Historical Beer Birthday: John Lofting

June 15, 2025 By Jay Brooks

Today is as good a day as any to celebrate the birthday of John Lofting (1659–June 15, 1742). Like many people born centuries ago who weren’t royal or otherwise well-born, we don’t know the exact day he was born, but we do know that he died today. Lofting was a Dutchman who lived in London as an adult, and patented several devices, the most famous of which was the fire engine, but he may also have been responsible for the beer engine.

Here’s his Wikipedia entry:

Originally Jan Loftingh, John Lofting was an engineer and entrepreneur from the Netherlands. His parents were Herman and Johanna. He moved to London, England, before 1686. He patented two inventions being the “sucking worm engine” (a fire engine) and a horse-powered thimble knurling machine. His mill was set up in Islington, where Lofting Road is named after him. However, in or about 1700, he moved his main operation to Great Marlow in Buckinghamshire to take advantage of the River Thames’ ability to turn a water wheel which improved productivity, enabling the production of over 2 million thimbles per year.

The Sucking Worm Engine, from the British Museum.

And while Joseph Bramah patented the first practical beer engine, Lofting’s design made it possible for Bramah to build on and create his. Although there’s little I could find specific about Lofting’s invention, it is mentioned in the Wikipedia entry for the beer engine:

A beer engine is a device for pumping beer from a cask in a pub’s cellar.
The beer engine was invented by John Lofting, a Dutch inventor, merchant and manufacturer who moved from Amsterdam to London in about 1688 and patented a number of inventions including a fire hose and engine for extinguishing fires and a thimble knurling machine as well as a device for pumping beer. The London Gazette of 17 March 1691 stated “the patentee hath also projected a very useful engine for starting of beers and other liquors which will deliver from 20 to 30 barrels an hour which are completely fixed with brass joints and screws at reasonable rates.”
The locksmith and hydraulic engineer Joseph Bramah developed beer pumping further in 1797.
The beer engine is normally manually operated, although electrically powered and gas powered pumps are occasionally used; when manually powered, the term handpump is often used to refer to both the pump and the associated handle.
The beer engine is normally located below the bar with the visible handle being used to draw the beer through a flexible tube to the spout, below which the glass is placed. Modern hand pumps may clamp onto the edge of the bar or be mounted on the top of the bar.
A pump clip is usually attached to the handle by a spring clip giving the name and sometimes the brewery, beer type and alcoholic strength of the beer being served through that handpump.
The handle of a handpump is often used as a symbol of cask ale. Keg beer dispensers usually feature illuminated countertop fittings behind which a handle opens a valve that allows the gas pressure in the keg to force beer to the attached spout.

A modern beer engine.

Historic Beer Birthday: William S. Gossett

June 13, 2025 By Jay Brooks

Today is the birthday of William Sealy Gosset (June 13, 1876–October 16, 1937). He “was an English statistician. He published under the pen name Student, and developed the Student’s t-distribution.” He also worked his entire career for Guinness Brewing, and was trained as a chemist, but it was his pioneering work in statistics, in which he was self-taught, that he is best remembered for today.

Here’s his biography, from Wikipedia:

