HOME-BREWED BEER
“Blessing of your heart, you brew good ale.”
“It illuminateth the face, warmeth the blood, and maketh it course from the inwards to the parts extreme.”
“A quart of ale is a dish for a king.”
“Sir, I have now in my cellar ten tun of the best ale in Staffordshire; ’tis smooth as oil, sweet as milk, clear as amber, and strong as brandy; and will be just fourteen years old the fifth day of next March, old style.”
ONE of the finest pamphlets ever issued in this country is William Cobbett’s “Cottage Economy.” Even now it affords good stimulating reading, and might still serve as a wise protest against the pietistic and other cant of the times. The object of the little book was first to emphasize the sound doctrines that no nation ever was or ever will be permanently great if it consists to any large extent of wretched and miserable families; that a family to be happy must usually be well supplied with food and raiment; and that it is to blaspheme God to suppose that He created men to be miserable, to hunger, to thirst, and to perish with cold in the midst of that abundance which is the fruit of their own labour. The second object of the book was to convey to the families of the labouring classes in particular such information as to the preparation of food, the selection of clothes and furniture, and the general management of homes as his wisdom and sound judgment dictated. All through the book runs a steady stream of common sense far removed from the slushy cant so prevalent in works of the kind. “A couple of flitches of bacon are worth fifty thousand Methodist sermons and religious tracts. They are great softeners of the temper and promoters of domestic harmony.” “Oak tables, bedsteads, and stools, chairs of oak or of yew-tree, and never a bit of miserable deal board. Things of this sort ought to last several lifetimes. A labourer ought to inherit from his great-grandfather something besides his toil.” “Nowadays the labourers, and especially the female part of them, have fallen into the taste of niceness in food and finery in dress; a quarter of a bellyful and rags are the consequence. The food of their choice is high-priced, and the dress of their choice is showy and flimsy, so that to-day they are ladies, and to-morrow ragged as sheep with the scab.” A healthy attitude towards the plain and the wholesome and the genuine marks the whole book. Among other things ardently desired by Cobbett was the extension of the practice of the home brewing of honest beer, and he denounced the growing habit of tea-drinking with a vigour that time and results have shown was not misplaced. He looked upon tea-drinking as a destroyer of health, an enfeebler of the frame, an engenderer of effeminacy and laziness, a debaucher of youth, and a maker of misery for old age. And he could scarce find adequate vent for his impatience of what he rightly considered the everlasting dawdling about with the slops of the tea-tackle, or for his pity for the labourer who, instead of cheerfully and vigorously doing a morning’s work on the strength of a breakfast of bread, bacon, and beer, has to force his tea-sodden limbs along under the sweat of feebleness, and at night to return to the wretched tea-kettle once more. How different, says Cobbett, is the fate of that man who has made his wife brew beer instead of making tea!
It has been said and often quoted that there is good beer, and better beer, but no bad beer. The present writer’s experience is that there is beer so bad that few drinks can rival it for disagreeableness in taste and effects; stuff which should never be called by the same name as that transparent, brown or amber, vinous fluid, “bright as a sunbeam,” free from acidity, flatness and insipidity, which alone is worthy the name of beer.