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Jane Austen, Brewer

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jane-austen
I suspect I’m not the only man in the world whose wife loves Jane Austen. And I further would not be surprised to learn that I’m not alone in not feeling quite the same level of joy at every new film or television adaptation of one of her works. (Is that enough “nots” in one sentence?) Oh, I’ve enjoyed a few of the costume dramas, I confess. I thought “Clueless” was quite enjoyable. So I don’t want you to think I’m an irredeemable boor. I’ve suffered through — ahem, I mean seen — most of them, and it’s not been as horrible as, say, “Dallas” or “Knot’s Landing” or any of a number of similar dreck.

But my interest in Jane Austen just shot up 99%, thanks to an article posted by BBC Magazine yesterday, Beer: The Women Taking Over the World of Brewing. It’s a great article all on it’s own, one of the few to treat the subject of women in beer with a decent amount of respect, for a change. But what caught my attention was a sidebar about Jane Austen by alcohol historian Jane Peyton.

It is a truth that should be universally acknowledged — Jane Austen not only drank beer but brewed it too.

As a teenager she would have learned how to make beer by helping her mother in the Hampshire vicarage where she grew up.

Brewing was part of household duties and even the women of genteel 18th Century families such as the Austens would know how to do it, even if the chores were sometimes delegated to domestic staff.

In a letter to her sister Cassandra, Jane wrote “and I that have the great cask, for we are brewing spruce beer again….”

As in most houses small beer (low alcohol) was served at the Austen dining table as a safe source of drinking water for all members of the family — children too — so Jane would certainly have tasted the results of her labour.

jane-austen-glass
It certainly makes sense, though I’d never really stopped to think about it before. Austen apparently mentioned her brewing efforts in letters to her sister Cassandra. In one of them she mentions small beer while in two others she talks about her spruce beer.

Austen also mentions spruce beer in her 1815 novel, “Emma.”

“But one morning — I forget exactly the day — but perhaps it was the Tuesday or Wednesday before that evening, he wanted to make a memorandum in his pocket-book: it was about spruce-beer. Mr. Knightley had been telling him something about brewing spruce-beer, and he wanted to put it down….”

And according to “Cooking with Jane Austen,” when the Austen family lived at Stoneleigh, her mother wrote about the “mansions ‘strong beer’ and ‘small beer’ cellars.” And Mrs. Austen also “brewed beer at Steventon in the last years of the eighteenth century and at Chawton cottage many years later.”

It almost makes me want to read her again … nah. Still, she’s now a bit more interesting.

Ozias-Humphrey-jane-austen

Beer In Ads #15: Bass, The Drink Of The Empire

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Tuesday’s ad is another oldie, based on the label, at least. I don’t know much about it either, but I love the association Bass is trying to make. While it’s obvious that they’re trying to evoke emotions of pride, it still comes off a little colonial and warlike. Of course, that may be because I live in a former colony. But with the tag line, “The Drink of the Empire,” I think I’m safe in saying the ad is somewhat imperial in its tone.

Bass_Beer

Beer In Art #57: Kelly Murphy’s Wassailing

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art-beer
After a few more mature works recently, today’s work of art is more playful and child-like. It’s by Kelly Murphy, who primarily write and illustrates children’s books, along with freelance work in similar fields, like toys and film. In 2007, on her blog, Murphy shared her work, Wassailing.

Kelly_Murphy-wassail

Wassailing is, of course, a traditional English and European custom that took place around the holidays, sometime around Christmas and in other traditions into mid-January. To read more about it, there are interesting accounts at the Hymns and Carols of Christmas, About.com, Time Travel Britain and White Dragon.

There also the drink Wassail, which I wrote about a couple of years ago after the release of Full Sail’s Wassail at Here We Go a-WASSAIL-ing

As for Kelly Murphy, here’s some more info from her biography.

Kelly Murphy is an award-winning illustrator and animator working predominantly with traditional and mixed media. Born and raised in southeastern Massachusetts, USA, she studied illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design. Since earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1999, Kelly has been actively freelancing across the various fields of editorial illustration, picture books and poster illustration as well as character design for both the film and toy industry. An accomplished children’s book author and illustrator, Kelly’s books have been published by America’s leading publishing houses and her tenth children book is already due to be available in the Fall of 2009.

And there’s a good overview of her other illustration, art and books at her website and her blog, Who the Sh*t Drank My Beer.

