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Welcome to Dan Snow's history hit. I've got such a treat for you today. You're not going to believe your ear holes.

Where were you when one of the most popular episodes of Dancer's history has ever been broadcast? It features Pete Brown, who's a beer historian. Yes, that job actually exists. I brought you a sexist term before, but now I'm bringing you a story of beer. Pete Brown has written many wonderful books. He's been at the heart of a campaign that has seen beer, proper beer, not lager, probably placed back at the heart of British global drinking culture.

He's an activist. He's an author. He's a historian. He's a communicator. As you'll hear, it's an absolute treat to be rerun this podcast from 2015 or 16, I don't even know so long. Have you forgotten what happened? This podcast could be older than the Trump presidency. Wow. Anyway, enjoy.

If you got to listen to other episodes, this podcast that listen to ads or you want to go and watch one of hundreds of hours of documentaries that we've made. But he's got a history hit TV. It's been all over the press there in the UK, thanks to the remarkable story of John.

What's the man who was born eight months after his father was killed eight years ago in 1940? It's been trending in UK. It's been lots of news shows. Thank you very much for the attention. Welcome to the new subscribers. If you use the code pod one, pod one, you get a month for free. You check it out for free. But if you like it, your second month, which is one pound euro or dollar. So head over that a history hit TV and check it out.

In the meantime, everybody enjoy Pete Brown.

I am so excited we have got beer that we can drink and we've got an excuse because it's history. Absolutely.

The history beer is the history of the British people. And so over beer, you can talk about whether you like it.

Well, let's open a beer and talk about that. You've got to see you've got a bottle opener, though.

Yeah, I go everywhere. I come with a bottle opener. I've got my book and my dorky my front door key to essentially.

Yes. The two things I need wherever I go.

What bear have you brought in? So I thought for for the day I'll bring in some beers. That kind of more historical in their in their significance. And I've kind of got the last 300 years of the history of British beer here in America.

And that's not just bear with a funny historical name. Is this is this because it's better that way?

Yeah, but it's kind of the history of beer of last few hundred years, the different styles that have come out. Beer was one of the drivers of the Industrial Revolution and London was where a lot of that stuff happened. So some of the greatest beer styles in the world were invented here. And you know, what we saw over the last 50 years or so was a lot of those styles disappearing as people kind of went to big mainstream industrial lager.

And what you got with the craft beer movement now is people really going back and trying to find these old styles and recreate that.

Oh, okay. That's interesting. Is that right? I thought people just were inventing new nice tasting beer and giving it an old fashioned name and claiming. But are there actual historic recipes and methods of being regenerated?

I think I think that used to happen. If you go back to real ale and the sort of old country pub style thing with, you know, old old erotics, rusty ferret's, Mashiro or whatever, you know, there was that willful kind of attempts to make things sound a lot older than they actually were real, as we know it, is. Britain's national drink is very traditional, only really goes back about 40 years.

It's insane.

The production methods of it's all about producing fresh ale, which, you know, it's brewed in about five days, that it goes into casks and then it's ready to be served in a pub within a few days before that happened, it was a lot more of a beer to be aged to a year. And they were very strong beers. They were designed to withstand export and they were designed to mature and change in the wood for up to a year while they were while they were maturing.

And that's why beer kept people live on long journeys over substance. OK, fine.

So you're talking about one less certain? Yeah, probably the most probably the most celebrated export beer. Its history is is very contentious, but it's been revived as the beer that's really driving the craft beer movement around the world now. And it's it's an India pale ale, of course. Yeah. Yeah. Everyone's drinking IPA. I wrote a book about five years ago. Cheers. So this is an idea produced by pressure drop for a brewery in in Hackney.

I'm partially responsible for these guys being in business, which fills me with ambivalent feelings. They read the piece I wrote about the jelly butchers. Suburban Stoke Newington went to the Jolly Butchers. They were so blown away by the beers there, they quit their jobs in the city, dump the brewery. So it's nice to see them doing well. I suggest to about India.

Why is it called that it's brewed?

I'd read something over the weekend that said it was it was brewed in India and exported to the UK. I mean, why would anyone want to do that? I don't know.

