Category Archives: Women and beer

Hair of the Dog: What we learned at Brewdog’s 2015 #PunkAGM

Blame John… and the rest of your marketing department

This morning Melissa Cole drew our attention to this new advertising campaign by Manchester-based brewery, JW Lees.

Screengrab taken morning of 5/11/14

Where do I begin? The assumption that only men drink beer? That women are shrieking harridans who prevent men from going out for a drink with their friends? Or that men are untrustworthy louts who lie to get their own way? You get the picture.

When I see things like this, I seriously cannot believe that we still live in a world where enough people thought this was a decent enough idea to go ahead with it. The attempt to push it on social media with a hashtag is even more offensive. Let’s spread the casual sexism and give it some real exposure. Fantastic. I know you’ve been around since the early nineteenth century, JW Lees, but what century do you think it is now?!

What baffles me the most about sexism in beer marketing is that breweries continue to alienate potential female customers. Yes, we know that there are a lot of women beer drinkers (and indeed brewers, sommeliers and writers) who will merely roll their eyes at this and move on to their next pint, but I’m not talking about them. Marketing like this solidifies the incorrect stereotype that beer is a man’s drink, and many women will continue to live in ignorance of beer’s fabulousness if we don’t remove barriers to entry. Women bombarded by this kind of bullshit may never build the confidence to go up to the bar and ask for a pint, even if they wanted to.

I #BlameJohn, and whoever else came up with this shit idea.

– PS

How should CAMRA campaign? Group responds in ‘sexist leaflet’ row

CAMRA offers to pull ‘sexist and insulting’ recruitment leaflets, but young drinkers demand public apology

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Young beer drinkers have expressed outrage at a “sexist and insulting” series of recruitment flyers CAMRA has distributed to universities across the country.

The flyers, which aim to recruit new members to the real ale society, feature pictures of women in low-cut tops and dressed as pin-up models.

A copy of the leaflet reproduced on a website petitioning CAMRA to withdraw it

They were sent to university real ale societies to be distributed at Freshers’ Fairs.

The CAMRA Young Members board expressed their disapproval when they were consulted before print, but said they had been ignored.

Rowan Molyneux, a young beer blogger, said that she originally thought the leaflets were a hoax.

“What sort of people do they want to attract? Slavering ‘lads’, drawn to the organisation because of the use of attractive women as window dressing?”

Members who contacted CAMRA to complain were “brushed off”, she added, and the organisation rejected claims that it was being sexist because it had women in its board.

CAMRA has offered to withdraw the leaflets, but young members have called for a full public apology to the university societies that acknowledges “the sexist nature of the flyers”, an apology to the Young Members Board and the creation of a transparent complaints process.

A petition calling for action from CAMRA currently has 77 signatories.

Samuel McNamara, of the York University Real Ale Society, said: “We welcome everyone as an equal participant. Women are not window dressing for a boys’ beer drinking club.”

Matt Jones, who has worked on the committee of a university ale and cider society, said: “This campaign, with its sexist imagery, perpetuates the image of beer drinkers of lewd, old men that we have worked so hard to get rid of. Ale is for everyone, regardless of their sex, sexuality, age, race, creed and background.”

ICIP has approached CAMRA for comment.

-ED

And all because the lady loves… beer

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ICIP is feeling a little bit intimidated.

Sitting on our table alone are a beer sommelier, an owner of a successful gastropub, an editor of an industry magazine and a brewer. And they are all women.

“A group of us got together to try to regain our voice in the beer world,” says our MC for the afternoon, Annabel Smith, co-founder of Dea Latis. “We recognised that there were a lot of women working in the beer industry who didn’t have a united voice. That’s why we set up Dea Latis.”

Lisa Harlow, Annabel Smith and Ros Shiel, founders of Dea Latis

It is clear that much has changed in the five years since Dea Latis was founded. As Annabel rattles through the list of of achievements made by women in the industry, many of these trailblazers sitting in the room with us, ICIP feels a massive swell of pride and empowerment.

Women hold the current positions of Chief Executive of the British Beer and Pub Association, Beer Sommelier of the Year, Brewer of the Year, BII Licensee of the Year and Director of Supply Chain at one of the biggest breweries in the UK. And that’s not all.

“We have two women in the room who brewed a beer for International Women’s Day. We had the first female beer inspector at Cask Marque. Broadcaster Marverine Cole founded Beer Beauty, bringing beer to the media. Jane Peyton and Melissa Cole are published authors of beer books,” Annabel continues. “Nearly 25% of CAMRA membership are women now. Considering that’s a membership of 160,000 members – that’s a huge number of women interested in and engaging with beer. We know from the latest Cask Report which was launched last September that there are 1.3m female regular cask ale drinkers in the UK. And yet it’s less than 100 years since we got the vote. I think to have done what we’ve done in the last 5 years – we’ve come a long, long way.”

Our heads are spinning with this seemingly unstoppable march of progress. But Annabel knows what we really turned up for.

“I can see you starting to think ‘“when will we get to the beer?’”

With a membership of over 200, Dea Latis runs regular events up and down the country to encourage women to discover and enjoy beer, and their beer and food matching events seem to be the most popular: “we found that one of the best ways to reach out to women is to match beer and foods; it completely changes the characteristics of the beer. We’ve done beer and chocolate, beer and breakfast, beer and cheese… perhaps most controversially we’ve done beer on its own!” says Annabel. “Beer works with chocolate in a way that wine can’t,” agrees her fellow Dea Latis founder, Ros Shiel.

