Following Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in England, large-scale brewing was taken out of ecclesiastical hands, a pattern which was repeated in other countries at different times. The Trappist ales we can still buy today were born when French trappist monks were forced northwards into the Low Countries during the Revolution. Used to making wine liqueurs from grapes grown near the monasteries, they turned to beer brewing from the available cereal crop and one of the great beer styles was born.

The next major step towards commercial brewing was the addition of the hop. Reynold Scott, in “A Perfitte Platforme For A Hop Garden” published in 1574, described how the addition of hops to a brew helped it to keep longer, and also made the brew more robust and capable of yielding more ale. He stated that a bushel of malt would yield eight or nine gallons of indifferent ale, whereas adding hops would give you eighteen to twenty gallons of very good beer, while more than doubling its shelf-life.

There was vigorous resistance to the hop from the suppliers of spices, or gruit, used in ale, and the archbishop of Cologne even tried to outlaw the use of hops. Suppliers of gruit were eventually over-ruled in the fourteenth century and bought off, due to demand for hopped beers from Bremen and Hamburg by Amsterdamers.

The hop arrived in England in the sixteenth century, brought to Kent by Flemish traders who introduced the hopped Dutch beers to much resistance from english ale-drinkers, who thought that the cold drink made a man fat, inflated the belly and gave him cholic and stones.

Whatever the truth of these statements, the new hopped beers did become popular, and by the middle of the century there were twenty-six commercial brewers in Southwark, handy for the Kent hopfields. In a testament to the skills of the London brewers, Elizabeth I, who loved her ale and was reputed to drink a quart for breakfast each day, disliked the local brew so much on a visit to Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, that she sent to London for supplies of her favourite ale.

The brown colour and smoky taste of English ales lay in the kilning of the malt. This was the practice of smoking the malt over a wood fire, preferably of hornbeam. The pale lager-type beers were discovered by accident when German brewers kept their brews in ice-filled caves in the hot summers. They found that the yeast behaved in a different manner, producing a thin head and fermenting on the bottom. The cold fermentation process allowed the German brewers to make a living through the whole year, but it wasn’t until late in the nineteenth century that a pure lager yeast was cultured. Lager brewing did not dominate entirely in Germany however, there were still many top-fermenting breweries and in Cologne lagering was banned by the City authorities.

While Germans weighed the merits of lagers and top-fermenting beers, porter appeared on the London scene and became so popular that the brewpubs couldn’t keep up with demand. This led to the opening of special commercial breweries, and in 1760 Samuel Whitbread opened purpose-built premises in Chiswell Street for the production of porter, aided by the new steam-power. The porter was stored in vast underground vats, the largest containing 3800 barrels of beer, and other London brewers followed suit, building bigger and bigger breweries. In 1814 a huge porter vat in Tottenham Court Road burst, sweeping away the brewery walls, nearby buildings and killing eight people.

The popularity of porter lasted until the Great War when government energy legislation killed it by stopping malt-roasting. Ireland, unaffected by the legislation, continued brewing stout and porter, and Irish stout is famous today.

The twentieth century saw the mechanisation and mass-production of beer as with many other products, but this very mass-production has led to a renaissance of our traditional ales through dissatisfaction with the insipid so-called keg beers of the sixties.

Through the formation of CAMRA, the popularity of beer festivals and a revival of real ales, the choice today is greater than ever. Whether it’s cask-conditioned, bottle-conditioned or a Trappist ale, lager, porter or Kriek lambic, there is a vast range of beers to choose from, and as many small new microbreweries as there were before the industrial revolution.