It was actually during the time of the British Raj and I learned all this when I did my book was that the British presence in India was originally trading. We wanted to kind of trade silks and fabrics in India. And of course, every time ships came over the horizon, the price of fabrics would go up massively. So the British left behind these little stations full time that the cold factories to buy the fabrics when it was advantageous to buy them and then sort of put them on the ships, on the ships arrived.

Now, between buying the old kind of bundles of fabric, there was nothing to do. And the British in India just drank themselves stupid. There was a local drink called Arak, which is made by getting pumps up out the top of a tree, let it ferment in the sun. The really good quality stuff, the real vintage stuff only sends you blind. Most of the first British the first European deaths in the Far East were from drinking Arak.

So we had to have something that British troops, when they went over life expectancy about three months. So so they needed really good quality beer in order for troops and civilians in India to drink that instead of drinking the local stuff. And it had to be strong because Iraq was very strong. The strength helped it survive the export and the journey took six months and something about the journey made the change. And when it got to India, contemporary accounts are all about it.

Then it's very ripe. It's ripened beautifully. So there was something happening in that beer. So I decided to kind of have a bottle, the traditional beer brewed, take it to India with me on ships and see what happened, which was interesting. What did it come out? Well, it's sort of it did mature. It did mature. You get you got this incredible temperature variation when you go in across the equator, which affects the ages of the beer, and you've got this constant movement as well.

You've got this kind of. Constant rocking for, you know, between three and six months, and it just turned into something that was kind of like half beer, half champagne, it was really special. And when I opened it in Calcutta at this kind of business delegation, this one guy came up and said, what is this trip you're trying to pull? This is not beer, it's wine. And I said, no, no, it's beer is beer.

Now, this is ridiculous. You take us for fools. And then he came back half an hour later, said, Can I have some more, please?

Speaking of which, because this podcast is so brilliant, you're doing all the talking. I'm doing all the drinking.

So I'm almost done on the behind. Softly Fantastic. But so, like, can we just let's wind over this because I'm too excited to. Beer is one of the oldest sort of recipes and the oldest manmade things that we have any record of.

Right. Yeah. Why do we drink beer and not water?

A few reasons. Quite a few reasons. In cities and towns, the water supply gets polluted pretty quickly. You know, there's always beautiful springs out in the countryside. But when the population urbanized, I mean, just near here, the slope pub just up in Carnaby Street, that was the center of a massive typhoid outbreak that they sort of tied back to the local water supply. It was safe to drink water because it's been boiled when you make beer.

It was safe to drink water. So it's very safe to drink beer. Then it was to drink water. So that's one reason. Another reason is it's readily accessible for nutrients.

It's got lots of carbohydrates in people. You had hair like everything else. If you're not drinking, too much of it is positively good for you. And it used to be used to be given out in workhouses, hospitals, schools, because it kept people alive.

So, OK, so in ancient Mesopotamia, all the way through to to Britain, it was safe to drink beer. But so so you do you boil water and they didn't know that was why it was good for you, because they didn't know that the germs are in there. But but they just knew at some stage of that process it was good for you.

We didn't know what made it unsafe. We had no idea what microbes and microorganisms were until about 150 and years ago. But we knew from very ancient times that if you boiled water, then it was safer. And if you go to boil it, why why not cook some barley and hops in it and turned out to be.

Yeah, and it tastes, it tastes better nutrition in it and it gets you a bit tipsy, which is which is fun. Yeah.

I mean most of our greatest people in our history, all these incredible achievements the people have done, they were half cooked when they were doing it. It's remarkable, isn't it?

I couldn't agree more. Right. So speaking of which, speaking of remarkable achievements, let's get this podcast up to the next level. What's the next beer to try?

I've got beer from fellas just down the road. They've been working with a beer historian called Robert Pattinson. Followers have been going since 1845. So they've got all these old records, old history books of their recipes. Brewers used to write them in code so that no one else could steal them. And Ron has spent his life kind of trying to break these codes. And so he's been working with Fullers over the last few years to recreate beers from from their archives.

So this is full. As much as Patronizes is the name of the series. It's a strong ale, I think, from around 1880, 1890. So so this is the kind of thing that people were drinking in in London in the late 19th century.

It's dark, isn't it? Yeah, that can actually smell some of the age on there. You get that kind of that is dried fruit character. That's this bottles a few years old and that's what's coming through there.