We’re about to find out if they’re right as we are poured glasses of our first beer, Blue Moon, and handed out segments of Terry’s Chocolate Orange.

Blue Moon is a Belgian-style witbier originally hailing from Colorado in the States and now part of the MillerCoors leviathan. It’s not a beer that ICIP would usually pick off the pumps, but we’re prepared to be swayed.

We get – predictably – orange notes on the nose, and the beer is sweet and incredibly mild for its 5.4% ABV. “The conception that all beer is bitter is blown out of the water with this beer,” Annabel notes. “While we obviously went for the pairing of the orange flavour in this and the chocolate, the light carbonation is also important. When you eat chocolate, it coats your tongue with a little layer of fat. The carbonation scrubs that away and cuts through it.”

We actually found that the beer mingled with the chocolate as we chewed and spread it all around our mouths even more, spreading the mellow orangey flavours. While it was tasty, we likened the match to the Chocolate Orange you got at Christmas and happily ate, but you probably wouldn’t have bought one yourself.

Beer number two is a different animal (sorry) – Tiger, brewed by Everards Brewery from Lancashire and clocking in at 4.2%. “It’s a bit darker than the Blue Moon and has a real burnished, gold colour to it. This is what I’d call a very ‘traditional’ beer, and it’s got a very good balance between bitterness and sweetness,” says Annabel. “Rather than overpower it, we’ve paired it with Green and Blacks Butterscotch Milk Chocolate.”

This offers something very different to our orange experience. The beer is rich and malty, and the toffee sweetness from this really compliments the butterscotch.

Annabel points out that the bitter cocoa pairs with the hops in beer, while the sugar in chocolate pairs with the sweetness of the malted barley. It might seem obvious, but we it hadn’t really struck us before. “There’s also a similar mouthfeel between the two, so they really complement each other,” she says.

This is especially apparent with our third match, which is a massive hit on our table. We are poured glasses of ink-black Thwaites’ Tavern Porter (4.7%), and asked to shout out what aromas we notice. A variety of replies from around the room include coffee, liquorice and cinder toffee.

“You notice when you taste it you get an almost drying feeling in your mouth,” says Annabel, and it certainly ends with a bitter, almost astringent hoppiness. “When we talked to the brewer she was adamant that she wanted to counteract that drying feeling with something very sweet.”

My god, was that feeling counteracted! We are passed around those old-fashioned chocolate cupcakes that you used to get as a kid before the Hummingbird Bakery-style boom – the flat-topped ones with a thick, hard layer of icing on top. ICIP is developing diabetes just looking at it.

“This should be a perfect example of the contrast between a dry bitter beer and an intensely sweet dessert,” says Annabel. “When we go out for a meal, especially to Italian restaurants, you get very sweet desserts, like tiramisu, and invariably you have coffee to go with it. The bitterness of an intense espresso balances out the sweetness of the sugary dessert. We’re trying to demonstrate the same principle here.”

The smokiness and richness of the porter mingled with the icing as it began to warm and melt in the mouth, bringing the sweetness down to an acceptable level. This match also benefited from the soft, crumbly texture of the cupcake, as some were struggling with the concept of matching a beverage to hard, brittle chunks of chocolate.

The next beer is a little bit special, and comes in a gorgeous wooden presentation box. “This is Shepherd Neame Generation Ale,” Annabel tells us. “Only 3,000 bottles of this beer were produced and it went through a 12-month aging process. It was brewed to commemorate five generations of Shepherd Neame as an independent family brewery, containing five classic malts and five hop varieties.” We can tell that what we’re swirling around our glass is a very special beer indeed. Coming at a 9%, the beer is brewed in the UK’s last remaining wooden mash tuns.

We get honey, dried fruit and nutty notes on the nose – and several people liken the aroma to Christmas cake. This carries through to the flavour, which has hints of molasses, cherries and other rich fruits. “It reminds me of my mum’s Christmas cake when she used to inject it with brandy,” agrees Annabel. “You get the warmth of the alcohol coming through.”

“The brewer wanted to match that dried fruit, so we’ve got Green and Black’s dark chocolate with Hazelnut & Currant.”

As we begin munching, the genius of this match soon becomes apparent. Despite the high ABV, the beer hasn’t too much of a lingering, alcoholic burn, and is quite soft in character. This gentle booziness mingles with the raisins, accentuating that Christmas cake or pudding association, but at the same time it really brings out the bitterness of the dark chocolate. We are in festive booze choccy heaven.

“Gosh, that’s made everyone go quiet!” Annabel laughs. Making the most of our momentary silence, she hits us with the bombshell that this amazing, limited edition, 9% beer in its beautiful presentation box, costs just £17.50. “I’m never going to be able to experience the most expensive bottle of wine in the world. I will never be able to afford a £20,000 bottle of wine. But I do know that in my lifetime I will be able to sample the best beers because it is so affordable,” Annabel says. ICIP already has their phone out and is trying to buy out the other 2,999 bottles.

