The beers and ales we drink today, many of them revivals of early recipes, are among the oldest beverages we have. A Sumerian poet mentioned beer and its health-giving qualities in a verse written around the year 3000 BC. It’s certainly true that the water was less than sterile, and beer with the antiseptic qualities of alcohol and its boiled water content was a much healthier prospect. Beer was known in ancient Egypt and the stonemasons who built the pyramids were paid with beer known as kash, hence the modern slang term for money.

Beer and ale are not the same, although beer tends to be used as a general term, but ale is un-hopped and excludes lager-type beers and stout. The heavy sweet ales brewed by the monks of medieval Europe were regarded as a food, and true beer was created when hops were added for extra flavour and as a preservative.

Britain’s main contribution to the history of beer is the rich dark porter, named for its popularity in the 18th century with the London porters in the big produce markets, and stout, a “stouter” version. Milds, brown ales and Old Ales are all dark beers, and it wasn’t until the popularity of India Pale Ale, brewed in Burton-on-Trent and bottled for export to India, that the lighter beers really became popular in this country.

The major difference between ales and lager-type beers is in the fermentation temperature. Ales are all warm-fermenting whilst lagers are cold-fermenting beers, although the exception is a hybrid type, the American Steam Beer which is brewed from a lager yeast and fermented at the temperature of an ale. In Tudor England one mash of malt was used to produce varying strengths of ale – the strongest ale, called prima melior by the monks, was made first. The malt would be mixed with liquor a second time to produce secunda which was given to lay workers in the monasteries, and then mixed a third time to produce the weak tertia given to poor pilgrims and the brothers. This tertia, Shakespeare’s small beer, was given to children and nursing mothers, as it was safer to drink than pre-pasteurisation milk.

Ale-brewing was largely the province of ecclesiastical houses before the dissolution of the monasteries and the rise of commercial brewing. The Fountains Abbey malthouse in Yorkshire produced sixty barrels of strong ale every ten days, while St Paul’s Cathedral produced nearly seventy thousand gallons of ale a year at the time of the Domesday survey.