Tactical Penguin Goes Nuclear

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brew-dog
Unless you’ve been ducking and covering under a rock, you no doubt saw that, while we were sitting down to eat turkey on Thursday, Scotland’s BrewDog released Tactical Nuclear Penguin, which they’re touting as the new champion “world’s strongest beer.” Weighing in at a robust 32% a.b.v., it bested the current American contender, Samuel Adams Utopias, by a whopping 5%. As is typical of the self-styled punks of beer, the release was amid controversy. Predictably, anti-alcohol groups in the UK wasted no time denouncing the beer’s strength as irresponsible, a laughable claim given Scotland’s whisky industry. Jack Law, head of Scotland’s own Alcohol Focus Scotland, said “it is child-like attention-seeking by a company that should be more responsible. The fact that they have achieved a new world record is not admirable. It is a product with a lot of alcohol in it – that’s all. To dress it up as anything else is cynical. It’s as strong as whisky, so you have to ask whether this is actually a beer or a spirit – it’s clearly a spirit.” So obviously the Scots have no shortage of ignorant blowhards in their neo-prohibitionist organizations, too. The fact that there are only 500 bottles and each one sells for £30 (almost $50) and is only a 330 ml (roughly 11.2 oz.) would suggest this is not cause for widespread panic, as it’s hardly going to be selling out of the local Tesco anytime soon.

Perhaps more surprising, one of BrewDog’s bitterest critics of late has been Roger Protz, the grand old man of CAMRA and British beer writing generally. I usually have great respect for Roger and all he’s done for beer, but he seems to have lost his mooring on this one and drifted out into the waters off insaneland. In today’s BrewDog Go Bonkers , he calls the BrewDog lads all sorts of unflattering names and accuses them of all manner of impropriety, even incorrectly accusing the new beer of not actually being a beer — it clearly is — and gets the barest details of its manufacture wrong, despite the fact that BrewDog’s website includes a video explaining how they created Tactical Nuclear Penguin.

He even throws his hat into the ring with the likes of Jack Law, head of Alcohol Focus Scotland, which I find almost unforgivable, especially given Law’s churlish quote about BrewDog’s “childlike attention-seeking.” Um, gentlemen, what exactly do you think marketing is? The very point is to get attention. You can disagree with the way a company goes about the marketing of their products, but calling it “childlike” or suggesting that it’s seeking attention is like saying the goal of advertising is to sell things. Duh. Paging Captain Obvious.

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James Watt in his penguin suit, with his newest beer.

Just two weeks earlier, in Enough Is Enough, Protz was again telling BrewDog’s James Watt and Martin Dickie it was time they “grew up and stopped behaving like a couple of precocious teenagers standing on a street corner with back-to-front baseball caps screaming for attention.” Wow. Watts referred to Protz, when he retweeted this, as “Grandpa Protz” and I think he may be onto it. I can’t imagine telling a brewer to grow up in print. That takes more cheek than I possess. They’re all adults, conducting their business the way they want to. But apparently taking their cue more from American sensationalist brewers than the often stodgy traditions of UK beer really ruffled Protz’s feathers. I know Roger to have strong opinions and to be a great champion of English brewing traditions, but these two anti-BrewDog posts seem more like personal attacks, as if they’ve offended him directly. As much as I hate to say it, he comes across as out of touch, a sentiment apparently shared by a great number of people who left comments to his posts. There were an enormous number pointing out the flaws in his reasoning and calling him on being set in his ways and unable to appreciate anything outside classic English beer’s range. Read the comments, they’re as illuminating as Protz himself, and are in many cases highly entertaining on their own.

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James Watt out of his penguin suit, with bottles of Tactical Nuclear Penguin.

From the press release:

This beer is about pushing the boundaries, it is about taking innovation in beer to a whole new level. It is about achieving something which has never before been done and putting Scotland firmly on the map for progressive, craft beers.

This beer is bold, irreverent and uncompromising. A beer with a soul and a purpose. A statement of intent. A modern day rebellion for the craft beer proletariat in our struggle to over throw the faceless bourgeoisie oppression of corporate, soulless beer.’

The Antarctic name inducing schizophrenia of this uber-imperial stout originates from the amount of time it spent exposed to extreme cold. This beer began life as a 10% imperial stout 18 months ago. The beer was aged for 8 months in an Isle of Arran whisky cask and 8 months in an Islay cask making it our first double cask aged beer. After an intense 16 month, the final stages took a ground breaking approach by storing the beer at -20 degrees for three weeks to get it to 32%.

For the big chill the beer was put into containers and transported to the cold store of a local ice cream factory where it endured 21 days at penguin temperatures. Alcohol freezes at a lower temperature than water. As the beer got colder BrewDog Chief Engineer, Steven Sutherland decanted the beer periodically, only ice was left in the container, creating more intensity of flavours and a stronger concentration of alcohol for the next phase of freezing. The process was repeated until it reached 32%.

