Amazing Historical Document

Boak and Bailey link to a remarkable BBC video from half a century ago. It is a beautifully-shot ten-minute documentary of Hook Norton, which was even then a bit of an anachronism with its 19th-century steam engine. All of the visuals are interesting in the way of these things, but I was most struck by beer, which was being made in the age of maximal adulteration. The video starts with a brief introduction to Bill Clarke, one of the family owners, who started working as a brewer in 1928. His father, Alban Clark, had been working at the brewery since the 1860s, and was the man who built out the steam brewery you can still find near the village of Hook Norton today. In the video, Bill’s son David leads the tour of the brewery, which he would take over in 1981. (His son James took over in 1998 and is managing director today.)

As the narrative unfolds, we are introduced to a living lineage that dates back to the 19th century. Because of Bill’s direct experience, direct knowledge of the brewery extends to before WWII. And the knowledge of the brewery he took from his father, who died when Bill was 13, goes into the very way back. (The US Civil War took place just a few years before Alban started working in the brewery.) This isn’t especially rare for British breweries, where careers last decades, but viewing it a half-century later makes it seem like we’re peering directly into the distant past.

Aside from the obvious visual delights in the video, what struck me was how they were making the beer at the time: it’s very much a document of a particular moment in brewing. David Clarke describes each detail in the process, and we can see what British beer was like in the mid-’70s. It is … pretty shocking. While the process is perfectly historic, the ingredients shed light on that dark era of British brewing, when industrialization was robbing traditional ale of its character. (The Campaign for Real Ale, created to protect the old ways, was founded three years earlier.) I’ve read a lot about this period and its ravages, but seeing this video brought it home.

Let’s review. In those benighted days, breweries were trying to make beer cheaper, and they shaved costs in a number of ways. Famously, they began to keg the beer, passing it off as a kind of gee-whiz futuristic cask (by all accounts it was atrocious). But they also tried to speed up production and cut costs on ingredients. Cutting costs leads to a different flavor profile, and if I’m being generous, I would guess that Hook Norton was responding to expectations more than cutting costs here. (They’d have save a lot more money by modernizing the brewhouse and shifting away from wooden casks, which they obviously rejected.)

Beer at the time must have been a strangely thin affair, given all the “adulterations” they used (a term later breweries would use to describe this era). In the beer in the video, the lightening begins in the mash tun, with a grist that includes corn. Once the beer makes it to the kettle, brewers continue the adulteration. They start with a brick of hard sugar (photos below), a new form of sugar to me; I’m sure Ron Pattinson has covered it, but I missed it. Then they add some kind of invert sugar, I assume—it’s a liquid they describe as “sugar syrup” in the video. That’s a lot of lightening, so they don’t stop there, adding some liquid caramel color to bring some color back.

This is, needless to say, not the way Hooky Best is made today. (They never identify the beer being made in the video, but Hooky is the flagship.) Today it’s an all-malt brewery and the website proudly mentions only four ingredients, in a kind of English Reinheitsgebot. And here’s the thing: that’s not how it was made in the past, either. David discusses how brewing has changed and what his grandfather—Alban—would have made of all this modernity.

“My grandfather, when he was alive, he would never have any sugar in the brewery. All he would brew with is malt and hops. And of course, the gravities were far and away above what they are today. And after he died, they started using sugar in the brewing. I think he’d think we we’d all gone the wrong way around to work. And he certainly wouldn’t think much of boiling [in] the copper with steam.”

The iron law of brewing is: things change. When we talk about “traditional” beer, it must always come with an asterisk. A few years after the BBC aired this video, Americans would start opening breweries where they would make “authentic” European beer. A huge part of their raison d'être was making beer that wasn’t adulterated—and the large majority of the early breweries turned to British beer as a model. The notion of adding sugar to a beer was, well into my writing career, considered a blasphemy to proper brewing. And yet they had adopted a tradition that had, even in the most traditional brewhouses in the UK, long ago started using sugar. The ironies of brewing history are only surpassed by its romantic facts.

In any case, it’s a gorgeous video, a delight to watch, and worth every bit of the ten minutes it runs. Please have a look—and thanks Boak and Bailey for exposing it. Okay, now to some of the pictures.