It’s a mark of the low status given to working class history that the role in London’s life and economy played by the city’s thousands of street and river porters, the men who gave their name to the beer, is almost completely forgotten, only 70 or so years after the last of the porters died.

Almost no modern books on the history of London mention the Ticket Porters and their rivals the Fellowship Porters, not even Weinreb and Hibbert’s 1,000-page London Encyclopedia (which does, however, manage to mangle a nonsensical story about ale conners and the Tiger pub at the Tower of London).

The exception is Peter Earle’s A City Full of People, subtitled Men and Women of London 1650-1750, published in 1994, which leans for its scholarship about the subject on Walter Stern’s The Porters of London, written in 1960.

This lack of general knowledge about the people who played an irreplaceable role in London’s economy from the 17th to the 19th centuries, one that was the equivalent of white van delivery driver, motorcycle courier and postman rolled into one, meant confusion for beer writers in the 1970s when they came to write about porter the drink.

They read comments by people such as John Feltham in 1802 that the drink was “a very hearty nourishing liquor … very suitable for porters and other working people. Hence it obtained the name porter.” But they thought the porters he referred to must be the only porters they knew of, the only ones surviving in London at that time, the porters of Billingsgate fish market and Covent Garden fruit and vegetable market, the ones famous for walking about with towering baskets of fish or fresh produce balanced on their heads. So they wrote, like Michael Jackson in 1977, about porter getting its name because of its “popularity … among porters in the London markets.”

The market porters, however, were only a fraction of the 5,000 or so men employed in full-time portering in London in the early eighteenth century, the time that porter the beer came into being (thousands more, incidentally,  worked as porters on a casual basis). The full-time porters were regulated by the City of London, and divided into two groups, the Fellowship Porters, who carried “measurable” goods (grain, coal, salt and the like) on and off ships moored in the Thames and in and out of warehouses, and the Ticket Porters (that’s a Ticket Porter pictured at the top of this blog, taken from Hogarth’s engraving Beer Street).

The Ticket Porters, who wore a pewter badge carrying the arms of the City, a cross and a dagger, were subdivided into two themselves, the waterside Ticket Porters, who dealt with all ship-borne cargoes the Fellowship Porters did not carry, and the Street or Uptown Porters. This last group carried everything from letters to parcels to merchant’s goods of all descriptions, which might weigh up to three hundredweight, nearly 350 pounds, the heaviest loads requiring a team of four porters with poles and chains. The Street Porters waited to be hired at 100 or so official stands placed around the City, and they charged up to five shillings a day, a good sum for a manual labourer.

Portering was hard work, however, and porters needed a considerable amount of carbohydrate as fuel – much of which they got from drinking. One estimate is that 18th century manual workers were getting 2,000 calories a day from beer. Pubs were used as fuelling stops: it was “universal” in the 18th century, according to a writer in 1841, for public houses in London to have a bench outside for porters to sit at and a board (that is, table) alongside it “for depositing their loads” while they stopped for “deep draughts of stout … such as are idealised in Hogarth’s Beer Street.” That was “stout” as in stout porter, of course: the strong, dark brew London’s brewers developed out of the brown beer they brewed at the beginning of the 18th century was just the sort of refreshing, energising brew the porters wanted, and its popularity with the portering class is why it was given their name.

Brewers were big hirers of porters, with Barclay Perkins’s Anchor brewery in Southwark, by the Thames, for example, taking on up to 140 Fellowship Porters at a time to unload malt barges. Reid & Co of the Griffin Brewery, in what is now Clerkenwell Road, like Barclay Perkins one of London’s 11 or 12 big porter brewers, also hired teams of porters to shift sacks of malt into the brewery. Reid’s then made the porters pick up their pay at one of its pubs, and it expected them to drink a pint of beer in the pub after they had been paid. When the brewery raised the price per load of malt it paid to the porters, it also increased the amount of beer they were expected to drink, to a “pot”, or two pints.

London had at least a couple of public houses actually called the Ticket Porter, one in Moorfields, which was kept by a man who worked as a Ticket Porter and the other (which was only closed and demolished around 1970) in Arthur Street, hard by London Bridge. (The former pub’s name is reflected in the name of a modern, and not very attractive bar, the Porter’s Lodge, at the bottom of Arthur Street.) Another pub, the Stave Porters, was in Jacob Street, Southwark until at least the 1930s. Charles Dickens invented a riverside pub called the “Six Jolly Fellowship Porters” in his novel Our Mutual Friend which was based, it is claimed, either on the Grapes, Limehouse or the Prospect of Whitby pub in Wapping.

The Fellowship Porters are said, in fact, to have used the Ship, in Gate Street, near Holborn, where new members were initiated. A description of the rite written in the 1920s says that a quart of strong ale was ordered, and the novitiate’s badge of office was dropped into the mug. The would-be porter then had to extract the badge with his teeth without spilling any ale.

By the 1920s, however, the Fellowship had been wound up for 30 years or so. In fact, the power of the official portering organisations had been evaporating since the very beginning of the 19th century. As the big dockyards began opening to the east of the City from 1802 onwards, the companies that built and operated them barred the ticket porters and fellowship porters from exercising any right to work in their dockyards. The same bar was operated by the railway companies when they opened their London termini, and employed their own porters. Rowland Hill’s Penny Post knocked on the head the Street Porters’ monopoly of letter carrying.

The ticket porters had vanished by the late 1870s. Fewer than a hundred men earned their living as a Fellowship Porter in the 1860s, though when a meeting was held to talk about dissolving the fellowship in 1892, more than 160 members turned up. An Act of Parliament finally dissolved the fellowship in 1894, giving each former porter compensation for the disappearance of his job. However, ex-porters continued to make claims on the City of London for some decades: there were still 16 former Fellowship Porters alive in 1932.

Porter the drink was pretty much on its deathbed in London by then, too, its gravity down to 1036 OG or less. The writer TEB Clarke in 1938 called porter “a lowly brand of draught stout selling in the Public [bar] at fourpence a pint”, making it one of the cheapest (and presumably weakest) beers available.

It was, literally a drink for old men and boys: my father, Arthur, remembered being sent aged 11, around 1933, to the bottle-and-jug department of the family’s local pub in North London to bring back a quart jug of porter for his grandfather, who would then have been 70 or so. On the way home the young boy would take a sly, and strictly illegal, mouthful of beer: I wonder if my great-grandfather ever noticed, and decided a sip was a fit fee to pay for my father portering the porter.

I love “blue-sky” invitations, unexpected requests for my company, so though it’s only a “virtual” event I was flattered and delighted to be nominated by Alan McLeod of A Good Beer Blog as one of his four guests for a fantasy beer dinner.

The “fantasy beer dinner” question was thought up by the American beer writer and beer blogger Stan Hieronymous, and the idea, Stan says, is

If you could invite four people dead or alive to a beer dinner who would they be? What four beers would you serve?”

The 10 “beer dinner fantasists” Stan has put up on his site so far have chosen a range of guests for which “eclectic” seems utterly inadequate as a description. They include Bernardo O’Higgins, the 19th century South American revolutionary; Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys; Robert Noonan, author of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists; William Shakespeare (nominated by two people); Martin Luther; Michael “The Beer Hunter” Jackson (also nominated by two people); David Bowie; Socrates; Winston Churchill; Ernest Hemingway; and John McEnroe. And me.

Since I’ve been chosen myself, I have naturally thouight about who I’d like to invite to my own fantasy beer dinner. I’m a little unhappy at the number restriction Stan has put on the game, as five – one host and four guests – doesn’t work that well in social situations. Sociologists say the ideal numbers of people for good conversation are three or four. Any more than that, and people get squeezed out, as the “natural” group number asserts itself. Take a look around at your next social gathering, and see how people naturally congregate in threes or fours – never fives. So it may be better to have host and three guests, or otherwise host and seven guests, which would the conversational group to split easily into two equal parts.

