Winter Beers: Embracing the Dark Side

Welcome to the Dark Side! For many people dark beer is a seasonal thing. Although, it doesn’t have to be. I enjoy a glass of decent stout or porter at any time of year. Especially if it comes with slice of strong Cheddar or blue cheese and a crusty baguette.

I’m not sure when exactly I developed a penchant for the dark side, although I suspect my lifelong friend Gerry (originally from Dublin) had a hand in it. We’ve been known to enjoy the odd Guinness or two (or decent local knock-offs) in a few of Vancouver’s better pubs.

As a young man in the UK my tastes leaned towards lagers and the like—back in the day when Pilsner Urquell with a slice of lime was de rigueur. It’s still my go-to thirst quencher when the mercury soars.

Eventually I moved on. As I did from my tan leather, slim cigarette case, fully decked with Stuyvesant, and matching Dunhill Flamethrower lighter. To my mum’s relief I also moved on from Gauloise and Gitane, whose pungency permeated every item of clothing I wore. Unquestionably, they were the dark side of French cigarettes.

Instead, occasionally, black-wrapped and gold tipped Sobranie became my decidedly less proletarian guilty pleasure.

Sobranie Black

Traditional tastes

In those heady days I worked for my late uncle Rick, in London, in St. James.

‘Ricky’ was a creature of habit, especially when it came to his choice of ‘tipple.’ A committed Gin drinker, he relished his classic dry Martini. ”Just show it the cap,” he would caution anyone bearing Vermouth. The Gin would be Gordon’s or Beefeater. The latter was particularly fitting: on occasion, he served as a ceremonial Beefeater in full regalia. Rick also drank Cutty Sark and Beaujolais (which he nicknamed ‘Jollyboys’). Cases would occasionally appear in our shared loading bay from our friendly neighbouring wine merchant, Berry Bros. & Rudd. Barter was the norm in those days.

Uncle Rick’s choice in beer—straightforward as his taste in Gin—was likewise touched by tradition.

London taxi

Some evenings after turning out the lights at the Bury Street gallery we’d hop in his decommissioned London Cab and detour on the way home via the local pub. (He always drove old taxis as they were the only car that could accommodate a 54” tall picture frame.) One of his earliest was a convertible Beardmore in which he once drove an entire soccer team to Brighton! Ultimately I learnt to drive on the cab, once I mastered double clutching!

Rick was an army man. A veteran of Dunkirk, he was a member of the Honourable Artillery Company (HAC). He was also in the reserve and used to drive (PM) Ted Heath around when ‘holidaying’ in Cypress.

At the pub he’d place his cherished wartime respirator bag on the bar and quip: “check for gas!”

respirator bag

Out would come the four empties and in would go the four full bottles of Watney’s Red Barrel. For the record, that’s the beer widely—and wrongly—regarded as being so homogenous it became the impetus for CAMRA (the Campaign for Real Ale). For sure, we never went to the ‘dark side’ then.

The rise of Porter

Whitbreads Chiswell St

That Moorgate pub was attached to Watney’s brewery. It was formerly Whitbread’s, London’s earliest—and vast—19th century commercial brewery. Today’s reincarnation (as a polished events mecca) includes a fully equipped AV centre. Originally this was the brewery’s Porter room. Its impressive dimensions and heavy beams still pay tribute to the scale of the process involved.

Billingsgate fish market porter

Porter and London are synonymous. The style quickly became the working man’s drink of choice, especially on the docks and in the markets. Estimates vary as to precisely when it first appeared but most suggest around 1720 or thereabouts. In a way Porter laid the groundwork for the eventual takeover of local pub brewers by the giants. Because it had to be aged over several months to a year, storage was a necessity. Breweries tried to outdo one another by building increasingly larger and larger, monolithic vats.

Gin Lane

As a kid, my grandmother used to take me to Sunday service at St. Giles in the Fields. In Dickens’ day the neighbourhood had been infamous as a ‘Rookery’ or slum. It was incredibly poor, down-trodden and crime-ridden. In fact, you can see St. Giles in the background of Hogarth’s infamous ‘GinLane.

Meux’s Horse Shoe Brewery wikipedia

Here too was Meux’s Horse Shoe Brewery, once home to the largest beer vats in the city—and the site of the tragic Great London beer flood of 1814.

A dark side tragedy

Giant Porter Vats at Meux

The twin Porter vats at Meux were enormous, some 25 feet high and 195 feet around. They contained a staggering 581,800 litres—or well over a million pints each. They along with others were installed on a raised platform. This enabled their contents to be fed into regular sized barrels for horse-drawn delivery. Vat or ‘hogshead’ construction really hasn’t changed much over the years. The gargantuan vessels were held together by a series of weighty cast iron hoops.

In the late afternoon of October 17th, 1814 one of the critical, lower hoops on a giant vat slipped off. After a short while the vessel ruptured, setting off a chain reaction that demolished a neighbouring, twin vat. The sheer force of the flood took out a brick wall. Its collapse and the ensuing tsunami of Porter through the narrow lanes and cellars of the slum killed eight women and children.

Brewery vat failures were not uncommon.  But nothing on this scale had happened before. True to form, the event—which was preventable—was declared an Act of God. The victims’ families were never compensated. But the brewery was excused payment of excise tax on the lost product.

It was, truly, the dark side of brewing.

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Inspiration for this post came from my story about BC winter craft beers that appears in the current issue of Taste magazine, which you may read and download here.