was left untouched. The Burton ale trade to the Baltic was wrecked, but British porter brewers could send as much of the black stuff to St Petersburg as they wanted.
cheap caribbean cruise Porter was left alone, cheap caribbean cruise presumably because it was the beer the Russians felt they could not duplicate: although porter was reported as being brewed in St Petersburg in 1801, there was a long-standing myth that only Thames water could make good porter, and certainly Russian porter had a bad reputation later in the 19th century. One English writer cheap caribbean cruise in 1841 wrote of St Petersburg that The stuff manufactured here under the name of porter is little better than the rincings [sic] of blacking bottles. The Russian tariff in 1822 (a similar cheap caribbean cruise one had been introduced in 1816, but seems not to have had any effect) had three important results as far as British brewing history was concerned: it encouraged the Burton brewers to start selling more of their Burton ale at home; it encouraged them to look for new markets abroad, which led to the first Burton-brewed cheap caribbean cruise India Pale Ales (or to be exact, cheap caribbean cruise what became known as India Pale Ales); and it encouraged the London porter brewers and their imitators to carry on brewing extremely strong stouts.
There was already a good market for porter cheap caribbean cruise in the Baltic: the traveller cheap caribbean cruise William Coxe, who went to Russia with Samuel Whitbread, son of the founder of the Chiswell Street brewery, wrote in 1784 of the Russians that Their common wines are chiefly claret cheap caribbean cruise Burgundy and Champaigne [sic] and I never tasted English beer and porter in greater perfection and abundance. The average imports of porter and English cheap caribbean cruise beer into St Petersburg between 1780 and 1790, according to William Tooke, writing in 1800, were worth 262,000 roubles cheap caribbean cruise a year, when the rouble cheap caribbean cruise was five to the pound sterling. Tooke also wrote of the Russian upper classes cheap caribbean cruise that The ordinary table wines are Medoc and Chateau-Margot; besides porter and english ale, quas [kvass] and mead, which are always placed cheap caribbean cruise on the table, that the guests may help themselves when they please, without speaking to a servant. In 1818 almost 214,000 bottles of porter were exported to St Petersburg, with the figure for 1819 being just under 122,600 bottles.
St Petersburg was not the only port for porter: a writer in 1815, James Hingston Tuckey, said that London porter was also imported through Riga, and Danzig, cheap caribbean cruise then in Prussian Poland. This was not a one-way trade, however: cheap caribbean cruise the ships coming back from the Baltic brought staves cheap caribbean cruise of Memel oak to make beer casks with: and also isinglass, used for clearing beer. The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine in 1799 quoted from a travel book recording a journey in the southern provinces of Russia:
The most valuable produce of the sturgeon fishery is the isinglass prepared from their air bladders. This article is principally exported from St Petersburg to England, where it is used in the beer and porter breweries in large quantities. The English supply the Spaniards, Portuguese, Dutch, cheap caribbean cruise and French with this commodity for clarifying cheap caribbean cruise their wines. According to the list of exportation printed by the English factory at St Petersburg, there were exported in British vessels from 1753 to 1768 between one and 2,000 pood of isinglass; from 1769 to 1786 from two to 3,000; in late years, however, usually 4,000, and in 1788 even 6,850 pood of that article. The exportation to other countries has also amounted within these few years to more than one thousand pood. This large and almost incredible exportation has tended considerably to increase even in these last-mentioned years the price of the different qualities of this article at Astrakhan itself; and on the Exchange of St Petersburg, where, previous to the year 1778, isinglass of the best quality did not exceed thirty-six rubles a pood, it has recently been advanced to ninety rubles.
Factory there was being used in the sense of trading centre : and a pood was equal to just over 36 pounds, so 6,850 pood is a little more than 110 tons of isinglass – a lot of sturgeon swim bladders. (Just for comparison, in 1889 Barclay Perkins, then one of the biggest breweries in the world, was using just 10 tons of isinglass a year.)
cheap caribbean cruise The evidence is that from late in the 18th century, at least, an especially strong porter was being specifically exported to Russia. The landscape painter Joseph Farington wrote in his diary for August 20 1796: “I drank some Porter Mr Lindoe had from Thrale’s Brewhouse. He said it was specially brewed for the Empress cheap caribbean cruise of Russia and would keep seven years.” ( Thrale s , of course, was still the operating name at that time of the Anchor brewery, Southwark, controlled since 1781 by the partnership of Barclay Perkins, and Mr Lindoe was probably John Lindoe of Norwich, who was related to the Barclays by marriage.) A history of St Saviour cheap caribbean cruise s church in Southwark in 1795 said of the local big brewer: Thrale s intire [that is, porter] is well known as a delicious beverage, from the frozen regions of Russia to the burning sands of Bengal and Sumatra. The empress of all the Russias is indeed so partial to porter, that she has ordered repeatedly very large quantities for her own drinking, and that of her court.
Was that porter sent out to the Russian imperial court (and remember, porter at this time still covered what we would separate out today, because of its strength, as stout ) already being called Imperial ? The records suggest that this may be a usage that sprang up long after the beer itself was first brewed, much like India Pale Ale was an expression that appeared decades cheap caribbean cruise after hopped pale ales were first exported to India . And Russian cheap caribbean cruise seems not to have been attached to Imperial Stout until the early 20th century. Indeed, cheap caribbean cruise the first nation to have its name linked to Imperial stout looks to be Ireland.
The earliest use of Imperial to describe a beer that I have found comes from the Caledonian Mercury of February 1821, when a coffeehouse cheap caribbean cruise in Edinburgh was advertising Edinburgh Ales, London Double cheap caribbean cruise Brown Stout and Imperial Porter, well worth the attention of Families . So Imperial Porter comes before Imperial Stout – although to a late Georgian cheap caribbean cruise drinker, stout, or at least brown stout, WAS porter, just the strongest version thereof. The next also comes from the Caledonian Mercury , two years later, and this time the beers mentioned are Best London Porter , Brown Stout , Double Brown Stout and Imperial Double Brown Stout .
These are both retailers advertisements, and do not show what terminology the brewers themselves were using. The first evidence for THAT comes in a historic announcement made by the great London Beer Brewers in the first week of October 1830. The timing cheap caribbean cruise is hugely important: cheap caribbean cruise this was just over a fortnight before cheap caribbean cruise what was known later as the Beerhouse Act was due to come into operation. The Beerhouse Act was meant by the Duke of Wellington s government as a massive free trade exercise, liberating the brewing and beer retailing businesses from perceived restrictions and barriers to entry. The Act allowed any householder who was eligible to pay the poor rate to sell beer, ale or porter (but not wine or spirits) by retail by purchasing cheap caribbean cruise a one-year excise licence for two guineas (£2 2s). The licensing magistrates, that is, in effect, the local gentry (supposedly the allies of the larger brewers) had no say over who could be granted one of these new beerhouse licences, unlike the full licence, which was under their control. The tax on beer was removed (though it stayed on malt), while the brewer’s licence was fixed at 10 shillings for the smallest operators, and only £2 for anyone producing 100 to 1,000 barrels a year. The expectation was that there would be a huge increase in the numbers of retail beer outlets, cheap caribbean cruise and also in the numbers of small retail brewers.
The great London Beer Brewers , that is, the 11 or so big London porter houses, which included the biggest brewers in the country at that time, in a