Sticking to Stan’s rules, however, my first choice is easy: Samuel Johnson, the 18th century writer, journalist, raconteur, lexicographer and coiner of more great one-liners than anyone in English litertature. Johnson was a great friend of Henry Thrale, owner of the Anchor brewery in Southwark, and his wife Hester, and when Thrale died, Johnson helped organise the sale of the brewery to messers Barclay and Perkins. His biographer, James Boswell wrote that

… when the sale of Thrale’s brewery was going forward, Johnson appeared bustling about, with an ink-horn and pen in his button-hole, like an excise-man; and on being asked what he really considered to be the value of the property which was to be disposed of, answered, ‘We are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich, beyond the dreams of avarice.’”

Boswell also records that on one occasion, chatting with Johnson,

We finished a couple of bottles of port, and sat till between one and two in the morning.”

So that settles the beer for Sam – O’Hanlon’s Original Port Stout from Devon, brewed with a couple of bottles of best Ferreira in every barrel of stout.

If I’m having Johnson, I really ought to have Ron Pattinson, author of Shut up about Barclay Perkins, whose irreplaceable blog brings to an under-appreciative world the solid, properly researched evidence about beer styles that almost nobody else provides, and who admits to being a trifle fixated about the Anchor brewery. He would love, I know, to meet someone who once lived at the brewery site, and knew John Perkins, the brewery manager, who teamed up with his fellow Quakers the Barclays to buy it after Thrale’s death. But Ron’s been picked by someone else so even though I’ve got a great beer choice form him stashed away – a 1977 Courage Imperial Russian Stout brewed to the Barclay Perkins recipe – it’ll have to be someone else around the virtual table.

I thought about including a musician – JS Bach, for example, or Django Reinhardt, who, being Belgian, would provide a good excuse for some fine beers from the land of his birth: Rodenbach Grand Cru, for example. But I’d want the musicians to play, and their playing would distract from the conversation, so – no musicians.

Instead I’ve gone for another poet. Dylan Thomas. Despite the legends, Thomas was more often a beer drinker than a whisky man, and he certainly loved pubs: he was surely great crack around the pub table. For Dylan (and incidentally, it’s properly pronounced “Dullan”, Y in Welsh having an “uh” sound, so that the Welsh for Wales, “Cymru”, is pronouncd “Cumree”) it should be something from his home town, Swansea, such as Brewery Bitter from Tomos Watkins.

This is meant to be an evening of anecdote and crack, and I’ve mentioned in a previous blog George Izzard, the one-time landlord of the Dove at Hammersmith, who had a book-full of great stories, such as the time he and the author and professional troublemaker AP Herbert tried to take the House of Commons to court for serving drink in its bars without a licence. For George, it would have to be a beer from Fuller, Smith and Turner, the brewery that owns the Dove – the 2005 Vintage Ale is at a peak now, so several of those would suit.

Finally, we need someone who is female, and who is, in Dr Johnson’s expression, “clubbable – which I would define as “great fun to sit drinking with”. The finest woman I know of to take that pleasure with is, luckily for me, the one I’m married to, Emer O’Neill. It was nights sitting in pubs such as the Scarsdale Arms in West London with the lady, just talking and enjoying, that helped me fall in love with her. She’d bring her own unbeatable sparkle to the table, and she’d certainly hold up the Irish end against Englishman Johnson and Welshman Thomas. Emer’s not a huge beer drinker, Sauvignon Blanc is her drop, but she does like wheat beers or top-class pilsners, so Weihenstephan for her, I think. And for the venue – the little raised drinking area at the Jerusalem Tavern, near Farringdon Road, London, I think: secluded enough for a good talk, just large enough for five to get round the table, and close to the bar …

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 you haven’t heard it yet, I feel confident in saying you’ll enjoy it greatly.

Duffy’s poem is a rare and brilliant exception to the general rule that poetry about pubs and beer is mostly pretty bad: Pete Brown commented in Hops and Glory that India Pale Ale in particular seemed to inspire Britons stationed out in Bengal, Calcutta or Madras to dreadful attempts at rhyme and metre. Here’s one I reproduce for its awfulness: it appears in the autobiography of Harry Abbott, who was an officer in the Indian Army, and, as it happens, grandson of a partner in Hodgson’s brewery, Edwin Abbott. This was “a song which used to be sung at many a pigstick party and race meeting in the thirties, forties and fifties”, that is, 1830s to 1850s:

‘Who has not tasted of Hodgson’s pale beer
With its flavour the finest that hops ever gave?
It drives away sadness, it banishes fear,
And imparts a glad feeling of joy to the grave.

Oh! to drink it at morning, when just from our bed
We rise unrefreshed, and to breakfast sit down,
The froth-crested brimmer we raise to our head,
And in swigging off Hodgson, our sorrows we drown.

Or to drink it at tiffin, when thirsty and warm,
We say to the khidmutgar*, “bring me some beer,”
Soon, soon do we feel its most magical charm,
And quickly the eatables all disappear.

Or at ev’ning, when home from our ride we return,
And jaded and weary we sit down to dine;
We ask but for Hodgson, and willingly spurn
The choicest the dearest the rarest of wine.

Then hail to thee Hodgson! of Brewers the head,
Thy loss we in India would sadly bewail;
May you live long and happy, and when you are dead,
1 will think of you daily whilst drinking your ale.

*Urdu for waiter

Beer for breakfast: it’s an interesting idea, but even in a hot climate I think I’ll stick to tea. Anyway, that was pretty rubbish – “And quickly the eatables all disappear” is especially vile. But to show it wasn’t just IPA that inspired crap verse, here’s a mid-19th century poem to porter, particularly Barclay Perkins’s porter from Southwark. The poem is called “Heavy Wet”, the nickname for porter among the working classes, and it appeared in a magazine called Bentley’s Miscellany in 1842. Actually, it’s so bad, I’m not going to give you all of it, just some edited lowlights.

O Heavy Wet! thine excellence
I sing, O Heavy Wet!
Nectar of man, who, having beer,
Need envy not Olympian cheer –
On thee my soul is set!

Let other British bacchanals
Imbibe the fuscous(1) stream,
Which Guinness from Eblana(2) sends
To Christendom’s remotest ends
Turban’d with mantling cream.

Or fraught with Oriental floods
Of Hodgson’s bitter brewin’
Of Burton, Edinbro’ or Crw(3),
Consign dull care and devils blue
To utter rout and ruin;

The fittest drink I stout maintain,
For coppers cool or hot,
Is porter – by the Thames’s side
From Barclay’s vasty vats supplied,
Pull’d from a pewter pot!

When noontide Phoebus(4) from my couch
Invites me to arouse,
Recruited by the balmy charms
Of genial Somnes’ downy arms
From yesternight’s carouse

No vile infusion of Cathay
I femininely sip,
With muffin, or if toast a bite,
No gas and water bottled tight
Pollutes my waking lip;

But rasher from the brawny thigh
Of porker deftly fried
Which Yorkshire unexceeded yields,
Or acorn-fed from forest-fields
Of Westphaly supplied

Whose savoury catabasis(5)
I momentar’ly cheer
With freshening streams (as summer rains
Invigorate the sitient(6) plains)
Of Barclay’s blessed beer.

Oh Porter! stream of Paradise!
By thee to man is given
Delight more rare than bearded Turk,
When rushing to the deathful work,
Aspires to taste in Heaven.

