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Digestive
India
Pale Ale
IPA
is one of the modern beer world's most misunderstood and badly
represented beers. Just like the country it was brewed for, it can be
fantastic, full, rich and diverse in flavours or poor, insipid and
tragic. Historically, IPA should be made with Pale malt, it should have
a high abv (6
%+) and should have as many hops as possible. It needed these
attributes to survive the journey that gave it its name...
Its story begins on the 31st December 1600
when The Independent East India Company was given a Royal Charter by
Elizabeth I to pursue trade in the Indies. The IEIC, or 'John Company'
as it was known, started its operations with some trading posts and
factories in Surat on the western coast. Of course, the company men and
soldiers needed some way of relaxing of an evening after a tough day
shouting/ shooting at the natives, and they did this by drinking
staggering quantities of booze. Everything. Loads of everything.
Binge-drinking doesn't even come close. Binge drinking, by definition,
involves a period when you don't drink. These guys drank morning, noon
and night. Lunches often turned into dinners. Wine, Madeira, beer,
arrack (a potent spirit distilled from rice, grain or dates), brandy
and whisky all featured. The company records are full of supervisors
being told off for over spending on booze. Obviously the brewers back
home wanted to jump on the boozy band wagon faster than a supermarket
discounts beer, but the Porter and Baltic Ale they produced sometimes
didn't survive the journey across the equator (twice) and usually
didn't keep for more than a week when it hit 30˚C+ India. So, being the
ingenious (probably), hard-working (sometimes), greedy (definitely) and
bearded (maybe) chaps they were, looked for a beer that would survive.
The solution came from a man named George Hodgson at his Bow Brewery in
the late 18th century. His October Beer, a heavily hopped beer,
survived the long journey unusually well and would sometimes arrive in
better condition than it left (the hops providing an antibacterial
agent that prevented spoiling). With the advent of coke (the fuel,
invented by Sir Henry Platt in 1603),
brewer's barley could be roasted to a lighter degree, and Hodgson's was
one of those lighter or 'paler' ales that responded well to cask
ageing. Hodgson's particular selling points though, were that his
brewery was a stone's throw from the docks, and that he gave the
captains of the John Company a liberal credit line of 18
months which allowed them to sail to India, sell their wares and return
to pay, instead of having to pay up front.
Unfortunately, Hodgson and his sons eventually angered The Company by
flooding out opponents and then raising price when their monopoly was
assured. So, one of The Company's directors in the early 1800s, a chap
by the name of Marjoribanks (pronounced Marchbanks), decided to involve
the brewers of Burton-Upon-Trent. Now Burton has always been a Mecca of
brewing, owing its success to the fantastic Burton water that contains
high amounts of gypsum. Gypsum is fantastic for hoppy beers and to this
day, brewers still Burtonise (add gypsum to) their water before making
pale ales. The brewers of Burton had been enjoying a thriving trade
with the Baltic states, but when Russia ceased trading with England in 1800
and the Napoleonic wars made trading with the rest of the Balkans very
difficult, the Burtonites were left with an awful lot of time and beer
on their hands. It's was something of a stroke of luck then when
Marjoribanks arrived to dine with Samuel Allsopp, and asked him to try
and produce a beer in the style of Hodgson's. Later, Allsopp took a
sample of Hodgson's to his head brewer Job Goodhead who disliked the
extreme bitterness of the beer, but thought he could replicate the
style. Goodhead famously brewed the first sample of Allsopp's IPA in a
kettle. The thing that Goodhead didn't realise is that the bitterness
of the beer would mellow and relax over the many months at sea, with
the temperature changing wildly and the beer in constant motion as the
boat rocked. All the Burtonian brewers then jumped aboard the IPA boat
and soon, Worthington's, Salt, and Marston's were all competing, but
Bass was emerging as the market leader. There followed the glory days
of Burton in the 1840's when output increased from 70,000
to 300,000
barrels.
In 1845,
the tax on glass was abolished so the public began drinking from glass
instead of pewter and the pale ale market went astronomical. Since
people could see their beer, they preferred a light beer that was
transparent and looked better in the glass. There's a legend involving
a shipwreck near Liverpool that spilled several butts of IPA near the
shore and sparked a craze for this special beer from Burton. It's
probably only half true because there would have been several wrecks a
year and many would be carrying IPA, so the natives must have been used
to it already. Still, there was a steady rise in demand domestically as
the travellers returned from overseas and beer was the lucky recipient
of a middle-class popularity surge. Around 1890,
Bass was the world's largest brewery, occupying a huge site and
employing over two thousand people in Burton alone, pushing out over 100
million bottles every year.
Of course the Empire began shrinking instead of growing and the Burton
brewers slowly turned their attention more and more to the domestic
market. But the brewers were complacent and ignored the rise of a
number of light lager breweries around the world that produced beers
that were even lighter and colder. The temperance movement at home was
growing larger and so real IPA was killed by lager and do-gooders...
Some brewers produced a beer that was slightly more hopped but of a
lower abv and labelled it IPA (Greene King, Deuchers), but these beers
are a pale shadow of what IPA once was and are nearly indistinguishable
from regular session pale ales or 'bitters' .
And so, the long dark years between 1910
and 1980
dragged by until the laws banning home-brewing in the US were finally
repealed in 1979.
This started a sudden rush of micro-breweries popping up all over the
country, most notably on the west coast. Brooklyn, Anchor and Sam Adams
were all at the fore. These tiny concerns weren't interested in selling
their beer to the whole world, and so could do as they pleased. Their
brewers studied old recipes and discovered the IPA. Adding American
hops like Chinook, Apollo or Challenger sent the bitterness quotient
through the roof and a new breed of drinker was born, The Hop-Head.
These fellows are constantly trying to get more hops into the beer and
have invented new styles (super-IPA, double-IPA) and strange new
methods (like forcing the finished beer through several feet of
compressed hops) to fuel their addiction. Like everything else, it took
some time for the micro-brew craze to reach Britain, arriving in the
middle to late nineties. Soon enough, teeny tiny breweries were
springing up in every vale and on every hill of this green land.
Nowadays, you can't throw a stick in the country without hitting two
micro-brewers.
One of these brewers, the very new Brewdog Brewery in Scotland brings a
new beer to our list, Punk IPA, (see opposite). The Hide, in our
wisdom, also stocks another IPA, this time from our favourite brewery,
Meantime in Greenwich. Meantime's IPA comes in a fab champagne bottle
that is ideal for sharing, it's bursting with proper old-fashioned
English Fuggles and Goldings hops and is perfect for opening your
palate or accompanying a curry or any spicy food. Ripe citrus, sweet
grass and orange zest give a good start to the journey, giving way to
herbs and spices and finishing with a hoppy oiliness that will leave
you dying for some food. If curry doesn't float your boat, try this
with rare beef or strong blue cheese. Corker.
If you happen to be wandering through Utobeer's stall in borough
market, we also strongly recommend Great Divide's Titan IPA and
Worthington's White Shield. If you'd like to learn more about IPA and
its history, pick up Hops and Glory by Pete Brown. It's an awesome read
told with a bit of humour and lashings of hops.
Chris
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