Scottish Ale - History

History

Brewing in Scotland goes back 5,000 years; archaeologist Merryn Dineley has suggested that ale could have been made from barley at Skara Brae and at other sites dated to the Neolithic. The ale would have been flavoured with meadowsweet in the manner of a Kvass or Gruit made by various North European tribes including the Celts and the Picts. By studying the analyses of organic remains found inside Grooved ware pots and by working with her husband, Graham, who is a craft brewer of some twenty years' experience, it was possible to reconstruct this ancient ale. They named it Meadowsweet Ale. The ancient Greek Pytheas remarked in 325 BC that the inhabitants of Caledonia were skilled in the art of brewing a potent beverage.

The use of bittering herbs such as heather, myrtle, and broom to flavour and preserve beer continued longer in remote parts of Scotland than occurred in the rest of the UK. Thomas Pennant wrote in A Tour in Scotland (1769) that on the island of Islay "ale is frequently made of the young tops of heath, mixing two thirds of that plant with one of malt, sometimes adding hops". Though, as in the rest of Britain, hops had replaced herbs in Scotland by the end of the 19th century, this Celtic tradition of using bittering herbs was revived in Brittany, France during 1990 by Brasserie Lancelot, and in Scotland by the Williams Brothers two years later.

Even though ancient brewing techniques and ingredients remained in use later in Scotland than was the practice in the rest of the UK, the general pattern of development was the same, with brewing mainly in the hands of "broustaris", or alewives, and monasteries, just as it was throughout Europe; though, as with brewing ingredients, the trend was for developments to move more slowly. The Leges Quatuor Burgorum, a code of burgh laws, showed that in 1509 Aberdeen had over 150 brewers – all women; and this compares with figures for London which shows that of 290 brewers, around 40% were men. After the Reformation in the 1560s commercial brewing started to become more organised, as shown by the formation in 1598 of the Edinburgh Society of Brewers – though London had formed its Brewers' Guild over 250 years earlier in 1342.

However, after the Acts of Union 1707, new commercial opportunities emerged that proved a substantial stimulus to Scottish brewers. Tax on beer was levied at a lower amount than in other parts of the United Kingdom, and there was no tax on malt in Scotland – this gave Scottish brewers a financial advantage. During the 18th century some of the best remembered names in Scottish brewing established themselves, such as William Younger in Edinburgh, Robert & Hugh Tennent in Glasgow, and George Younger in Alloa. In Dunbar in 1719, for example, Dudgeon & Company's Belhaven Brewery was founded. Scottish brewers, especially those in Edinburgh, were about to rival the biggest brewers in the world.

While it has long been assumed for various reasons that Scottish brewers made little use of hops, the available information from brewing and trade records show that brewers in Edinburgh used hops as much as English brewers, and that the strong, hoppy ale that Hodgeson was exporting to India and which became known as IPA, was copied and brewed in Edinburgh in 1821, a year before Allsopp is believed to have first brewed it in Burton. Robert Disher’s brewery in the Canongate area of Edinburgh had such a success with his hoppy Edinburgh Pale Ale that the other Edinburgh brewers followed, exporting strong, hoppy Scottish beer throughout the British Empire, and into Russia and America. The beer historians Charles McMaster and Martyn Cornell have both shown that the sales figures of Edinburgh’s breweries rivalled that of Dublin and Burton upon Trent.

Charles McMaster, the "leading historian of the Scottish brewing industry" according to Roger Protz, believes that the hard water of Edinburgh was particularly suitable for the brewing of Pale Ale - especially the water from the wells on the "charmed circle" of Holyrood through Canongate, Cowgate, Grassmarket and Fountainbridge; and that due to the quality of this water brewer Robert Disher was able to launch a hoppy Edinburgh Pale Ale in 1821. While Martyn Cornell in Beer: The Story of The Pint, shows that when the brewers of Burton in the late 19th century were exporting their hoppy Burton Ales in the form of India Pale Ale, so were the William McEwan and William Younger breweries. When the Burton brewers exported strong malty Burton Ales, so did the Edinburgh brewers, under the name Scotch Ale. The Edinburgh brewers had a very large and well respected export trade to the British colonies rivalling that of the Burton brewers. By the mid-19th century Edinburgh had forty breweries and was "acknowledged as one of the foremost brewing centres in the world".

Some writers, such as Pete Brown in Man Walks into a Pub, believe that beer brewed in Scotland developed significantly different from beer brewed south of the border in England. The belief is that hops were used sparingly, and that the shilling designation was uniquely Scottish. However, Dr John Harrison in Old British Beers gave a recipe for the English brewery Brakspear's 1865 50/- Pale Ale in which 1.8 oz of hops are used per imperial gallon, along with the Scottish brewery W. Younger's 1896 Ale No 3 (Pale) which also uses 1.8 oz of hops per imperial gallon. These both indicate that there was no difference in use of hops, even for the everyday domestic beers, and that the shilling designation was used in other parts of the British Isles.