Our penultimate match throws us a bit of a curveball. It’s another strong and special beer, this time brewed by ICIP’s pals up in Southwold, Adnams. Solebay was first brewed in 2009 to celebrate 350 years of the historic brewery, and was inspired by strong Belgian styles. It comes in with a 10% ABV, and pours hazy and golden.

We get orange and ginger on the nose, and also some estery notes like banana and pear drops. There is a distinct sweetness to this beer, thanks of the addition of Demerara and Muscovado sugars. They also add a few sprigs of lavender, so there’s a floral note.

“There’s a lot going on in this beer,” says Annabel. “It’s sweet, because there’s a lot of residual sugar, and it has some citrus notes, so this was the first brewer to say they wanted to pair it with a white chocolate.”

We’re not sure about this. While ICIP has an entire cupboard dedicated to chocolate (really), we are big on the dark stuff, and haven’t really touched its pale cousin since we ate white choccy buttons as toddlers.

We were wrong. We were so wrong.

We are handed around Montezuma’s Peeling Amorous, which marries white chocolate with lemon and sour cherry. The bitter and sour fruits easily balance the very sweet and creamy chocolate.

“White chocolate has a higher fat content than milk and dark chocolate,” says Annabel. “But there is such a high carbonation in this beer that it cuts through the fattiness.” As well as taking the edge of the sweetness, stopping it from being too sickly, the citrus notes in the beer match the lemon in the chocolate. It is mind-blowingly good, and a complete surprise.

Just when we thought our day couldn’t get any better, someone puts a bottle of Liefmans Kriek in front of us. Now we’re just being spoiled.

“If any beer could demonstrate how versatile beer can be, this is the one,” says Annabel. Some of the tasters in the room are about to get acquainted with their first lambic. “It is fermented using wild yeast which gives it a slightly sour flavour. They use whole cherries – the stalks, the stones, the skins and the flesh. So you might get a slightly marzipan flavour which comes from the cherry stones – sweetness balanced with the sourness.”

Chocolate and cherry can’t fail. We know that already. But Dea Latis has pulled the rug out from under our feet by passing around some Thornton’s dark chocolate… with chilli.

The addition of the chilli is certainly subtle. At first, several ladies on our table think they’ve been given the wrong chocolate. But it’s a few seconds after you’ve eaten it that you get a gentle heat at the back of your throat.

“If you think about about, a lot of people put dark chocolate in meat chillies to take the edge off the heat and add a richness of flavour,” says Annabel. “We already know this flavour combination of the cherry and chocolate never fails – like Black Forest gâteau on the tongue. Let’s mix it up a bit with the addition of the chillies.”

This is a beautiful match. It turns into cherry truffle in your mouth, with a gentle heat lingering on your tongue. The tingle of the chilli plays off the sour fizz of the lambic and brings your palate alive.

Once our hosts have finally prized the beer and chocolate from our vice-like grip, we take a vote on our favourite match. The Liefmans Kriek and dark chilli chocolate is the runaway winner, although apparently the Adnams Solebay and white chocolate surprise entry comes a close second.

Having spent a whole afternoon being plied with deliciousness in some pretty inspiring company, we’re feeling hugely positive about women’s ever-growing role in the beer world.

Jane Peyton

“There is a way to convert women to drinking beer, and it is for other women to talk to them about it,” says Jane Peyton, beer sommelier and beer writer. “Let them know that it’s a drink for everyone, and give them a really flavoursome beer – not that pale, insipid, blank, watery thing that the industry seems to think women want. It’s the complete opposite. It’s about giving them permission to try it – I know that sounds patronising, but it’s true.”

“What we find is that although brewers are waking up to the fact that a lot of women are drinking beer, and are doing their own women-oriented marketing, as an overall generic campaign we act as an adjunct to that – we want to add to it, not replace it,” says Ros.

“Out of all alcoholic drinks beer is the most female, ironically, even though it is marketed at men,” adds Jane. “Women invented beer. Yeast is female. The female part of the hop plant is used in brewing. Historically women were the brewers. All the deities of beer are female… so it is actually a drink for everybody.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it!”

Thanks to Dea Latis for some of the photos used above.

Want more? Check out our interviews with Annabel Smith and Jane Peyton, as well as our coverage of the most recent Dea Latis breakfast.

– PS

Second breakfast: a morning tasting with Dea Latis

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Dea Latis, a group of women beer fans, movers and shakers, had two things to convert me to at their breakfast tasting in December. Having beer with breakfast, and having breakfast.

Just for starters, beer at breakfast is something I normally associate with festivals. The experience of waking up in a tent-slash-sweatlodge, with eyes trying to crawl out of my pores and nothing but a half-drunk warm tin of lager with which to rinse-spit dust, was not an experience I wanted to reconstruct in a pub in London’s Kings Cross the night after my works Christmas ‘do.

Oh, but on arrival at Somers Town Coffee House I realised I could not be further from the scorched earth of Reading ‘05. Long, communal tables lovingly laid ala Christmas dinner; bottles and bottles of beers stood to one side; mugs of coffee that chalkboards screamed was some of the best in London (and it was pretty good).

I should have known better, because the ladies at Dea Latis are a classy bunch. Named after the Celtic goddess of beer and water, they’re a group of women – brewers publicans, writers etc. – who want to reclaim beer for the sistahood because, they say, “it’s far too good to be enjoyed only by men”. It’s free to join, and they organise three-monthly social events like the Beer and Breakfast tasting. You can find out more in our interview with founding member (and MC for the Beer Breakfast) Annabel Smith in our interview from earlier this year).

