In search of the lost London beer style

Hop monsters — the true London beer style?

When the late great beer writer Michael Jackson wrote The World Guide to Beer, the book that’s usually acknowledged as introducing the modern concept of beer styles, in 1977, he could hardly have guessed that, less than 40 years later, interpretations of nearly all the styles he wrote about would be brewed commercially in his home city. Back then, the Good Beer Guide needed only three symbols to describe the cask repertoire of English breweries: one for mild, another for bitter, and an occasional third for “old ale or special”.

It wasn’t always so. Beer historian Ronald Pattinson once remarked to me that, at the beginning of the 20th century, “you could walk into a London pub and have a choice of five or six draught beers such as bitter, mild, Burton and porter, all completely different in character and with strengths ranging from 3% to 7 or 8% ABV”. That diversity began to shrink exactly a century ago, during World War I, not only through shortage of ingredients but because of increasing taxation and regulation of the brewing industry – ostensibly in the name of the war effort but in reality driven by the same sort of ideological objections to alcohol consumption that gave rise to the USA’s disastrous experiment with Prohibition from 1920-1933.

Heavy taxation based on a beer’s gravity persisted into the interwar years, so beer strengths declined accordingly, and the industry responded to the challenges of the 1930s recession and of rebuilding after World War II by streamlining its output. By the time of the real ale revival in the 1970s, the idea that beer was all about low gravity session ales suitable for drinking in pints was firmly embedded in the British consciousness. The growth of microbreweries and the emergence of more discerning drinkers prompted a revival of interest in defunct styles like porter, and new developments like golden and summer ales – but almost always at session strengths.

The current abundance is partly the legacy of Michael Jackson himself, and the way his work directly and indirectly inspired would-be brewers in countries like the USA where big brewing had almost entirely obliterated older and more localised brewing techniques and styles to start rebuilding their beer culture from a blank sheet. The resulting enthusiastic eclecticism and cosmopolitan openness has now returned to the old European brewing heartlands to inspire a new generation of brewers. And nowhere is this more evident than London, a city with a long tradition of being open to exotic influences and new ideas.

All this makes it rather challenging to talk about specifically London beer styles. The beers with the deepest historical roots in the capital are porters and stouts, though, aside from a few wood-aged experiments, no contemporary London brewer makes porter in a way comparable to the 18th century methods of maturing strong porter for years in wooden vats. By the end of the 19th century, milds were a more typical London style, and in the early 20th century, the related sweetish style of bottled brown ale typified by Mann’s Brown was regarded as an East End speciality. Today, hardly any London brewers offer a regular mild and none brews anything like Mann’s Brown, which itself is still around but produced outside London.

Old school real ale drinkers associate the capital with the revered cask bitters brewed by Fuller’s and Young’s, the two independents that survived into the 1970s. While Young’s is no longer brewed here, Fuller’s is proud to remain a London brewer, though neither can really be said to brew beers in a distinctively London style. Instead they reflect a general southeast English preference for relatively dry and hoppy cask bitters, doubtless influenced by the proximity of the Kentish hop gardens, and drawn without sparklers, with a low level of carbonation and a minimal head.

London can equally claim, alongside Wrecsam and Glasgow, to be one of the UK’s few genuine lager-brewing cities. In the 1930s, Barclay Perkins on Bankside became the first big British brewer to commit to lager production  In the 1990s London was the birthplace of one of Britain’s first ‘craft lager’ breweries, Freedom, and is still the home of one of its most successful, Meantime. And today the city can claim to be the UK’s main centre for hop-forward US-inspired pale ales and IPAs: while a good few London breweries don’t bother with bitter, pretty much all of them have at least one hoppy pale ale in their repertoire. Anyone tempted to express regret at this apparent departure from tradition should remind themselves that London originally gave the world not only porter, but India Pale Ale too.