Pete Brown, by contrast, has a far more measured reaction to BrewDog’s new beer. We agreed on what was the best part of the press release.

Beer has a terrible reputation in Britain, it’s ignorant to assume that a beer can’t be enjoyed responsibly like a nice dram or a glass of fine wine. A beer like Tactical Nuclear Penguin should be enjoyed in spirit sized measures. It pairs fantastically with vanilla bean white chocolate it really brings out the complexity of the beer and complements the powerful, smoky and cocoa flavours.

Pete takes the right approach IMHO, wanting to focus on the beer itself, which he describes as “an Imperial Stout that has been matured in wooden casks for eighteen months. It has then been frozen to minus twenty degrees at the local ice cream factory in Fraserburgh. By freezing the beer to concentrate it this way, they get the alcoholic strength.” Hard to say what it might taste like, but Pete speculates it will have “very rich, smooth, mellow and complex flavour.” Also, like him, I’m certainly keen to find out. I recently attended a Utopias beer dinner, my third tasting of this year’s version, which is 27%, tantalizingly close to Penguin’s 32%. It’s a wonderful beer, but its release was not accompanied by the frenzy of this beer. Likewise, other very strong beers like Schorschbräu (at 31%), Hair of the Dog Dave (at 29%), as far as I know, did not cause any beer writers to scold them for their efforts. So what’s the difference?

As to the question of whether or not it’s beer, Pete continues:

I once attended a breakfast hosted by Jim Koch, founder of Samuel Adams, father of the awesome Utopias. I asked him a similar question — is this still beer? — and was inspired by his answer. He said something along the lines of beer has been around for thousands of years. Over that time it has evolved continually, and the pace of evolution has picked up considerably in the last couple of centuries. “How arrogant would we have to be to say that in this time, our time, we’ve done everything with beer that can be done? That we’ve perfected beer?” he asked me.

This is why when I love Brew Dog, I really do love them. It’s easy — and not always inaccurate — to accuse them of arrogance. But not when they do something like this. It’s far more arrogant to say ‘we can’t possibly improve on our beer’ than it is to never stop trying to do precisely that. In my marketing role, I often hear brewers talk about something like a slightly different bottle size and refer to it as ‘innovation’. Brew Dog are genuine innovators on a global stage, redefining what beer can actually be.

I guess I just don’t understand the bombastic reaction the release of this beer produced and the way in which it and the brewer’s intentions have been misinterpreted. Why wouldn’t any beer lover want to try it? After all, it really should be about the beer.

brewdog-penguin

Beer Lover’s Britain

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inside-beer
Looking for a nice overview of the beer scene in Great Britain? 2001 British Beer Writer of the Year Jeff Evans has a comprehensive and affordable solution. He’s written Beer Lover’s Britain and it’s available at his Inside Beer online store as a pdf e-book for less than $10.

At a little more than 100 pages, it’s packed with information about British beer, how best to enjoy it and where to find the best beers that England, Scotland, Wales and even Northern Ireland have to offer.

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From the press release:

The first e-book in the series is Beer Lover’s Britain, a comprehensive guide to enjoying beer in the United Kingdom, written by award-winning British beer writer Jeff Evans. With the UK pound trading low against most foreign currencies, including the US, Canadian and Australian dollars, there’s never been a better time for beer fans to check out what the British Isles have to offer, especially with this new publication to guide them through.

British pubs are often spoken of as ‘the envy of the world’, with their historic charm and embracing conviviality, and Beer Lover’s Britain reveals how to make the most of them with tips on everything from which type of pub will suit you best to how to order a pint. Essential information on pub food, games, gardens, opening hours, children’s facilities and entertainments is also provided, along with recommendations for the very best pubs to visit around the UK.

The British brewing industry – father of such beer styles as pale ale, IPA, stout, porter and barley wine – is explored in just enough detail for visitors to understand the context of what they are drinking, with recommendations provided for beers and breweries to seek out as they travel around the country.

What is real ale? Where can I find it? Should my beer be warm? Have I been overcharged? What can I eat? Where should I stay? These are just some of the important questions Beer Lover’s Britain answers in more than 100 packed pages.

According to author Jeff Evans, travellers are often baffled and a little intimidated when they first encounter British beer and the British pub.

‘The British pub is quite unlike many pubs and bars found elsewhere in the world and visitors can be more than a little confused if they don’t know the procedures and etiquette’, he explained. ‘Beer Lover’s Britain aims to demystify the pub and the British beer scene for travellers from other countries by offering sound advice and handy hints to smooth the course of their travels and boost their enjoyment of British beer.’

