Another slow week for holiday season. Which, I mean, I'm partially to blame. No time to write! Anyway, this is what caught my eye this week! 
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A few more added notes on what was once known as 'Lambeth Ale', which appears to be popular around the late 1600's. 

"Anyway, it is clear that Lambeth ale is something kept in the Royal larder, the only beer or ale mentioned, next to the bread of the elite not to mention the champers. Its high status nature is confirmed by this account of another 1680s gesture at court: In 1687, the French ambassador in London was sending to the marquis de Seignelay regular consignments of English ale, “known as Lambeth ale” and not “strong ale, the taste of which is not much liked in France and which makes men as drunk as wine and costs just as much.”

Overview and analysis of some Newark brewing records from 1910.
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A look through an online database of materials concerning whisky in Canada.

"Here, I want to focus on three areas: first, use of whiskey with tansy, as I showed yesterday occurred in Pennsylvania (Jack Daniel used it too in Tennessee); second, taste notes comparing frontier whisky to that of c. 1899; third, a vivid description of an early country tavern."
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Recent excavations in China found a tomb containing a few interesting items. One in particular being a wine vessel in the shape of a deer. I don't know what they mean by 'wine', since alcohol derived from rice is beer...They also found some nice cups for 'soup'. Cool find nonetheless!

Slow news week, it seems. But perhaps that should be expected, given the holiday season and all. In any case, here's what caught my eye this week!
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A look into beer, brewing, and the British Navy.

"One thing we know already, is that they aimed at taking along a gallon of beer for each person on board for each day. We know that because, as I first wrote in 2014 and mentioned again in  the first issue of MASH magazine,  Sir Martin Frobisher provisioned his voyages in 1576-77 to the Canadian High Arctic with that much beer. This was a pretty fabulous expedition, funded by a company if investors made up of aristocrats and even “QE the 1” herself. So they also got to take along two firkins of prunes and other treats."
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Follow a series of posts regarding whisky distilled in Port Hope, a small town around Lake Ontario.

​"An index of this fame was the annual exports of whisky in this period. As Smith’s Gazetteer details, a burg of only 1,200 people sent out 429 casks of whiskey in 1844 (see p. 150). This number is very small today but it was hardly small for the size of the town in question or the number of producing distilleries. In 1844 Port Hope had five distilleries, according to Smith’s."
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The history of the Oregon Hop Growers Association!

A nice little article highlighting factoids about the history of brewing in Wallingford.
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A featured piece by friend of the blog Brian Alberts in the Washington Post, discussing the association of beer and politics!

"Beer, in fact, was central to the founding of our country. Taverns were more common than churches in Colonial society. They were hubs of political and social life where people ate, drank, heard local news, argued about it, held public meetings and conducted business transactions."
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An account of the archaeological evidence of Heather use in brewing.
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A series looking into the history of Rum in the Canadian Navy.

"Consumption by officers with the men was not traditional but the event was ceremonial, as shown by the consigning of the last dram to the sea. The Commander spoke well and the clip in general is affecting, it speaks to a different time, one we can learn from in more ways than one."
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Although this time not from Lars, it is a good summary of what Garshol has uncovered so far.

For those looking to expand their blog news feed, here's a list from the good folks over at Boak & Bailey!

This month's Beer Advocate had a few pieces on brewing history. This one particularly caught my eye, as it is a full on historic brewery!
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Continuing the research efforts into the ale brewed in Derby, which was apparently quite popular at the time (what with having only around 700 houses, but 120 ale houses and 76 malt houses).

"So, it’s pretty clear that well before coke, Derby malt was a thing and a desired thing. Moved by massive pack horse trains, by water as discussed in the first post or by subterfuge as the Pickfords of Macclesfield illustrate. Folks wanted their hands on it."
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Lars' further exploration of Seto culture and their koduõlu ale, which they sampled at a local restaurant.
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A look into the use of Heather in antiquity!
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"There are certainly more ancient references to heather in Greek and Latin than its adjunct-y friend, meadowsweet. Prior to the first c. BCE, the authors only describe heather as a plant that is worth cutting and lighting on fire. Later, Pliny likens heather to myrica – the name for the family of plants that includes another famous gruit herb, bog myrtle."
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Hints at a Brewing Museum in England around the 1980s. Dunno if it's heartwarming to know that promotion and the study of brewing history was occurring back in the 80s, or daunting because it closed down...

A brief examination of the cask ale sparkler, a little device used to add foam to ales.

"The sparkler was referred to parenthetically in a 1949 brewing journal article by J.W. Scott, “From Cask to Consumer”. Initially I thought it was a post-1945 invention, or perhaps an expedient to make thin, wartime beer more attractive in the glass."

