A Tale of Good Cheer for Christmas

This Christmas I have been enjoying a wonderful range of speciality ales brewed for the festive season.  Seasonal Winter warmers have long been a feature of the UK beerscape, but I don’t ever remember the range and diversity on offer this year.  With original names such as Elves Bells, Tinsel Toes, Santa’s Ale and Festivity, they range from crisp light ales to deep Irish reds and strong dark milds.  But the year end is traditionally a time for reflection and I have been drinking long enough to know that it wasn’t always like this.

British cask ale is a unique product.  Good beers are made elsewhere in the world, but there is nothing that really compares for character or complexity with a pint of well kept, cask conditioned ale pulled straight from the wood.  It seems incredible now, but just under forty yeas ago the very existence of this drink was under threat.

When I started going in to pubs the British beer market was in a sorry state.  Years of consolidation in the brewing industry had reduced literally thousands of small family brewers to a few dozen companies.  When I was seventeen I could name every active brewing company in Britain, and the market was entirely dominated by the so called “big six”: Whitbread; Allied Lyons; Bass; Watney, Mann & Truman, owned by the huge Grand Metropolitan Group; John Courage, part of Imperial Tobacco; and Scottish & Newcastle Breweries.  These giant conglomerates had swallowed up nearly all of Britain’s independent breweries.  In some cases well known brands survived after acquisition, but what the big six really wanted was the distribution network, the estates of so called ‘tied houses’ that each brewer owned.  In most cases after acquisition the brewery would be closed and, at best, production would be moved to a large national brewery.  More often than not the independent brewers’ own brands simply ceased to exist, because the conglomerates preferred to put all their marketing weight behind a small number of super brands that could be promoted nationally, or even internationally.

These companies were not interested in taste, character or tradition.  Their business demanded volume sales, rapid throughput and efficiency.  Cask ale is a craft product.  The beer continues to ferment in the barrel which is what gives it its unique appeal.  But this means that it takes extra days after barreling to reach maturity, and then yet more time to settle after transportation to the pub.  It can be easily spoiled by a landlord who doesn’t know how to keep it.  I have lost count of the number of times I’ve been served a pint of foul-tasting, cloudy bilge water with the words. ‘it’s supposed to look like that, it’s real ale’.  Furthermore it has a limited shelf life, (that continuing fermentation again), and that also means that it doesn’t travel overseas.

All of these issues were deeply problematic to the big six.  Their response was pasteurisation.  In the sixties the big brewers started brewing cold, fizzy drinks: lagers, often brewed under licence from foreign brewers, and so called ‘keg beers’, dark beers like traditional ales, but filtered, pasteurised and chilled.  These products got around the problems of keeping real ales, they allowed the brewers to focus advertising and promotion on mega brands, and conveniently they appealed to a younger demographic.  Let’s just say they were less of a jump from childhood drinks like cola or lemonade.

 In those days beer was one of the most advertised products on British television, and even today the brands and their advertising slogans will be remembered by anyone who lived through that era. Worthington E, 'the pint that satisfies'; Courage Tavern, 'what your right arm’s for'; Double Diamond 'works wonders!';  Whitbread Tankard, 'helps you excel!'; and the execrable  Watney’s Red Barrel.  That last one's not a slogan, just my own description.  For me the most memorable was Whitbread's 'Big head Trophy Bitter, the pint that thinks it’s a quart', the advertisers seemingly making a virtue out of the fact that many publicans could not control the new CO2 cylinders, and you often ended up with two glasses of frothy head to get one pint of beer.  Thankfully most of these products no longer exist.

I was fortunate to grow up in a small town with over thirty pubs, all of which continued to serve cask conditioned ales.  At the end of the seventies, I could find 15 or 20 different ales within easy walking distance, still drawn from the barrel in the traditional way.  But other parts of the country were not so lucky.  Independent brewers, where they still existed, were obliged to follow the lead of the big players and introduce their own lagers and keg beers.  These products were made to seem youthful and modern.  It seemed like only a matter of time before cask ale died out altogether.

Then CAMRA came along.  One of the most successful consumer groups ever formed, The CAMpaign for Real Ale, started a fightback.  The organisation’s stated aims are:

·         Protect and improve consumer rights.
·         Promote quality, choice and value for money.
·         Support the public house as a focus of community life.
·         Campaign for greater appreciation of traditional beers, ciders and perries as part of our national heritage and culture.
·         Seek improvements in all licensed premises and throughout the brewing industry

The efforts of this group to publicise the plight of traditional ales, and lobby companies and licencing authorities turned the tide.  Brewers were forced by public demand to retain and even expand real ale production.  The very term ‘real ale’ was a CAMRA creation.