Thy virtues on the moral frame,
And physical alike,
With influence beyond the power
Of fam’d Armida’s(7) fairy bower,
Do magically strike;

For whilst on pious votaries
They bounteously bestow
A prize far ‘bove rouleaus(8) of wealth
Of muscular and lusty health
The ripe and ruddy glow, –

With like beneficence they shed
On th’ elevated mind,
From all anxiety secure,
“Making assurance doubly sure,”
Felicity refined.

Then let us sing God save the Queen!
And Barclay-Perkins eke,
And may we never know regret
For lack of pots of heavy wet
One day throughout the week.

(1) ‘Of a dark or sombre hue’ (2) An old name for Dublin (3) cwrw, the Welsh for beer (4) the sun (5) descent (6) thirsting (7) a mythical enchantress (8) rolls of coins

At least it’s trying to be funny, in an irritating Oxford-classics-graduate-showing-off way (which is why I’ve had to put in all the footnotes), but it goes on far too long: I’ve only reproduced half of it, and that’s too much. Here’s a tip: if you’re going to write rubbish rhymes, make ‘em short.

A very early Russian Stout ad from 1922

It was terrific to see a positive story on the BBC about beer, with the coverage of the Great Baltic Adventure, the project to take Imperial Russian Stout back to Russia by boat, just the way it was done 200 and more years ago. But what’s this claim here, at 1:05 by BBC reporter Steve Rosenberg, talking about the first exports of stout from England to the Baltic:

“The problem was that by the time it had got to Russia it had frozen, so the brewers back home bumped up the alcohol content to make sure it didn’t turn into ice-lollies.”

Nooooooooooooo! Please, there are enough myths about beer history already, without new ones being started. Let’s make it clear, right now: the stout exported to Russia was NOT brewed strong to stop it freezing. If it had been cold enough to freeze the beer, the ocean itself would have frozen over, and the ships wouldn’t have been able to get through. It was brewed strong because that’s the way the customers liked it.

Actually, and with respect to Tim O’Rourke, whose idea the Great Baltic Adventure was, and who roped in 11 British brewers from Black Sheep to Meantime to supply Imperial Russian Stouts to take to St Petersburg by sea, the Russians also liked another strong English brew in the 18th century, Burton Ale, the thick, sweet, brown ale brewed in Burton upon Trent and shipped out of Hull. But on March 31 1822 the Russian government introduced a new tariff that banned almost every article of British manufacture, from cotton goods to plate glass, knives and forks to cheese, umbrellas to snuff boxes – and “Shrub, Liquors, Ale and Cyder”. Porter, however – and this included what we would now call stout – was left untouched. The Burton ale trade to the Baltic was wrecked, but British porter brewers could send as much of the black stuff to St Petersburg as they wanted.

Allsopp reacts to the Russian ban on English ale, 1822

Porter was left alone, presumably because it was the beer the Russians felt they could not duplicate: although porter was reported as being brewed in St Petersburg in 1801, there was a long-standing myth that only Thames water could make good porter, and certainly Russian porter had a bad reputation later in the 19th century. One English writer in 1841 wrote of St Petersburg that “The stuff manufactured here under the name of porter is little better than the rincings [sic] of blacking bottles.” The Russian tariff in 1822 (a similar one had been introduced in 1816, but seems not to have had any effect) had three important results as far as British brewing history was concerned: it encouraged the Burton brewers to start selling more of their Burton ale at home; it encouraged them to look for new markets abroad, which led to the first Burton-brewed India Pale Ales (or to be exact, what became known as India Pale Ales); and it encouraged the London porter brewers and their imitators to carry on brewing extremely strong stouts.

There was already a good market for porter in the Baltic: the traveller William Coxe, who went to Russia with Samuel Whitbread, son of the founder of the Chiswell Street brewery, wrote in 1784 of the Russians that “Their common wines are chiefly claret Burgundy and Champaigne [sic] and I never tasted English beer and porter in greater perfection and abundance.” The average imports of porter and English beer into St Petersburg between 1780 and 1790, according to William Tooke, writing in 1800, were worth 262,000 roubles a year, when the rouble was five to the pound sterling. Tooke also wrote of the Russian upper classes that “The ordinary table wines are Medoc and Chateau-Margot; besides porter and english ale, quas [kvass] and mead, which are always placed on the table, that the guests may help themselves when they please, without speaking to a servant.” In 1818 almost 214,000 bottles of porter were exported to St Petersburg, with the figure for 1819 being just under 122,600 bottles.

St Petersburg was not the only port for porter: a writer in 1815, James Hingston Tuckey, said that London porter was also imported through Riga, and Danzig, then in Prussian Poland. This was not a one-way trade, however: the ships coming back from the Baltic brought staves of Memel oak to make beer casks with: and also isinglass, used for clearing beer. The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine in 1799 quoted from a travel book recording a journey in the “southern provinces” of Russia:

The most valuable produce of the sturgeon fishery is the isinglass prepared from their air bladders. This article is principally exported from St Petersburg to England, where it is used in the beer and porter breweries in large quantities. The English supply the Spaniards, Portuguese, Dutch, and French with this commodity for clarifying their wines. According to the list of exportation printed by the English factory at St Petersburg, there were exported in British vessels from 1753 to 1768 between one and 2,000 pood of isinglass; from 1769 to 1786 from two to 3,000; in late years, however, usually 4,000, and in 1788 even 6,850 pood of that article. The exportation to other countries has also amounted within these few years to more than one thousand pood. This large and almost incredible exportation has tended considerably to increase even in these last-mentioned years the price of the different qualities of this article at Astrakhan itself; and on the Exchange of St Petersburg, where, previous to the year 1778, isinglass of the best quality did not exceed thirty-six rubles a pood, it has recently been advanced to ninety rubles.

“Factory” there was being used in the sense of “trading centre”: and a pood was equal to just over 36 pounds, so 6,850 pood is a little more than 110 tons of isinglass – a lot of sturgeon swim bladders. (Just for comparison, in 1889 Barclay Perkins, then one of the biggest breweries in the world, was using just 10 tons of isinglass a year.)

The evidence is that from late in the 18th century, at least, an especially strong porter was being specifically exported to Russia. The landscape painter Joseph Farington wrote in his diary for August 20 1796: “I drank some Porter Mr Lindoe had from Thrale’s Brewhouse. He said it was specially brewed for the Empress of Russia and would keep seven years.” (“Thrale’s”, of course, was still the operating name at that time of the Anchor brewery, Southwark, controlled since 1781 by the partnership of Barclay Perkins, and “Mr Lindoe” was probably John Lindoe of Norwich, who was related to the Barclays by marriage.) A history of St Saviour’s church in Southwark in 1795 said of the local big brewer: “Thrale’s intire [that is, porter] is well known as a delicious beverage, from the frozen regions of Russia to the burning sands of Bengal and Sumatra. The empress of all the Russias is indeed so partial to porter, that she has ordered repeatedly very large quantities for her own drinking, and that of her court.”

Was that porter sent out to the Russian imperial court (and remember, “porter” at this time still covered what we would separate out today, because of its strength, as “stout”) already being called “Imperial”? The records suggest that this may be a usage that sprang up long after the beer itself was first brewed, much like India Pale Ale was an expression that appeared decades after hopped pale ales were first exported to India. And “Russian” seems not to have been attached to “Imperial Stout” until the early 20th century. Indeed, the first nation to have its name linked to Imperial stout looks to be Ireland.

“Imperial Porter” in 1821

The earliest use of “Imperial” to describe a beer that I have found comes from the Caledonian Mercury of February 1821, when a coffeehouse in Edinburgh was advertising “Edinburgh Ales, London Double Brown Stout and Imperial Porter, well worth the attention of Families”. So “Imperial Porter” comes before “Imperial Stout” – although to a late Georgian drinker, stout, or at least brown stout, WAS porter, just the strongest version thereof. The next also comes from the Caledonian Mercury, two years later, and this time the beers mentioned are “Best London Porter”, “Brown Stout”, “Double Brown Stout” and “Imperial Double Brown Stout”.

