Were we able to transport ourselves back to the Middle Ages and enquire in England, Flanders, Bavaria or Bohemia about the key features of the popular diet, ale or beer would unquestioningly and unhesitatingly be listed alongside meat, bread, milk and vegetables. The questioner would be regarded as being mightily peculiar if he or she were to question ale's legitimate place on the table. It was neither a comfort food nor an extravagance. It was an integral part of the food intake in all walks of society. In eighth-century England a monk might consume eight pints of ale a day.
Beer in Britain has long been considered to be a key part of the diet, as much so as wine in France. Henry Brougham MP (Brougham 1830) said that 'To the poor the beer is next to a necessity of life.'
Over 50 years ago the nutritive value of beer was emphasised. An admittedly weakish beer [3% alcohol by volume (ABV) in the austere early post-war years] was claimed to provide 200 calories and a fth of a working man's requirement for calcium, phosphorus, nicotinic acid and ribo avin (Bunker 1947). The satisfaction of having at least part of one's dietary intake in a pleasurable form was not sneered at then.
Perhaps the rst person to conduct a serious study of the impact of abstinence, moderation and excessive drinking on health was statistician Raymond Pearl. On the basis of interviews with over 2000 workers in Baltimore, he concluded almost 80 years ago that on average moderate drinkers lived longer than abstainers and much longer than those who were heavy drinkers (Pearl 1926).
Yet now, at the dawn of the twenty- rst century, beer-drinking is regarded in many societies as a vice. It is surely astonishing that in the United States it is possible to buy cigarettes at the age of 18, but it is not legal to purchase alcohol until the age of 21. It would be a struggle to identify any merit associated with smoking, with the possible exception of its role as an anxiety relaxant. By contrast there is accumulating evidence that alcohol, including beer, in moderation can have a bene cial impact on health and wellbeing.
In passing, let us consider the legal age at which, in the US, it is possible to partake of other activities that surely might be considered a genuine risk to health and wellbe-ing, not only for the partaker but also for those around them. A child may legally drive a car, with relatively few restrictions, at the age of 16. More alarmingly, 35 states in the US have no licensing or registration requirements for guns (www.soros.org/crime/ higlights.htm). Seven states lack a legal minimum age for buying a ri e or shotgun from an unlicensed dealer, while six states have no legal minimum age for a child to possess a handgun. In ve states there is a minimum age - 16 in New York, Georgia, Vermont and Alaska, and just 14 in Montana. But the minimum legal age for drinking alcohol in all 50 states is 21!
Opinions about the relative merits and de-merits of smoking, driving, guns and alcohol will of course differ between individuals. Certainly if we consider the respective virtues of smoking, weapon use and alcohol (in restraint), then it seems to this author that there may be a warped set of priorities in one country at least. Nonetheless beer is the second most popular drink in the United States, with annual average per capita consumption at 357 8-ounce servings, after sodas and other soft drinks (861) (Beverage Digest 1998). Worldwide production of beer in 1999 ran at 0.13 billion litres.
It seems that we have lost sight of the real bene ts of a foodstuff such as beer (and it is a foodstuff, as we will explore in Chapter 5) for the body and for overall wellbe-ing. P.G. Wodehouse, in The Inimitable Jeeves, wrote: 'It was my Uncle George who discovered that alcohol was a food well in advance of modern medical thought.'
In Pearson's Weekly (a rival to Tit-Bits and founded in 1890 by Sir Arthur Pearson, who went on to create the Daily Express), Bass Ale received the following testimonial:
An old friend of mine, Colonel Worsley CB, when in India, had a very dangerous attack of dysentery and was given up by the doctors. When dying as it was thought, he begged the man in a faint whisper to give him some Bass and as it was thought his case was hopeless he was humoured. He then drank pint after pint and began to get better as soon as his yearning was satis ed much to the astonishment of the doctors and brother of cers.
Despite the fact that once upon a time I was research manager with Bass, I can't believe that there was anything magical about Bass Ale to make it superior in the context quoted as compared to any other beer. I remain open-minded about the veracity of the report, and about the likelihood of a causal link between Worsley's wellbeing and the consumption of beer.
The claims for Bass have been various. Doctors in its town of origin, Burton-on-Trent, are said to have recommended it as a laxative. Writing in The Times, Dr Mapother recommended Bass as a cure for gout. It is claimed that Bass cured Edward VII, when Prince of Wales, of typhoid. Perhaps this stimulated the music-hall song that ran
I've tasted hock and claret too, Madeira and Moselle
But not one of those boshy wines revives this languid swell
Of all complaints from A to Z the fact is very clear
There's no disease but what's been cured by Bass's Bitter Beer.
Remarkable testimony! But Bass isn't the only brand to have been championed in this way. 1928 saw Guinness launch the slogan Guinness is Good for You, and followed it with such as My Goodness, My Guinness and Guinness for Strength (Fig. 1.1). The sweet stout, Mackeson, was marketed in the 1950s on a slogan of:
It looks good, it tastes good, And, by golly, it does you good.
Nursing mothers were expected to enjoy a daily bottle of stout.
Those were the days when some governments were not hesitant to see the virtues that beer had as a social cement and catalyst of contentment. As Queen Victoria had said rather earlier: 'Give my people plenty of beer, good beer and cheap beer, and you will have no revolution among them.'
The British government in the middle of the last century was totally happy to see the trade association The Brewers Society champion their members' products with generic messages including For Bodily Health - Beer is Best and To Set A Man up for Winter - Beer is Best and For an A1 People - Beer is Best
Predictably, the temperance lobby countered with Beer is Best Left Alone.
This type of campaigning by the Brewers Society stressed the social element of beer as much as anything. There was scienti c understanding of the composition of beer and brewers realised that it could make a contribution to dietary intake of various key components, as you would expect from 'just another' foodstuff. The Brewer's Journal in 1939 reported (on the basis of a study by the Royal Society) that a barrel of beer was the equivalent in cumulative nutritive value of 10 pounds of beef ribs, 8 pounds of shoulder mutton, 4 pounds of cheese, 20 pounds of potatoes, 1 pound of rump steak, 3 pounds of rabbit, 3 pounds of plaice, 8 pounds of bread, 3 pounds of butter, 6 pounds of chicken and 19 eggs (Glover 2003). At that time the body of evidence was not available that now indicates that the moderate intake of beer has a clear impact in preventing certain diseases.
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