That's a that's a weird taste, isn't it. It's is it. If you get that taste in a weak beer that's not got much more to it, then it's horrible. Yeah. When you get in a stronger beer that's got more body in it to counter it.

It tastes I mean, not like Guinness, sort of thick and creamy, but it just has a real thick taste in the mouth isn't it. And is that I mean to taste changes are be more sophisticated, less sophisticated. Is this a sort of simpler beer to brew? Why is this an old sort of taste?

I think it's a bone of contention, you know, because there's a massive orthodoxy in the beer industry today that people want light refreshments. If you look at lager ads today, it's all about easy drinking, refreshment, and that means it's cold, it's fizzy, it goes down really quickly. And I like that on a on a hot summer's day. That's great. But there seems to be tied in with that this idea that people don't like strong flavors.

And if you go back a hundred years, this is the kind of stuff we have now. You know, this is this is not for the faint hearted. This is quite strong, powerful beer. And this is what everyone was drinking.

But it's interesting, you talk to food historians about food, 100 years, 200 years. All the flavors are insane, aren't they? I think perhaps perhaps because nowadays we're used to so many lovely smells and flavors all day that there's less emphasis at the meal times. But back then, they just threw the kitchen sink everything, didn't they? Because I think things were so bland the rest of the time, you might as well.

And your ingredients were very variable. You couldn't really rely on quality the way we can today. I've got one beer here which has been laced with a bit of wild yeast, which might be quite interesting when we go into that. But until the 1873 1888, you couldn't guarantee that you. Getting a clean fermentation from your beer, and so if you were getting these off notes from wild, yet it took a lot more stuff in there to cover that up and to get roughly the flavor that you were trying to get.

And our tradition in this country, would every family brew their own beer town, village, parish, go back to the Middle Ages?

Brewing was an activity that happened in every household the way that make your own bread was. And it was always a task of the woman. It was something that women did in the house. So the best ones would put up a nail stick outside the house to show the brew was ready. People start to barter based on the beer of the woman who's making it better than the rest of the village. About the 12th 13th century, it starts to get taxed and alehouse estates become public places, pubs, the kind of forerunner of the pub.

But you might have a front room that was public. The family would still live elsewhere in there. Yeah. And yes, there's a handful of places like that left today where you find these pubs just like people's front rooms and the beers in the cellar, and you bring it up in jugs and serve it up into one like that in Pembrokeshire, which is definitely the best pub into.

And I'm sure you've just written a book called The Pub. It's out at the moment. I bet you've been to some really historic parts, some insanely brilliant ones.

I mean, it's interesting because if you get a place like London, you know, it's constantly being rebuilt and reinvented and and repurposed and historic pubs don't really survive very well. You go out into the countryside on the old kind of coaching routes, old sheep, droving routes, these ends that were built for for travellers and for merchants and the ones that are still there, you just got centuries of history in a building. And for me to sit there and say, OK, somebody was sitting in this room doing exactly the same thing I'm doing right now, hundreds of years ago, that purpose, that function hasn't changed one bit.

Okay, so you got the women of the house would brew, some of them would take it to next level, open an establishment. And so I guess no one would come and drink that. I mean, does that just show that alcohol consumption was at the heart of these communities as they are expanding and and changing?

Well, this is the thing about, say, alcohol consumption. We're living through a phase. And this is cyclical, by the way. We're coming in out of this of this sort of way of thinking. We're living at a time now when we think that consuming alcohol is inherently a bad thing, that, you know, it's OK in moderation so long as you drink responsibly. But but, you know, implicit in that is this idea that, like smoking, it's somehow bad for you.

For most of our history, we've been drinking. It's a natural thing. And we're not the only animals that do it. All right. Yeah. Elephants, when they smell fermenting beer in India, have been known to charge factories. There's there's actually a theory of evolution, the the drunken ape theory, which is that the incredible aromas that rotting fruit gives off when it's being fermented by yeast attract sort of the most energetic and quizzical apes. And they're the ones that survive.

Oh, goodness. That's a great story. If it's true, I will be very happy.

And so and so I think drinking alcohol is a perfectly natural thing for the human condition. And it's it's as natural to us as eating and changing your brain chemistry to relax into these stresses. You know, and for most of our history, we've been having to put lot pretty grim situations and grim circumstances and, you know, and nice think at the end of the day takes the edge off. And I think that's that's what we've done for most of our history.