These are both retailers’ advertisements, and do not show what terminology the brewers themselves were using. The first evidence for THAT comes in a historic announcement made by the “great London Beer Brewers” in the first week of October 1830. The timing is hugely important: this was just over a fortnight before what was known later as the Beerhouse Act was due to come into operation. The Beerhouse Act was meant by the Duke of Wellington’s government as a massive “free trade” exercise, liberating the brewing and beer retailing businesses from perceived restrictions and barriers to entry. The Act allowed any householder who was eligible to pay the poor rate to sell beer, ale or porter (but not wine or spirits) by retail by purchasing a one-year excise licence for two guineas (£2 2s). The licensing magistrates, that is, in effect, the local gentry (supposedly the allies of the larger brewers) had no say over who could be granted one of these new beerhouse licences, unlike the “full” licence, which was under their control. The tax on beer was removed (though it stayed on malt), while the brewer’s licence was fixed at 10 shillings for the smallest operators, and only £2 for anyone producing 100 to 1,000 barrels a year. The expectation was that there would be a huge increase in the numbers of retail beer outlets, and also in the numbers of small retail brewers.

The London porter brewers announce the brewing of “Imperial Ale”, 1830

The “great London Beer Brewers”, that is, the 11 or so big London porter houses, which included the biggest brewers in the country at that time, in a reflection of the soon-to-be-lower tax on their product, and an apparent attempt to deter all the expected new beerhouse retailers, in London at least, from brewing for themselves, announced together that they would be cutting their prices by 12 shillings a barrel, equivalent to a penny a quart pot. They also made what contemporary commentators said, correctly, was the “remarkable” announcement that they were about to commence brewing ale. New readers may need telling that we were still, in the early 1830s, in the period when ale was seen as a different drink to beer, less hopped and, generally pale: the porter brewers were “beer” brewers because their product was hoppy and dark, and there was an entirely different set of specialist “ale” brewers in London at that time. The fact that the porter brewers, for the first time, started brewing ale as well in the 1830s has generally been seen (well, by me, anyway) as a reaction to the growing popularity of sweeter, less hoppy ale and the beginnings of the decline in sales of porter. But it looks from that announcement that a large part of the reason for starting to brew ale was also for the big porter brewers to give the new beerhouses even less of a reason to want to become brewers themselves, by offering them a “one-stop shop” where the beerhouse proprietors could obtain both their porter and their ale from the same supplier.

Not all the big porter brewers rushed into ale brewing in the 1830s, incidentally: Meux in Tottenham Court Road, for example, remained a porter-only brewery until 1872, and Reid’s only began brewing ales in 1877. But that’s an aside: what is relevant to this discussion is what the big London brewers called their different grades of beer and ale in their circular of October 1830 announcing the price cut. There were Porter, as 33 shillings a barrel, Stout at 43s, Double Stout at 53s – and Imperial Stout at 63s. On the other side there were X Ale at 48 shillings a barrel, XX Ale at 58s, XXX Ale at 68s – and Imperial Ale at 80s.

Barclay’s Imperial Double Brown Stout, 1844

“Imperial” here seems to be being used simply to mean “our biggest”, with no specific reference to Russia, or just porter/stout. “Imperial” without “Russia” attached (although often with other adjectives in the mix) is a usage that carries on through the following decades: there’s a reference to “London Imperial Brown Stout” from a retailer in Southampton in 1832, for example, and “Imperial London Stout” on offer in a newspaper in 1834. In 1844 Barclay’s “Imperial Double Brown Stout” was being advertised in The Times, one of only a very few mentions I have found of Barclay’s brewing an Imperial stout in the 19th century (“IBS”, or Imperial Brown Stout, appears to be Barclay’s usual “in-house” name for the beer). Others brewed Imperial stouts too: Jenner’s of the South London brewery from at least the late 1840s to the 1880s (as I’ve mentioned before, Miles Jenner of Harvey’s is a descendant, so he is carrying on a family tradition by brewing an Imperial stout in Lewes); there was “Imperial Extra Stout” from the big London porter brewer Truman Hanbury & Buxton in 1847, at what seems to be the standard price of seven shillings for a dozen quart bottles, 75 per cent dearer than bottled porter; “Imperial Irish Stout” in 1848 (which looks to come from Davis Strangman of Waterford), Imperial Brown Stout from the Dublin brewers Findlaters in 1855; and “Dublin Imperial Invalid Stout” from Manders in 1872. (One Welsh wine and beer merchant, in Rhyl, in 1868 was claiming to sell “Guinness’s Imperial Stout”: that, I think, was definitely the retailer’s description and not the brewery’s.)

Imperial Irish Stout in 1848

London and Dublin were not the only Imperial Stout brewers. Samuel Allsopp was advertising an Imperial Stout alongside its Burton ales and EIPA in 1865 (Bass Imperial Stout “drawn from the wood” was on sale alongside draught Bass Barley Wine and Allsopp’s Burton Ale at Klein’s Raritan House in New Brunswick, New Jersey in 1901, for late Victorian American extremophiles). In 1882 the Nelson Evening Mail in New Zealand was advertising the arrival of Tennent’s Imperial Stout from Scotland. In 1900 Seth Senior’s brewery in Shepley, Yorkshire would sell you Imperial Stout at 1s 4d a gallon, the same as its IPA and Strong Ale. But London looks to have specialised in the drink. The Salisbury Hotel, Fulham, was boasting that it sold Watney’s Imperial Stout in 1886. A 19th century price list for Young’s brewery in Wandsworth (exact date unknown but probably about 1870) included draught Imperial Stout. The East End of London brewer Manns was apparently bottling an Imperial Stout in 1893, although as this was six pence a dozen pints cheaper than the 3s 6d India Pale Ale, it may not have been that strong. Whitbread’s Imperial Stout was on sale at the Admiral Keppel in Shoreditch in 1903. The little West’s brewery in Hackney, north-east London, would sell you a pin (four and a half gallons) of “Imperial stout (for invalids)” for 7s 3d, which implied an original gravity of 1080 or a little less.

But none of those advertisements talked about “Russian stout”. For part of the time 19th century brewers would not have wanted to mention Russia in connection with their products, of course: we were at war with Russia in the 1850s, an event commemorated in such pub names as the Alma, the Inkerman Arms, the Florence Nightingale and the Lord Raglan. Even ignoring the impact of the Crimean War, however, there seems to be a remarkable lack of regular correlation between “Imperial stout” and Russia in the 19th century.

Indeed, for at least one exporter of stout to Russia, the “Russian” stout appears to have been different from the “Imperial” stout. Walter Serocold, author of The Story of Watneys said of Reid’s brewery, just off the Farringdon Road in London, in the 19th century:

There was vast cellarage under the breweries to accommodate the various types of stouts and ales which had to mature in cask before consumption. Some six stouts of gravities varying from 1100° (Russian stout) to 1045° (porter) were brewed; the famous Reid’s Imperial Stout was 1080°.

Findlater’s Imperial Brown Stout from Dublin, 1855

That Reid’s brewed both an Imperial Stout and a Russian Stout is confirmed by Alfred Barnard’s description of the brewery in 1889, when it still had one racking store devoted entirely to XX imperial stout, and another store filled from end to end with stout for Russia, “for which this house is justly celebrated”. One place that advertised Reid’s Imperial Stout for sale was the St John’s Gate Tavern, previously the Jerusalem Tavern, in Clerkenwell in 1880.

