Category: Beer History

The Home Brewer’s Guide to Vintage Beer by Ron Pattison

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This entry is part 40 of 56 in the series 2022 Reads

As always, I’m posting this a while after actually finishing the book. Supposedly, I read this book a few years ago… but I don’t really remember doing so. Perhaps that’s the result of sleep-deprivation, since the time when I (supposedly) read it, my son was very young. In any case, I thought I’d get a refresher on English beers, and this fall I might brew up a few of them.  I’m without the two brewing books I used to find most useful and/or inspiring while planning out my brewing, what that was a more frequent pursuit: Ray Daniels’ Designing Great …

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Wait for Me, Day 21

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This entry is part 21 of 23 in the series Playing "Wait for Me"

This is an entry in a journaling game I’m currently playing. An explanation, and my first entry, is here. Oh, and these posts are organized into a series now. You can see the post series page here.  (I haven’t abandoned this—especially not so near the end of the game! I just wanted to do the entries justice, and well, life’s been busy. There’s one more entry in the game, which I’ll get posted this week, and then I’ll post my thoughts on the game as a whole.)

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Wait for Me, Day 20

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This entry is part 20 of 23 in the series Playing "Wait for Me"

This is an entry in a journaling game I’m currently playing. An explanation, and my first entry, is here. Oh, and these posts are organized into a series now. You can see the post series page here.  (I haven’t abandoned this—especially not so near the end of the game—I just wanted to do the entries justice and have had a lot on my plate the past week.)

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S. eubayanus found in Tibet! (Er, in 2014?!?!)

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So, back in 2011 I mentioned the discovery of S. eubayanus in the wild in Patagonia. That’s exciting because S. pastorianus (often called “lager yeast” in English: it’s the yeast used to make a lot what the world recognizes as “beer” today, for better or worse) is actually a hybrid of two other kinds of yeast: that is, it was formed when two different kinds of yeast contributed DNA to a hybrid yeast. Those two yeasts were S. cerevisae (familiar as top-fermenting brewer’s yeast, but in fermenting other alcohols and making bread as well), and an until-recently mysterious, never-before isolated strain that got called S. eubayanus. The latter yeast was …

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Scumbags & Con Men of Georgian English Brewing, #1: Humphrey Jackson

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The other day, I posted about folk magic in modern England, but aside from that, I’m also plowing through the piteous biography of Georgian London’s most hapless brewer. The biography, Dr. Johnson’s “Own Dear Master”: The Life of Henry Thrale by Lee Morgan was one I would probably have passed on, had it not been remaindered and on sale for only a few dollars, but it has proven entertaining so far, in part because Morgan seems eager to paint Thrale sympathetically. It’s not hard to understand why: Thrale was, at one time, head of the biggest brewery in England; he married up, he was …

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More on Dr. John Perkins, Yes, Of THAT Perkins Family

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This has nothing to do with beer itself, but is an interesting footnote to brewing history. A while back, I mentioned a tantalizing rumour that the son of the brewer John Perkins (of Barclay Perkins fame) had led a life of adventure, ultimately fighting under Simón Bolívar in the Venezuelan War of Independence, but noting there was no more information than that about his fate. Well, today I heard back from the source of that information, Nicholas Harding (who sprouts from the same family tree, apparently?) with more information, in the form of an obituary confirming that indeed, a Dr. John Perkins …

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A Recipe for Mum(me)

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One of the things about writing about historical brewing practices is that, while the methodology is likely not to be too different from what a homebrewer does–mash grain, run off wort, sparge, run off sparge, boil, ferment, package, imbibe–the technology used to complete those steps is absolutely going to differ. Fiction-writing requires details, so I’ve been hunting through brewing manuals of the 1700s, which is a manifold pleasure. It’s fun for a few reasons, but I’ll focus on one for now: the recipes. Among the most amusing is the recipe for Mum that I discovered in The Whole Duty of a Woman, …

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