A rousing speech from Annabel – a whistle stop tour through some of the industry’s many high points this year – ends “the more noise we can make the better”; an incentive our rowdy crowd hardly needs as we welcome the Breakfast’s main speaker, School of Booze founder Jane Peyton.

“Some people carry a bible, I carry hops,” Jane explains, proudly setting out her sample nuggets. Beer, she argues, is unavoidably female: women invented beer; yeast is female; the female part of the hop plant is used to make beer; female deities gave beer to humanity as a gift. “When women hear that, they think ‘we’ve got a part to play’,” she says. “We have to change men’s perception of women drinking beer. There’s a lot of work to do – but we can do it, can’t we?”

Can’t we just! Invigorated, we tuck into our first pairing – poached egg and smoked salmon with hollandaise drizzle, served with St Austell Brewery’s Clouded Yellow (4.8%). The citrus-y, hopped St Austell’s is a lovely compliment to the rich hollandaise.

Making short work of that, we crunch into the second course, crispy smoked bacon with a herby grilled tomato, served with Freedom Pilsner Lager (5%) The Pislner, light, sparkling and refreshing, cut well through the oil of the grilled tomato; a good foil to the salty bacon.

(At this point that I should reveal that your correspondent is a vegan and has consequently cribbed many of these tasting notes from her good-natured breakfast companions. But you will be relieved to hear that observations about beer are absolutely her own. ISINGLASS? WHAT ISINGLASS?)

Next up: Bombardier Rarebit Crumpet served with Wells and Young’s Bombardier (4.1%), a great success. The sturdy Bombardier paired well with the salty cheese, without the overall sense of stodge you might expect from cheese-on-crumpet.

Black Pudding and Apple Crisp not only did the impossible and made black pudding look elegant, but matched well with Timothy Taylors Landlord (4.1%), itself bitter, brown and allegedly “blokey”.

Chilli Avocado on French Toast – big, tough flavours on sturdy bread – sat nicely with Thwaites Wainwright (4.1%) before the morning’s only misfire, a banana and strawberry smoothie served with Wells and Young’s Banana Bread Beer (5.2%). I’ve got a bit of a thing for Banana Bread Beer – it was one of the first “different” beers I remember acquiring a taste for – but it was rendered almost tasteless by the ice-cold smoothie, which seemed to numb every part of your palette except the bitter-preoccupied edges.

Nevertheless, pudding-breakfast was redeemed by the next course – the universally popular Pancakes with Chocolate Sauce and Blueberries served with Wells and Young’s Chocolate Stout (5.2%). An obvious pairing, perhaps – chocolate and chocolate – but good to note that neither strong flavour squashed the other. Added entertainment was had by mixing Banana Bread Beer and Chocolate Stout to create a delicious choco-banana hybrid.

Finally the women of Dea Latis voted, expertly corralled from noisy conversations and banana-chocolate beer experiments by Annabel, and the first pairing, egg and smoked salmon with Clouded Yellow, came out a clear winner. The Vegan Vote went to the avocado on toast with Wainwright – the citrus in the beer took the place of the squeeze of lime I’d normally douse my avocado with.

I leave breakfast tipsy and converted, states to which circumstances seldom lend themselves at pre-brunch. As someone whose breakfasts rarely stray beyond the instant (an apple! Half an apple! WHY HAVE I LEFT HALF AN APPLE IN THE FRIDGE?) to the bizarre (leftover Ma Po Tofu – because nothing wakes up your face like eleven Szechuan chilli), I was as impressed by the array of food as I was by the beer. The beer itself was brilliantly accessible – something you could pick up from your local supermarket instead of having to enter the GPS of your nearest hipstertastic deli and remortgage your house to buy.

But best of all was the company – tables of smart, beer-loving women (and one token bloke); who shouted out tasting observations with confidence and could guess the strength of a beer from the first sniff. If you haven’t been to a Dea Latis event before, then one of their breakfasts is a great place to start. And if you’re not convinced about breakfast, or beer, or the two together, a seven-course tasting menu like this one should be enough to make you think again.

Find out more about Dea Latis

All photographs courtesy of Ros Shiel

Just to rub it in, that seven course tasting menu:

Poached Egg and Smoked Salmon with Hollandaise Drizzle served with St Austell Brewery’s Clouded Yellow 4.8% (from St Austell Brewery in Cornwall)
Crispy Smoked Bacon with a herby grilled tomato served with Freedom Pilsner Lager 5% (from Abbots Bromley in Staffordshire)
Bombardier Rarebit Crumpet served with Wells and Young’s Bombardier 4.1% (from Bedford)
Black Pudding and Apple Crisp served with Timothy Taylors Landlord 4.1% (from Keighley in West Yorkshire)
Chilli Avocado on French Toast served with Thwaites Wainwright 4.1% (from Blackburn in Lancashire)
Banana and Strawberry Smoothie served with Wells and Young’s Banana Bread Beer 5.2% (from Bedford)
Pancakes with Chocolate Sauce and Blueberries served with Wells and Young’s Chocolate Stout 5.2% (from Bedford)

– ED

Back to school – an interview with Jane Peyton

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Beer made out of Christmas trees? Booze and witchcraft? All in a day’s work for author, sommelier and School of Booze founder Jane Peyton. We caught up with Jane this week to hear all about her work spotlighting British hops; learnt how and why women went from prolific brewers to a beer minority; and were treated to an excerpt from her new book Beer O’Clock.

