Trade Beer Blog

A flat tyre on my bike made me take the bus this morning, which meant that I reached the book review section of the 29 September edition of The Economist.  A paragraph in a review of A Little History of the English Country Church by Roy Strong caught my eye:

Yet these upheavals were nothing, Sir Roy claims, in comparison to the puritanical purges of the civil war, during the mid-1600s, which devastated not only the fabric of the church but also the social communion of the congregation. Moreover, the loss of income, particularly from banning the making and selling of church ales, meant that the buildings started to crumble. The book's illustrations show churches stripped bare and others in which the gaudy tombs of the elite have replaced images of saints.

This is way beyond my field of knowledge, but at least I can field an appeal to the more historically minded of my fellow beer bloggers: Who know more about the church ales?

Update:

Martyn Cornell tried to comment of the blog, a function I've shut off because of the high voloume of spam. Well he e-mailed me with the following extract from the first draft of his book  Beer: the Story of the Pint. (Which is on my bookshelf, I hasten to add!):

The rise of beer over ale in the 16th and 17th centuries was matched by the decline in the tradition known as the “ale”. This was a local celebration designed to raise funds for a particular purpose. The longest-lasting was probably the “church-ale”, organised by the churchwardens, when the profit brought in from the brewing and selling of drink, and the consumption of food to go with it, was used for the maintenance of the local church, and for improvements such as a ring of bells or a new loft. Often the “ale” was held in a building called the church-house. Other ales could be for municipal purposes. Lyme in Dorset held regular “cobb ales” in the early 17th century to pay for keeping up the town’s harbour: the one in 1601 raised £20 14s 10d. But the more Puritan-minded Tudor clergy were appalled by church-ales, with one in 1570 claiming they were occasions for “bul-beatings, beare-beatings, bowlings, dycing, cardyng, dauncynges, drunkenness and whoredom.”

Church-ales had actually been largely suppressed under the Protestant Edward VI in the late 1540s, but had sprung back up under his Catholic sister Queen Mary in the 1550s right across the south and west of England. When Mary died and was replaced by another Protestant monarch, Elizabeth, church-ales continued at first in many places, with sometimes spectacular feasts. The “church ale games” for the parish of St Mary in Bungay, Suffolk, in 1566 had a menu that included lamb, veal, honey, eggs, butter, cream, custards, pastries and eight firkins of beer. But from the 1570s, under pressure from Protestant clergy and local magistrates, church-ale celebrations began to disappear from many counties, including all of East Anglia, Kent and Sussex, and to diminish sharply in number elsewhere. By the end of Elizabeth’s reign they were confined mostly to parishes in the West Country and the Thames Valley.

The holding of church-ales was still worrying Somerset’s magistrates in 1633, and sporadic attempts to revive the feasts were suppressed by magistrates in Devon and Sussex during the Interregnum that followed the execution of Charles I in 1649. However, after Charles II’s Restoration in 1660, only one parish in England, Williton in Somerset, seems to have revived the church-ale. It was restarted in 1662, even though the new tax on brewing, which also applied to the Williton churchwardens’ brews, reduced their profits. Takings were declining sharply in the 1680s, and the last blow was the introduction of the Window Tax in 1696, which forced the churchwardens to lease out the church house where the ales were held.

Martyn has an excellent blog - the Zythophile.

You know, the beer where they've taken out the carbohydrates and, with them, the flavour. Foster's of Australia want to reach the image-conscious Australian men attempting to keep their beer bellies in check.

Well, the important thing is to get the punters to think about other things than beer. So a bunch of Slovenian(!) half-naked blondes is what they expect to do the trick.

I don't mind scarcely clad blondes at all, although I would not want them in my beer. But do they (Foster's, not the Slovenians) seriously think that their potential customers for the watered down beer will want to identify with their choice of role model? One thing is how you actually look, another is how you perceive yourself...

