The ale, apparently, had nothing to do with the colouration.
Even the sublime Milton condescended to make allusion to spiced ale in his L’Allegro:—
Till the livelong daylight fail Then to the spicy nut-brown ale.
Wither, in Abuses Stript and Whipt (1613), says:—
Will he will drinke, yet but a draught at most, That must be spiced with a nut-browne tost.
The last quotation is only one out of the many to be found in our literature having reference to the toast with which the spiced ale was so often crowned. Perhaps the most curious is one from Greene’s Friar {383} Bacon (sixteenth century). The Devil and Miles are conversing on the pleasures of Hell, whence they soon afterwards proceed. “Faith ’tis a place,” says Miles, “I have desired long to see; have you not good tippling houses there?—May not a man have a lusty fire there, a pot of good ale, a pair of cards, a swinging piece of chalk, and a brown toast that will clap a white waistcoat on a cup of good drink?”
Even in the last century toast and spices were not uncommonly put into ale. Warton, in his Panegyric on Oxford Ale, wrote:—
My sober evening let the tankard bless With toast embrown’d, and fragrant nutmeg fraught, While the rich draught, with oft-repeated whiffs, Tobacco mild improves.
The Anglo-Saxon custom of drinking healths and pledging has been, at any rate, since the eighteenth century, termed toasting. In the twenty-fourth number of The Tatler the word is connected with the toast put in ale cups. This is probably correct, though Wedgewood considers it a corruption of stoss an! knock (glasses), a German drinker’s cry. The explanation given in The Tatler of the connection between the two meanings of the word “toast” is, however, open to question. It runs thus: “It is said that while a celebrated beauty was indulging in her bath, one of the crowd of admirers who surrounded her took a glass of the water in which the fair one was dabbling and drank her health to the company, when a gay fellow offered to jump in, saying, ‘Though he liked not the liquor, he would have the toast.’”
In the reign of Charles II. Earl Rochester writes:—