Then in 1989, partly as a result of CAMRA campaigning the UK government became involved as The Competition Commission conducted an inquiry into the whole industry.  The commission found that “The demand for a wide variety of bitter, and strong regional tastes and preferences, are important features of the United Kingdom beer industry.”[i]  Further it concluded that the vertical integration of brewing and retailing operations created a complex monopoly which restricted choice, kept wholesale prices unacceptably high and worked to prevent new entrants from taking hold.

Following the recommendations of the commission, the Secretary of State ordered the break up of this cosy system.  Thousands of pubs were sold off by the brewers in to specialist pub companies, Pubcos for short, such as Punch Taverns and Enterprise Inns.  These companies were then free to source their beer wherever they liked.

Since then the market has changed dramatically with the fortunes of brewers and retailers headed in opposite directions.   Pubs have had to evolve rapidly to changes in the market such as national smoking bans, enforcement of drink-driving laws and a growing awareness of health issues, all of which mean that as a nation we drink less beer.  Supermarkets now take a significant share of drinks sales.  Food has taken up much of the space vacated, with the gastro-pub a welcome new phenomenon especially in rural areas.  But many publicans live on incomes well below the national average and overwhelmingly they  blame the pubcos for taking a short term view, simply raking off profits from hard working tenants while offering little in return[ii].

In recent years, The Competition Commission has again been looking at practices within the retail distribution of beer, but a walk through any town centre will show that the traditional British pub is under threat.  Many simply enter a slow decline into shabbiness like an OAP desperately trying to survive on an inadequate pension.  Others turn to a range of stratagems to survive including loud music, karaoke or wall-to-wall sports TV. But for every new customer that these features attract, another one is lost.  Nationally Britain loses around 1000 pubs each year, and this situation has pertained now for several years.

In contrast, the brewing industry is healthier than at any time in almost 100 years.  The big six continued to consolidate and today there is a big four who still brew 8 out of every 10 pints sold.  The UK is not immune to global trends and bland global products such as Carlsberg, Heineken or Stella Artois dominate here as elsewhere.  But according to CAMRA[iii], there are now 1,147 different breweries operating in the UK, more than at any time since 1927 and way too many for me to try and memorise.   Of these, 187 have opened in the last 12 months alone.  Together they produce over 5,200 different beers.  This explosion of new entrants has brought a wonderful array of new and different beers, the vast majority of them real ales.  Many are microbrewers supplying only a small number of local outlets.  Alongside traditional bitters, milds and porters they experiment with different styles, using imported hop varieties and other flavours such as citrus, spice or even coffee.  This is not an industry desperately struggling to keep traditional methods and products alive in the face of relentless progress.  It's a confident, vibrant sector reinventing itself for the new century, producing new products in the traditional way.

Microbrewers still only account for a tiny proportion of overall beer sales.  But the British beer drinker has never had such an interesting and diverse range of quality ales to choose from and the immediate future looks secure. To an old campaigner like myself that is something to celebrate.

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[i] The Supply of Beer: A report on the supply of beer for retail sale in the United Kingdom

[ii] Special Report from Parliamentary Committee

[iii] http://www.camra.org.uk/article.php?group_id=11205

Who Do You Think You Are Kidding Mr. Osborne?

Is there anybody who doesn’t know that we are in the middle of the worst economic recession since the war?  This week UK unemployment reached its highest point in 15 years, inflation is running at 5%, real wages are falling and business confidence is being held down by the crisis in the Eurozone.  Even if all that has somehow passed you by, you could tell something big was happening just by listening to the language of our politicians.  David Cameron in his first leader’s speech as Prime Minister resurrected Lord Kitchener’s call to arms telling his party “Your country needs you”.  George Osborne, The Chancellor of the Exchequer, caught the prevailing mood and revived his own wartime slogan to tell voters “We are all in it together”, conveniently ignoring the fact that some of us are more ‘in it’ than others in the way that only a multi millionaire could.  Even the Green Party has recently called for a ‘new home front’ against climate change, Caroline Lucas, the party’s only MP comparing climate deniers to appeasers of the Nazis in the 1930s.

Maybe it really is time to look to the 1940s for parallels in our present circumstances.  After all, the whole of Europe is occupied with the plight of the Euro and in thrall to the Germans. Britain alone, it seems, stands on the outside ready to fight the contagion of Eurozone uncertainty on the beaches.  For the most part, the British public has adopted austerity with the usual blend of sangfroid and chirpy resignation.  There is something in the British character that appears to make the hair shirt almost as comfortable as the ubiquitous shell suit, or in the case of George Osborne, the Barbour jacket and green wellies.

