London Drinker beer festival, Camden, March 14

Our second visit to the London Drinker beer festival in the Camden Centre on Bidborough Street, a stone's throw from the British Library. As before we were pleased by the size of the venue, with a huge main hall and several smaller sections where food and imported beer were served, and the not-terribly-comfortable but quieter balconies. As we attended on the last day of the festival a lot of beer was starting to run short: at the beginning of the evening about half the titles in the programme were gone; by 9PM only a handful of British beers remained, but we'd had a chance to try a good few by then. Staffing was as usual amateurish but friendly, with many of the familiar faces from CAMRA beerfests all over London showing up at the bars. (The only sour notes being the sarcastic steward trying to get us to use the cloakroom "for charity!", and the pushy chap from the Save Our Pub campaign who tried to get us to buy £50 shares in the Antwerp Arms, gave incorrect information about dividends—that we hadn't asked for—and dumped a hug pile of coasters on me that both contained errors in the site URL, and a site where their own project seemed not to be listed yet! Laugh or cry.)

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.

Four London Beerfests

Since the last regular posts on this blog, we have visited four London beer festivals, and usually posted our micro-tasting notes on Twitter (with the hashtag #RealAle). I'll comment here mostly on the venues and the ambiance of the festivals overall, with comments only on the most memorable ales.

Twickenham Beer Festival, October 19th, 2012

Our annual pilgrimage to the Twickenham Beer Festival continues. The venue is spartan and very crowded, with almost no seating available for the more sedate drinker. Food was pretty embarrassing—sub-canteen level swill served on paper plates. They could really do better. Beer range was good, with over 50 real ales on tap (although not all at once) and a cider stall in the foyer, although ciders and perries were not listed in the programme, so it was a bit more hit and miss. There's a large stage in York House, and our companions pointed out that a bit of local live music at some point in the evening would not have been a bad idea.