Born in Canterbury, England to Agnes Sealy Vidal and Colonel Frederic Gosset, Gosset attended Winchester College before studying chemistry and mathematics at New College, Oxford. Upon graduating in 1899, he joined the brewery of Arthur Guinness & Son in Dublin, Ireland.
As an employee of Guinness, a progressive agro-chemical business, Gosset applied his statistical knowledge – both in the brewery and on the farm – to the selection of the best yielding varieties of barley. Gosset acquired that knowledge by study, by trial and error, and by spending two terms in 1906–1907 in the biometrical laboratory of Karl Pearson. Gosset and Pearson had a good relationship. Pearson helped Gosset with the mathematics of his papers, including the 1908 papers, but had little appreciation of their importance. The papers addressed the brewer’s concern with small samples; biometricians like Pearson, on the other hand, typically had hundreds of observations and saw no urgency in developing small-sample methods.
Another researcher at Guinness had previously published a paper containing trade secrets of the Guinness brewery. To prevent further disclosure of confidential information, Guinness prohibited its employees from publishing any papers regardless of the contained information. However, after pleading with the brewery and explaining that his mathematical and philosophical conclusions were of no possible practical use to competing brewers, he was allowed to publish them, but under a pseudonym (“Student”), to avoid difficulties with the rest of the staff. Thus his most noteworthy achievement is now called Student’s, rather than Gosset’s, t-distribution.
Gosset had almost all his papers including The probable error of a mean published in Pearson’s journal Biometrika under the pseudonym Student. It was, however, not Pearson but Ronald A. Fisher who appreciated the importance of Gosset’s small-sample work, after Gosset had written to him to say I am sending you a copy of Student’s Tables as you are the only man that’s ever likely to use them!. Fisher believed that Gosset had effected a “logical revolution”. Fisher introduced a new form of Student’s statistic, denoted t, in terms of which Gosset’s statistic was {\displaystyle z={\frac {t}{\sqrt {n-1}}}} z=\frac{t}{\sqrt{n-1}}. The t-form was adopted because it fit in with Fisher’s theory of degrees of freedom. Fisher was also responsible for applications of the t-distribution to regression analysis.
Although introduced by others, Studentized residuals are named in Student’s honour because, like the problem that led to Student’s t-distribution, the idea of adjusting for estimated standard deviations is central to that concept.
Gosset’s interest in the cultivation of barley led him to speculate that the design of experiments should aim not only at improving the average yield but also at breeding varieties whose yield was insensitive to variation in soil and climate, i.e. robust. This principle only appeared in the later thought of Ronald Fisher, and then in the work of Genichi Taguchi during the 1950s.
In 1935, Gosset left Dublin to take up the position of Head Brewer, in charge of the scientific side of production, at a new Guinness brewery at Park Royal in northwestern London. He died two years later in Beaconsfield, England, of a heart attack.
Gosset was a friend of both Pearson and Fisher, a noteworthy achievement, for each had a massive ego and a loathing for the other. He was a modest man who once cut short an admirer with the comment that “Fisher would have discovered it all anyway.”

And this biography is from the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive:

William Sealey Gosset was born on June 13, 1876 in Canterbury, England where he was the oldest of five children. He died at the age of 61 in Beaconsfield, England on October 16, 1937. He attended the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich to b ecome an engineer before he was rejected because of poor eyesight. William Gosset was never employed as a statistician. In a world of quarrelsome statistics, but he got along with everyone. He was a very helpful, quiet, patient and loyal person.
He went to school at Winchester and was well educated before entering the New College in Oxford. Here he won a first degree in chemistry in 1899. After getting his degree as a chemist, he got a job at Guinness brewery in Dublin in 1899, where he did important work on statistics, but her was never hired at a statistician. It was his environment at Guinness’ that made him a statistician. The brewery was interested in how they could make the best beer.
In 1900, the Guinness Research Laboratory was opened, which was head by the most distinguished brewing chemist, Horace Brown. Horace Brown along with the other brews were wondering how to get the raw materials for brewing beer at the cheapest but getting the best. There were many factors that they had to take into account such as varieties of barley and hops, what conditions of dying, cultivation and maturing factors.
After a few years of research, given that they were given a free hand to explore the conditions of brewing. This gave Gosset a chance to work as a statistician. He was able to take the data from the different examples of brewing to help find out which way was the best. As the young brewers work together, it seemed natural for them to take the data to Gosset to solve the numerical problems.
Gosset, in 1903, could calculate standard errors. In 1904 he wrote on the brewing of beer. This report lead to Karl Pearson consulting Gosset. Gosset met Pearson in July of 1905 when they had long talk together. Pearson, in an hour and a half, m ade Gosset understand the theory of standard errors. Gosset went back to the brewery and practiced those method for the next year. The meeting was also successful in which Pearson got Gosset to take up the study of the law of error.
Gosset wrote paper in his spare time under the name “Student.” His paper were on the probability of error of the mean and of the correlation coefficient for publication. Gosset even managed to run cooperative experiments with Hunter a nd Bennett at Ballinacurra, Buffin at Cambridge, and Beaven at Warminster in the testing of seeds against other seeds. Gosset also work with R.A. Fisher. The funny part is that Fisher did not get along Pearson, but Gosset studied under Pearson and also got along with Fisher.
To quickly recap William Gosset, he was born in 1876 and died in 1937. He did mathematical research for beer brewing, but had the problem working with only a small sample size. He work on the concept of probable errror of a mean. He also analysi sed an extended and broad range of problems such as the counting with a haemacytometer, probable error of a correlation coefficient, cereals, agronomy and the Lanarkshire milk experiment.
A very personal friend, McMullen, said this about Gosset, “he was a very kindly and tolerant and absolutely devoid malice. He rarely spoke about personal matters but when his opinion was well worth listening to and not in the least superficia l.”

