How did hoppy beers become popular in Britain?
There is an interesting thread on @BoakandBailey twitter account (16.5) about the rise of hoppy, golden beers in the UK.
For me the first such beer was Hop Back’s Summer Lightning
It still tastes decent today but in the early 1990s for those of us brought up on malty, brown beers (which we enjoyed I should underline) the level of hops was a revelation. This was a beer taste we had not previously had.
As Boak and Bailey note other beers followed on- OakhamJHB, Rooster’s Yankee, Kelham Island Pale Rider and so on.
This though was 30 years ago. The Beer Orders had just begun to open up the pub trade (not as it turned out always in a good way). Pubs still tied to breweries could sell a guest beer and pub disposals started to see the rise of pub companies.
There were however few independent pubs dedicated to selling interesting cask beer (this was a long time before craft keg).Supermarkets did not sell, in the main, beer from smaller breweries.
Summer Lightning was brewed in Wiltshire and JHB in Cambridgeshire. How was it possible to come across such beers in, for example, London except by making a visit to a specialist pub?
The answer which may read oddly to some in 2021 is Wetherspoons. Beers like Summer Lightning and JHB were regularly on the bar at Spoons pubs and that without doubt is where many first tried and get the taste for them.
Tim Martin has been called many things (often quite accurately) but rarely one of the founders of modern UK beer drinking habits…
Ah, Summer Lightning… my favourite beer from that period, drawn fresh at The Wine Vaults in Southsea, which at the time was THE real ale pub (wouldn’t sell lager or spirits for a few years!) Some wonderful festivals and regular free ‘tasters’too. Sadly taken over by a chain in the early 2000s
At moments like this I reach for my battered copy of the Journal of the Institute of Brewing (May-June 1995, p219) which includes an abstract of a piece I wrote for Brewer’s Guardian in 1994 identifying golden ales (mid-strength, gold-straw, very high in aromatic hops) as a separate category for the first time in print. So Hooray for me!