A beer the colour of red wine tends to get people’s attention. That was only the first of the surprises at a tasting I led at Coopers’ Hall on Saturday, in my role as one of the City’s four Ale-Conners.
The occasion was St Abdon’s Day, kept by the Coopers in honour of their patron saint, and the household duly gathered at Devonshire Square for the afternoon. Tasting the ale is, after all, the one duty the office has never had to invent for itself — so when the Company asked whether the Ale-Conner might say a few words over four glasses, there was not a great deal to deliberate.
The brief I set myself was simple: four British beers, no imports, and as much distance between the first glass and the last as the country’s brewers could supply. It turned out to be quite a lot of distance.
- British Lager Utopian Brewery, Devon
- Sussex Best Bitter Harvey’s, Lewes
- Coolship 2025 Burning Sky, Sussex
- Parcelle Rouge Burning Sky, Sussex
We opened with the Utopian, which exists to answer a question most drinkers have never thought to ask: why should a good lager have to come from somewhere else? Brewed in Devon, given the time that lager actually needs, and crisp enough to make the point without a word from me. Then Harvey’s Sussex Best — the benchmark, and rightly so. A beer that has been quietly getting it right for long enough that people forget how difficult it is.
The Burning Sky beers stole the show. Their Coolship takes its name from the vessel it is made in: a broad, shallow tray in which hot wort is left open to the night air to cool, picking up whatever wild yeasts and bacteria happen to be passing, before it goes into barrel to spend a long time becoming itself. Nobody chooses the yeast. You find out what you have later. Very few in the room had ever tried a sour beer, and watching a hall full of Coopers meet one for the first time was worth the afternoon on its own.
Then the Parcelle Rouge, and the colour did the work before I could. Deep red in the glass, poured from a bottle, and unmistakably beer once it reached the nose — but the eye takes a moment to catch up with the label. There was a pause, then a good deal of laughter, then the questions started, which is precisely the order one hopes for. By the end of the afternoon the room had produced a fair few converts to sour beer, several of whom had arrived quite certain they would not be.
That, in a glass, is the case this office keeps making. British brewing is not one thing. It runs from a Devon lager brewed with patience, through a Sussex bitter that has been the standard for generations, to beers fermented by whatever the night blows in — and all of it is made here, by people worth knowing about.
My thanks to Laura Miller for organising the event and running it so smoothly, and to the Worshipful Company of Coopers for having me along.
If your livery company or ward club would like something similar — four beers, a short talk, and no obligation to enjoy the sour one — do get in touch. I would be glad to help raise the profile of Britain’s brewers wherever there is a room willing to listen.
And if you would rather do your own research, there are 180-odd establishments on the pub map ready to assist.