An unusual gift box at the Natural History Museum in London - wine goblets made from beer bottles, where they have just heated and reshaped them, saving a lot of energy in the process. Of course you could use similar glasses for beer, too. I would not go for Corona bottles, though, but which  other breweries have nice bottles that could be used? Grolsch comes to mind, and I think I've had a few English barley wines with the label integrated in the bottle, too. Other suggestions?

From our Cambodia correspondent:

A Cambodian man who took off his trousers, tied the legs at the bottom and wrangled a 2-metre cobra into them died when it bit him through the fabric, local media reported Monday.

Khmer-language daily Koh Santepheap quoted police as saying Chab Kear, 36, saw the reptile swimming in a river just outside the capital last Thursday during a drinking session and captured it in the hopes of selling it later in the day.

He tied the animal inside his trousers and a scarf around his waist, but as he continued carousing the enraged snake managed to get its fangs free and bite Kear three times on the stomach.

The newspaper reported Kear's last words as being "don't worry - it's nothing a drink can't fix" before he succumbed to the cobra's venom.

I am afraid we will see more of this closer to home with all the smokers being forced to  do their drinking outdoors across Europe as smoking is banned in country after country.  Watch out for the reptiles tonight!

I've been in London for almost a week, so I haven't been updating here. I was with my family, so my pub crawling was very limited, but I'll write up some thoughts and observations over the next few days. I'll have to upload some photos as well. Meanwhile, David has recommended an article in the New York Times on beer tourism in Maine. Looks good!

My collegue Thierry works in Parma, Italy, so when I knew he was coming to Oslo for a meeting, I asked him to bring along a few bottles of Italian beer from the Baladin brewery.

The Elixir has a lively carbonation and a long lasting rocky head over a cloudy golden beer. It smells of Belgian style yeast. There a whiff of barnyard - not stable, but more understated.

This is a rich, malty brew and it is quite spicy. There is ginger and cinnamon, and a pepper and mustard flavour similar to the one you get from a salad with watercress or rocket (ruccola). There is a bitterness, too, mostly of the burned sugar variety, and the beer does not come across as too sweet.

Port-like overtones as there often are in a beer of this strength, and a warming alcohol finish. This is a seriously good beer!

The state monopoly stores here in Norway claim to be short of shelf space for premium beers, so the selection in most shops is pitiful. Funny then that they manage to find space for three liter bottles of Heineken, a silly product if there ever was one!

The New York Times has almost given us a time machine when they have opened up thir archives, giving free access to their articles through the years. Whatever your interests are, you can have snapshots of how a given topic is covered through the years.

Not surprisingly I did a little search for beer, and one of the articles that came up was from October 1851 -

MUNICH.; Characteristics of the City--Theatres--Art-Beer--Manners of the People, &c.

A few paragraphs:

EU Commisioner for Enterprise and Industry, Günter Verheugen, has stepped forwards to put to rest all stories about banning the British pint and other measurements.

We at the EU have decided the time has come to nail these myths once and for all by setting out in black and white what has always been our view: that Britain should continue to use imperial measures for as long as it likes.

Brits like to get milk and beer in pints and truth be told, so do the thousands of Europeans who live in or visit the UK and love those traditions that make it so unique. Brits also like the signposts to say how many miles it is to London, Cardiff, Edinburgh or Belfast.

According to the BBC, it is not quite as easy as that, the EU has in fact backed down.

The commission has kept extending the deadline for the UK to complete the full transition to the metric system, with the most recent deadline being 2010.

This would have meant setting a deadline for ending the traditional delivery of pints of milk - and the sale of pints of beer in the UK's pubs.

Good news for all beer lovers. I find the term we at the EU sligthly patronizing, but I'll let that pass right now. We are toasting Günter tonight, and a half will not do!

The Rake in Borough Market has won the Time Out Best Bar Award. I bet the Morning Advertiser was happy to snub the news online. I predict it's going to be crowded, as it is also one of the smallest pubs in London. The Rake seats 44 people and the bar is only 13x7 feet.

(There is more seating outside, though)