Seminar: Making and Marketing of Roman Wine

Dominic Rathbone: The making and marketing of Roman wine 

18:00 Wednesday November 19, 2014.
The Plough, 27 Museum Street, London WC1A 1LH 

What was Roman wine like? How was it produced and distributed? Through an illustrated survey of some of the evidence, especially the archaeological evidence, for wine-making in Roman Italy and the marketing of Italian wine, I try to reconstruct and explain the major changes that occurred in the period 200 BC to AD 100. First, we see the rise and fall of large wineries, aimed at large-scale production of a standardised product, which was exported in massive quantities in an new ‘Italian’ form of amphora.

Later, Italian wine is marketed in much smaller quantities but throughout the Roman world in an adapted Greek-style amphora, and literary sources start praising the distinct wines of regions and even estates. This suggests a perhaps surprisingly ‘modern’ correlation for Roman wine between production strategies (quantity or quality?), changing markets and consumer tastes, and product packaging.

(Dominic Rathbone, King's College London)

ALL WELCOME

This seminar is part of the History Down the Pub series, organized by Gabriel Bodard and Lorna Richardson. We have an open Call for Papers for the coming year. Contact the organizers with any suggestions or questions.

Seminar: Great London Beer Flood

HISTORY DOWN THE PUB

Martyn Cornell: Remembering the Great London Beer Flood

18:00 Thursday October 16, 2014.
The Plough, 27 Museum Street, London WC1A 1LH

Two hundred years ago this month, a tsunami of beer weighing hundreds of tons crashed through crowded streets just off Tottenham Court Road, bringing death and destruction. Historian Martyn Cornell will discuss the sources for this event, and how we need to read them in order to reliably describe how and why it happened. Contemporary newspaper reports give a very different story to the ones that appeared in accounts of the event in the 20th century, with a great story accruing all sorts of falsehoods and exaggerations.

ALL WELCOME

This seminar is part of the History Down the Pub series, organized by Gabriel Bodard and Lorna Richardson. We have an open Call for Papers for the coming year. Contact the organizers with any suggestions or questions.

Call for Papers: History Down the Pub

History Down the Pub is an academic seminar series, held in a Central London pub, discussing the history and archaeology of beer, brewing, pubs, drinking and other alcohol-related matters. We attempt to take a methodological perspective to the history of drinking, with speakers addressing as much how we know, the nature of our sources and the historical/archaeological methods applied to them, as what we know about our ancestors’ drinking habits.

We invite speakers for the 2014-15 seminar season on any aspect of this subject, from the archaeology of ancient brewing or wine-making and trade, or modern English (or other) brewing and pub history, and all topics in between. We shall attempt to alternate between ancient and modern topics throughout the year.

The first seminar, Harvey Quamen’s “Using Digital Humanities Techniques to Study the History of Beer and Brewing” was held in The Plough in August 2013. Further details of the series can be found at http://scienceforthirstypeople.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/HDtP

To offer a paper, please send a 300-500 word abstract to both Gabriel Bodard (gabriel.bodard@kcl.ac.uk) and Lorna Richardson (l.richardson@ucl.ac.uk), or feel free to enquire informally to the same addresses.

Great British Beer Festival 2014, Kensington Olympia

We attended the Great British Beer Festival in Kensington Olympia on the Wednesday night. I think going earlier in the week has proved to be a win: although busy, it wasn't as crushingly overcrowded as Friday or Saturday, beers were still in plentiful supply (even many of the popular ones, although this year and last year's medallists ran out before I could get to them) and the atmosphere was generally relaxed, staff in a good mood, etc. There were fewer tables scatted around the whole venue than we've seen before, but a large seating area off in the side room catered for pretty much everybody who wanted to sit down for the evening—we only had to lurk for five minutes before spotting a half-table opening that we gradually colonized.

I didn't take full tasting notes of everything I drank this evening, but a few highlights are below:

St George's Beerfest, Old Mitre

Ye Olde Mitre, near Chancery Lane (which we visited a couple years ago as part of the 25 London pubs tour), held a St George's Day beer festival this week, serving up at least half a dozen patriotically themed ales for the occasion. By the time we attended on Thursday night, there were only three beers left, but we dutifully tried them all. (Unfortunately, a table for four in the already-crowded upstairs bar had been booked for a party of 30+ city shirts, so after our beers we moved on to a more pleasant environment.)

Everards, Ascalon: a dark amber/fruity brown ale, which was pretty much odorless (although the smell of burning bread from the cheese toasties which are the Mitre's only food offering made it pretty hard to smell anything). On the tip of the tongue it was watery, almost bready, and only slightly more smoky and malty in the mouth; maybe a hint of overripe fruit (apple or pine rather than citrus). Then it was woody, yeasty, maybe almost a hint of mushroom earthiness and loam in the swallow. The aftertaste barely lingered, but maybe held a little spice, liquorice and soy. Overall this was more interesting than the insipid first taste suggested, but still meh. (**/5)

History Down the Pub: London, August 28th

Harvey Quamen: Using Digital Humanities Techniques to Study the History of Beer and Brewing

Three major questions—all difficult to answer—prompt this talk:

1. what caused the sudden demise of porter around 1820?
2. how did the style called India Pale Ale spread so rapidly?
3. can we locate the historical London breweries?

Although surrounded in some mystery, these questions might be answerable using some techniques from the digital humanities. In particular, building a database of historical recipes will help us understand the movement and growth of beer styles (especially as those styles moved through homebrewing) and we can begin to track master-apprenticeship relationships with the use of propopographies, databases that serve as “collective biographies” of groups of people. Finally, using historical maps (like the Agas map digitized at the Map of Early Modern London project), we might begin to reconstruct the historical distribution of beer around the capital.