Examining old newspapers shows the range of beers produced by three different breweries in the early 1900s.

"I was surprised to see that the two Faversham breweries produced both Table Ale and Table Beer. Table anything was pretty rare in England by this point. It had long been dropped by the big London brewers. The examples here must have been pretty low gravity as they're under 30s per barrel. At that price, they's have to be under 1040º."

As was hinted at last week, Dr. McGovern and crew provide evidence for wine making in Georgia from 8,000 years ago.
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Back in 2016, Lars Garshol went to a festival in Estonia which celebrates the local traditions. One of which is brewing.

"Then, suddenly, one beer was a little different. It was roastier and sharper in flavour than the others. We had no idea why, and language differences and busy brewers were making it difficult to learn very much about how these beers were made. We were collecting phone numbers and trying to make appointments to visit some of these brewers the next day to see what we could learn."
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An experimental single malt, single herb brew with meadowsweet! Will have to give this a go soon.

Learn how to make Victorian-era pub mirrors! I had no idea you could do this, but it's pretty cool.
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Further investigation into the International Wine & Food Society, this time in my home turf of Southern California (albeit in 1957).

A small collection of old photos from the Bass Brewery in the early 1900s.
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A brief look into drinking during times of war.

"So it might then seem a little glib to talk about booze and the battlefield, but the fact is, until recent years at least, the association has been unavoidable. Historically, alcohol has long been ally for the soldier, whether to boost morale, or to sterilise and anaesthetise."
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A research summary and dive into the etymology of 'Kveik'. Fascinating as always.

"The original meaning of the word was simply "yeast," because there used to be just a single kind of yeast. That was the one you used in beer, and if you managed to get hold of some wheat you'd use it for baking, too. But then yeast became available in the shops. Now the brewers distinguish between "gjær" (the standard Norwegian word for yeast), which is something you buy in the shop, and "kveik", which is the traditional farmhouse ale yeast."

Experimental beer brewing with einkorn, a type of wheat. Although the project stemmed from brewing with emmer instead, they were successful in producing a decent sounding beer!

The dudes over at Brewing Classical Styles have been putting out some interesting material these past days, so be sure to head over and read their other content.
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It's a touchy subject, but the brewing history field isn't rolling with money. If you can help, please do! Ron's research is paramount in the brewing history world.

Looking into a beer and food pairing event from 1944 by the Wine and Food Society of New York. Features beer's with names such as 'Atlantis Double Dark' and 'Krueger Kent Ale'. 

"May 7, 1942 is exactly five months after WW II began for the United States. On that night the Wine and Food Society of New York held a luxurious beer and food tasting at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. As I’ve mentioned before, the same society held two other beer events (that I know of) in the 1940s: one in 1941 before Pearl Harbor and one in September, 1944."

Pretty cool photographs and descriptions of pubs in England from 1964.

A great source of info on Derby Ale, which was honestly my first time hearing about it. Apparently, it was one of the first beers brewed with coke kilned malt, and is a part of the greater research effort into beers from the 1600's. Be sure to catch the entire series!

A look at an advertisement for Allsopp's East India Pale Ale.
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For the anniversary of Martin Luther's theses, NPR researched into the Luther family's influence on hop usage. I remain skeptical that Lutherans pushed for hops as a protest to Catholicism, but there are some interesting tidbits here.
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A nice article on the local brewing history in Illinois. 

"Thies was a recent immigrant from Westphalia, Germany, and Blank came to Quincy from Baden, Germany, in 1848. When Blank died two years later, his widow, Salime, married Thies. In 1857, a fire in the brewery malt room caused $6,000 in damages, but business continued, and in 1859 Henry Grimm became Thies' partner. Grimm and his wife, Rosina, came from Alsace in 1835. Rosina was the sister of Casper Ruff, the brewery's original owner. In 1864, Thies and Grimm sold the brewery to Jacob Luther and his father-in-law, Michael Durrstein."
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A summary of what Patrick McGovern has been up to as of late.
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A look into Meadosweet's usage in ancient brewing!
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Thoughts on the recent archive of the Labatt Brewery which has recently been made available!
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So apparently Budweiser is releasing a beer brewed to a recipe from the 1930's. Dunno if that's good or bad...
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Researching into the word 'nip', and how it was used as a unit of measure in pubs.

"Just to confuse things, though, this 1725 Canting Dictionary suggests that a nipperkin referred to half a pint of wine but ‘half a Quartern of Brandy, Strong Waters [spirits], &c.’ Half a quartern is insanely confusing — half a quarter of a pint, we think."
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A narrative on the history, geography, and culture of beer. Will need to get my hands on this someday...

A nice profile on the Black Creek Brewery, a historic brewery which uses technology from the 1860s.