It Comes In Pints: Your first beer – we’ve been told – was a pint of Tetley Mild. Can you tell us what your top beers are today?

Jane Peyton: It depends on my mood, the weather and reasons for drinking (i.e. quaffing or sipping) but beers I go back to again and again are:

Fuller’s London Porter
Brewster’s Hop a Doodle Doo
Thornbridge – Jaipur
Harviestoun – Ola Dubh
Elgood’s – Black Dog
Ilkley Brewery – Mary Jane

ICIP: Have you found your tastes have changed over time?

JP: Yes – I really like sour beers – gueuze and Red Flander ale such a Duchesse de Bourgogne. When I was younger I was not keen. I also like big fruity barley wines, whereas 10 years ago I was not a fan.

ICIP: You have worked on some collaboration brews, most notably with Brewsters, Fuller’s, Ilkley Brewery. How did you make the jump from drinking beer to brewing it?

JP: There has been a trend for the past few years of some breweries inviting beer writers/sommeliers to collaborate/co-create brews. It’s great fun for the non-pros and hopefully fun for the breweries too. It brings in new ideas to a brewery for brews or ingredients that the brewer might not otherwise have thought of. I’ve been lucky enough to have been invited to collaborate on brews with several breweries from giants such as Fuller’s, smaller operations such as Brewster’s and Ilkley Brewery, and brew pubs such as Brewhouse & Kitchen in Portsmouth. And it is so fascinating for a beer lover to have chance to experience up close the magic that goes into creating their favourite drink.

ICIP: Beer O’Clock, the beer brewed for the release of your new book of the same name, was a green-hopped beer, which is quite a rare style due to the short-time frame available to use the fresh hops. What made you decide to go for this type of beer for the launch of the book? Does it have special significance for you?

JP: I brewed the beer with Sara Barton, owner of Brewster’s and current British Brewer of the Year. I wanted to create a delicious golden coloured session beer that showcased how amazing English hops are. I wanted the beer to have a single varietal hop in it so drinkers could think: “wow – one single hop can do all this for aroma, flavour and bitterness.” (Most British beers have between 2 and 4 different varietals of hops in them).

This meant finding a really significant hop.

I had other requirements of the hop too – I wanted it to have been developed by Dr Peter Darby, the world’s leading hop breeder (he is an Englishman based in Kent), for it to be grown on Stocks Farm in Worcestershire – this farm is owned by Ali Capper and her husband. Ali’s farm grows enough hops each year to make 45 million pints of beer. Ali is the publicity manager for the British Hop Association and is a great ambassador for the beauty of British hops.

And finally, to make it even more tricky in finding the perfect hop, I wanted to use green hops. This means that the hop is harvested the day before brew day and shipped overnight from the farm to the brewery where the hops must be used within hours otherwise they start going mildewy, ie. the hops are fresh rather than dried as most hops are. Green hops can only be used at harvest time, and hops ripen at different rates and at different times so the logistics of getting the hops is not easy. The hop we used for Beer O’Clock was ‘First Gold’ and it ticked all the boxes of my criteria. First Gold is also the world’s first hedgerow hop so it is more sustainable to grow as it is more resistant to hop disease and needs less spraying. It is a spectacular hop in aroma and flavour and I was so pleased with how the beer turned out. That is all down the brilliance of Sara Barton.

ICIP: Are you planning any other collaborations in future? Are there any ideas or particular types of beer you want to experiment with?

JP: I will be doing a collaboration with Ilkley Brewery in January. We have not decided what style yet but I have a few ideas. The last brew I did with Ilkley Brewery is called The Norseman and contains Christmas trees. It was just awarded Champion Beer of Otley Brewery (Yorkshire) and is now part of the main range of Ilkley Brewery’s beers.

I will also be brewing again soon at Brewster’s but have not decided what to do yet. The season will influence what style we brew as mainstream drinkers’ tastes tend to move with the weather – i.e. darker heavier beers in winter and lighter hoppier brews in warmer weather.

ICIP: As an historic booze expert you cover the cultural history of a range of drinks other than beer (and discuss them at length in your book School of Booze) – is beer your top tipple? Does its history interest you in particular?

JP: Yes, beer is my passion. I really like sparkling wine too but if I only had one choice of booze it would be beer. Beer also has the most significance to early human development and history than any other alcoholic drink. Its history is very colourful. Throughout history beer was a drink for everyone – whereas until recently, wine was for high status people. Consequently there are much more interesting stories about beer history than there are about wine history, or the history of any other alcoholic drink. Beer and wine (and mead) are the alcoholic drinks that have been drunk for longer than any other booze.

ICIP: We’ve read numerous articles and interviews where you describe the connections between ale-wives and witchcraft. Why do you think women have gone from being so prominent (70 per cent of brewers!) in brewing to barely being associated with even drinking beer over just a few hundred years?

