British Brewer

Pretty Things

It was with great sadness that I recently learned Buzzards Bay brewing down in Westport MA had stopped brewing their own brands. Great ales in a beautiful farm setting. The place was owned by the Westport Rivers Winery guys (great wines also) who still appear to be going strong but alas the brewery was not to be.  I took a tour down their a couple of years ago and sampled some brews fresh from the kettles, yum.  It appears they are now a contract brew location opening up the brewery to third parties and appear to have launched a new brand called Just Beer.

So it was with great pleasure that I learned over the weekend that Buzzards Bay Brewing is contracting with the Pretty Things Brewery. A great project brewing fantasic ales.  Just as BritishBrewer is re-creating and brewing authentic real ales, Pretty Things is going one step further and actually brewing ales using authentic old recipes and techniques, researched by top beer historians, using traditional methods.

This past Saturday evening, thanks to my friend and great ale critic Mike Chase who I use to critique my own fare introduced me to Pretty Things and poured a few bottles of their ST BOTOLPH’S TOWN Rustic Brown Ale, only batch #2 bottled last April.  It reminded me of Theakstons Old Peculier, the brew I happen to be avidly researching as my first experimental Brown/Old Ale recipe.  So I come home and fire up the internets and what do I find but the brew master of Pretty Things was a former brewer from Yorkshire, England, and the Rustic Brown is actually inspired by Old Peculier and a couple of other rustic darker Yorkshire ales, right down the use of Yorkshire malts and the northern england fermenting technique of open Yorkshire squares. It was a fantastic beverage, and I only wish we had more because when the word got out about (via the oohs and aahs) there really was not enough to go around.

Check out Pretty Things at these locations. I am really looking forward to the London Mild inspired by the Milds brewed in 1800’s London and something I briefly mention in my post on Brown Ale.

Brown Ale

For those of you who are regular readers you know we have spent the last 8 weeks or so looking into classic British Pale Ale recipes such as Fullers ESB, Pride, Flowers, and Wadworth 6X.  Next up we will be focusing on Brown Ales and their big brother, Old Ales (which we covered in a previous post). I hope to get some great recipes together and have been hard at work researching the best ones to try out.

But before we move on this post is for those of you that enjoy a glass of brown ale or two (its my wife’s favorite ale) whether its Smuttynose Old Brown Dog or a Newcastle Brown from back home in the UK.  I thought it would be worthwhile to highlight a little of Brown Ales rich history, which dates back to 1600’s Britain, before getting into some recipes.

But first, what is Brown Ale?  The BJCP classification of English Brown Ale encompasses the Northern and Southern English varieties along with Mild Ale. The Southern Brown Ale is described as:

A luscious, malt-oriented brown ale, with a caramel, dark fruit complexity of malt flavor. May seem somewhat like a smaller version of a sweet stout or a sweet version of a dark mild.

with the Northern:

Drier and more hop-oriented than the southern English brown ale, with a nutty character rather than caramel.

Whatever the classification Brown Ales have a cult following and are among one of the most popular styles for homebrewers, following stouts and porters.

The term Brown Ale was first used by brewers in the late 1600’s London to describe the beverages they sold at the time such as Mild Ale, a lightly hopped sweet beer made entirely of brown malt.  This type of beer died out in the early 1800’s with brewers moving to pale malt which proved cheaper due to higher sugar yields and is still used by modern brewers today.

The term “Brown Ale” was revived again in the early 1900’s by the London brewer Mann, who create Mann Brown Ale (still available today and brewed under contract by Thomas Hardy Burtonwood).  By the 1920’s Brown Ales were very popular again with large brewers such as Whitbread began brewing strong browns, far stronger than the modern browns brewed today with an ABV of over 5%. The popularity of Mann Brown and Whitbread Double Brown continued through WWII at which point breweries began to produce weaker, cheaper Brown Ale (I suspect due to rationing and the economic conditions of the time) all but wiping out the expensive, more premium forebears. Today, with the exception of homebrewers, the strong Brown Ales are hard to come by, being replaced with Porters, Stouts and Old ales.  Great examples of Northern English, strong, Brown Ales would be Samuel Smiths Nut Brown Ale and Newcastle Brown.  Mann’s Original Brown Ale would be a good Southern example.

It is actually in the USA that Brown Ale has seen a resurgence, mainly from the legion of homebrewers like myself who like to brew strong flavoured, robust ales. The grass roots movement has not gone unnoticed by the micro-brewers who have developed a broad array of full-bodied Brown’s for the American public. American Brown Ales tend to be drier than either of their English counterparts, with a slight citrus aroma and bitterness due to American varieties of hops used.  Popular American varieties include Petes Wicked, Smuttynose Old Brown Dog, Sam Adams Brown and Brooklyn Brown. A whole host of Brown Recipes are available online also.

So my quest will be to recreate a selection of Old and Brown Ales in the coming months and I welcome any suggestions for brands you would like me to try.  I fully intend to attempt at least Samuel Smiths Nut Brown and possibly a Smuttynose.  Should be fun. Would love to get a Brown and an Old onto my completed recipes page.