Manders’ Dublin Imperial Invalid Stout, 1872

The export trade of beer from England to Russia appears to have fallen quite early on into the hands of the firm of A. Le Coq, which dated back to 1807, and which was claiming in 1912 that its business “for a great many years” consisted “almost exclusively” of exporting “Special Stout” brewed in London and “Ale” brewed in Burton – a clue that Burton Ale continued to be popular in Russia. alongside strong stout. Le Coq’s problems were that the tax on its imports had risen from 15 kopeks a quart bottle in 1881 to 72 kopeks, or 1s 6d, in 1900, while the tax on beer in casks was about 175 per cent, and railway rates in Russia were four or five times higher for imported beers than for Russian ones. The result was that the retail price of Le Coq Stout or Ale was 2s 6d a quart – and millions of fake bottles of Le Coq beer, produced by “several” different brewers, were on sale.

Le Coq’s answer was to buy for £91,000 the Tivoli lager brewery in Dorpat, the town now known as Tartu, in modern Estonia, then part of the Russian empire. In its prospectus in 1912, Le Coq said the water at the Tivoli brewery “is, for all practical purposes, identical with the water of the London Brewery which has hitherto supplied Messers A. Le Coq and Co,” and it would thus be able, once the brewery plant had been extended, to supply “a first-class Stout at a price within the reach of the general Russian public.”

Unfortunately for British investors in A. Le Coq, two years after the start of attempts to brew within the borders of the Russian empire, the First World War erupted, with Russia eventually banning alcohol as part of the war effort. This was followed by the convulsions of the Russian Revolution, which saw Estonia gain its independence, but meant the Tartu brewery was cut off from its intended market.

Russian Stout – or “Russian Imperial Stout”? – in 1934

Barclay’s is generally reckoned to be the brewery that supplied A. Le Coq with its stout: is it a coincidence that the brewery in Southwark began selling a beer in Britain under the name “Russian Stout” in 1921 or 1922, when it must have become clear there wouldn’t be a market in Russia again for such a British-brewed beer for an exceedingly long time? Ron Pattinson’s researches show this beer in 1921 was still known internally as “IBS”, “Imperial Brown Stout”, though it was marketed as “Russian Stout”, and the labels, from 1931 at least, said “Russian Imperial Stout”. In 1970 the name on the labels was tweaked to say “Imperial Russian Stout”, and it is this form of the name that influenced the many subsequent revivals of super-strong stouts.

So, then: “Imperial porter” came before “imperial stout”; there’s no conclusive evidence that the “imperial” bit definitely came from any connection with the Russian imperial court (although I think it’s reasonable to assume it probably did); and “Imperial” has been used with brews other than stout for more than 180 years to mean “biggest we do” – meaning nobody can complain about “Imperial Pale Ale” and the like.

Very few beer brands survive today that have modern examples to put into a worthwhile four-decade vertical tasting. That’s simply because forty years ago there were hardly any beers being brewed that had the longevity to be still drinkable when even the most junior brewer involved in their production is now at or approaching retirement age.

It wasn’t looking good for Courage Imperial Russian Stout, which was one of less than a handful of strong beers capable of great age being brewed in the 1970s and which stopped being made in the early 1990s despite a history going back more than two centuries.

But Courage IRS, doubtless in considerable part because Michael Jackson’s World Guide to Beer in 1977 featured it across two pages, has inspired a huge number of imitators in the US and created an extremely popular beer style in the process.

When the Bedford brewer Wells & Youngs acquired the rights to the Courage beer brands from Scottish & Newcastle in 2007, the first two beers from the old Courage stable Wells produced were the Best Bitter and Directors Bitter. But I am sure it quickly occurred to the company’s marketers that here was a chance to bring back a truly iconic beer, which would surely have an instant appeal in the US as the ur-IRS, the Imperial Russian Stout in honour of which all others are named.

Thus in May last year the Bedford brewery produced the first new brew of Courage Imperial Russian Stout for 18 years, two bottles of which they’ve been kind enough to send to me, to my great delight, as I love a good IRS. And because I’m the sort of sad nerd who stuffs bottles of beers away for decades, I was able to pull out examples of Courage IRS from 1975, 1985 and 1992 to compare against the latest version.

The 1975 version, made at the Horsleydown brewery by Tower Bridge in Bermondsey, South London, actually has a bottle cap that says “Barclays Russian Stout”, reflecting the original brewer of the beer, Barclay Perkins of Southwark, which merged with its near-neighbour Courage in 1955. It opens with a slight “pfft”, always a relief with old bottled beers, and there is an instant aroma of chocolate, meat and coffee. The beer is totally black and pours with no head, but a fair amount of condition is apparent in the mouthfeel, and it’s entirely drinkable still after 37 years, rich and full, though without much complexity. There is a burnt malt bitterness, little trace of hops, and sweet chocolate comes through at the end. You would not guess this was a beer almost four decades old: it would still be a fine match for a chocolate dessert.

On another 10 years to the 1985, brewed at the John Smith’s brewery in Tadcaster, Yorkshire after the closure of the Horsleydown brewery in 1981. There is no sound on taking the top off, but a slight petillance shows up in the glass. The initial nose is of liquorice and dark brown toffee, and the colour is extremely dark brown, rather than black. The mouthfeel is thinner than the 1975, and the flavour is baked raisins and burnt batter: indeed, I found I was thinking of Garibaldi biscuits, which, by coincidence, were also once made in Bermondsey. This is less bitter than the ’75, but still remarkably drinkable for a 27-year-old beer.

Seven years later, in 1992, IRS was still being made in Tadcaster, though this was the penultimate year of brewing IRS by Courage. Twenty years on, it has an almost whisky-like nose, and the condition has again very nearly disappeared. The colour is back to black, and the mouthfeel is oily and sharply alcoholic. Sweet chocolate is still the loudest note, but underneath are bitter orange and, again liquorice. This is a lovely, heartening, rich beer and quite astonishing for its age: very enjoyable.

Before I got on to the resurrected Wells & Young edition, I was lucky to have another revived version to try: Ed Wray of the Old Dairy Brewery in Kent sent me last year his “cloned” version of Courage IRS and, fortunately, I had decided to wait a few months before drinking it, which meant it was around to be included in this multi-decade test. Ed’s IRS pours a lovely creamy head, and cream-and-chocolate were the major initial attributes. This was not, on my brief encounter, a particularly complex beer, but very enjoyable.

The W&Y IRS, made in May 2011, also pours a great head, but before that comes a massive hit of hop aroma on the nose: this is a beer that smells and tastes as if it has been rammed full of English hops (Fuggles was my guess, though I see from Des de Moor’s tasting notes that they were actually Styrian Goldings, which are, of course, despite their name, Fuggles-grown-in-Slovenia.) The first bottle, I was struggling to cope with the bitterness (I’m not a fan of strongly hop-aroma-forward, bitter-flavoured stouts), but as Stan Hieronymous has wisely pointed out, you can’t judge a beer properly on just one glass.

A second bottle the following day, by which time I was prepared for the hops hit and able to see over and through it, allowed the complexity to come through, revealing a beer with a suggestion of a hoppy Crunchie bar livened by a touch of ginger: chocolate, esters, sweetness lurking under, to me, an approaching-DIPA level bitterness. (Michael Jackson’s Beer Companion from 1993, incidentally, says Courage IRS had “around 50 units of bitterness”, which would give it, at 1098OG, a BU/GU (bitterness/gravity) ratio of .51 – far below the .90 ratio that the American homebrew guru Ray Daniels apparently believes is correct for the style. Hmmmm.)