JP: In England this was to do with the fact that beer was originally made at home by women. Surplus ale would be sold to people who did not brew at home. After the Black Death the demand for beer increased because labourers could get higher wages. They wanted to spend their extra money on ale. Around the same time England started fighting wars overseas. Soldiers received eight pints a day as their ration. This meant that a regular and secure supply of ale/beer was essential. Women brewing at home could not brew enough beer. From then on beer was made in bulk in breweries. Women generally did not work outside the home, they could not get credit from moneylenders to build breweries, and they could not own their own property (it belonged to their husbands). This, and the fact that beer became a lucrative industry that men wanted to get in on sidelined women as the primary brewers.

See here for an article I wrote for Stylist online about the link between witchcraft and female brewers.

ICIP: As a beer sommelier you know a lot about beer and food matching – can you explain some of the basic principles of pairing food and beer for a novice?

JP: Here is an excerpt from Beer o’ Clock to explain some of the guidelines of beer & food matching.

“Why is beer so perfect for matching with food? For flavour and texture but also for the practical fact that beer is up to 95% water so it refreshes the mouth and clears the palate – and that is the number one reason why we have liquid with our food. Beer contains carbon dioxide an efficient palate scrubber which prepares the mouth for the next morsel. Even real ale with no discernible bubbles contains dissolved CO2 which adds a note of invigorating acidity and lightens up the richness of food. Hops contain varying degrees of bitterness and they also act like knives cutting through flavour and texture and both of these properties are refreshing.

When pairing beer with food this is the mantra – Cut, Complement, or Contrast.

Cut: choose a beer that cuts through the flavour or body of the food. For instance fish & chips with a crisp refreshing beer to cut through the fat, and citrus hops to complement the fish.

Complement: choose a beer that will complement the flavours of the food. For instance, spicy food with a beer containing spicy hops.

Contrast: choose a beer that is a complete contrast to the food. For instance big flavoured chocolatey porter or stout with delicate salty oysters.

But rules can be broken and it is fun to experiment to see which beers work with certain dishes.”

ICIP: What beers are on your Christmas list? Are there any beers you can recommend to match with Christmas fare like the turkey dinner, the Xmas pud…?

JP: Lots of beers for Christmas dinner! I would go for a flute of Deus (a French beer made with Champagne yeast) as an aperitif before dinner, a hoppy pale ale for the main course, a big barley wine for mince pies, porter for Christmas pud, or Christmas cake and Stilton cheese, Belgian kriek or Frambozen for trifle. Fuller’s Vintage Ale in a brandy balloon or snifter glass on its own as a digestive.

Beer O’Clock: Craft, Cask and Culture and School of Booze: An Insider’s Guide to Libations, Tipples and Brews are available now.

Beauty and the Yeast: catching up with Beer Beauty’s Marverine Cole

Swotting up at the School of Booze

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To celebrate the release of her two new books, Beer Sommelier Jane Peyton has collaborated with Brewsters Brewery to produce a special green-hopped beer. ICIP got their hands on the books and went along to the launch party to find out more.

Jane Peyton is a bit of an hero of ICIP’s. She’s one of just eight female Beer Sommeliers in the UK and has founded two alcohol-related events companies – School of Booze and Operalicious. She is also an author, after-dinner speaker, tasting tutor and occasional Fuller’s brewery tour guide. Summed up – she is our kind of lady. So we were very excited to find out she had not one but two books coming out this October.

Beer O’Clock: Craft, Cask and Culture (Summersdale, 2013) is a true celebration of beer, and an excellent addition to any beer drinker’s bookshelf. Jane’s passion is evident from the outset, describing beer as a “priceless gift to humanity, begetter of happiness, sociability and companionship”. She believes that beer, more than any other drink, brings people together, acting as an international language.

Her historical section on “beer’s early years” is fascinating, reporting that beer may have been produced as early as 7000BC. This section pays particular attention to the role of women throughout beer’s history, from early brewers to the female gods of beer such as Ninkasi (Sumerian), Ceres (Roman) and Mamasara (Peruvian).

Jane breaks down the brewing process into a summary easily understood by newcomers to beer. She takes time to explain the importance of each of the key ingredients – water, malt, hops and yeast – and also discusses the best way to taste beer to get the full benefit of aroma and flavour. One of our favourite chapters focuses on the health benefits of beer. High in antioxidants, B-vitamins, potassium and silicon, and offering protection from breast cancer, heart disease, gallstones and Parkinson’s, beer now seems an even more alluring option (in moderation!).

But the crowning glory of the book, as far as ICIP is concerned, is the whopping sixty pages dedicated to beer styles. This explains the characteristics of nearly seventy different beers, from Abbey to Witbier, and everything in between, also giving you examples of brands to try, recommended serving temperature, glassware and ideas for food matching. This section is so comprehensive that we wish we could carry it around with us everywhere (and given the neat design of the book, at a weeny 18x14cm, we probably could). It really is a beer-lover’s bible.

Jane’s second new book, School of Booze: An Insider’s Guide to Libations, Tipples and Brews (Summersdale, 2013) expands on some of the areas touched on in Beer O’Clock, but extends the scope to cover all alcoholic beverages. She traces the history of alcohol through Mesopotamia, Egypt, Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, tells us why we get hangovers, where we get cork from, and explains the process behind everything you’d find behind a bar, from absinthe to wine. It is a dizzying trip, packed with enough trivia to make you popular down your local for a long time to come.

