It feels like everyone knows about small beer. It’s practically ingrained in our national consciousness, no doubt thanks to the phrase’s use as an idiom for something of little importance. And you may think that the history of small beer is itself small beer. Medieval and Early Modern England (and Scotland) brewed a low alcohol beer that everyone drank to stay hydrated. What else is there to know?
It’s probably my past life as a museum curator that encourages me to fall down rabbit holes in beer history. I always want to know a little bit more, and pulling on the thread can occasionally unravel the whole bloomin’ cardigan. That has certainly been the case when I attempted to answer one seemingly simple question:
How small was small beer?
What was the alcohol by volume (ABV) of historical small beer? I wanted to understand at what alcoholic strength small beer becomes strong beer – and whether that distinction bears any relationship to what we consider a weak or strong beer to be today.
Trying to find the answer to this tiny question about small beer has led me to a new discovery about the way that our nation consumed beer in years gone by.
I started out on this path because I was writing about the history of low and no alcohol beer, and there is one great dragon of a lie that needs to be slain. It is endlessly perpetuated that in the Ye Olde England days, people drank small beer instead of water, because it was safer.
We know that safe drinking water was available. We know that because pretty much every settlement in human history has been founded where there is an abundant and reliable source of water. The evolution of modern society is intricately tied to the waterways which carry the survival and prosperity of its people. There is plentiful evidence for the manipulation of water courses in ancient times, never mind the canals, wells and conduits that were used in the medieval period and beyond to provide safe water for residents to drink. Town councils were endlessly imposing sanitation laws in an effort to keep them clean.
So British people in centuries past weren’t drinking beer out of necessity. They were drinking it because that was the staple drink. It was cultural, if you will. Beer had a calorific benefit for a society predominantly engaged in manual labour. And as we will see later, it was entirely socially acceptable.
There is plentiful evidence for the manipulation of water courses in ancient times, never mind the canals, wells and conduits that were used in the medieval period and beyond to provide safe water for residents to drink. Town councils were endlessly imposing sanitation laws in an effort to keep them clean.
There were essentially three options for brewing a low alcohol beer:
Intentionally brew a low gravity beer as a whole beer
Take a second run on the grain from a standard brew, which would yield less fermentable sugars and produce a weaker brew
Extract some alcohol from a regular beer by boiling
It seems the first option was preferred for quality, and the route taken by home brewers. Commercial brewers were the most likely to use a second running to eke out their profit margins. ‘A Brewer of Extensive Practice’ wrote their methodology in detail in 1760 in the treatise ‘The Compleat Brewer, or Art and Mystery of Brewing Explained’:
MOST families have got into so regular a way of brewing their small beer after their ale that it will be not be easy to persuade them them out of it, but they may be assured that if they have any value for that kind of drink it is their interest to brew it alone, for the trouble is very little more than the other way, and the drink is incomparably better. The method is very little different from the brewing of any other kind. As to the quantity of malt or strength of the beer that is at the pleasure of the person, but however it is intended in point of strength, the brewing should be performed at once, and all that is made should be of one kind, not a stronger first and a weaker afterwards. We shall give directions at the rate of two bushels and a half to the hogshead, which will make a very excellent kind.[1] [my italics]
The anonymous author goes on to detail the recipe as promised. Not only is this source interesting in detailing how small beer was made, it also emphasises that there was no set guideline as to its strength.
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