Here’s a three-part story on the Pretty Things Once Upon a Time 1838 & 1945 release on 3/14 coming from their Facebook page:
…for 1838 & 1945 we looked for somewhere with a bit more space and settled on the ever-fabulous Publick House in Brookline. Also, this bar has two sections, enabling us to have an 1838-themed section and a 1945 section. Hooray!
So: if you can come along to the launch party (March 14th, 4-8pm, Publick House in Brookline), which I hope you will, you can dress up as a 1940s lad or ladette, or if you want, 1830s would also be appropriate. 1945 is what we are shooting for though.
For Part I—Brewing History, Part II—The History & Part III—The Party…
Brewing History (and costume parties)
Pretty Things Beer & Ale Project has a side-project: a project within a project. Once Upon a Time takes beers from history and re-brews them. We have a new website for these beers, called oldbeers.com, and a new twitter account, @OldBeers. Hooray!
We brew these old beers because we want to drink them. Also, because we want to dress up in period costume and ponce about whilst drinking them. I think a lot of serious pursuits in life only really appeal because of the dressing up: weddings and the British Monarchy both spring immediately to mind. We here at Pretty Things HQ have also developed a fascination for putting our old beers in their rightful historical context. So here comes an epic, three-part blog, split into: 1. The Beers, 2. The History, and 3. The Costumes. Read whichever appeals most. Or, of course, none of ‘em…
History Part 1: The Beers
For Once Upon a Time, we brew beers from the past. We work with a beer historian, Ron Pattinson, who gives us original brew-day documents (the 1838 brewsheet is shown here). Then we brew the beer.
It sounds simple, but you won’t find many other historical beers brewed this way. There’s no creativity involved in our brewing for OUAT. We reproduce as closely as possible what the brewer-from-the-murky-past did the day he wrote the records in his amazing olden-days curly handwriting. We don’t let anything get in the way.
Brewing these beers is challenging: to our heads, the brew house and our wallets. First of all, resisting the temptation to tinker with the recipes is hard: that’s why we are so proud of the authenticity of these beers. It’s easy to see these recipes as inspiration instead of fact; it’s easy to criticize them; it’s easy to think the beer will be boring or horrible! Even Ron once told me he was once tempted to throw a few extra pounds of hops into a batch, and he’s the historian! But we resist all these thoughts and make the beers exactly as they were written in history. Dann always says, if there’s a choice between making a better beer and making a more authentic beer, we will always choose authenticity over improvement. (This only holds true for Once Upon a Time, not our other beers!)
Second, these beers were brewed in very different breweries and very different times. In the 1800s, hops were a major commodity crop in Europe and the Middle East: hops were cheap, available, whole leaf plants. They were chucked into brewkettles in enormous quantities. It was not unusual to see a ton of hops used in a batch of beer. Yes: an actual ton, as in the unit of measurement. Today hops are delivered in 11lb vacuum-packed mylar bags, not by the warehouse-load. Of course, our brewhouse and batch size is waaaay smaller than those historical batches, so we can do it: but these hop quantities still cause major issues with yield, clog up the brew house, and make it hard to figure out how to make any money.
The first beer we did was a Mild ale from 1832. This beer had so many whole-leaf hops added to it you could stand a stick up in the boil. We were forbidden to use whole leaf any more after that: the hops clogged every valve in the brewery. So now we use the right amount of hops, but they are pelletized, not whole leaf. These hoppier beers have more than twice the hopping rate of a modern American double IPA. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Talking of pipe smoking, that’s one of the unique characters we’ve noticed in the hoppier beers from the Once Upon a Time series. Something about boiling that many hops in sweet wort leads to a caramelized, smokey character. And as Dann loves to point out, these beers would invariably have been enjoyed by mustachioed fellows with a pipe in one hand and a beer in the other. (That’s his excuse for his two new favorite hobbies anyway).
So, on to the beers we’ve just brewed. We were looking to make something else similar to the first 1832 Mild we did. People are always asking us how on earth that beer is a Mild ale. The answer is, that Mild then did not mean dark or weak, it meant young. I love this. History at work, making us modern beer drinkers who like to put beers into style boxes all sound like a right bunch of nitwits. But, we’ve also always wanted to make an “actual” mild, as in a dark, low gravity drinking beer. Of course, Ron had the perfect way to kill two birds with one stone, and do a fun historical experiment at the same time.
So, these are our new historical beer releases: two beers from the same brewery, brewed under the same brand name, 107 years apart. X Ale, 22nd November 1838, and X Ale, 22nd February 1945. These beers were from Barclay Perkins brewery in London (now long closed). They were brewed & sold as the same beer over these 107 years, but the recipe and process changed dramatically. The beer changed from a golden, 7.4%, extremely hopped ale in 1838 into a 2.8% dark grainy beer in 1945. Probably a lot of factors came into play: wars, hop shortages, grain pricing, rationing, taxation, patriotism, the motorcar, the industrial revolution… I’m guessing these all played a role in the weakening and darkening of this beer. Interestingly, since 1945, Mild ale in Britain hasn’t changed so much: it’s still dark, and one of the weakest beers produced.
All we can say for certain is that these beers are faithful recreations showing that dramatic change was afoot between 1838 and 1945, and you can taste history-in-action by drinking the two beers side by side, starting on March 14th at Publick House in Brookline, and shortly after in bottles and kegs far and wide! Ron Pattinson will be flying in from Amsterdam for the occasion, so if you’d like to meet the historian behind it all, that’s another reason to come on down. The more compelling reason, of which more in Part III, may or may not be… the costumes!!
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History Part II: The History!