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Right. Let's go next year. What have we got here? Because I am out, I'm dry. So this is the one I mentioned with wild yeast.

There's a Louis Pasteur in Emile Hansen who worked at the Carlsberg laboratory, managed to isolate Louis Pasteur, worked at the council.

So he Hansen was a student of Pasteur who worked at the Carlsberg laboratory. And Pasteur first identified that fermentation was caused by yeast. The chemists in the mid 19th century believe that fermentation, the conversion of sugar to alcohol was just this process, this reaction that happened. And Pasteur proved that it was living organisms in the beer that caused it to happen, which was revolutionary. So we've been brewing beer for probably about 10000 years and it took Pasteur in, the experts have to say.

And the reason it works is these tiny little single celled organisms that eat sugar and crapp alcohol and carbon dioxide is a great thing.

It's amazing.

So, as you say, all these wonderful women brewing all the way well from ancient ancient Mesopotamia, almost medieval, they actually didn't know what was happening. Just aren't these ingredients and wonderful things would occur.

I spent a lot of time with the side to make last year and he said we simply act as if we know what we're doing. And and when we find out what we're doing, it doesn't change much.

Change the dead right. The side of the Ratten. That was absolutely that was all I said.

So this beer is a porter. And Porter was the first industrial beer in London from around the seventeen, twenty, seventeen thirties. This was when the housewives and the sort of brewpubs moved and it became a bit all about big industrial breweries, a lot of information, inventions and innovations like steam power use used microscopes. The use of hydrometer was all kind of pioneered by the brewing industry and the first big industrial breweries in the world were in London, not far from where we are now.

And Potter was the first big industrial beer. So this beer was right.

So I was driving in sort of the industrialization of production.

Yeah. So they could the bigger they got, the cheaper they could supply their beer. It got to the point where they could supply pubs, cheaper than pubs could brew themselves. And so you get the big names like Whitbread, names like what is all kind of all coming up in London. And this was the best style. And this was aged in massive wooden vats, as I said, for about a year.

Oh, yeah. And there's a slight funkin up to this beer. Yes, there is. And this is this is by Eldridge Pope up in Kingsland near Kingsland. And they just said, well, if you are starting these beers in wood for a year, the Britannia makes these natural yeast that live in what would have got into the beer. And they give it this kind of like sleights. Sounness It's like dryness. So this is the taste, as far as we can tell, of what everybody in London was drinking through the eighteenth century.

That is brilliant. This and gin. And you could then transport this.

So we are imagining Nelson's Navy with were they drinking water? Beer.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, in fact, in volume terms, more port went to India than Van opiated. It's just Ippei was the big rock star, you know, and and yeah, the British. The British. The Industrial Revolution was fueled by Porter and the British everywhere in the world were fuelled by Porter and our sailors dominating the world's oceans are fuelled by porters.

Definitely connected.

Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. So this is slightly. Yeah. It's kind of a little bit taat. It's, it's probably not what you expect from a beer. I'm not sure if you like it or not, but it's dark. You know what, to be honest, I'm enjoying it very much. OK, so it could be the company but yeah I think I my favorite so far I think still is that IPA.

Yeah. And it's, but that's could be the modern the I mean more used to drink.

Well this is the thing. And the weird thing about this IPA is if you could take it to India in say, 1830. And I love that, by the way, that's my favorite Bleasdale at the moment, but if you took a bottle of that to Calcutta in 1830, they would pour it into the harbor and say, this is green, it's raw, it's not ripe yet. All the beautiful, big, vibrant, fruity flavors that we love now until about 50 years ago were considered completely unsuitable in beer because it hadn't aged properly.

Because these last. Yeah, tastes almost. If you have a this is if you have a wine, it's a little bit too old. I mean, since that age in these ones, isn't it. Yeah. So it's still very good.

Yeah. Don't get me wrong, I'm enjoying it. And what about what's next. So my final one is, is the daddy of them. This is Russian Imperial Stout. Oh my goodness.

Three words that should never go together. So this was the favorite drink of Catherine the Great. OK, who would demand that all her courtiers drank it? It was it was kind of, again, originated in London. This is taking Porter and just ramping everything up, just setting everything up to 11. Okay.