Beer In Art #53: George Morland’s Alehouse Politicians

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art-beer
Today’s artist comes from the very early days of England’s artistic beginnings. Before the 18th century, there was little that could properly be called “English art.” At that time, most art came from France, Spain, The Netherlands, Germany and a few others. That’s who English painters studied. But that began to change in the mid-1700 with such painters as Thomas Gainsborough, William Turner, John Constable, George Romney, Henry Raeburn and today’s featured painter, George Morland. While others painted portraits and some city life, Morland concentrated on rural life and, naturally, the county inn was often featured in his works. The initial painting that led me to Morland, pictured below, is known as Alehouse Politicians,, most likely painted during the 1790s.

Morland-alehouse_politicians
Like most of Morland’s popular paintings, others made copies of them as engravings to be sold to the public, such as this Mezzotint by W. Ward, published by Wards and Co. in 1801.

morland_alehouse_politicians2 (1)

Plenty more of Morland’s rural paintings depicted inns, such as the Fox Inn, painted in 1792.

Morland-fox_inn

Or The Bell Inn, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

Morland-bell_inn-color

Which itself was redone as a black and white engraving:

Morland-bell_inn

From his biography at Wikipedia:

Morland was born in London on 26 June 1763. His mother was a Frenchwoman, who possessed a small independent property of her own. His grandfather, George H. Morland, was a subject painter. Henry Robert Morland (c. 1719 – 1797), father of George, was also an artist and engraver, and picture restorer, at one time a rich man, but later in reduced circumstances. His pictures of Jaundry-maids, reproduced in mezzotint and representing ladies of some importance, were very popular in their time.

The finest of Morland’s pictures were executed between 1790 and 1794, and amongst them his picture of the inside of a stable, in Tate Britain, London, may be reckoned as a masterpiece. His works deal with scenes in rustic and homely life, depicted with purity and simplicity, and show much direct and instinctive feeling for nature. His coloring is mellow, rich in tone, and vibrant in quality, but, with all their charm, his works reveal often signs of the haste with which they were painted and the carelessness with which they were drawn. He had a supreme power of observation and great executive skill, and he was able to select the vital constituents of a scene and depict even the least interesting of subjects with artistic grace and brilliant representation. His pictures are never crowded; the figures in them remarkably well composed, often so cleverly grouped as to conceal any inaccuracies of drawing, and to produce the effect of a very successful composition. As a painter of English scenes he takes the very highest position, and his work is marked by a spirit and a dash, always combined with broad, harmonious coloring. He exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy from 1784 down to 1804, but few of his academy pictures can be identified owing to the inadequate description of them afforded by their titles.

Here’s yet another one, Outside the Alehouse Door, painted in 1792.

Morland-before-tavern

And here’s one final painting, Outside an Inn, Winter, painted around 1795, and part of the Tate Collection:

Morland-outside_inn

If you want to know more about George Morland, his Wikipedia page is a good start, but there’s also a good biography at the Online Encyclopedia. The Sterling Times has the most complete collection of his prints and Google Books has an online book about Morland, George Morland: his life and works. ArtCyclopedia has a good collection of links and more of his works can also be seen at The Old Print Shop, Intaglio Fine Art, the Art Renewal Center and the Tate Collection.

Beer In Art #51: Frederick Daniel Hardy’s Home Brewed Ale

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art-beer
For today’s work of art we revisit the Victorian Era, when most large households included a home brewery. The artist is Frederick Daniel Hardy and his painting is entitled Home Brewed Ale.

Hardy-Home_Brewed_Ale
Hardy was born in 1826 or 27 and lived until 1911. Born in Windsor, England, he was originally a musician for Queen Victoria before abandoning it to study art. This painting was created around 1884. Like this work, most of Hardy’s are scene of everyday life for ordinary people.

If you want to learn more about the artist, Wikipedia has a little information, but generally there’s not much about Hardy. You can see more of his work at Bridgeman Art.

Beer In Art #46: Christopher Nevinson’s The Hop Fields

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art-beer
Today’s artist is a British Futurist named Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson. While many of his paintings and illustrations appear to tackle more contemporary themes like urban life and World War I, he did paint some more idyllic landscapes like The Hop Fields.

Nevinson_hop-fields

In fact, his most striking images are almost all the war paintings, showing the unpleasantness of modern warfare. That seems somewhat ironic, as the Futurist movement he is associated with was about making a break with the old and changing the future, more of a political and societal movement rather than one concerned with paintings styles. But I suppose despite World War I being the first modern war, war itself is one of mankind’s oldest instincts revealing its horrors is in keeping with Futurist ideals.