Pricenomics has a good overview of Gossett’s contributions to mathematics and statistics, entitled The Guinness Brewer Who Revolutionized Statistics.

Historic Beer Birthday: Carl von Linde

June 11, 2025 By Jay Brooks

Today is the birthday of Carl Paul Gottfried Linde (June 11, 1842–November 16, 1934). He “was a German scientist, engineer, and businessman. He discovered a refrigeration cycle and invented the first industrial-scale air separation and gas liquefaction processes. These breakthroughs laid the backbone for the 1913 Nobel Prize in Physics. Linde was a member of scientific and engineering associations, including being on the board of trustees of the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Linde was also the founder of what is now known as The Linde Group, the world’s largest industrial gases company, and ushered the creation of the supply chain of industrial gases as a profitable line of businesses. He was knighted in 1897 as Ritter von Linde.”

His importance to brewing, especially yo lager beers, is undeniable. His first refrigerating machines were built for breweries. This is situation prior to his inventions, from the University of Chicago:

Before the development of mechanical refrigeration technologies, brewers were reliant on ice harvested from lakes and ponds and stored in ice-houses. The invention of mechanical refrigeration machines provided commercial brewers with the technology necessary to keep beer for longer periods of time. Refrigeration technology was also used in special railroad boxcars, permitting brewers to ship their product over longer distances. One of the most successful early designs for a mechanical refrigeration system was invented by Carl von Linde (a professor at Munich Polytechnic School) and was an ammonia-based vapor-compression system.

eCopy, Inc. — One of the drawing from his first patent, in 1873.

This history of the development of Linde’s refrigeration machines is from a brochure prepared by his the company he founded, The Linde Group.

Initial contacts with breweries

After von Linde had published his ideas in 1870 and 1871 in the Polytechnic Association’s “Bavarian Industry and Trade Journal,” which he also edited, a development was set in motion that would determine the direction of the entire rest of his life. His articles on refrigeration technology had aroused the interest of brewers who had been looking for a reliable year-round method of refrigeration for the fermentation and storage of their beer. In the summer of 1871 an agreement was made between von Linde, Austrian brewer August Deiglmayr (Dreher Brewery) and Munich brewer Gabriel Sedlmayr to build a test machine according to Linde’s design at the Spaten Brewery. With their help, Linde’s ideas would be put into practice, so that a refrigeration unit could then be installed at the Dreher Brewery, the largest brewery in Austria, in the hot, humid city of Trieste (now part of Italy).

Building the first Linde ice machine

The construction plans were finally completed in January 1873 and the patent applied for. The Bavarian patent required, however, that the machine be in operation within one year. Therefore von Linde and Sedlmayr placed an order with Maschinenfabrik Augsburg that same month to build it. And with some effort they succeeded in starting operation by the important patent deadline in January 1874. Of course, the first machine did have its difficulties.

The main problem was that von Linde’s mercury seal did not work properly so that the methyl ether used as the refrigerant leaked out of the compressor. In Linde’s words, “This design was not a suitable solution for the requirements of practical use. So it seemed imperative to build a second machine.”

In order to finance it, von Linde assigned part of the patent rights to Sedlmayr, to locomotive builder Georg Krauss and to the director of Maschinenfabrik Augsburg, Heinrich von Buz. In return, they provided the funds needed for the development, building and testing of a new refrigeration machine.

linde-refrigeration-machine — Building the second refrigeration machine

With his student and assistant Friedrich Schipper, von Linde designed a new compressor, which had a significantly simpler and more effective seal. The sealing material used in the newly designed gland construction was glycerin and the more efficient ammonia was used as the refrigerant. The new machine weighed and cost only half as much as its predecessor.

In the spring of 1875 Linde ordered the new compressor from Maschinenfabrik Augsburg and submitted it for a Bavarian patent, which was awarded on March 25, 1876 for ten years. He received the German Reichspatent in August 1877.

