Strange Tales of Ale

Martyn Cornell

• Publisher: Amberley Publishing
• Year: 2015
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781445648088
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Winner of Beer Book of the Year at the 2016 British Guild of Beer Writers Awards The history of ale and beer is pitted with strange tales. Take the way the RAF made sure British troops received supplies of beer after the D-Day landings in 1944, for example: they filled up the fuel drop-tanks slung below Spitfire fighters with mild and bitter and flew seventy-five gallons at a time over to the makeshift landing strips in Normandy. Then there's the Great London Beer Flood of 1814, when a giant vat at Meux's brewery in Tottenham Court Road broke and 570 tons of beer smashed down the brewery's back wall and flooded out into the streets, killing eight people. The link between ale and bridal gowns, the odd story of pea beer, the most notorious brewer in history, the true story of the yard of ale and brewing beer from Christmas trees – these and many other tales have been collected by Martyn Cornell, an award-winning writer and beer historian, and will amuse, entertain and educate beer fans everywhere.

Table of contents

• Cover
• 1 - The Great London Beer Flood
• 2 - The True History of the Ploughman’s Lunch
• 3 - Putting Beer in Spitfire Fuel Tanks
• 4 - The Bridal Gown – Echo of a Beery Celebration
• 5 - The British National Dinner – Roast Beef, Plum Pudding and Ale
• 6 - The Potboy in History, Literature and Art
• 7 - Dutch Schultz, Beer Hero?
• 8 - The True Story Behind Britain’s Most Popular Pub Name
• 9 - When the Stately Homes of England Drank Twenty-One-Year-Old Ale
• 10 - The Tale of the Dimple Beer Mug
• 11 - The Dove, Hammersmith – a Tiny Mystery
• 12 - The Most Notorious Brewer in History
• 13 - The Origins of Binge Drinking
• 14 - Havisham’s Kentish Ales – Beer in Literature
• 15 - In Praise of Rough Pubs
• 16 - Give Peas a Chance
• 17 - What Shakespeare Drank
• 18 - When the Vicar Brewed His Own Beer
• 19 - What to Order in a Victorian Public House
• 20 - The Brewery that Salami-Sliced Itself to Death
• 21 - The Mystery of the Yard of Ale
• 22 - The Shadowy History of Sessionability
• 23 - Shades, Dives and Other Varieties of British Bar
• 24 - Words for Beer
• 25 - What Did Pliny the Elder Say About Hops?
• 26 - The Patron Saint of English Brewers
• 27 - The Jerusalem Tavern, the Trigger’s Broom of Pubs
• 28 - The Nettle and the Damage Done