Wednesday 24 February 2016

Mild beer

Here's a comment from an an expert - Guthrie McCabe - which deserves wider distribution:-

“Mild ale is the lowest of the low!” “Mild ale is dead!” In Britain, where it originated, it is seen as weak, uninteresting and old-fashioned. It has the reputation of being a “cloth cap” beer, drunk by the sweaty working classes as they swarmed out of the factories and coal mines, eager to slake their thirst after long hours of hard physical labor. 


The term “mild” seems to have become relatively common in the eighteenth century, although there are even earlier references to it. At this time it did not really apply to any particular style of beer, but merely to beers that had not been kept, and were sent out for drinking within a matter of weeks after brewing. It was often applied to porter, the most popular beer in England in the late eighteenth century. But this was only to distinguish new porter, from “stale” porter, which had been kept in wooden vats for as much as six months to over a year.

Going into the nineteenth century there was a change in popular taste, and more and more of the beer brewed was new, rather than long-vatted. These new beers were sometimes called mild, still as a descriptive term only, or more commonly “running beers,” a term still sometimes used by modern English brewers. Even by the middle of the nineteenth century, there does not appear to have been an actual style designated as mild ale. That may be because most brown beers were simply called “ales” if they were not porter or stout. The use of “mild” to designate a new beer somewhat fell out of use as virtually all ales became running beers. Those that were meant to be kept were now termed “stock ales.”

An important development in English brewing around the 1820’s was the development of India pale ale in Burton upon Trent. Pale ales had been around before, but had not been widely popular until IPA came on the scene. By the second half of the eighteenth century, most brewers were producing pale ales of one sort or another, and the popularity of porter and stout had waned drastically. So they had to come up with another name for their brown, non-porter beers, and “mild ale” was the term they chose. 

5 comments:

  1. donde hallemos una milk stout, mejor cerveza donde las haya, que no me pillen debajo de un haya, que empuño mi laya

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  2. ¿De verdad y como decía un amigo u.u nos estamos volviendo todos locos con esto de la cerveza?

    Por ejemplo, con la famosa y fatigosa definición de cerveza artesana… ¿Tantas horas de debate, tantos post y tan importante debería ser el definir o rebatir su definición, excluyendo y separando en grupitos y tachando de buenos y malos a unos u otros en lugar de bastarnos si su contenido es o no de calidad? ¿A caso alguien duda de la calidad de Nøgne o Goose Island aunque hayan sido compradas por grandes corporaciones? ¿O Sierra Nevada o Samuel Adams producen cervezas menos buenas por mucho que sus infraestructuras sean tan grandes como algunas macros? Por Main… dejémonos de tanta semántica…
    la mild beer es un estilo de cerveza flojo, pero para gustos,,,
    les recomiendo la Mierda Fuego, una IPA americana de recorrido.

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  3. coños fríos, cervezas calientes.
    Mild
    para las uvas

    ReplyDelete