It’s unclear when Nevinson painted The Hop Fields during his career, or where exactly it was done. But it certainly seems right at home during the Arts & Crafts movement that ended around 1910. The hops themselves seem a little thin, but I like that you can see the round buildings in the distance through the vines. You can even buy a print of the The Hop Fields at Bridgeman Art On Demand.

Nevinson’s biography from Wikipedia:

Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson (13 August 1889 – 7 October 1946) was an English painter. He is often referred to by his initials C. R. W. Nevinson. He was the son of the famous war correspondent and journalist Henry Nevinson and the suffrage campaigner Margaret Nevinson. Educated at Uppingham School, which he hated, Nevinson went on to study at the St John’s Wood School of Art. Inspired by seeing the work of Augustus John, he decided to attend the Slade School of Art, part of University College London. There his contemporaries included Mark Gertler, Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash and Dora Carrington. Gertler was, for a time, his closest friend and influence, but they subsequently fell out when both men fell in love with Carrington.

On leaving the Slade, Nevinson befriended Marinetti, the leader of the Italian Futurists, and the radical English writer and artist Percy Wyndham Lewis. However, Nevinson fell out with Lewis and other ‘rebel’ artists when he attached their names to the Futurist movement. Lewis went on to found the Vorticists, from which Nevinson was excluded (though he is said to have coined the title for the Vorticists’ famous magazine, Blast).

At the outbreak of World War I, Nevinson joined the Friends’ Ambulance Brigade with his father, and was deeply disturbed by his work tending wounded French soldiers. For a brief period he served as a volunteer ambulance driver, before ill health forced his return to England. He used these experiences as the subject matter for a series of powerful paintings which used Futurist techniques to great effect. Subsequently appointed an official war artist, his later paintings lacked the same powerful effect. A large collection of his work can be found in the Imperial War Museum in London.

Shortly after the end of the war, Nevinson traveled to New York, where he painted a number of powerful images of the city. However, his boasting, and exaggerated claims of his war experiences, together with his depressive and temperamental personality, made him many enemies, in both the USA and England. Roger Fry of the Bloomsbury Group was a particularly virulent critic.

Nevinson was credited with holding the first cocktail party in England in 1924 by Alec Waugh

The first cocktail party in England? How cool is that?

There’s also biographies of Nevinson at Modern British Artists and also at Encyclopedia.com.

You can also see additional pieces by Nevinson at ArtCyclopedia, Artnet, Bridgeman, at the Tate Collection, and the The World Images Kiosk at UC Berkeley.

Beer In Art #39: Phoebus Levin’s Life In The Hop Garden

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art-beer
Today’s work of art depicts Life in the Hop Garden, and is by illustrator Phoebus Levin. It was painted in 1859 and today the original resides at the Towneley Hall Art Gallery and Museum located in Burnley, Lancashire.

Phoebus_Levin-hop_garden

Levin lived from 1836-1878 and was born in Berlin, but exhibited in London from 1855-1878. That’s about all the biographical information I could find about him. You can see a few more of his works at My Art Prints and ArtNet.

Beer In Art #38: Lawson Wood’s Nine Pints Of The Law

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Since I just returned from England and the Great British Beer Festival I thought it made sense that today’s work of art is decidedly British. It’s a humorous work entitled Nine Pints of the Law by famed illustrator Lawson Wood.

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One website describes the painting like this:

World-worn and weary after a hard day’s work, these British bobbies still have the strength to heave a hefty pint of ale. Artist Lawson Wood takes a lighthearted look at his country’s comical constables in characteristically British style.

And here’s a brief overview of Wood, according to one biography:

Clarence Lawson Wood (1878 – 1957) was born at Highgate, the grandson of the landscape painter L J Wood. He studied at the Slade School and at Heatherley’s and was the chief artist on the staff of C Arthur Pearson Ltd for a number of years. He served in the Kite Balloon Wing of the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War.

Wood’s work is usually in ink and watercolour and most of it is humorous in style and content and he was a member of the London Sketch Club. His repertoire of characters includes policemen, army officers, Stone Age people with dinosaurs and, most popularly, the orang-utan, Gran’pop, introduced in the 1930s.

Gran’pop appeared weekly in the Sketch for a number of years and his fame translated to the US, where Wood prepared at least four animated cartoons for production in Hollywood.

Lawson Wood, as he signed his work, retired from the world of illustration and lived in Kent in seclusion until he died at the age of 79.

For a more thorough biography, check out Been Publishing, I’m Back, and there’s also Art in a Click. To see more of his work, try the Baron Fine Art Gallery, Chris Beetles or Poster Unlimited.