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Kent hops, hedgers and Pale India Ale
Here’s another titbit* from the Times archives: a report from 1840 on the hop harvest with some fascinating clues about what hops went into IPA (I was wrong, incidentally, in saying the archive is not...
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IPA: much later than you think
When do you think the expression “India Pale Ale” was first used? Much, much later than you’d imagine, and much, much later than the idea of a pale ale exported to the Far East. The term India Pale Ale...
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IPA: much later than you think part 2
Click to read part 1 From 1823 the Burton brewers began to brew pale ales for the Indian market. I’m not going to go into the development of Burton pale ale here, but between them the big Burton...
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Poems on beer, good and bad
Someone has put Carol Ann Duffy’s poem “John Barleycorn”, a “lament for, and a celebration of, the Great British Pub”, from the BBC Culture Show programme, up on YouTube: you can find it here and, if...
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The first ever reference to IPA
(Note: three years on from this post, the earliest mention of the phrase IPA has been pushed back another six years: see here.) This is a truly historic document: the first known use of the expression...
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IPA: the executive summary
Well, that was all rather too much: nearly 4,000 words and more footnotes than a Jerry Lee Lewis concert. So here’s the executive summary on what we know, what we don’t know, what we can justifiably...
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