Back then, bubbly for most people would have been a glass of Babycham. Wine was mainly drunk by posh people, though old dears in the saloon bar were supping Port and lemon. The rest of the populace drank beer — but not beer as we know it today.
The main style was mild ale. It developed in step with the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century. People who worked long, arduous hours in factories and mines wanted a beer that would restore lost energy.
It was called mild because it was less heavily hopped than porter, stout and pale ale, and the malty nature of the beer appealed to people with sweat on their brows. It was also — an important consideration — several pennies cheaper than other beers.
By the 1950s, Britain was still an industrial nation. We dug coal, made steel, built cars and ships and mild remained the main type of beer. Fascinating figures produced by Miles Jenner, who runs Harveys Brewery in Lewes, East Sussex, show that in 1945 mild at his brewery accounted for 75% of production — and that proportion would have held true for most breweries, with the exception of the pale ale producers in Burton-on-Trent.
By 1965, Harveys’ production was evenly split 50:50 between mild and bitter. Twenty years later, mild accounted for just 8% of Harveys’ production, and has gone on falling ever since. Today we live in a post-industrial society and, with few horny-handed sons of toil around, mild scarcely troubles the barometer.
But it hangs on. Harveys, to its credit, still brews its XX Mild, while the current Champion Beer of Britain is Oscar Wilde from the Mighty Oak Brewing Company in Essex, a victory that has given a major fillip to the sector. Mighty Oak claims Oscar Wilde is Cockney rhyming slang for mild: I think the brewery is guilty of a pork pie, but it’s undoubtedly a great name and pays homage to the writer who famously said that “work is the curse of the drinking classes”.
Scores of small independent brewers have mild in their portfolios and they are boosted every year by the Campaign for Real Ale’s Make May A Mild Month promotion. Two weeks ago I wrote about Elgood’s Brewery in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, where Black Dog mild, along with Cambridge Bitter, remains an important brand.
Across the border into Lincolnshire, Batemans in Wainfleet has stayed true to its Dark Mild and does well with it in the free trade, as mild has been dropped by most other brewers in the region.
As the British drink more Guinness than any other nation on the planet, it surprises me when I hear people say “I don’t like dark beer” and refuse the offer of a glass of mild.
Mild is not stout but, in common with Guinness and other versions of that style, mild does offer aromas and flavours quite different to those of pale ale and bitter: roasted grain, liquorice, coffee, caramel, chocolate, and raisin and
sultana fruit, to name a few.
As well as producing figures for mild production, Miles Jenner at Harveys put his stamp on the Jubilee with a remarkable dark beer. Many brewers produced Jubilee beers for the occasion but for me the stand-out one is Harveys’ Elizabethan Ale.
This is a faithful recreation of the Coronation Ale produced by the brewery in 1953. It’s a 7.5% ABV barley wine and uses identical ingredients to the 1950s brew: pale and black malts with flaked barley, and Fuggles and Goldings hops grown on the same farm — Stuart Highwood’s at Collier Street in Kent.
The enormously complex beer has aromas and flavours of dark toffee, burnt fruit, coffee and chocolate, with peppery hops and a hint of Port wine in the finish.
Jenner still has a few samples of the original 1953 beer, which he says is still “drinking well after 60 years”. I plan to visit the brewery and try out old and new beers side by side. I’ve ordered a batch of the new beer (harveysonline.co.uk) and it’s now safely in my cellar.
I doubt I’ll be around in 60 years to see how the beer tastes, but I’ll keep them and sample them for as long as possible until I join Oscar Wilde for a mild in the Great Saloon Bar in the Sky.