Early 20th-Century Burton, Brief Return

On Friday, home brewer extraordinaire Bill Schneller sent me an email about a special beer pouring at the Firkin Fest over the weekend: Burton ale to evoke the style as it was made in the 1930s, recipe by Bill, brewing by the Green Dragon (Buckman) brewery.  I had planned to skip that fest in very mild protest (it's a huge missed opportunity and offends my love of cask ale).  Fortunately, the Green Dragon continued to pour beers after the fest, and so I went and grabbed a pint last night.  Rare is the opportunity to try a Burton; doubly rare is the opportunity to drink it fresh on cask.

Burton Ales

Burton ales go back a very long time.  They were originally brewed in Burton upon Trent in the 18th century for the export Russian market.  They were then brown ales, made at insane gravities--both original and finishing.  When Russia passed a massive import tariff in 1822, Burton's export market dried up and brewers had to figure out how to sell the product to locals for whom the malt syrup was too sticky and thick.  They lightened the beer somewhat--though it never got pale--and reduced the gravities ... somewhat.  The hallmark of Burtons is strange balance point: they are simultaneously packed with residual sugars and hops.  Imagine a beer as thick and dark as Grade B maple syrup (and damn near as sweet) but hopped to the heavens.  It's both sweet and heavy and sharply bitter.

Bill's Burton is in the foreground.

As you would expect, Martyn Cornell is the go-to source for the style:

The recipe ... is absolutely typical of the Burton Ale style: pale ale and crystal malts, brewing sugar for additional extract, caramel, and Special Brewing Sugar, a dark molasses-type sugar, for colour and extra flavour. The result is a sweet, dark, fruity warming beer, just like its few surviving brother beers in the Burton Ale style, which include Young’s Winter Warmer, Marston’s Owd Roger and Theakston’s Old Peculier.

Now listen to Bill's recipe and see how he did:

"[T]he bulk of the invert was demerara sugar that someone there inverted to slightly darker than the Invert No 2 that a lot of these beers used.  Less refined sugars like that tend to burn a tad and can give a little roastiness.  Oh, the grain bill also had about 20% Mild ale malt.  It was 60% Pale (split between Maris Otter and Golden Promise), 20% Mild Ale, 5% dark crystal, and 15% Invert Sugar (about 85% of that was Invert 2 and the balance was the Belgian 160L)."

It was brewed to 1.075 and had 75 BUs of hops--100% East Kent Goldings.  Bill didn't mention amending the water in the first email, but that was clear on the palate, and he confirmed they went about half-Burton on the salts ("I've done full-on Burtonization and it can make the bitterness pretty intense and aggressive.")  I'm long past trying to defend these revivals as "authentic," but I would say Bill did a great job trying to evoke a beer that approximates the experience of a beer from 80 years ago.

So what's a Burton taste like?  For modern palates, it's quite unusual.  One 19th century writer referred to Burtons as "glutinous," and that's what sprang to my mind.  Some beers are sweet and heavy--barley wines, some stouts--but they can't compare with the heaviness and stickiness of this beer.  It was almost gluey.  But then the hops come roaring in and nip the sweetness; it's balanced by having both the malt and hops cranked to 10.  It also had a slight roasty note that, based on the recipe, surprised me (that's what Bill is responding to in the quote above).  A heavy, heady beer.  I could actually imagine modern palates--those who adore extreme beers--shifting just a half step and finding real pleasure in Burtons.

The most important discovery, though, were the minerals in the water.  They add a stiffness, sharpening hops and giving beer a sense of dryness.  When you read about Burtons, you wonder how anyone could have drunk the things.  The key is the hard Burton water--it ties the elements together so that they don't just scream at you but achieve a palatable lusciousness.  A lot is made of the water that came up through the gypsum beds underneath the city, especially as it influenced the development of pale ales.  But to understand the style most associated with the city, this element is critical.  I can imagine that making a Burton out of totally neutral Portland water would result in a sticky, treacly mess.

There's purportedly another cask of this beer left on earth.  I will endeavor to alert you as to when and where it goes on tap.  Anyone interested in the history of beer really should have a pint.

The Surprising Worthington Revival

I toted home a number of beers from Europe, but all but one from Britain were given to me. The last was so interesting I had to buy a bottle myself: Worthington's famous White Shield. Worthington is an ancient brand, and it has been brewed by different breweries over the decades; now it's back in Burton in a little test brewery inside the National Brewery Centre (though the flagship White Shield is brewed at the massive Coors plant that looms over the city). Pete Brown calls the beer "one of the best beers in the world" and he's not wrong. Beyond best, it's one of the most interesting and a wholly unique Burton product. We'll get to that in a moment, but first, a bit of history from Pete:

It traces an unbroken lineage back to the 1830s as one of the genuine IPAs brewed in Burton on Trent and sold in Calcutta. When I was researching Hops and Glory I found records of it being imported to the Calcutta docks. It was dwarfed in size by Bass and Allsopps. but did steady business. Allsopp's is no more, and Bass is in trouble. White Shield has certainly had its ups and downs, almost disappeared after brewing was contracted out from Burton, but was rescued and revived by [brewer] Steve [Wellington] about a decade ago. Since then, it's won Champion Bottled Beer of Britain and Steve has been named Brewer of the Year.

What's especially unlikely about the beer's revival is that it was guided and funded by Coors--now the dominant brewery in the famous old city. (Marston's, with its old Burton union system, is another big brewer, but Coors is the latest king of industrial brewing in the city that invented it.) Coors spent a million pounds and three years on the brewery, and for their trouble they got one of the strangest, most characterful beers in the market. A great bargain from my side, but not one you'd expect Coors to strike.