The last time I drank Courage IRS anything like this “new” was in 1994 in the Forester in West Ealing, one of the few pubs selling the beer at the time, which had the 1992 version. I don’t remember it being then as noticeably smack-your-nose-with-hops as the W&Y version is: maybe it’s just me, though, as a quick check shows no one else tasting the beer seems to comment about the head-in-a-hopsack sensation I was getting. That (to me) over-hoppiness will, I feel fairly confident, die down over the next year or two, making this a beer I really, really want to come back to about May 2013, and again in 2014. And, ideally, in 2021.

Wells and Young’s head brewer, Jim Robertson, apparently set out to recreate the Courage IRS he remembered from the start of his career as a brewer, and it looks quite likely that he has succeeded in recreating a beer with the same massive potential longevity. This is, of course, just how it should be: the first mention we have of Barclay Perkins’s beer “specially brewed for the Empress of Russia”, from 1796, said it “would keep seven years”. If the W&Y version is indeed like the Courage one, at seven years it will be just an adolescent: it looks set to be a fine beer still after 20 years in bottle, and perfectly drinkable at almost twice that age.

The continuing fantastic expansion in the number of old documents scanned, OCR’d and available on the internet is presenting the lucky historical searcher with constant opportunities to push back the boundaries. The latest terrific find is an ante-dating of the first use of the expression “India pale ale” by almost six years, taking it from Liverpool in January 1835 to Sydney, Australia in August 1829.

Advertisement for East India Pale Ale, Sydney Gazette, Saturday August 29 1829

That advertisement for East India pale ale comes from the Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser of Saturday, August 29 1829. Unfortunately it doesn’t mention whose East India pale ale Mr Spark was selling at his stores. However, the “Taylor’s” also mentioned in the ad is almost certainly the London brewer better remembered as Taylor Walker, which was well-known in Australia, having been exporting its stout and porter to the colonies from at least 1822, but which had also been exporting pale ale to New South Wales since early in the decade, an advert in the Sydney Gazette from Thursday 20 November 1823 shows.

EIPA, ‘the best summer drink’, in the Colonial Times, Hobar,t February 19 1830

The 1829 ad seems to say that Mr Spark had two sorts of pale ale on sale, Taylor’s and East India. If there were two, the other one might have been the unhoppy version of pale ale that London brewers had long been making (see later). On the other hand, an ad just a few months later in the Colonial Times of Hobart in Tasmania on Friday, February 19 1830 lists “Taylor’s Brown Stout, East India Pale Ale (the best summer drink) and XXX Ale for sale”, meaning that whatever interpretation you put on that 1829 ad, Taylor Walker’s still (currently) takes the prize for the earliest named beer to be called an IPA (oh, all right, an EIPA – same difference). The XXX ale, meanwhile, probably WAS pale, lightly hopped ale.

We can be fairly certain that the EIPA in the 1829 ad wasn’t Hodgson’s, the best-known of the hopped pale ales exported to the East before 1830, because the Bow brewery’s beer was highly admired and regularly praised, and would have been specifically named by anybody selling it: another Sydney newspaper, the Monitor, complained in April 1828 that “Colonial beer” was “not so good as” Hodgson’s pale ale, and adverts in Australian newspapers for Hodgson’s pale ale from at least 1823 called it “celebrated” and “highly esteemed”. (Though a “Letter to a Gentleman in London” printed in the Australian newspaper in Sydney on Wednesday 16 July 1828, talking about being served Hodgson’s and Taylor’s beers on board ship on the five-month voyage out to the colonies, complained that these were “names that I had never heard of when in London”.)

East India pale ale, brewer unnamed, continued to be advertised in newspapers in Sydney to 1831 (including one mention of “India fine pale ale in casks”. Then in October 1832 the Sydney Herald carried an ad for “Barclay and Perkins’ East India Ale”, in hogsheads, showing that another big London porter brewer, like Taylor Walker, was now in the India pale ale business. (In November 1833 the Herald printed a notice for “Thirty-five Hogsheads of ‘Taylor’s’ BROWN STOUT fifteen ditto of ditto East India Pale Ale”.)

Barclay and Perkins’ East India Ale, Sydney Herald, October 29 1832

The next month, on December 20, the Hobart Town Courier included an advert for, among a long list of other items “landed in good order by the barque Forth from London”, “Ind & Smith’s India pale ale, and best brown stout in Hhds [hogsheads, 54-gallon casks] and in bottle.” Ind and Smith were the brewers from Romford in Essex who, in 1845, became Ind Coope, and who went on to open a brewery in Burton upon Trent in 1856, at least in part, it seems, to serve the export trade.

The names missing from exports of something called India pale ale to Australia, you’ll have spotted, are the major Burton upon Trent brewers Bass and Allsopp, who were, from 1823 onwards, pushing Hodgson out of the pale ale trade in India itself. Bass pale ale does not seem to appear in ads in any Australian newspaper until 1830, years after Hodgson and Taylor’s.

It’s perhaps not THAT surprising that Australia should have started using the name India pale ale earlier than Britain. Although “pale ale as prepared for India” was on sale in London in 1822, it did not become a widely available drink in the UK until after the Burton brewers started using their new railway connections to ship their bitter pale ales to London, in 1841. Only at that point was it necessary to differentiate between the hoppy pale ales the Burton brewers made and the mild pale ales that the ale brewers of London, such as Charrington’s, Mann’s and Goding’s, had been producing for many years, and calling the hoppy version “India pale ale” was a good way of doing it.

In Australia they were getting the well-hopped beers made by Hodgson AND the lesser-hopped ales, like Charrington’s XX pale ale, both on sale in Sydney and elsewhere in the Australian colonies in the 1820s, 15 or 20 years or more before Britons began seeing hoppy pale ales in quantity. Hodgson’s was well-known to Australian consumers and known to be bitter, so perhaps didn’t need calling something to flag its bitterness. Taylor’s, Barclay’s and Ind’s pale ale, however, might have been mistakenly thought by Australian consumers to be the sweeter kind of lesser-hopped ale, like Charrington’s, and so perhaps needed to be called an India pale ale to make it clear these were well-hopped, bitter drinks, something British consumers didn’t need flagging up because they weren’t getting the new hoppy pale ales yet. (I confess I don’t find that argument hugely convincing, but it has its points. And remember, when IPA-like brews did finally take off in Britain, a new term had to be invented for them by the consumer: bitter beer.)

Addendum: in the light of comments below, I should add, because it’s not clear from what I said above, that I strongly suspect the “East India pale ale” designation was strictly a retailer’s usage, in Australia, and not one used by the brewers themselves, or even by the shippers. So I wouldn’t expect to see any brewer’s records, or shipping records, talking about IPA this early.

Sydney in 1828, incidentally, had seven operating breweries, though their average output per month was only around 120 barrels each, despite “Colonial beer” selling for six pence a quart and London porter at 20 pence a quart.

(Hat tip to the Foods of England website for pointing me to “India Pale Ale” ads in early Australian newspapers.)

A label registered in Australia by Ashby’s brewery of Staines, Middlesex, England in 1876

It’s a small error, as they go, but it has been around for at least 40 years, and it appears everywhere from Michael Jackson’s World Guide to Beer to the labels on bottles of Harvey’s Imperial Extra Double Stout, so let’s try to stamp it to death: Albert Le Coq was NOT a Belgian.

Le Coq is remembered as a 19th century exporter of Imperial stout from London to St Petersburg, whose firm eventually took over a brewery in what is now Tartu, in Estonia to brew Imperial stout on what was then Russian soil. The brewery is still going, it took back the name A Le Coq in the 1990s, and an Imperial stout bearing its brand has been brewed since 1999, though by Harvey’s of Lewes, in Sussex, not in Estonia. But every reference to the company founder, Albert Le Coq, apart from in the official history of the Tartu brewery – which is almost completely in Estonian – says he was a Belgian. He wasn’t.