So I need to ask about this. So it's really embarrassing. I hope no one judge me, but what is stout?

It's like a lot of things in beer. It's a marketing term originally. So Porter was the style of drink. And again, where did its name come from? No one really knows Arthur Guinness. So how successful Porter was in London started brewing it in Dublin. It brewed ale before that. And then he made a they they sort of pioneered using really dark roasted barley. Now you get a pale ale, a lager, the barley that has been very lightly killens.

You get these kind of biscotti, breakfast cereal flavours from it. You turn the heat up a bit and it's like roasting coffee beans. You know, you could get something like that. Yeah. And we really get roast barley into it. You get coffee and chocolate notes. And so after actually was the second Arthur Guinness who really cracked that. And and he called it extra stout supporter because he was stronger. Oh, I see. I actually said, okay, well, that means that was reduced to Stoutland.

So this is the big amped up version. That was the trade between England and St Petersburg. We we ran out of wood to make beer barrels out of. So we started going to to the Baltic to buy Russian. OK, if you're sending ships to pick up Russian oak, you need to kind of have the ship full of something going that way before you bring the wood back the other way as we put beer on there.

And the Russians really liked British beer sending booze to Russia and coal to Newcastle, isn't it? I mean, what's the point they've got? Well, it's good to hear they developed a taste for the British beer. Yeah.

So this is another strong export beer designed to survive export the it was originally what is now carige. What's now Charles Wells.

The Brewers just changed hands all the time, but it was originally UNCA Brewery in in Sivak that that created this this beer. It's been kind of passed down and down. And this was the brewery when it was well, it was the Rails Brewery before it was Zanca Brewery. And when when the family sold it, they were very good friends with Samuel Johnson. And that's when he said, we're not just selling a parcel of VAT's here. We're selling potential to become rich beyond the dreams of avarice.

And that's where that that that phrase comes from because it was about making this beer.

Is this the opposite of small? But what was the expression? Small beer? Yes, small beer is so you got a big machine full of full of malted barley. You put your water through that, you heat it up and you extract all the fermentable sugar out the barley and you're on that off into a separate vessel at the hops in ferment. That's where you get your beer from. The more sugar in that liquid, the stronger job is going to be small beer.

You'd keep your leftover grains and you'd put more water through it again and just flush out the very last bits of sugar and flavor and everything else. And it would ferment to about to one to two percent AbbVie.

And that's what these kids that's we get the kids that work houses, schools, hospitals, you can't get drunk off it, but it's still got a lot nutritional value. Yeah.

And it's interesting nowadays. Was it was it Carlsberg or some of the other day tried to reintroduce the lunchtime beer idea and it would be one or two percent and it didn't didn't really work apparently.

But now a lot of people have tried it and I think we're just too scared of it at the moment. It's like, well, it's beer. It's one percent, you know, freshly squeezed orange juice is not point five percent LTV. Oh, yeah. The actual fermentation that happens in in in sugar sugary drinks. Yeah, we're drinking alcohol all the time without even knowing it. Nought point five, one percent. Two percent really isn't that much.

That's fascinating isn't it. And now the history of beer I suppose has come. What's this relationship with, with wine always been because now suddenly it's very fashionable again.

But I suppose when I you and I were growing up there was seen as a bit of a Loucks drink, younger man and not sophisticated people drank wine and thought that presumably change through the I say Catherine the Great. This was our favourite tipple. So it must have been very grand at once stage.

Yeah, they've had an uneven relationship and the inferiority thing with beer. And it's something that a lot of those in bear have fought against about until recently, it kind of comes to to place it comes from Romans who obviously drank a lot of wine when they came north into Europe. They thought that Bay was a barbarians beverage. You know, they came to Britain against Germany and they they found people drinking, people they consider to be barbarians, drinking this wine of malt.

They called it and said it was inferior.

And then, of course, you got after the Norman invasion, you've got this sort of duality in a lot of British life where the French version of something is classier than than the English version. You think about how many French words we use in a restaurant, you know, or, you know, cuisine is better than cooking and that kind of thing.

