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CALLED TO THE BAR
A ‘foreign country’ we should visit more often
Adrian Tierney-Jones
I got a press release the other day. Here is a paragraph from it.
‘Jamie Allsopp, seven times great grandson of pioneering brewer Samuel Allsopp, isn’t just picking up where his ancestors left off. He’s fulfilling a lifelong dream of restoring the ales that made his family’s name, to their former glory. A dream of brewing beer that actually tastes like beer, for a generation thirsty for the real thing.’
The release goes onto say that how with the use of a surviving ledger of his family’s original recipes and the help of a Burton-style brewing expert, Allsopp has had a Pale Ale and IPA brewed. I was also sent a bottle of each. Apart from the wincing bit about beer tasting like beer used to taste, I was very interested in trying the beers. However, the first thought that came to me was did I ever drink Allsopp’s IPA? Initially I thought not as it seemed to be a beer that belonged to a long ago era, but flicking through Ian Webster’s very entertaining The Story of the Hand, a history of Ind Coope & Samuel Allsopp’s, I realised I might have at least tasted its ghost. According to Webster, the IPA was last brewed under that name in the 1930s. Then it became Double Diamond, which in my early teens was one of the first beers that I ever tasted, though I presume the recipe would have gone through many changes by then. Naturally I wasn’t taking tasting notes but I do vaguely recall a sweet maltiness similar to the malt extract my mother used to give me when I was young. Reading on, I discovered further changes. The company merged with Ind Coope in the 1930s, with its name being dropped at the end of the 1950s. Finally, Ind Coope was enveloped by Allied Breweries during the great brewing ram raids of the 1970s.
Before reading Webster’s book, I had heard the name of course. It was one of Burton’s most famous breweries, and its offices and brewery, standing like a solid fortress, can still be seen close to the railway station. However, for all intents and purposes it was just another name from Burton’s illustrious past such as William Bass, Thomas Salt and William Worthington. However, we live in exciting times for beer and the name has been brought back to life by Jamie Allsopp.
This is the latest revival/recreation in British beer, in which brands of the past have been brought back and in some cases polished up for the craft beer generation, part of which does seem to have a thirst for the past (according to Wikipedia, in 2018 Brewdog’s James Watt declared that the brewery were hoping to recreate the original Allsopp’s IPA, which obviously seems to have not happened). The great folk devil of the 1970s, Watneys’, has also been resurrected (at least its name, that is, as Red Barrel isn’t anywhere to be seen), while Truman’s in London is making excellent beers as is Lacon’s in Great Yarmouth (try their magnificent Audit Ale).
In the past I have pondered on the point of these beer revivals, wondering if they are a sign of the return of beer culture’s once dominant and wilful nostalgia. When I first started writing on the subject in the late 1990s, there were still a few breweries that turned to the past to sell their beers. Wye Valley, for instance, had the retro pin-up Dorothy Goodbody (hard to imagine it these days), while I recall a couple of beers from Caledonian being branded with an old style drawing of the brewery and a horse drawing a cart loaded with barrels. As the nowforgotten writer LP Hartley once wrote, ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there’. It certainly has been a seductive place when it comes to selling beer.
However, I think there is something different about the return of Allsopp’s. For a start the original recipes have been used, a practice that a few still extant family breweries have been digging up, Burke and Hare style, in the past few years. Fuller’s had Past Masters, while Hook Norton, Shepherd Neame and Greene King have rooted around in their archives. The results have been excellent, so it was with great anticipation I turned to
Beer Writer Of The Year 2017 • Best Beer Writer, National Media 2019
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tasting the Allsopp beers. I was not disappointed.
The Pale Ale was a clean and clear copper colour, with citrusy and spicy hop bursts on the nose and light fruity esters, alongside hints of green apple. It was light in its body, refreshing, crisp, with some biscuity malt alongside a tangy bitterness in the finish. The malt came forward more as the beer warmed up. It was not particularly complex but easy to drink.
However, when it came to the IPA, this was a masterpiece. Copper-mahogany in colour (or looking like an Alt according to the brewer friend I was tasting it with), it had aromatics of spiciness, a suggestion of tobacco, a plum crumble fruitiness and hints of light toffee. On the palate there was caramel, toffee, citrus, an eloquent mid palate bittersweetness followed by a sharp, lingering almost peppery bitterness in the finish. It was vivid in its appeal to my palate. The past might be a foreign country but maybe it is somewhere we should visit more often.
Adrian Tierney-Jones
Voted ‘Beer Writer of the Year 2017’ by the British Guild of Beer Writers, Adrian Tierney-Jones is a freelance journalist whose work also appears in the Daily Telegraph, Original Gravity, Daily Star and Beer Magazine amongst many others. He’s been writing books since 2002 and they include West Country Ales, Great British Pubs, Britain’s Beer Revolution (co-written with Roger Protz) London Local Pubs and his latest The Seven Moods of Craft Beer; general editor of 1001 Beers To Try Before You Die and contributor to The Oxford Companion to Beer, World Beer and 1001 Restaurants You Must Experience Before You Die. Chair of Judges at the World Beer Awards and also on the jury for several other competitions, Occasionally blogs at
http://maltworms.blogspot.co.uk
BREWING & BEVERAGE INDUSTRIES BUSINESS • Autumn 2021