I wonder if all this wartime retrospection is having an impact on the nation’s eating habits yet.  After all the extraordinary fact is that the Second World War was the only time in modern history when the entire population of Britain has enjoyed a healthy balanced diet.  In both WWI and WWII when the UK introduced conscription they found many working class men unfit for military service because of malnourishment.  Almost immediately, as affluence returned in the 1960s, a new disease of obesity began to manifest itself, and is now running at epidemic proportions.  But for a few years in the middle of the twentieth century, government rationing ensured that everyone got a fair share and everyone had the basics for healthy living.

In 1939, (for American readers that’s when WWII started for the rest of us) Britain was completely locked in to the Empire System,  which meant we imported 75% of our food: wheat from Canada; butter, cheese and sheep meat from Australia and New Zealand; sugar from the Caribbean and so on.  Next time you hear someone talking about ‘food security’ think about that.  More than 50% of meat was imported, 70% of cheese and sugar, nearly 80% of fruits and about 70% of cereals and fats.

The Germans knew that the quickest way to force Britain to surrender was literally to starve her into submission.  That is what led to the Battle of the Atlantic where convoys of merchant ships ran the gauntlet of U Boats in order to bring basic food stuffs into the British Isles.

As the blockade began to bite, the government had no choice but to take a firm grip on food distribution and introduce rationing for all.  The minimum weekly allowance of butter per person was only 2oz (57g), cheese was even tighter at 1oz (28g) and sugar was only 8oz (57g).  Eggs were rationed at 1 per week, but only if available.  They usually weren’t.  Meat was rationed by price, but again availability governed consumption more often than the official measure.

The only things that were not rationed at any stage during the war were bread and fresh vegetables.  Ironically bread and potatoes only went on ration after the end of the war, as Britain assumed the additional responsibility for feeding liberated Europe.  In fact as members of the public were urged to ‘Dig for Victory’ the supply of home grown vegetables grew steadily.  The whole country it seems  willingly dug up their lawns and flower beds to grow spuds and leeks.  That hair shirt mentality again!  By 1943 over 1 million tons of vegetables were being produced from gardens and allotments.

The Ministry of Food then set about providing information and recipes to help people make the most of their rations.  Marguerite Patten, who later became a famous food writer, was employed to come up with nourishing recipes which she broadcast on the BBC.  Most famous of all was the vegetable pie which came to be named after the Minister of Food, Lord Woolton, but which was in fact created at the Savoy Hotel in London by the head Chef, Francis Latry.

Frederick Marquis,
1st Earl of Woolton

This diet, rich in vegetables, low in meat and fats, was sufficient to “Keep Britain Fighting Fit,” in the words of yet another wartime slogan, and by the end of the war Britain produced almost 80% of its own food.  The figure today by the way, stands at around 60%.

When rich politicians decide to preach to the public, or when they urge people to tighten their belts while standing in front of their chauffeur driven Jaguars, it naturally falls on deaf ears.  The public simply does not believe that they are all in it together while they see bankers receiving huge and unjustifiable bonuses, or MPs fiddling their expenses.  But anyone who is nervously watching inflation erode their savings, or struggling to survive on Job Seekers Allowance could do a lot worse than taking up gardening.  Digging is therapeutic and fresh vegetables are delicious.  You will also find that growing and eating your own vegetables is good for your health, good for your wallet and good for the planet.

Recipe – Lord Woolton’s Pie

Ingredients:

1lb diced potatoes
1lb cauliflower
1lb diced carrots
1lb diced swede
3 spring onions
1 teaspoon vegetable extract
1 tablespoon oatmeal

Salt and pepper to taste
A little chopped parsley

Method:

 Cook everything together with just enough water to cover, stirring often to prevent it sticking to the pan. Let the mixture cool. Spoon into a pie dish, sprinkle with chopped parsley.

Cover with a crust of potatoes or whole meal pastry. Bake in a moderate oven until golden brown. Serve hot with gravy.

Wooltons Pie with potato crust

Notes:  I’m not sure what was meant by ‘vegetable extract’ in the 1940s, but I used Marmite.  Also the original recipe suggests varying the selection of vegetables according to season and availability.  Although I have a long standing love affair with swede we are currently not on talking terms, so I substituted some butternut squash.   I didn’t have spring onions so in the interest of austerity I substituted a small red onion.  I’ve also read comments that the pie could be a bit bland, so I added a chopped leek and used a cheese mash for the crust.  I probably blew my ration for the month!

