Kmflett's Blog

The return of Mild: the old man’s drink?

Social media recently has quite a bit on the return of mild, primarily dark mild. It appears to have become a trend amongst some who identify as craft beer drinkers. Its mainly on cask (there were old style keg milds, don’t get me started etc..) and breweries have started to produce milds again, often though not always in the 3-4% range.

Of course as has been pointed out some breweries including Boxcar have been brewing mild for a while, but in general it has been hard to find in recent times. Brains in Cardiff started to produce their award cask mild, Dark, again in the autumn after demand had dropped so low that brewing of it had almost stopped in cask (not so much in other formats).

One sees the comment that it was an old man’s drink and so inevitably became untrendy. I probably do qualify at 65 as an old man now but I certainly was not old when I started drinking it in the 1970s. Even then it was a hard to find drink in London (not in the Midlands and North-West) and its drinking was promoted, as it still is, by CAMRA. In short even 50 years ago it was becoming a niche cask drink and CAMRA have promoted a mild in May for a very long time.

Mild of course is a style of beer not a strength but the two became conflated at some point. No doubt beer historians can enlighten us.. However in the Victorian era and certainly up to the First World War when beer strengths were reduced, it was brewed at 5% and above in many cases.

After 1918 and even more after 1945 it was unusual at best to find a strong mild. Tetley’s in Leeds brewed 4 milds including one at 5.5%. My thanks to Ron Pattinson for the point that this was unusual and disappeared after 1945. Chesters’ Fighting Mild, brewed at Ardwick was also reputed to be 5.5% but by the time Twitbreads got hold of it by the 1970s it had gone down to 3.5%.

Perhaps the point is that just as now breweries produce a range of bitters,pales and IPAs of different strengths so this was also the case with milds.

The strengths of some pre-World War one milds has been echoed by a few breweries in more recent times- Sarah Hughes ruby mild is probably the most well-known example but the Redemption/Kernel Victorian mild collab (at 6%) has been brewed again recently and is available on cask.

Mild had a poor reputation back in the day because it was alleged that unscrupulous landlords poured beer from slop trays etc back into the mild cask where because it was dark it couldn’t be detected visually- only when you drank it. Perhaps in some cases, but the real reason I suspect for mild’s decline was that it had become a drink not of old men but of industrial workers who drank numbers of pints of not too strong beer to replace liquid they had lost while working. There are still industrial workers, though not so many, and the rise of lager perhaps took some of the market.

Finally a word for light mild. I used to enjoy drinking McMullen’s AK mild, which is still produced and is definitely not dark. Again mild is style of beer not a colour or strength.

Anyway I’m glad its back. It’ll help me relive my youth….