Once you’ve sparged your wort (trickled water through it to extract the sugars), drained your mash tun and let your yeast go wild, you can bottle your beautiful brew up and look forward to hours of lovely drinking. But don’t forget that, while supping away, you need to give the liquid a name. We’re not talking about ‘Tis Our Own’ or anything crap like that. For beer you need earthy, bestial names to make your fellow drinkers proud of the beer’s heritage.
Dog Bolter • Happy New Beer • Rudolph’s Revenge Seriously Bad Elf • Daggy Sheep • Old Legover Bishop’s Finger • Dizzy Dick • Another Fine Mess Buddy Confusing • Dark Vader • Old Pants Down Cojones • Big Black Handful • Old Pig’s Bottom Daggy Pig • Sticky Tacky Tackle • Piddle in the Sun Milk the Stout Nipple • Research • Bugger Me This • That • Pokey Old Hole • Dead Badger Olde Speckled Wart • Olde Dribbly Bottom Stick-on Beard • Olde Twig • Big Milky Gibbet Arsehole • Kneehammer • Office Party Olde Flibbertigibbet • The Usual
Some non-alcoholic beer names
If you’re teetotal, well, first of all, fair play to you for getting this book; second, you’re allowed to call – gulp – non-alcoholic beers imaginative names too. Here are some of the ones we came up with.
Why? • Get A Life • Limp • Olde Dull Maid Sensible • PG • Old Zzzzzzzz
How was it for you? We took our first brew out onto the streets of Yorkshire to check and it went down a storm. One thing you learn pretty quickly is how different each brew can turn out – especially if you’re making small quantities at home. You also learn the vast range of beer types you can choose from. Check out our list of home-brew suppliers in the directory at the back.
Beer is a brown drink with a foamy head, or a piss-coloured, fizzy drink called lager, right? Wrong. There are as many types of beer as there are types of women – more even. Here’s our guide to some of the tastiest, foxiest and downright psycho …
Belgian ‘wild’ beers
Really crazy beers, with fermentation being left to ‘wild’ yeasts in the air – just like in days of yore. Whereas modern breweries are cleaner than a nun’s panties, these Belgian ‘Lambic’ brewers go more for the British hospital approach to hygiene. Windows are left open, moulds encouraged to fester – anything to get those free-thinking yeasts in to have their way with the brew.
The beer equivalent of an orgy – takes place spontaneously, with random partners; you never quite know what the outcome will be.
Wheat beers
Also often called ‘white’ to confuse things. This fresh and feisty style is another Belgian classic, a great thirst quencher – better than cheap, lager piss by a country mile. Often cloudy (hence ‘white’), the husk of wheat make it a tricky little customer for the brewer and it often clogs the brewing vessels.
Foxy little blonde – easy, a bit thick, but fresh as you like and liable to leave you wanting more on a hot summer’s day.
Porters and stouts
Dark, heavy beers that get their burnt fruit flavour from the roasting of malts at high temperatures. Thick, gooey beers – think Guinness, think Beamish with knobs on. Sadly porters are not much around today, though obviously popular in Ireland – and Alaska for some reason.
Strong, dark, body and creamy head is an acquired taste not easily forgotten!
Celtic beers
At this point a word or two about our Celtic friends in Ireland and Scotland is probably in order. Without wanting to give a history lesson, it’s worth noting a few differences in brewing, which have left a beer legacy in these fine countries today.
It was a Celtic tradition to use bittering herbs like heather, cereals and fruits to flavour the beer, because hops were difficult to grow, and expensive to import from southern England. Even if you could overcome the shame of it. Small breweries have revived this practice and their beers are proving very popular with the punters and beer writers alike. Pine cones and seaweed are among the ingredients being used to give a unique Caledonian tang to today’s beers. And not just because they’re free.
Shilling
One of the things an English beer drinker will notice when entering the land of kilts and free prescriptions is how much the Scots go on about England and the English.
Another thing is the need for a whole new vocabulary at the pump – the language of shillings. No, this is not a cheap joke about wallets and cobwebs. At your average Scottish bar, you’ll have the choice of a pint of 60/– or 70/–. Perhaps an 80/– or 90/– if you’re feeling adventurous.
These shilling (‘/–’) categories reflect the prices charged for a barrel of beer in the 19th century. The stronger the beer, the more it cost, hence 60/-, 70/-, 80/– and 90/–. Just to make things easy, these categories were also known as ‘light’, ‘heavy’, ‘export’ and ‘wee heavy’, with ‘wee heavy’ being the strongest, as well as the easiest to make a joke from.
The shilling names fell out of favour but were revived in the 70s, and we think they’re great. McCheers!
Can be heavy-going, but will keep you warm in winter.
Dark Irish beers
In Ireland, Guinness is a national icon, up there with James Joyce and Roy Keane. Yet a lot of people don’t know that the origins of the big G are in a dark beer popular with the porters at Covent Garden market in London. When this was exported to Dublin, Arthur Guinness decided to take on the challenge, and he did like a challenge. In the early days bg (Before Guinness), when Dublin authorities threatened to cut off his water supply, he threatened to pickaxe the gang who came to dry him out. You didn’t mess with Arthur.
Anyway, so successful was he at brewing ‘porter’, or Dublin Stout as it became known in Ireland, that he switched his entire beer production to it in 1799, and the rest is definitely history.
It’s not all Guinness though, oh no. There’s another strand of brewing in Ireland that has been making a bit of a comeback recently and that’s Irish ales, or Irish red ales. These get their name from the reddish hue produced by roasting small quantities of barley in the brewing process – it’s very popular with beer connoisseurs.
Definitely good for you, with a strong body and frothy top!
American artisan beers
We Brits took beer with us when we colonised America. Then immigrants from Germany brought their lager styles to the Yanks. Now the trad Brit styles are making a comeback in the States, with artisan brewers – from the West Coast to the East – producing everything from strong, so-called ‘barley wines’ to savoury brown ales (like our Newcastle Brown).
A marriage made in heaven – strong