In fact the Le Coq family were originally French Huguenots, who had fled to Prussia in the 17th century from religious persecution in their home in Metz, Lorraine, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in 1685. They prospered in their new home, operating mostly as merchants, though one, Paul Ludwig (or Louis) Le Coq, (1773-1824), the great-grandson of Jean Le Coq, born in Metz in 1669, rose to be chief of police in Berlin. It looks as if Paul had a brother, Jean Pierre Le Coq (1768-1801), born in Berlin, who was a merchant in Hamburg, and his branch of the family also became wine merchants, owning a winery in Kempten, near Bingen, on the borders of the Prussian Rhineland.

The year before Jean Pierre died he had a son, born in Berlin (although some sources say Bingen), called Jean Louis Albert, who became better known under the German version of his name, Albert Johann Ludwig Le Coq. Plenty of sources going back to at least 1939 claim the family company was founded as A Le Coq & Co in 1807, when Albert was just seven years old: there seems no documentary evidence of this, however. Nor is it clear when, and by whom, the wine business in Kempten was acquired. At any rate Albert was living in Kempten in 1827, when his eldest child, Andreas August, was born there.

Some time in the 1830s Albert Le Coq moved to London, apparently to develop a trade in Britain for the family wine business. In 1851 Albert claimed he had been living in England for 20 years, implying he moved to London in 1831, though the births of all his children up to the youngest, Molli, born 1836 in Frankfurt, were in the same region of Germany as Bingen. Albert was certainly settled in London by 1841, when the census found him living in Mornington Crescent, St Pancras. He had probably been in business in Britain for some time, however, for the partnership of Albert Le Coq and Charles Seidler, merchants of Mark Lane in the City, operating as Le Coq & Co, was dissolved “by mutual agreement” on July 1 1841. Within a few years, of this, if not before, Le Coq had expanded from wine into exporting beer, not just stout but, surviving bottle labels show, pale ale, to Danzig, Riga and St Petersburg. One source suggests the trade was prompted by the opportunity to fill the holds of the returning fleets of ships were now coming the other way, from the Baltic to Britain, with cheap, high-quality barley from Livonia (covering parts of modern Latvia and Estonia) after the abolition in Britain in 1846 of the Corn Laws, which had previously placed high tariffs on imported grain.

Strong stout had been exported from Britain to Russia since at least the late 18th century, notably by Barclay Perkins’s Anchor brewery in Southwark, earlier known as Thrale’s. The landscape painter Joseph Farington wrote in his diary for August 20 1796: “I drank some Porter Mr Lindoe had from Thrale’s Brewhouse. He said it was specially brewed for the Empress of Russia and would keep seven years.” The average imports of porter and English beer into St Petersburg between 1780 and 1790, according to William Tooke, writing in 1800, were worth 262,000 roubles a year, when the rouble was five to the pound sterling. In 1818 almost 214,000 bottles of porter were exported to St Petersburg, with the figure for 1819 being just under 122,600 bottles.

From early on, Le Coq exported beers to Russia in bottles embossed with the firm’s name, bottles which the Russians were happy to recycle: according to Ronald Seth, writing in 1939, the first Russian wines from the Caucasus ever seen in Britain, on show at the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park in 1851 as part of the Great Exhibition, were in repurposed A Le Coq beer bottles. The Crimea War, which lasted from 1853 to 1856, put a short stop to exports to Russia, but at the end of the war, again according to Seth, Russian officers entertained their British guests at Sevastopol with A. Le Coq porter.

Albert settled in England firmly enough to want to become a British citizen, which he did in 1851 (when the claim about living in the country 20 years was made, and when his home and office were at 1 Muscovy Court, Trinity Square, Tower Hill). His business partners by now included the wine and drink merchants Thomas Butcher and William Henry Howes, John Watson and the shipping agent George Lee: in January 1858 the partnership of Le Coq and Watson of Muscovy Court was dissolved. The size of deals Le Coq was doing can be gauged from the wreck of the motor sail ship Oliva in 1869 on its way from London to Danzig, when it ran into reefs off the coast of Norway during a storm and went down shortly afterwards with a cargo that included bottled beer from Barclay Perkins’s brewery being exported under the A Le Coq name worth £751 – perhaps £150,000 today.

Albert retired from the business in 1861, and returned to Berlin, where he died in 1875, and the firm of A Le Coq & Co was left in the hands of two more partners, John Turnbull and Richard Sillem. The Sillems were also originally German, from Hamburg, where they had been merchants since at least the 16th century, and where they must have known Albert’s father. Richard’s father Herman had come to England at the beginning of the 19th century. However, Richard Sillem died aged 37 in 1866, and his place in the partnership was evidently taken by his brother Oscar Hyde Sillem, born 1838. After Albert Le Coq’s death his son, Andreas August was no longer interested in the London beer exporting business, preferring, it appears, to run the seeds business he had set up in Darmstadt, Hesse, and in 1881 the London export operation was sold to Oscar Sillem, though still operating under the A Le Coq name. (Back in Germany the Le Coqs were raised to the aristocracy, becoming Von Le Coq: Albert’s great-grandson, August Robert Gerhard Albert von Le Coq, was an officer in the German army, and died, aged 20, in 1917, on the Western Front, ironically not far from where his ancestors had lived two centuries earlier.)

In Britain, meanwhile, business flourished, with Oscar Sillem never having to visit Russia himself: the beer was shipped out, and the Russian merchants who bought it would turn up unannounced at A Le Coq’s offices in Orange Street, Southwark to pay upfront with Tsarist gold rubles. The firm had agents across Russia and into Siberia, and was even selling its stout in China, while “from the mysterious country of Tibet, even, reports had come of the long, slender A Le Coq bottles being used as candlesticks.” Andreas August Le Coq was in China from 1852 to 1855, having sailed out round the Cape and arrived in Hong Kong late in 1851: his son Albert August von Le Coq became a famous archaeological and ethnographic explorer in Central Asia and China, taking part in four expeditions to Chinese Turkmenistan that brought back hundreds of crates of material to Berlin.)

However, in the early 1890s Le Coq’s trade in Russia began a rapid decline, and in 1895 Oscar sent his 28-year-old son Herbert Oscar Sillem to St Petersburg to investigate the reasons for the drop-off in orders. Herbert did not, at that time, speak Russian, but he had been educated in Switzerland and did speak German and French. The latter was of particular benefit in dealing with the business community in St Petersburg, since French was the preferred language for communication in Russian high society.

Herbert quickly found there were two big problems. The first was the high tariffs imposed on imported beers, coupled with the high freight charges put on foreign beers by the Russian railways, four or five times higher for imports than for Russian ones. These together pushed up the price of A Le Coq’s products on the Russian market, hampering sales compared to cheaper local brands. The second problem was the enormous amount of fake A Le Coq Imperial Extra Double Stout being sold, produced by “several” different brewers. Acting as his own detective, Herbert Sillem uncovered “huge” warehouses in St Petersburg filled with counterfeit A Le Coq beer. However, when he reported this to the police, nothing happened.

The Russian finance ministry told Herbert explicitly that no change would be made to the high import charges, and the Sillems eventually decided that to protect their market they would have to move their headquarters to St Petersburg and start bottling in Russia, particularly after the import tax went up another 50 per cent in 1900 to 72 kopeks, or 1s 6d, per quart bottle, having risen from 15 kopeks a quart bottle in 1881. A warehouse was thus rented in Italyanskaya in St Petersburg, in 1906, a short distance from the Nevsky Prospect, where a bottling plant was installed, while Herbert Sillem lived next door in the Hotel d’Europe. A Le Coq dropped its long-time supplier, Barclay Perkins, and the beer supplied for bottling in Russia came instead from another big London stout and porter brewer, Reid & Co, which had merged with two of its rivals in 1898 to form Watney Combe & Reid: Reid’s had made a strong “Russian stout”, with an OG of 1100, for many years.