“The very first trials with this second compressor yielded fully satisfactory results,” said von Linde, not without pride. The machine was sold to the Dreher Brewery in September 1876, erected under Schipper’s supervision and started up in spring 1877. It ran until 1908, providing refrigeration and dehumidification

Technical breakthrough

But despite this success, Linde created a third design immediately after the second machine was installed at Dreher, turning his attention to gas pumps, which were already widely used. This third, horizontal design proved to be the best cold vapor machine on the market in terms of its price/performance ratio and became the standard type of Linde compressor for decades to come. During the more than six-year development and experimentation phase, a reliable solution also had to be found for distributing the generated cold. After long trials, in executing an order for the Heineken Brewery in Rotterdam, von Linde developed a method of circulating cold saltwater brine in a pipe cooling system (natural convection cooling), which was installed on the ceiling of the refrigeration rooms.

horizontal-twostage-ammonia-compressor — And this inset is about the company’s “First customers and partners: brewers.”

In 1840, many continental European breweries switched to bottom fermented lager production (in contrast to the “English” top-fermented brown beers or ales) because the beer remained fresh longer and customers preferred the taste. The ice machine described by von Linde seemed ideal for achieving the required lower temperatures and to ensure precise cooling control. So it is no wonder that some major brewers showed great interest in this invention.
Gabriel Sedlmayr of the Munich Spaten Brewerey was willing to let von Linde experiment with an early refrigeration machine in his brewery in the early 1870s. The first unit functioned passably well, but was too large and had numerous flaws. The drawings submitted for the patent showed that Sedlmayr himself had a hand in the second version, which was significantly smaller in size and worked well. This unit was sold to the Trieste Dreher Brewery for air cooling.
With Sedlmayr as an intermediary, the Rotterdam Heineken Brewery under its director Feldmann ordered an ice machine in 1877 for ice production. In his collaboration with the Heineken Brewery, Linde developed “natural convection cooling” with a system of cooling pipes under the ceiling of the cellar. Feldmann in turn put von Linde in contact with J. C. Jacobsen, head of the Carlsberg Brewery in Copenhagen, who ordered a large refrigeration unit in 1878.
Karl Lang, technical adviser and supervisory board member of several Rhineland breweries, also played a significant role during the founding period of the “Gesellschaft für Linde’s Eismaschinen.” He introduced Linde to brewery director Gustav Jung, who not only ordered a refrigeration unit but also became, with Lang and banker Moritz von Hirsch, a shareholder and Supervisory Board member of the Linde Company.
The connection between the Linde Company and brewery directors was maintained to some extent over several generations. After the death of Karl Lang in 1894 his position as chairman of the Supervisory Board was taken over by Gustav Jung, followed by his son Adolf Jung in 1886. Carl Sedlmayr took over for his father Gabriel on the Supervisory Board and in 1915, the third generation of this family followed with Anton Sedlmayr. The Jung and Sedlmayr families held their Supervisory Board seats until after the Second World War.

Here’s Linde’s entry from the Oxford Companion to Beer, written by Horst Dornbush.

Linde, Carl von
was a 19th-century German engineer and one of the world’s major inventors of refrigeration technology. See refrigeration. Starting in the middle of the 18th century, many people before Linde had tinkered with artificial refrigeration contraptions, but Linde was the first to develop a practical refrigeration system that was specifically designed for keeping fermenting and maturing beer cool—in Linde’s case, Bavarian lagers—during the hot summer months. Linde was born in the village of Berndorf, in Franconia, in 1842, at a time when warm-weather brewing was strictly forbidden in his native Bavaria; no one was allowed to brew beer between Saint George’s Day (April 23) and Michael’s Day (September 29). This was to avoid warm fermentations, which provided ideal habitats for noxious airborne bacteria to proliferate and caused yeasts to produce undesirable fermentation flavors. Both made summer beers often unpalatable. Summer brewing prohibition had been in force since 1553 and was only lifted in 1850, by which time Bavarian brewers had learned to pack their fermentation cellars with ice they had laboriously harvested in the winter from frozen ponds and lakes. There had to be a better way to keep beer cold…and that was just the challenge for a budding mechanical engineering professor like Linde, who had joined Munich’s Technical University in 1868. See weihenstephan. The basic principle of refrigeration had been understood for centuries. Because cold is merely the absence of heat, to make things cold, one must withdraw heat. Compressing a medium generates heat; subsequently decompressing or evaporating it quickly absorbs heat from its environment. Devices based on this principle are now generally known as vapor-compression refrigeration systems; apply this to a fermenting or lagering vessel, and it becomes a beer-cooling system. For Linde, the next question was the choice of refrigerant. Initially he experimented with dimethyl ether but eventually settled on ammonia because of its rapid expansion (and thus cooling) properties. He called his invention an “ammonia cold machine.” Linde had received much of the funding for this development from the Spaten Brewery in Munich, which was also the first customer to install the new device—then still driven by dimethyl ether—in 1873. By 1879, Linde had quit his professorship and formed his own “Ice Machine Company,” which is still in operation today as Linde AG, headquartered in Wiesbaden, Germany. By 1890, Linde had sold 747 refrigeration units machines to various breweries and cold storage facilities. He continued to innovate and invented new devices most of his life, including equipment for liquefying air, and for the production of pure oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen. In 1897 he was knighted, and from then on could append the honorific “von” to his surname. He died a prosperous industrialist in Munich in 1934, at the age of 92, and today Linde AG is a leading gases and engineering company with almost 48,000 employees working in more than 100 countries worldwide. For all his many accomplishments, Linde’s pioneering work in artificial beer cooling technology is perhaps his most enduring legacy.

