Wishlist #4; Preservation of Historic Beer Styles

Twenty years ago, I drank black beer. Otherwise known as Guinness. I drank black beer because I wasn't keen on brown beer (bitter) and that pale yellow beer (lager) gave me the windy-pops. I knew nothing of beer style - all I knew was it came in different colours.

Nowadays, I'm ceaseless in my search for yet another oak-aged dry-hopped bottle-fermented triple imperial gooseberry hefeweizen. Having gained an understanding of beer styles, I want to discover more. To find those breweries that aren't afraid to experiment, playing fast and loose with new flavours or paying respect to historical recipes (come on down, Thornbridge and Brewdog).

And it's those traditions that I feel need to be preserved properly. Without those baseline styles of brewing beer, we wouldn't have the building blocks for experimentation. Individual breweries keep historic beer styles alive, but I'd like to see a concerted and co-ordinated effort. Recipes should be held in a national depository as part of a National Museum of Brewing. CAMRA could highlight a style every two months (the 'Mild in May' approach) to raise its profile and the drinking public's awareness. And my dream.... the in-house brewery bar at a National Museum of Brewing producing a sampler tray of beers brewed to historic recipes. It would be the reference sampler for British beer styles. And when you'd polished it off, you could move down the bar and try some tasty UK kegged gooseberry hefeweizens too.

1 comment:

  1. Well said! and a sampler tray of historic recipes would be fantastic. I'd love to try really authentic beer as it would have tasted 100, 200, 500... years ago. That sort of thing really fascinates me.

    ReplyDelete