The Beer
Burton water is famous not only for its hardness, but a distinct diabolical, brimstone quality. A true Burton beer, one that has been pulled up through the gypsum-rich wells, should exhibit the "Burton snatch"--a whiff of unmuted sulfur. For the most part, Burton beers have the snatch engineered out of them; Burton Bridge, a local micro makes lovely, but sulfur-free cask ales, and Marston's, in spite of the union system, is another bland tipple. Worthington's, though, are the real deal. Each beer in the line has the sulfur, from the Bass revival called "E," to Red Shield, a pale, but especially in White Shield, the closest thing you'll find on the planet to a historic IPA.*

Sulfur comes in two varieties, one that smells like a burned match (strange but broadly unobjectionable) and one that smells like rotten eggs (objectionable). I was shocked to find the Worthington line has the latter--a whiff of which will send the unprepared sniffer into involuntary recoil. Amazingly, the nose attunes itself to this assault. The hard water gives a strong mineral structure to the beer that works well with a fairly malty body. It's hoppy, but the hops work in tandem with the salts. I've long heard how Burton water draws out hoppiness, and it's true; the minerality is stiff and crisp, and it frames the hop bitterness. Together, the flavors make one of the most complex beers I've ever sampled. In fact, there's something almost Belgian about the way the aromas, texture, and flavors harmonize. By the end of my pint (and I'm afraid a pint fresh at the brewery is going to be far better than any other mode of delivery--probably far, far better, if the reviews on BeerAdvocate are any measure) I found I was actively enjoying the whiff of sulfur.

A hundred and fifty years ago, Burton was the center of British brewing, and the character of the beers was considered paradigmatic. Other regions despaired of brewing decent pale ales (or despaired of selling their decent pale ales to a public confident they could only be brewed in Burton). I have always understood this intellectually, but sitting down to try Worthington in situ, I finally experienced it. I get it. The flavors are strong and unusual but beguiling. I brought a bottle home with me, but from this side of the ocean, that looks to be a woefully inadequate supply. A truly original beer, and one you must seek out if ever you find yourself in the middle of England.

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*Relatedly, Alan's got an interesting post up about revival styles and how and when they can or should be considered "authentic." The post and comments are worth a read.

The Far Reaches of Beerdom

When you're an old man like me, the pace of change sometimes takes you by surprise. Last night, I had BridgePort's latest, Summer Squeeze. It has come to the place where if a brewery doesn't throw something exotic into the kettle or conditioning tank, drinkers will wonder: what's the point? Summer Squeeze is a pale with lemongrass added to the hopback and Yuzu fruit juice (an East Asian citrus, though Yuzu is the Japanese word) in the conditioning tank. I mean, if you're not throwing Asian fruit into the tank, you're not really trying. As a bonus, it's hopped with super-obscure Auroras.

A fascinating beer. I was sure there was a wheat base, but the brewery makes no mention of it. The beer is otherwise a pilsner blond with a huge citrus nose. In this case, the word "citrus" is not evocative or metaphoric, but quite literal. Brewer Jeff Edgerton describes it as Mandarin, but I get more a lemon note (but perhaps that's the lemongrass, confusing me). I expected something like a shandy, but actually, it tastes more like a Mexican beer with a huge squirt of lime. The citrus is assertive and resinous enough to stick around long after you've swallowed. I'm not sure what to make of it. Very crisp and refreshing--like a soda with a twist of citrus--and no doubt perfect on a summer day. But I do wonder, at what point will we have transgressed beyond the essential beeriness of a thing and into a different category altogether? I'll be considering that well after the next three trends come and go.

I had another beer last night, too--actually, just a single swallow. It was also an extreme and strange beer, but if Summer Squeeze was a future visitation, this one came from the distant past. The style of beer was Burton Ale, one I've read a great deal about but never had occasion to try.* That's not a surprise: Burtons haven't really been brewed since the Second World War--and even then they had gone through some substantial change. Burton is an old style, and it seems old-timey to our modern sensibilities. They started out as brown in their proto-phase, and then got amberish by the 19th century. They were brewed at massive gravities, but then finished out quite high, too. They were extensively hopped to balance the inevitable sticky sweetness. The result? Here's Martyn Cornell:

But while they had some success with the recipe as brewed for the Baltic in pubs in places such as Liverpool, Manchester and London, "those who admired its flavour and its purity, and who wished to drink more of it," according to the journalist John Stevenson Bushnan, writing in 1853, "found it too heady, too sweet, and too glutinous, if not too strong. Indeed it was so rich and luscious that if a little were spilled on a table the glass would stick to it."

The one I had was a homebrew, and it was made very much in this vein. It was hugely rich and very sweet, though a decent wallop of hops were trying to balance things out. The balance point was well beyond modern palates' preferences for drier beers. It was disorienting. I would have liked a whole glass to savor, to see what the long-term effects were.

Of the two beers, I would say the Burton, a famous style once brewed for centuries and sent on ships to far countries, was the wildest. Yuzu is one thing, but man, Burtons are wild, strange beers.

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*Writers like Cornell insist that certain beers brewed today are roughly in the Burton style, but I am not convinced. The beers they write about from the 18th and 19th century were different beasts than the kind of beers brewed today.

PHOTO: FOXEARTH AND DISTRICT LOCAL HISTORY