Beer Saints: St. Medard of Noyon

June 8, 2025 By Jay Brooks

Today is the feast day of St. Medard of Noyon, who was also known as St. Medardus (c. 456–545). “He was the Bishop of Noyon. He moved the seat of the diocese from Vermand to Noviomagus Veromanduorum (modern Noyon) in northern France. Medardus was one of the most honored bishops of his time, often depicted laughing, with his mouth wide open, and therefore he was invoked against toothache.” He is also the patron of brewers, as well as vineyards and good harvests. “He is sometimes depicted with a giant eagle hovering over his head to shelter him from rain, while others around him got wet (reputedly this occurred while he was a child.) This led to his association with control over the weather.”

This account is from CatholicSaints.Info:

Born c.470 in Salency, Picardy, France; died c.558. Born of a Frankish noble father and a Gallo-Roman mother, Saint Medard was educated at Saint-Quentin. He is also the brother of Saint Gildard, archbishop of Rouen. At 33, he was ordained to the priesthood and became so successful as a missioner that he was chosen to succeed Bishop Alomer in 530 in the see of Vermandois. Medard may have been consecrated by Saint Remigius of Rheims.
According to an unreliable tradition, Medard moved his see from Saint-Quentin to Noyon after a raid by the Huns, then united it with the diocese of Tournai. Allegedly Noyon and Tournai remained under one bishop for 500 years.
Medard is known to have given the veil to Queen Saint Radegund. He is credited with the institution of the old local custom of Rosiere. Each year where his feast is celebrated, the young girl who has been judged the most exemplary in the district is escorted by 12 boys and 12 girls to the church, where she is crowned with roses and given a gift of money (Benedictines, White).
In art, an eagle shelters Saint Medard from the rain, a reference to the legend that this happened when he was a child (Roeder). This may explain the origins of the superstition that if it rains on his feast day, the next 40 days will be wet; if the weather is good, the next 40 will be fine as well (White). He might also be portrayed with two horses at his feet, leaving footprints on stone, or holding a citadel (Roeder). In Medieval art, Medard may be laughing with his mouth wide open (le ris de Saint Medard), and for this reason he is invoked against toothache (White).
Saint Medard is the patron of brewers, peasants, prisoners (Roeder), corn harvests, and vintage (White). He is invoked on behalf of idiots and lunatics, as well as for fruitfulness, both in child-bearing and in the fields, for rains and vineyards, and against bad weather and toothache (Roeder).

Why exactly he’s a patron of brewers or vineyards or good harvests is not very clear, and I can find no satisfactory answer. The only logical assumption may have to do with association with rain, but that’s admittedly a bit of a stretch.

Central part of a triptych from St. Catherine Chapel by unknown artist (circa 16th century)

There’s also a Brasserie Saint Médard in France that was founded in 2015 that uses the saint in their logo and on their beer bottles.

The Cheerupping-Cup

March 19, 2025 By Jay Brooks

Today, like every day, I surveyed a list of writers born this day and try to find an appropriate quote involving beer or drinking for the day. I’ve been doing this for years and have amassed a fairly sizable quantity of quotations. But today I stumbled upon yet another great word that has been lost to time, or in this case never quite seems to have caught on at all, which is a pity.