Ah, being an armchair historian is great. I have Wikipedia-d-it-up and read London: an Autobiography by Jon E. Lewis, and now I consider myself a great expert on the context from which these two beers emerged. So in other words, please take the factual content of what follows with a few grains of salt, but I hope you enjoy it nonetheless.
1838 London was Dickensian, grubby, and poverty-filled. Big Ben hadn’t been built; Trafalgar Square didn’t exist. The rich built lavish houses in the suburbs, which included St John’s Wood and Hampstead. The Industrial Revolution was forging full steam ahead, and workers were pouring into the city from the countryside, crammed into poor housing surrounding the industrial centers. In 1838, London’s population was well over 1 million, and most of these people had been born outside the city. Young and old, they worked in match factories, textile mills, the enormous dockyards and on the new railways which spread further into the city almost daily. Breweries were part of this revolution, supplying beer (which was still safer than water), to the masses. Beer was big business; in 1838 45,394 licenses were issued for beer-houses (today, there are 7000 pubs in the whole of Greater London, a far bigger area). Beer was delivered by draymen on carts pulled by enormous horses. This photo, from the website beerworkers.com, shows an apparently teenage drayman delivering a hogshead (54 UK gallon = 3.5 regular kegs!). Breweries were enormous: on a scale that we can only imagine today. Whitbread’s brewery was described in 18xx as covering an area the size of xxx. Beer was not stored in casks, but rather it filled whole rooms, floor to ceiling. These rooms each held up to 3800 barrels: more than Pretty Things will brew this year! They were made watertight with the help of Josiah Wedgewood of pale-blue-china fame.
Beer was an everyday substance, consumed in quantities by young and old (along with my other favorite drink, tea). This was due in part to the prevalence of disease, among which cholera was king. It wasn’t yet known that cholera was spread through drinking water, but people suspected it and knew that drinking beer was safe (brewery workers didn’t die of cholera). Tea was also safe since the water was boiled; in summer when people drank their water cold, cholera outbreaks emerged more often. It seems surprising, then, that Mild ale in those days was not the weak beer we drink today but was a heavily hopped strong ale. I don’t really have an answer for that, beyond the conclusion that being a bit drunk all the time must have been considered normal!
Trade Unions emerged in the 1800s and disputes included one in 1834 over which beer was given to building workers to drink: this emphasizes the high place that beer held in the everyday working man’s life.
I think we can allow ourselves some cheerfulness amongst the stories of poverty, disease and squalor. 47,000 pubs must have made for some jovial moments in a city like London. I like to imagine all sorts of mustachioed fellows standing elbow to elbow drinking this 1838 7.4% X Ale throughout the City, laughing at rude pictures of French ladies and what-not. The Eagle Tavern on City Road in the West End held entertainments for the “lower orders” and in 1838 advertised a Gala every night with fireworks, theatre, dancing, vaudeville, and fountains. So clearly there was some fun to be had if you could afford it.
February 22nd, 1945 in London was another place altogether. The city had been bombed, badly, and VE day was still a couple of months away. Rationing, evacuation, the war, the home front: these had split families, taken away belongings, and I’m guessing it had an effect on the beers brewed too. So what we have made I think is a utilitarian beer, a beer designed to provide comfort and entertainment to a bedraggled and tired bunch of people, with minimal resources and at minimal cost. That said, it’s a cracking beer! As probably most of us know, there was much fun to be had in wartime London. And of course, you don’t need me to tell you about the stiff-upper-lipped-salt-of-the-earth Londoners of World War II. Probably the biggest cliché in British history, but also one of our finest hours. I even have a second hand story from my Aunty Tilly who was a teacher then: one of her 8 year old pupils came in to say there was a man waiting to see her in the playground. When she went outside, she found her date for the night waiting for her in a tank!
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History Part III: The Costumes!!
Aha! And now for the really fun bit. When we release a Once Upon a Time beer, we invariably take the opportunity to don a bit of period garb and gad about the place like we’re on Masterpiece Theatre. The past three releases were at Deep Ellum in Allston, but for 1838 & 1945 we looked for somewhere with a bit more space and settled on the ever-fabulous Publick House in Brookline. Also, this bar has two sections, enabling us to have an 1838-themed section and a 1945 section. Hooray!
So: if you can come along to the launch party (March 14th, 4-8pm, Publick House in Brookline), which I hope you will, you can dress up as a 1940s lad or ladette, or if you want, 1830s would also be appropriate. 1945 is what we are shooting for though.
So: What to Wear? February 22nd 1945 was at the very end of World War II, so rationing was in full force, and Londoner’s wardrobes had no doubt been depleted over the last 6 years of war, the Blitz, going up in smoke etc. So clothing would have been fashioned out of what was available, with a lot of mending and making-do going on. Functional items for women such as turban hats (to cover unwashed hair) and flat shoes (better for driving tanks in) were popular. At the same time though, the silhouette and accessories were quite feminine, in a uniformy way: tucked in waists and belts, shoulder pads, little hats perched on one’s bouffant, and red lips. For men, you can go one of two ways: Frank Sinatra or Winston Churchill. Or wear a uniform. Why not?! You should see the one Dann’s wearing!
For my costume, I found a 1940s women’s suit on ebay for quite a steal, and I have a hat to go with it. Now I just have to figure out how on earth they did their hair back then: it looks impossible to me, but I will be having a bash. We shall see!!!
We hope you'll join us next Wednesday at Publick House. If not, we hope you'll try the beers, hopefully side-by-side, and appreciate the very long and colorful history of London beer and brewing, and how amazing the links between people and their beers have been throughout the last several hundreds of years.
Cheers!
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