Verdict:  Using a mashed potato topping made this into a kind of vegetarian shepherd’s pie and it had the same comforting, homely feel.  The taste was evocative of my childhood somehow and I thoroughly enjoyed it, which is just as well because even though I halved the quantities there’s enough for two more main meals.  Quite acceptable as a filling, midweek dinner and economical too.

Sugar Rush

I was casually listening to the radio the other day.  Geraldene Holt, an internationally famous food writer and author of the unambiguously titled “Cakes” was making a carrot cake.  An ambitious idea for the radio you may think.  Anyway I had only a passing interest as she and the presenter discussed whether the inclusion of carrots made this a healthy option.  (The answer, in case you needed to be told, is no!)  But then, as she ticked off the ingredients one by one, she said something which did cause me to stop and pay more attention.  ““Lovely natural Muscovado Sugar,” she purred, “now this is healthy of course.”  The presenter clearly shared my skepticism about this claim and, barely managing to control her splutters of incredulity, she challenged the writer on it, causing Geraldene to change her assessment, “Well, I think it’s healthier for the environment; it’s not sugar beet.”  That is of course an altogether different point, but it got me thinking, and I quickly realized how little I really knew about this everyday product which is eaten by almost everybody.  Where does sugar really come from?  Is there a difference between beet sugar and cane sugar?  What are the social and environmental impacts of growing and producing sugar?  Since then I have been on something of a journey of discovery which is going to provide the theme for the blog over the next few days.

History

Sugar Cane

Sugar Cane (Saccharum) seems to have originated somewhere in the islands of what is now Indonesia and New Guinea.  For possibly thousands of years the cane was grown and chewed raw to unlock the sweetness before anyone thought of processing the plant to extract crystalline sugar.  The first written mention of sugar, is in the 1^st century AD in Rome where it is described as a medicine for the stomach, bladder and kidneys  produced from ‘reeds’ in India, obviously sugar cane.  Its production is first documented in India during the Gupta Empire around 350 AD.  The very name sugar is derived from a Sanskrit word sharkara meaning sand or gravel, which reminds us that the refining process was less efficient in those days.

From India it travelled to China around 630 AD when the Tang dynasty emperor T'ai-Tsung sent special envoys to the Gupta court to learn the art of sugar making.  Shortly afterwards it spread to the Arab world and was carried west by the Muslim expansion of the seventh and eight centuries under the Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphates, reaching the whole of North Africa and Moorish Iberia.  It was a very popular trade item because, in a world where goods were transported by camel caravan, sugar’s price relative to weight or volume was extremely high.

For over 1,000 years the cost ensured that sugar remained a luxury item, a ‘fine spice’ available only to the super rich. Mainly this was because of the labour intensive nature of cultivating and processing sugar cane and that is also why sugar production has always been inextricably tied up with slavery. The Venetians began growing sugar cane in Cyprus in the 10^th century, using slave labour imported from the Black Sea region, but output remained low until around 1450 when the Catholic kingdoms of Portugal and Castile began production using African slaves, particularly in the island territories of Madeira and the Canaries. By 1490 Madeira had become the largest producer in the western world.

Workers on a sugar cane plantation in Louisiana

Sugar then was well placed to make the next hop across the Atlantic to Spain and Portugal’s new territories in the Caribbean and Brazil.  Some accounts say sugar cane plants were even carried by Christopher Columbus on the Santa Maria.

The Spanish began growing sugar as early as 1501 in Hispaniola and shortly thereafter in Jamaica and Cuba.  Over the next hundred years sugar plantations were established from Brazil to Florida and almost every island of the Caribbean.  In addition to the Spanish and Portuguese territories, Dutch, French and English colonies were established to produce and process sugar cane.  The native peoples of the Americas however succumbed readily to European diseases such as small pox and influenza, leading once again to labour shortages.  Sugar producers turned at first to indentured workers from Europe, but they proved equally susceptible to tropical diseases such as malaria and yellow fever.  The solution was to import slaves from Africa, resistant to both old world and tropical diseases, and so the infamous triangular trade was established.

This increase in output finally brought sugar within reach of the ordinary citizenry and they loved it. It must have brought about something of a revolution in European cookery.   By the end of the eighteenth century sugar accounted for 20% of all European imports.  In money terms from 1750 until 1820 sugar remained Britain’s biggest single import.  The average per capita consumption in Britain in 1800 was 20lbs per annum.  The historian Niall Ferguson says “The rise of the British Empire…had less to do with the Protestant work ethic…than with the British sweet tooth.”  The British Empire, he claims, was launched on a “sugar rush”.