Tobias Smollett was born today in 1721 in “Dalquhurn, now part of Renton in present-day West Dunbartonshire, Scotland.” According to his Wikipedia page, he “was a Scottish writer and surgeon. He was best known for writing picaresque novels such as The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751) and The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), which influenced later generations of British novelists, including Charles Dickens.”

While searching through his work today, I happened upon a great word in his 1771 novel The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, which is described as “the last of the picaresque novels of Tobias Smollett, published in London on 17 June 1771 (three months before Smollett’s death), and is considered by many to be his best and funniest work. It is an epistolary novel, presented in the form of letters written by six characters: Matthew Bramble, a Welsh Squire; his sister Tabitha; their niece Lydia and nephew Jeremy Melford; Tabitha’s maid Winifred Jenkins; and Lydia’s suitor Wilson.”

In the 59th letter of the novel, of a total of 85, which was written by J. Melford Argylshire and addressed “To Sir Watkin Phillips, Bart. of Jesus college, Oxon” and beginning “Dear Knight,” Smollett invented the word “chearupping-cup” to describe … well, a cup of cheer, with, naturally, alcohol in it. Here’s the paragraph that includes it:

When the Lowlanders want to drink a chearupping-cup, they go to the public house, called the Change-house, and call for a chopine of two-penny, which is a thin, yeasty beverage, made of malt; not quite so strong as the table-beer of England,—This is brought in a pewter stoop, shaped like a skittle, from whence it is emptied into a quaff; that is, a curious cup made of different pieces of wood, such as box and ebony, cut into little staves, joined alternately, and secured with delicate hoops, having two cars or handles—It holds about a gill, is sometimes tipt round the mouth with silver, and has a plate of the same metal at bottom, with the landlord’s cypher engraved.—The Highlanders, on the contrary, despise this liquor, and regale themselves with whisky; a malt spirit, as strong as geneva, which they swallow in great quantities, without any signs of inebriation. They are used to it from the cradle, and find it an excellent preservative against the winter cold, which must be extreme on these mountains—I am told that it is given with great success to infants, as a cordial in the confluent smallpox, when the eruption seems to flag, and the symptoms grow unfavourable—The Highlanders are used to eat much more animal food than falls to the share of their neighbours in the Low-country—They delight in hunting; have plenty of deer and other game, with a great number of sheep, goats, and black-cattle running wild, which they scruple not to kill as vension, without being much at pains to ascertain the property.

I confirmed with the O.E.D. that this is the sole instance of the word being used (at least that they recorded) and which thy defined as “Of an alcoholic drink: reviving; comforting….” “Chear,” being an archaic form of “cheer,” that never quite caught on as well as cheer, it feels better with the double-ee’s. And indeed later editions spelled it “cheerupping-cup” as listed in “A Supplemental English Glossary,” by T. Lewis O. Davis, and published in 1881, under an entry for “Twopenny.”

From “A Supplemental English Glossary,” by T. Lewis O. Davis.

And in another instance from a news report in the Stamford Mercury, Friday, July 4, 1823, there’s a story using the word.

The language of love, so much talked of by the poets, prevailed against every remonstrance of friends and even the rage and fury of relations. The happy swain had conquest in his cheeks and will love, cherish, honour and obey. Hand in hand the couple blithely proceeded to the adjoining village of Rippingale where the festive board groaned with the weight of the feast and it also being the annual feast day of the parish, the tabor struck up and the village was gay. Rural sports were the order of the day and the merry dance and sparkling glass went round till night was at odds with morning and the groom, having taken sufficient of the cheer-upping cup, the happy couple retired and after throwing the stocking, the jolly swain was left wrapt in the arms of Morpheus to enjoy (what he most needed), nature’s sweet restorer, balmy sleep. [My emphasis.]

But doing some more rabbit-hole digging, I discovered it was used earlier with the more common ‘cheer’ spelling, though still not often and certainly not enough to suggest its use became widespread by any means. The O.E.D. lists as an adjective “cheer-upping” with the same definition, “[o]f an alcoholic drink: reviving; comforting…” with a range of use from 1720-1832. They also list a quotation that predates Smollett, from 1733, so it’s likely he wasn’t the first after all. “They … retired to comfort themselves with a cheer-upping Cup,” which is from “English Malady: or, A Treatise of Nervous Diseases of All Kinds,” by George Cheyne, though he remains one of the few to use it in fiction.

