To celebrate our good friends at The Beer Shop’s 5th birthday, we’ve invited owners Lee and Lauren into the brewery all the way from Nunhead for a celebratory collaboration brew. Knowing their fondness for traditionally conditioned ale, we wanted to brew a style that belonged in cask. We also wanted to make a beer as authentically as possible, while catering it towards contemporary palates and drinking habits. We settled on the mild ale.
“malty characteristics and mahogany hue”
This is a quintessentially English beer; a style that has been enjoyed in neighbourhood establishments just like The Beer Shop for generations, standing the test of time by continually reinventing itself. Our version honours this trend by being sessionable as opposed to its heartier forebears. What is today ‘mild’ in terms of hop profile and alcoholic content, was mild during the 18th century in the sense of being a ‘young’ beer. This meant fresh and unaged, and typically with an ABV hovering around the 6% mark, sometimes higher. Wartime concessions during the early 20th century restricted the original gravity of beers to 1.030, which meant milds were produced at around 3%. They still, however, retained the malty characteristics and mahogany hue that we know and love today.
“tradition is in our grain bill and brewing process”
Where we’ve upheld tradition is in our grain bill and brewing process. Our mild is an ode to dark beers of old, when malts were dried over wood, charcoal or straw fires. This imparted an expected smokiness lost with the introduction of steam kilning during the mid-18th century. Like our Smoked Brown ale, our mild includes Rauchmalt and Special B to replicate these characteristics, which we’ve then balanced with Extra Pale Maris Otter and Amber malt. We’ve also foregone the present-day luxury of fly sparging in favour of the parti-gyle system. We mashed and boiled our grist three separate times before coalescing it all into one mild. It’s a well rounded and distinguished brew, fit for a birthday bash.. We’ll be raising our glasses to The Beer Shop and their future, but filling them with a bit of the past.
Mildly related
You’ll see the characters of Peaky Blinders regularly huddled around a bucket of mild ale at the Garrison Inn. What’s interesting is supposedly during the 19th century, the mild’s reputation was muddied by dodgy landlords blending the slop trays of beers into casks, or potentially buckets, and repurposing this as ‘mild ale’. Whether or not the show strives to be that authentic is anyone’s guess.