Sugar beet

Unlike the maritime powers of Western Europe, Prussia didn’t have an overseas empire.  Instead they had Franz Karl Achard.  Achard studied physics and chemistry in Berlin and went on to become a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences and a favourite of King Frederick II, who took a keen interest in his research.  Having carried out ground breaking work on the acclimatisation of tobacco to the German climate, in 1789 Achard turned his attention to producing sugar from beets which could be cultivated in a European climate.   Silesian White Beets (Beta vulgaris) used for cattle feed, had been known for some time to contain sucrose, but Achard developed a commercial process to refine and extract it.

Sugar Beet

Sugar beet received a huge fillip due to various embargoes, blockades and other interruptions to the Atlantic trade resulting from the Napoleonic wars, in Germany and also in France.

Today 30% to 35% of all sugar is made from Sugar Beet and beets are grown in Europe, Canada, USA, Russia and the Ukraine.

Meanwhile cane sugar is grown throughout the world in tropical and sub-tropical regions.  The biggest producers are Brazil, India, China, Thailand, Pakistan and Mexico, but sugar is important locally to the economies of many other countries from the Caribbean to the Philippines.

Sugar is now one of the most basic foodstuffs in the world.  It is a key ingredient in baking, brewing, soft drinks and almost every other processed food from ketchup to breakfast cereals to ice cream.  Increasingly it is fermented to produce ethanol for biofuel and is even used in a wide range of industries from leather tanning, inks and dyes, textiles, pharmaceuticals and precast concrete.

It's been an extraordinary march towards world domination for this humble condiment.

Snape Maltings

Sailing barge on the River Ore

Alongside food one of my lifelong passions is history.  It has been a great pleasure ever since I settled in my adopted county to discover Suffolk’s rich heritage in food production.  Suffolk’s agricultural tradition owes a lot to the county’s location close to London, and its great communication links, especially by water.   Produce from Suffolk farms could be moved readily to the coast by the famous sailing barges on the county’s rivers: the Stour, the Orwell, the Deben, the Waveney and my own local river the Alde/Ore, and from there down the coast to the great metropolis.

For over a hundred years the Alde, which becomes the Ore when is passes Aldeburgh and turns south to Orford, was important in the transportation of one commodity in particular, malt.

Barley used in malting

Malt is produced by first starting and then stopping the germination of barley.  This process causes the barley to convert starch in to sugar producing the characteristic sweet tasting product which features in so much of our food, and even more importantly our drinks.  Malted barley is used in bread making and biscuits; it’s found in breakfast cereals and confectionery (think Maltesers and Mars Bars); it’s used for bedtime drinks such as Horlicks, Ovaltine or Milo, and goes into manufactured sauces and malt vinegar; it has been used in brewing since at least 2500BC, and forms the basis of the Scotch whisky industry, which still consumes 40% of Britain’s malt production today.

From the middle ages, most villages would have had a small malting house to supply local brewers and bakers, but in the nineteenth century improved brewing techniques allowed brewers to expand production and they demanded greater quantities of malt.  Large-scale maltings grew up to match the challenge and local malt houses all over the country closed down.  In Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), Thomas Hardy says of Weatherbury, “the ancient malt-house, which was formerly so characteristic of the parish, has been pulled down these twenty years”.

Grainstore at Snape Maltings

One of the winners in this industrialization of malting was the maltster and brewer, Newson Garret of Leiston.  Having bought a local grain and coal business at Snape Bridge he began malting barley in 1854.  Snape Maltings grew over the years to become a sizeable operation.  Garret’s malt was exported by boat to London and further afield to the continent.

Turning the malt

Malting the traditional way was labour intensive.  After three days of seeping the barley in successive changes of water, the grain starts to sprout.  It is then spread out on a malting floor where it it’s raked and turned by hand two or three times a day for about  five days.  At that point the barley is then transferred to a kiln where it’s dried to stop the process and allow the malt to take on colour.

Snape Maltings

From the 1940s onwards large pneumatic machines were gradually adopted for drying malt. These machines employed far less labour, halved the processing time to around five days and allowed much greater scale of production. The industry entered yet another phase of consolidation and Snape’s days were numbered.

Today Britain is still the third biggest producer of malt in the world after China and the USA, making about 10% of global output.  British malt is exported to over 80 countries and is used by 14 of the top 20 brewers in the world.  Suffolk is still a big grower of barley.

Suffolk grows a lot of barley

However Snape closed its doors in 1960 and is now used for a variety of purposes including a famous concert hall and venue of the Aldeburgh Festival.

Sailing barges no longer plough majestically up and down the river to Snape at high tide.  But if you half close your eyes you can still see wagons drawn up under the grain hoists, and if you breathe deeply enough you might just be able to sense an “atmosphere laden with the sweet smell of new malt” as Gabriel Oak once did.

Snape Maltings