Martyn Cornell, 1952-2025
Martyn, left, with Ron Pattinson in Copenhagen in 2016.
Pick up a beer book written before 2010 and you are likely to read a potted history of IPA, invariably described as the first beer strong and hoppy enough to survive the journey from Britain to India. It’s a yarn bound together by myth and nostalgia that served the purposes of people boozily repeating it over pints. It was the only history of IPA anyone knew, though, and people had been repeating it for generations. We don’t tell that story any more and the reason is Martyn Cornell.
Yesterday we learned that Martyn had died, just a couple weeks before his 73rd birthday. Tributes started pouring in via social media, and almost to a person they mentioned Martyn’s kindness and generosity. I experienced them as well. While I only met him once, at a famous conclave in Copenhagen at which Carlsberg had gathered nearly every beer writer in the world, I corresponded with him regularly. When I asked him to look over the history sections of The Beer Bible, he happily agreed. (Martyn, a professional copywriter, also shamed me into abandoning the double spaces I placed between each of my sentences. I can date anything I’ve written by whether it contains those spaces or just one—it’s as if Martyn is winking at me.)
You can see what a lovely man he was just by looking at the photos of his gentle smile—which seemed to be permanently fixed to his face. Please go online to read the warm memories people are writing. I tend to agree that the person we are matters more than the work we did, so these comments are apt and appropriate in the wake of this news.
But the work Martyn did was singular, literally transforming the way we understand beer. Very few people have had such an impact on a subject, and we should remember this part of his legacy as well.
In the period BC, before Cornell, the state of brewing history was terrible. Beer and brewing has never been an elevated subject, and for centuries its story had been neglected. Martyn came to historical research later in life, and with no professional training in the subject. Nevertheless, his work was impeccable. He began haunting the stacks of libraries, peering at blurry reproductions of advertisements in Victorian newspapers, and collecting yellow-paged books that described beer in earlier centuries.
There he discovered beer’s real history, or important parts of it, and his writing, in books, articles, and his long-running blog Zythophile, began to reeducate us. This work continued to the very end of his life. Just last week, he published an article correcting Guinness on the type of porter that lent the style its name, and Wednesday his 477-page magnum opus Porter and Stout, which he’d been working on for years, will come out.
Martyn emphasized that history’s value lies not in getting facts straight, or at least not only in that. Does it really matter that Brits were already sending oceans of strong, hoppy porter to India when IPAs finally came along? Who really cares if it was this beer or that beer that came first? Martyn showed us why the details matter.
My favorite part of Martyn’s IPA debunking came when he pointed out that IPAs weren’t really that big a deal in India—comparatively small amounts were being sent south. The style really gained currency when breweries marketed it to British drinkers, who were besotted with anything having to do with India or the Raj. Breweries had been sending pale ales to India for half a century before they realized local drinkers would go for “pale ale as prepared for the India market.”
The two versions of the IPA history—the pre-Cornell telling and his corrected version—tell us very different things. The first romanticizes the British empire and exoticizes everything from the beer to the destination. The latter version is more prosaic, one that introduces the petty interests of commerce. The former is a whitewash, the latter a more unsettling story. The details matter because they result in different stories with different lessons.
Another big debunking involved porter and a bizarre story about “three threads” that, like the old IPA history, was ubiquitous until Martyn came along. That one turned out to be more of a mystery. According to the history people repeated about porter, it was the result of in-pub blending of three “threads,” or different batches of beer—ale, beer, and twopenny (or a brewery’s effort to recreate that blend). It didn’t take Cornell long to correct the history about what porter was, but a question presented itself: where did that whole “three threads” nonsense come from in the first place? Turns out a man writing in 1802 offered this whopper (by that time porter was decades old), and we repeated it for two centuries. Martyn’s porter research revealed how myth + time can become fact (or “fact”).
Cornell’s body of work brought our understanding of beer into the 21st century. It connected us to the culture and technology of the past, and clarified the continuity that brought it into the present. It caused us to abandon not just the myths we’d learned, but their implicit lessons. Very few writers do the kind of work that so fundamentally transforms our understanding of a subject as Cornell did.
I don’t want to short the work of other historians, especially including Ron Pattinson, whose name is often mentioned in the same sentence with Martyn’s. Historians contribute different elements to our understanding of the past. Beyond hunting facts, though, Martyn was a wonderful writer. He knew how to take the facts he unearthed and put them in a digestible narrative his readers could understand. His influence came from the way he interpreted these facts for us.
Martyn was very much at the top of his game, and it’s a tragedy to lose him. We’ll miss his cheery presence (though when he was tackling poor history, he wasn’t always, strictly speaking, kind) and folks like me will miss his help and support. Beyond that, his sudden death means we’ve lost all those myths he had yet to debunk, all the mysteries he had yet to uncover. It is a greater loss than the average beer drinker—the one who more or less knows the story of IPA but has never heard of Martyn Cornell—even realizes. I am feeling much lonelier this morning living in a world with Martyn, and I will be missing him for years to come.
RIP