The Sillems also began looking for a brewery inside Russia where they could brew their own Imperial Extra Double Stout (instead of having to import it from England), and thus be taxed as a local product rather than a foreign one. Some had doubts that stout could be brewed in Russia successfully. But Oswald Pearce Serocold, a director at Reid’s, promised “counsel and help” in getting a brewery in Russia to brew good stout.

Before this happened, around 1903, A Le Coq began selling the Imperial Extra Double Stout in Britain, in pints and half-pints, advertising it in Country Life and Golf Illustrated as “Incomparably superior in nourishing and sustaining properties to any other … an unrivalled beverage for all accustomed to severe exercise and exposure to rough weather.” The Lancet magazine reviewed it, as it did other beers, finding the stout, “shipped hitherto exclusively to Russia”, had an abv of 11.61, “a rich malty flavour”, “a very considerable proportion of nutritives”, and was “free from excessive acidity”.

Eventually, in 1911, after a long search for a brewery in Russia, the A Le Coq directors picked the Tivoli lager brewery in Dorpat, Livonia, the town now known as Tartu, in modern-day Estonia. The operation had been started in 1827 by a man called Justus Reinhold Schramm, and a big new brewery had been built in 1894-96, with modern equipment, including a new drum maltings that was claimed to be only the second of its kind in the world. However, the owner since 1885, Julius Moritz Friedrich, had decided he wanted to sell up. Tests on water taken from boreholes at the brewery showed it was for “all practical purposes, identical with the water of the London Brewery which has hitherto supplied Messers A Le Coq and Co,” and it was acquired for £91,000.

In its prospectus to potential investors in the brewery in 1912, A Le Coq said the Tivoli operation would be able, once the brewery plant had been extended, to supply “a first-class Stout at a price within the reach of the general Russian public.” Oswald Serocold helped A Le Coq recruit an English brewer and a maltster to produce stout at the new plant in Dorpat. After problems were found with the plans for the new stout plant, which were designed in England, delaying the start of stout brewing for three months, the first sample batch arrived in April 1913. Unfortunately for British investors in A Le Coq, barely more than a year after the start of attempts to brew within the borders of the Russian empire, the First World War erupted, with Russia eventually banning alcohol as part of the war effort. Then came the Russian Revolution, which cut off the brewery, now in an independent Estonia, from its previous major market.

All the same, in 1921 the A Le Coq brewery reopened in what was now Tartu under the Sillems, making light and dark lager for the Estonian market, and in the 1920s it brewed approximately a third of all the beer brewed in Estonia. In 1926 it began production of imperial stout again. There was even an attempt, in 1929, to export imperial stout to Germany, with a couple of boxes of bottles being sent to Hamburg: the arrival of the Great Depression, however, put an end to that. By 1937 stout was just 0.4 per cent of the brewery’s total production, with 61 per cent being pilsen lager.

Then the Second World War came, and in 1940 the Soviet Red Army annexed Estonia, which was eventually incorporated into the USSR. The brewery, like every other industrial concern in the country, was nationalised, and its last director, Herbert Sillem’s son James Herbert, left Estonia: he and the other shareholders in A Le Coq were eventually compensated by the British government in 1969 for the appropriation of the brewery, from money made by selling the gold reserves of the former Republic of Estonia, which had been frozen in the Bank of England. During the Nazi occupation of Estonia the Tivoli brewery operated as the Bierbrauerei Dorpat, with around 80 per cent of production being consumed by the German army. After the Soviets swept back in the autumn of 1944, the brewery in Tartu eventually became one of the leading brewing concerns in the USSR, though it no longer made stout.

In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed, and Estonia declared its independence. Although the brewery was still owned by the state, the name A Le Coq was brought back for some of its beer brands in 1992. In 1994 it brewed stout for the first time in decades, though critics described the beer as “a little too lager-like”. A year later the Tartu brewery was privatised, and in 1997 it was bought by Olvi Oy, the last remaining large independent brewery in Finland, which renamed its entire Estonian operation A Le Coq Ltd in 2003.

Meanwhile, the beer writer Michael Jackson had mentioned A Le Coq’s Imperial Extra Double Stout in his World Guide to Beer, published in 1977. By then about the only Imperial Stout still being brewed was the original Barclay Perkins one, now made by the company that had taken Barclays over in 1955, Courage, whose brewery stood alongside Tower Bridge. But in the 1990s an increasing number of American craft brewers were making Imperial Stouts, and in 1998 an American importer, evidently inspired by Jackson’s account of a genuinely Russian Russian Stout, decided to try to get an authentic version of the beer recreated. The Tartu brewery was happy to put the A Le Coq name to the beer, but it was agreed that it should be brewed in England, with the Estonians insisting that it be made by a small, independent brewery with experience of making porter-style beers. The company chosen was Harvey & Son of Lewes in Sussex. What those who picked Harvey’s could not have known was that Harvey’s head brewer, Miles Jenner, came from a family that had actually brewed imperial stout itself at its own brewery in Southwark in the 19th century, long before they moved to the seaside.

Jenner and his team set about trying to recreate a recipe for Imperial Extra Double Stout, leaning on the memories of brewers who had produced Barclay Perkins Russian Stout in the 1950s. The well water at Harvey’s was similar to that used by Barclay’s, with levels of calcium carbonate, calcium sulphate and sodium chloride that matched quite closely, and those same levels of minerals also fitted old descriptions of the best sort of liquor for brewing stouts with. The ingredients were 54 per cent Maris Otter pale malt, 33 per cent a mixture of amber, brown and black malts and 13 per cent invert sugar, to give an original gravity of 1106 and a final alcohol level of 9%. The historical hop rate was 15 pounds to the quarter, but Jenner and his team decided to lower that figure to 11 pounds to account for modern hops containing more alpha acid than they did in the past. Even so, the resultant 6lb per barrel was six times the hops that went into Harvey’s best bitter.

The first brew was made in 1999, and after nine months of conditioning it was bottled in corked bottles and released for sale in February 2000. Drinkers raved over its complex mixture of flavours. But something was still happening in the beer, Unknown to Harvey’s, a wild yeast called Debaromyces hanseni was lurking in the bottles, and after nine months it began making itself known, consuming the remaining “heavy” sugars and producing carbon dioxide, which started pushing the corks out. Luckily, the Debaromyces added even more complexity of flavour to the finished beer, as well as raising its level of alcohol, and Harvey’s have been happy to leave it to do its work, adding another three months to the time the beer is left in tanks to let it finish. The final conditioning by wild yeast is, in fact, the last touch of authenticity: there is no doubt that the original 19th century Russian stouts would have been part-fermented by wild yeasts such as Brettanomyces as well.

Today A Le Coq Imperial Extra Double Stout is brewed once a year, 27 barrels at a time, and is matured in either stainless steel or glass-lined mild steel tanks. Harvey’s also now bottles a what Miles Jenner calls a “nouveau” version of the beer, within six weeks of fermentation, and sold under the name Prince of Denmark. “Originally we produced it as a bit of fun for the Copenhagen Beer Festival,” Jenner says. “It was chilled, filtered and pasteurised but was surprisingly good and we kept it going as, invariably, people got tired of waiting for the new IEDS vintages while we ruminated as to whether they were ready or not! That said, it’s not bad and, among its many awards, won the Supreme Championship at the International Beer Challenge in 2012, having beaten IEDS to the Stout and Porter trophy. Such are the unexpected joys of brewing!”