Beer O’Clock is dedicated to Sara Barton, founder of Brewster’s Brewery in Lincolnshire, and Jane and Sara collaborated to make an eponymous green-hopped beer for the launch party. For the uninitiated, when a beer is green-hopped fresh hops are used instead of the traditional dried ones (or pellets). This means that there is more oil left in the hops and more of their flavour is evident in the final product.

The beer obviously went down a storm in The Mad Bear and Bishop, the Fuller’s pub in Paddington station where the launch party was held. A whole firkin was sunk during the lunchtime session and ICIP was lucky to grab two halves before the pumps ran dry once again in the evening. The pub was heaving with beer fans – interestingly, predominantly female – snapping up signed copies of Jane’s new books while supping pints.

Beer O’Clock (4% ABV) is a golden ale, single-hopped with First Gold and made with three different malts. It has a sharp, citrus aroma, a hoppy hit balanced with a good level of bitterness. The result was a light, session ale with a pleasing astringent mouthfeel and decent body. ICIP overheard other drinkers getting marmalade on the nose – very appropriate for Paddington station!

For anyone wishing to try Beer O’Clock, The Rake in Borough Market will have some in on October 23rd – be quick, it is very exclusive and this will be your last chance.

– PS

Hitting the Marque: half an hour with Beer Sommelier Annabel Smith

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What’s the number one beer-myth women have fallen for? Are slimming clubs to blame for our messed up relationship with beer? Could our cave women ancestors be responsible for our taste in hops?

Annabel Smith has been Training Manager at Cask Marque for nearly a decade, is a member of the British Guild of Beer Writers, and is one of just 40 Beer Academy-accredited Beer Sommeliers in the UK. She is a founding member of Dea Latis, a project encouraging women to drink more beer, and regularly hosts tutored tastings to men and women alike. It Comes In Pints? had a chat with Annabel about her relationship with beer, what was involved in becoming a sommelier and why she thinks beer is yet to be embraced by women en masse.

It Comes In Pints?: Have you always been a beer drinker?
Annabel Smith: Since I’ve legally been allowed to drink beer, yes! It’s something I’ve gravitated towards partly because of part time work I did after I left college – working in a pub, basically. I’m of the generation where most girls drank pints of beer.

ICIP: What kind of beer in particular were you drinking then? Has your palate evolved over time?
AS: Definitely lager. It wasn’t ale at that point, but it was all kind of interconnected with the work I started doing. I started working in a pub full-time and it was very anti-lager, it was a very traditional ale house. I learned a lot there about what to do with the beer in the cellar, how to look after it, how it was different from lager. I realised it had an awful lot more flavour than mass-produced lagers that I had been drinking, and part of the job was you never ever sold the beer to a customer without trying it first thing every morning to make sure it was absolutely perfect.

ICIP: What was the process of becoming qualified as a Beer Sommelier?
AS: I had to prove that I had hosted a number of tutored tastings, that I’d helped businesses to choose beers to go with menus, that I had changed people’s opinions about beer. That was actually the most time-consuming part, putting together the proof of evidence file. Then I had to take an advanced Beer Academy (BA) course. You tasted hundreds of different styles of beer and then you sat a one-to-one examination. A BA examiner brought out 21 samples of beer for me to try. I had to say where the beer came from, what style of beer it was, what hops and malt I thought had been used, even attempt to identify the brand, all from a blind tasting. For the food matching, the examiner hands you a menu and asks you to pick five beers to go with starters, mains and desserts. They don’t want you to reel out something you’ve read in a book, what they want to see is your opinion about a beer. For example, a lot of people say stout goes with oysters. And I don’t get it, I’ve never understood that match at all. I think that stout goes brilliantly with apple pie and custard. Every weekend I went out and bought three different styles of beer and just took them home, had a bit of cheese and a bit of pâté, and just filled out notebooks with my own tasting notes. They said don’t be afraid to challenge what previous experts have said about beer. So it is quite a fun accreditation to go for!

ICIP: There are 40 Beer Academy-accredited Beer Sommeliers in the UK and 8 of them are women – the press seems to make a point of calling you a female Beer Sommelier. Do you ever get fed up with being described this way?
AS: I think this is all contributing to interest in the category. If it means getting a piece in the paper, I don’t mind at all if it says “female beer sommelier”, because at least beer is being written about. For the last twenty years there’s been sod all written about beer, really, and all of a sudden it has started to become interesting again to the media.

ICIP: Obviously a lot of your work at Cask Marque is to do with cask ale, so where do you stand on the cask vs keg, real ale vs craft beer debate?
AS: At Cask Marque, what we’re doing is testing the quality of cask ale in the on-trade. But we do get a lot of brewers, especially big multinationals, coming to us and saying “we also want you to test our lager or our stout”. So in the trade we’re about all beer, not just cask ale. My opinion on the whole kind of craft movement is, if it’s a really well-produced beer, and it’s kept correctly and served correctly, I have no issue with how it’s being packaged.

ICIP: We spoke to some women at GBBF who said that they felt they need to back up their opinions on beer with knowledge so as not to be “caught out” whereas they felt men can bluff about beer. Do you agree?
AS: Ooh, that’s quite an interesting point! I think generally, when you think about food in general, if women have a brilliant dish in a restaurant, they have a natural curiosity as to how it was made, how the flavours were achieved. I think men would just go “that was a brilliant meal!” Women are more naturally curious about variety of flavours and trying to understand why they enjoy something, but equally why they don’t enjoy something.