Harvey Quamen is an Associate Professor of English and Humanities Computing at the University of Alberta, Canada. A longtime homebrewer, Quamen spent the 2009 academic year as a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College, London. Drinking with KCL and UCL friends began his foggily remembered interest in the history of London brewing.

This lecture is the inaugural event of the History Down the Pub series, and will be held in the Plough, 27 Museum Street, London (opposite the British Museum: see https://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=WC1A+1LH), at 6pm on Wednesday August 28th 2013.

All welcome.

GBBF 2013: tasting notes

We attended CAMRA’s Great British Beer Festival in Kensington Olympia on the opening night, Tuesday August 13, which was also a friend’s birthday. It was a slightly odd feeling to be entering almost as soon as we were allowed to, but the drinking had already been going on for five hours because it had been the trade session all afternoon. I didn’t come to the GBBF last year, so this was my first experience of the Olympia venue, which compares favorably to the Earl’s Court where it was held for several years before. As usually, the event was well-organized, with lots of food and entertainment available; and as it was Tuesday night it wasn’t too crowded and there were enough seats for all of us.

I was hoping to start the night with a pint of Fyne’s Jarl, but it was just my bad luck that that beer won the bronze medal in the best ale awards, so it had all run out even though we arrived only half an hour after the doors opened to the public. Instead I settled for a glass of their Maverick, which was also very good: a lovely bright red-brown ale with impressively frothy head and a slightly acidic odor; a massive tart apple first taste; disconcertingly it was a bit sparkly further in the mouth, but had a good touch of caramel and satisfyingly bitter grapefruit pith in the swallow. I was happy.

The Lamb Beer and Liquor Beerfest

The Lamb Beer and Liquor on the Holloway Road, Highbury, had a London beer festival this weekend; thirteen breweries were represented, although only half a dozen beers were on cask when we turned up on Saturday afternoon. From the menu it seems most of their business is done with keg beers, and they had a bit of a problem with the temperate of the casks at the festival which they solved by passing beers up through a trapdoor from the cellar. This also involved an elaborate system of tokens (pictured below), which you could purchase from the bar and exchange for a pint. However you could also order a pint from the bar for the same price, and have it delivered from the cellar, so the function of the somewhat iconic tokens remains an utter mystery. (Perhaps they also offered indulgences?)

Utobeer (Borough Market)

This evening, on our way to the Market Porter (which RV will post about later), we popped into the Utobeer stall in Borough Market to pick up some bottled beers for a more detailed tasting (which we'll no doubt post here some time). Strangely, this little shop is listed in Des de Moor's book as one of the Top 25 Bars in London: although I've seen pubs with bigger selections (The Cask in Pimlico, for example), and certainly shops with wider and more interesting real ale offerings (Real Ale in Richmond, for one).

Mad Bishop & Bear, Paddington Station

On our continuing tour of Des De Moor's recommended Top 25 Pubs and Bars in London, we visited the Mad Bear and Bishop, a large, open-plan pub in the second storey above the concourse of Paddington Station. Despite the location this is a remarkably civilized pub, with comfortable seating, not too crowded with commuters, a good menu and a respectable beer range (for a tied pub, at least: almost no non-Fuller's titles on tap).

I started off the night with a Black Cab Stout, a Fuller's ale I hadn't come across before, and was very pleased indeed that I did. It's a pitch dark beer, but with a very dark red translucence rather than pure black; it gives off the aroma of dusty smoke, not as much harsh charcoal as most stouts, more like the dusty threshing of young wheat. The first taste is quite tart and sappy, with more yeasty bitterness on the swill, but a very pelasantly mild swallow. I suppose this is a stout rather than a porter, but it's one of the most mellow stouts I've had in a while. Very pleasing. I don't know why this isn't on tap more widely in London.

Top 25: The Euston Tap

Our first of 25 visits to the top London pubs was not too far afield. We went to the Euston Tap, conveniently located right outside Euston station. The tiny building that hosts it is a lodge once part of the Euston Arch demolished in the 60s. The bar area is simple and polished, there is seating outside and on the first floor, which can be reached by climbing some spiral stairs and is a bit claustrophobic. It looks like they did what they could with the space they had, but the Euston Tap is certainly better for a quick beer while waiting for the train rather than for a more relaxed pub evening; unless you're seating outside, that is.
The selection of beers and ales definitely makes up for these few inconveniences. They have 150 bottled beers, 20 kegged ales and 8 rotating live ales. Yum. I've been at this pub a few times this summer and always was lucky enough to have a really good time sat in the garden area. This time we were upstairs, which was less pleasant, but I nonetheless recommend this little gem, especially if you happen to have an hour to spare before catching your train. Hopefully my fellow pub explorers will say whether they agree in the comments.

But now to the beers that we tried. Unlike most of our beer tasting sessions, the marks and comments are personal to the person that had the beer. I gathered here as many comments as I could get, plus I include some tweets that were sent during the evening.

50 weeks of beer tasting

Over the next 12 months, a group of us are going to visit each of the top 25 pubs in London (as defined in the CAMRA publication, London's Best Beer Pubs & Bars by Des De Moor), one every two weeks. The pubs, and a couple of shops, are plotted on this map, and the pointers will be changed to red after we visit each.


View Top 25 Pubs in London in a larger map

If anyone would like to join us, that would be great. We shall of course post tasting notes and any other information of interest to this blog as we go.