But whoever came up with, I still don’t understand why it fell out of use, because it just rolls pleasantly off the tongue: “cheerupping-cup.” Who wouldn’t want, or often need, a cheerupping-cup? I think I need one now. Who’s with me? Fancy a cheerupping-cup?

Beer In Ads #4665: Batman, Robin & Miss Rheingold 1962

January 2, 2024 By Jay Brooks

Tuesday’s ad is for “Rheingold Beer,” from 1962. This ad was made for the Rheingold Brewery, which was founded by the Liebmann family in 1883 in New York, New York. At its peak, it sold 35% of all the beer in New York state. In 1963, the family sold the brewery and in was shut down in 1976. In 1940, Philip Liebmann, great-grandson of the founder, Samuel Liebmann, started the “Miss Rheingold” pageant as the centerpiece of its marketing campaign. Beer drinkers voted each year on the young lady who would be featured as Miss Rheingold in advertisements. In the 1940s and 1950s in New York, “the selection of Miss Rheingold was as highly anticipated as the race for the White House.” The winning model was then featured in at least twelve monthly advertisements for the brewery, beginning in 1940 and ending in 1965. Beginning in 1941, the selection of next year’s Miss Rheingold was instituted and became wildly popular in the New York Area and beyond. In 1962, Kathy Kersh won the contest and became Miss Rheingold for that year. She was born Kathleen Kroeger Kersh on December 15, 1942 in Los Angeles, California (though one source claimed it was Hawaii). She attended a theatrical school, studying dance and acting. In 1959, she won the title of Miss Junior Rose Bowl, and became a professional model, and later an actress and singer. After her year as Miss Rheingold 1962, she married actor Vince Edwards, best known as Dr. Ben Casey on the TV show of the same name. But they were married for only four months before divorcing, and her daughter was born shortly thereafter when she became a single mother. Some of her more memorable appearances were on Burke’s Law, My Favorite Martian, The Beverly Hillbillies, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and a small part in the film “The Americanization of Emily.” In 1967, she signed a record deal with Power Records, and released two singles. After a small role as Cornelia, one of the Joker’s henchmen, on Batman, she married Burt Ward, who played Robin. That marriage last two years, and afterwards she attended business school and embarked on successful a career in commercial real estate. As far as know, she still lives in Sherman Oaks, California. Unlike many of the Miss Rheingolds, Kathy Kersh, went on to have quite a career in entertainment, appearing in both films and television, and continued to sing and do some modeling as she had before 1962. Probably her most remembered appearance was in two episodes of Batman during season 2 in 1966. She played Cornelia, one of the Joker’s henchmen in a two-part story: Episode 21 – “The Impractical Joker” followed by Episode 22 – “The Joker’s Provokers.” Here’s the description of “The Impractical Joker” episode:

The Joker pulls off a string of key-related pranks throughout Gotham City, then with his magic box, proceeds to snatch a priceless jeweled key right under the noses of Batman and Robin. The Dynamic Duo wise up to his ways and thwart him at their next encounter. However, the Joker has more devious plans to do away with them both before his final caper.

And this is for “The Joker’s Provokers” episode:

After a reworking, the Joker’s magic box holds the power to alter time forward and backward. Batman and Robin learn of his plans to pollute the city water supply, and butler Alfred is sent to take over as security guard at the water works. Alfred nabs the box upon the villain’s arrival, freezing him and his cronies in time, but unwittingly commits a dangerous error when he removes the box’s key.

Kathy Kersh wore a very distinctive costume which was a fan favorite. Here’s several stills from the two episodes. And she got quite a lot more out of this appearance on Batman as you’ll soon learn.

Batman, Robin and Cornelia (Kathy Kersh).

Another signed still showing Robin being kidnapped.

Batman and Robin break into Cornelia’s place.

During the filming of the two episodes, Kathy Kersh became acquainted with Burt Ward, the actor who played Robin and the pair became a couple, getting married in 1967.

Burt Ward and Kathy Kersh at the wedding in 1967.

This article appeared shortly after the couple married in 1967.

This newspaper item from after the duo married.

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