ICIP: When you’re talking about beer or recommending beer, do you change what you say depending on whether your audience is women or men?
AS: If I’m talking to a group of women they usually come in with some very definite preconceptions about beer. It might be a general “I don’t drink it, so I don’t like it”, or “it’s a man’s drink”. So with women I give them a bit of history about why they don’t drink beer, and why it’s so embedded in male culture, then go on to bust some of the myths. With men, it’s much more about how important the beer industry is to the economy. I tailor it towards ages as well. I talked to a WI group a few weeks ago who were all sixty-plus so I did a lot of little stories, like in the 1930s how popular Guinness was, and they all remembered all the old Guinness adverts. If I’d given that talk to a group of 18 year olds it wouldn’t have been relevant.

ICIP: What’s the number one myth you’ve come across when you’re talking to women about beer?
AS: That beer’s fattening.

ICIP: So how do you dispel that?
AS: It’s less calories than any other drink you can order across a bar, other than water. Take half a pint of beer, a medium sized glass of wine, so 125ml, and a single spirit and mixer. The beer is right at the bottom of the scale, that’s 80 calories, then we go to 120 calories for your wine and 130 calories for the spirit. I know categorically who is promoting this myth, and it’s slimming clubs in this country. They say if you’re on a diet, you must drink vodka and slimline tonic – it’s a load of rubbish! It’s purely to do with lifestyle, for example if you go out and have five pints of beer, the last thing you fancy eating afterwards is a salad. You always go for your carb-laden things. It’s the hops in the beer that are causing you to crave those fatty foods. Hops themselves are a very distant cousin of the cannabis family. So you’ve got minimal amount of hops in beer, but it’s the hops that are causing you to crave certain types of food.

ICIP: Like the munchies?
AS: Basically, yeah!

ICIP: Do you find when women sit down and try beer, the problem is mostly the flavour and they need to find a taste they like, or that the problem is mostly image?
AS: The biggest problem we have is the fact that they’ve never been given an opportunity to try it in the first place. If you actually put a glass of beer in somebody’s hand and say “why don’t you try that”, the first barrier to it is colour. If you put a very black beer in a non-beer drinker’s hand, especially a woman, they’ll go “ooh, it looks really thick and heavy and I’m frightened of it!”. If you put a very pale, blonde beer in a woman’s hand they go “that looks quite nice and refreshing actually”, because they relate more to it in terms of lager or white wine.

I think the second thing is bitterness level, because women have a far heightened sense of bitterness than men do. The average number of tastebuds is 10,000, but women have a lot more than men. Basically when we were cave women, the blokes would go out and hunt for food and we would stay in the cave with our children. When the blokes came back with food, women would always chew it before they gave it to a child to make sure it was safe. If they tasted anything which was bitter it set off a receptor in the brain saying “don’t give this to a child; it’s poisonous”. We’ve retained that bitterness receptor in the brain; you can tell, when a lot of women drink bitter beers, they scrunch their face up, and it’s purely this reflex going off in the brain going “it’s not safe”. Whereas men have lost that reflex in the brain and they can take far higher levels of bitterness.

ICIP: So what’s a good entry beer for women in general? If you were trying to get women into beer for the first time?
AS: Okay, I’d certainly go for something a bit floral, a bit sweeter, and I’d always go for a light colour, but not necessarily a fruit beer. It’s almost like putting sugar coating on it. In my opinion, any beer that you’ve brewed specifically for women always fails in the marketplace. Because women just go “you know what, if it’s not good enough for men, I’m not bothered about drinking it, so don’t try to fuss it up as something feminine”. I’d always say, don’t go for one that’s very, very bitter, very heavily hopped, because you’ll put your first time beer-drinker off for good. Strangely enough a lot of women like mild. Mild is quite an old-fashioned beer but it’s low in strength and it’s a lot sweeter than other darker beers. But of course, mild is almost black in colour, so as soon as they see it, it’s like a dichotomy between the appearance and flavour, whereas if you could just put a blindfold on them and give them a glass of mild, I bet they wouldn’t believe it if you whipped the blindfold off and said you’ve just been drinking a very dark beer!

I think also we’ve got a bit of an issue in that most women I speak to absolutely hate the glassware that beer is served in. It just makes a change to our perception of beer if it’s served in a lovely glass.

ICIP: Do you think that’s something that the craft beer environment has that normal pubs maybe don’t?
AS: I think it’s a massive advantage they have. Most of the family-owned breweries in the UK are still run by men, and it’s sixth, seventh generation of brewing and they should have recognised long ago that there is room in the market for having nice, stemmed glassware. I actually did an experiment at one of the breweries in North Yorkshire, hosting a ladies’ beer and food evening. The last beer of the evening, I used the same beer but I put some of it into half-pint glasses and some of it into wine glasses.. 90% of the women said they liked the wine glass, and I said “you’ve actually tasted exactly the same beer”. Because of that glass, they thought it was a better quality product, it was nicer to drink, it was a better experience. It doesn’t cost much to do that, does it?

To find out more about Dea Latis and their events check out their blog or find them on Twitter.

It Comes In Pints?

Ladies who blog about beer.

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