And wine wine has done a brilliant French it in a brilliant, brilliant job of marketing wine around the world as the classiest beverage. Now, if you've been to France, if you're into wine and any honest wine critic will tell you there's dreadful wine and there's brilliant wine, same with beer, there's dreadful beer and there's brilliant beer.

And most of the people I meet who work in the industry, the people who really know in a passion about wine, are also passionate about great beer and vice versa. And I met a few people go, oh, we've got to tell people that Bay is better than wine. No, it's not. And wine is not better than beer, but the best of each. I just I just wonderful.

And we can imagine success from the great drinking her Russian stout so she wouldn't have sort of moved to a French claret for a big state banquet or anything. I mean, has there always been this sort of relationship between wine and beer?

I don't know enough about other countries, but but she's on record as being very famously kind of insisting that everyone drank British beer. And she she boasted that she could outdrink an Englishman when it when it came when it came to she was a formidable woman in every way.

And now, of course, we've got this unbelievable revolution in beer going on across across. You can hardly buy an old school industrial commercial beer in the United States and Canada. And here in the UK, it's changing very rapidly as well.

Cheju, the whole industry, I think when you look at beer because it's ubiquitous and because it's the absolute kind of lifeblood of ordinary working people, whatever the biggest forces are in society will shape beer.

So after the housewives brewing it, you know, at that time, the minister's religion was the most powerful force in the country. So the monks brewed beer. Then you get the industrial revolution. And so it's big industry that produces beer 40, 50 years ago. We start to produce from start to move from simple production focused economy to a more marketing oriented economy. And it was classic adverts and big advertising campaigns and sponsorship that dictated beer. Now we're living in a time when it's the rejection of that, when people don't want things handed to them by big brands, they want personal.

They were artisanal, they were local. They want to know the person who's made whether you're talking about bread, cheese, beer, this is this is what people want. And it actually took beer a long time to catch up with the broader food trend. But now it's finally happened and it's changing the entire industry because I'm half Canadian and Canadians.

I mean, people thought the U.S. was back. Beer was extraordinary. I mean, it was I can't mention it, obviously, because I don't get sued. But there were two basic brands. I know them well. And going there as a kid, it was as sorry as an over eighteen year old. Yes, it was it was pretty brutal.

And now, you know, obviously here in Britain, but particularly in North America, the change is just extraordinary.

It really is. It really is. And although it's still small in terms of like the total share of the market, it's where all the action is happening. And I do some consultancy to the industry and all the kind of manufactures of big, larger brands. They're saying, tell me about Kraft, what do I do? Should we be changing our business? And it's it's affecting everything.

The big businesses need to give it a silly label with some stupid pros on it and call it a craft beer.

The problem is they they they educators out of the state they want us to be in. So when we start drinking lager in the seventies, they said, oh, OK, the best lager comes from continental Europe. I said British people start going to continental Europe and come back. Yeah, you're absolutely right. And the stuff you're serving us is crap imitations of that. So we get more sophisticated. Then they say, OK, we need to make ourselves seem a bit more sophisticated.

We start educating people about ingredients and processes and they go, oh yeah, OK. Yeah, you're not doing that.

So so we kind of get educated out of our ignorance by the people who want to keep us there. And then we go, well, you say it's all about authenticity and quality. Thank you very much. I'm going to go over here to some guy who really does do that.

Well, Brewing is one of the oldest human professions. And luckily, it seems to be an absolutely fantastic form at the moment. Absolutely.

Yeah. There is an argument, another argument historically that the domestication of grain for brewing came before the investigation of wheat for bread.

It drove the whole thing whole of civilisation is based on. A desire for bed, as soon as you've got shoes, you've got farming, grain farming, you've got permanent settlements, you've got the first cities and towns so big as the root cause of civilization is my sort of argument really feel like that sort out the podcast will end on that note.

Two blokes drinking beer, putting the world to rights.

Absolutely. Did you follow the history of our country? Ivan, thanks for reaching the end of this podcast. Most of you probably asleep, so I'm talking to your snoring force, but only when he's awake. It would be great if you could do me a quick favor, head over to wherever you get your podcasts and rate it five stars and then leave a nice glowing review. It makes a huge difference for some reason to how these podcasts do madness.

I know, but them's the rules. Then we go farther up the charts, more people listen to us and everything will be awesome. So thank you so much. Sleep well.

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