Discover

It’s early March in Austin, Texas, just days into the city’s flagship visitor-driven event, the South By South West (SXSW) cultural festival. The sun is shining as it should be, and in a busy downtown beer garden, tables of Stetson-clad, Western-booted drinkers are passing on the festival to line up in front of racks of cask beer, filling their branded miniature English pint glasses with an array of pin, firkin and gravity cask pulls from across Texas and the US.

Photos by Justin Brummer

What springs to mind when you think of a Mexican lager? Sinking your toes into gorgeous smooth white sand as you recline on a beach in Cancun or Puerto Vallarta with a Dos Equis or Pacifico? Stuffing a lime down the neck of a Corona or Sol in a student bar? Or sipping a Modelo or Victoria over plates of sizzling fajitas? In the UK, Mexican lagers might lack the enormous popularity and ubiquity they enjoy Stateside but it’s likely that most beer drinkers will have encountered them sufficiently to have their own idea of what to expect when ordering one.

Illustrations by Christine Jopling

In the beginning there were no pubs.

It’s hard to believe, I know, but it has taken centuries of cultural evolution to build the societies we move through today—pubs and all.

Early examples of pubs can be split into three categories:

– Inns, Taverns and Alehouses.

Inns worked to provide a place of rest and nourishment for weary travellers, now almost entirely replaced by our modern day holiday inns and motorway service stations. Taverns were introduced to Great Britain by the Romans—once they’d provided us with roads and infrastructure the next obvious step was to introduce their tabernae. In Italy a taberna was a bar dedicated to serving local wine, but the Romans gladly adopted British beer instead, and taverns were born. Alehouses followed suit, places for the sale of beer and ale—as the name suggests—that sprung up throughout cities and towns providing third spaces for the workers and men of the community.

Illustrations by David Bailey, photos by Amelia Claudia and Matthew Curtis

Learn and Discover's quick guide to the brewing process.

The short and easy to understand new definition was developed by CAMRA in order to make it easier to identify which are real ciders and perry:

• CAMRA defines real Cider or Perry as being fermented from the whole juice of fresh pressed apples or pears, without the use of concentrated or chaptalised juices

• Within this, a number of real ciders and perries can be additionally described as ‘live’.

CAMRA encourages and promotes cider and perry which retain active yeast with the potential to carry on fermenting, however, slowly, right up to the moment you drink it.
Cider and Perry are not brewed like beer, but fermented like wine. The fermentation process is both through the presence of active or ‘live yeast’, and through the action of bacteria (the friendly kind).

Beer is amazing. Cider and Perry are amazing. Depending on your tastes, on those two things I am sure we can all agree.

Our favourite drinks, their rich social, cultural and economic history unite us in a common narrative of enjoyment and craft. Although, the diverse cast of people involved are not always as visible as they could be.

There are so many ways to brew and ferment and a multitude of settings within which to relish them. It’s unsurprising then that there are many different kinds of people involved in the creation, promotion, distribution and service of beer, cider and perry. Not to forget those who educate on and celebrate them.

Our contemporary brewing, making and drinking culture is a diverse scene. Whether it be the fact that one of our most prominent brewers and industry activists is a woman of colour or that many of our most celebrated writers, broadcasters and educators are women, people of colour or members of the LGBTQI community.

Up until the middles ages (1500s-1600s), British ale remained an unhopped drink made by fermenting sprouted barley grains known as malt. If ale was flavoured it was done with a range of bittering and potentially psychoactive herbs and spices such as wormwood, bog myrtle and yarrow. Brewers then, as they do now, combined a pragmatic approach to brewing beer (using whatever is to hand or locally available) epicurean (what tastes good) and functional approach (accessing improvement of beer and how to keep it for longer).

Hops were introduced to English brewing in the 1600s by Flemish brewers emigrating to Kent from Flanders in Dutch speaking Belgium. By the turn of the 17th century, hops had superseded other bittering ingredients. Hops remain the dominant bittering, aromatic and flavouring ingredient in worldwide beer production.

Saccharomyces cerevisiae, literally sugar fungus (in latinised greek), is a species of yeast. Yeast are microspcopic single-celled fungi. Along with other fungi such as mold, yeasts are collectively responsible for a myriad of luxury and staple drinks and foodstuffs; beer, wine, bread and cheese are somewhere near the top of a very long list.

MalMalt. You’ve probably heard and uttered the word countless times: Maltesers, malt whisky, malt biscuits, malt extract. The list is endless. The reason we have such a wealth of malt products in our lives? Beer!

Water is fundamental to brewing. Without it there would be no wort and no volume of liquid to take on the flavours and textures of the ingredients and adjuncts used in brewing. Equally as important are the pH of the water and the dissolved minerals and trace elements it contains.

In the early 1970s, CAMRA coined the term ‘real ale’ to describe traditionally kept beers, served from a specific type of barrel called a cask, without the injection of additional carbon dioxide gas.

The Campaign launched a vocal effort to promote these ahead of the mediocre, artificially carbonated, often pasteurised, brand name beers backed by extensive advertising campaigns, which had come to dominate the beer trade. These products of mid-20th century industrialisation of brewing, were reducing consumer choice and threatening the future of a more flavourful type of beer that could trace its origins back over a thousand years.

A fabulous array of ciders are made all over the world. In the ‘Old World’ of Western Europe we have the cultural powerhouses of Asturias and the Basque Country in Northern Spain, as well Brittany and Normandy in France. Every region produces idiosyncratic ciders based upon different apple varieties, terroir and traditional methods of production. In the ‘New World’ – regions without longstanding heritage – dessert apples are utilised to create an array of ciders, often with significant influence from the world of beer and wine. In this instalment Gabe travels to Hardanger in Norway to attend the Hardanger International Cider festival, getting know local producers and their delicious wares which include; still, sparkling, flavoured and ice ciders.