My glass is half and half full

Hard on the heels of the MA's report last week on the growing influence of imported beers in Britain, I can report on the remarkable revival of an old London style… courtesy of a brewery in the Czech Republic.

The beer is called Half & Half. It's available so far in just one London pub and it comes from the Budweiser Budvar brewery. It is a blend of two beers, Budweiser Original — the famous global brand that must never be confused with American Bud — and Budvar Dark.

Dark was introduced just a few years ago and was hotly disputed within the brewery at the time. Brewmaster Josef Tolar was firmly opposed to producing a dark lager — old fashioned and cloth-capped, he said — while his deputy Ales Dvorak wanted to bring back an old style of beer but with a modern twist.

Until the industrial revolution of the late 18th and 19th centuries, which enabled pale malt to be produced on a commercial scale, all lager beers were dark. They were made with malt cured over wood fires. British ales were dark for the same reason. The development of pale malt led to two major brewing innovations — pale ale in Britain and golden lager in central Europe.

But while dark mild lingered on in Britain so, too, did dark lager, especially in Bavaria, the southern part of Germany. Just over the border in Bohemia, part of the Czech Republic, Ales Dvorak argued the case for brewing a dark lager but making it less sweet and more bitter than the dark lagers of the 19th century.

The beer was well received in the Czech Republic and caused a sensation when it was unveiled at the Great British Beer Festival a few years ago. The beer has since gone on sale in selected pubs throughout Britain and has not only become popular with drinkers but also led to a demand for it to be mixed with Budvar Original.

The British office of Budvar has now responded to this demand for mixed beer by putting it on sale in one London pub, the Lord John Russell in Marchmont Street, WC1.

Budvar has gone to the expense of installing a special fount with three taps: one serves Original, the second Dark while the tap in between draws beers from both kegs and mixes them en route to the bar.

If the trial in the Lord John Russell is successful Budvar UK plans to roll out Half & Half in other pubs: the Capital Pub Group, for one, is interested. It's a delicious beer, with roasty and vanilla notes, a good hop bitterness, and a refreshing character. If you have the time and the money, you could order halves of the two main beers along with the mixture and compare all three.

Drinking the beer was nostalgic pleasure. It brought back memories of drinking in London pubs back in the 1960s when mixed beers were all the rage. Half and half in those days meant a mixture of mild and bitter. In the Cockney heartland, this was known as "narfer narf" — a half of mild and a half of bitter mixed. If you wanted a half pint of the blend, you called for a "narfer narfer narf".

Boilermaker​

With a teenager's sweet tooth, my beer-drinking life started with a mixture of bottled brown ale and draught mild. This was called a Boilermaker. I imagine this was the result of its popularity with people who made boilers. My father worked in the London docks and I should have asked him, but it's too late now unless there's an email address for the Great Saloon Bar in the Sky.

Other popular mixes at the time were Black & Tan, a blend of stout and bitter; Granny, old and mild; Blacksmith, barley wine and Guinness; Dragon's Blood, barley wine and rum; and Mother-in-law, a blend of old and bitter. The last-named would be banned by the modern thought police as being politically incorrect.

When my taste buds improved,

I graduated from brown and mild to light and bitter. This was known as a Lightplater. I've no idea what this means but imagine it's another long-lost working-class skill.

These fascinating names have all disappeared, along with mixed drinks. Looking back, it seems odd that drinkers mixed brown and mild and light ale and bitter when they were same thing in bottled and draught form. I imagine the reason was that draught beer in those days was not very good and adding carbonated bottled beer gave it a bit of fizz and life. The habit probably led to the rise of keg beer, which almost killed off cask beer until the arrival of the Campaign for Real Ale in the 1970s.

So I'm greatly indebted to Budweiser Budvar for bringing back the joys of narfer narf. I doubt that the Cockney name for the mixture will be exported to the Czech Republic but perhaps other London blends may tickle their fancy.

How about a Dog's Nose, popular in Victorian London and referred to by Dickens in The Pickwick Papers. It was quite a mixture: warm porter, moist sugar, gin and nutmeg.

I see from last week's MA that Fuller's Porter is selling well in London. All we need now is the sugar, gin and nutmeg. I'm sure the Chiswick brewery will be happy to oblige.