Thoughts on Magna Carta Ale
Two members of the project team went to St Albans Beer and Cider Festival in September, largely to attend a tutored tasting led by Roger Protz. We didn’t expect to be thinking about pageants very much, but one of the beers that we tasted prompted some thoughts about re-enactment, history and identity.
Windsor & Eton brewery has recently launched Magna Carta Ale, inspired by the impending 800th anniversary of the signing of the charter in 1215. This is a strong beer – 7.2% ABV – brewed in the style of a medieval beer. Of course, we don’t know exactly what beer tasted like 800 years ago, but some of the ingredients were similar to those known to have been used in that period. You can read more about the beer here, at Roger Protz’s website:
It’s fair to say that this beer divided opinion more than the others that we tasted. Magna Carta Ale is dark and bitter, with a strong note of liquorice on both nose and palate. Some were heard to say that they were glad to be drinking beer in the twenty-first century and not the thirteenth.
There is, of course, a flourishing market in food history, with a range of cookery books available teaching you how to cook medieval, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century, and even wartime food. At a conference on ‘St Albans and the First World War’, I was recently given the opportunity to taste trench cake, and a couple of years ago authentic workhouse gruel (‘skilly’) was served at the opening of an exhibition on workhouses at the Florence Nightingale Museum. Taste – along with sight and sound – can be an integral part of the visitor experience.
I don’t know of any ‘period’ food being served at a historical pageant – perhaps the pageant-masters of the twentieth century missed a trick? Ot maybe there are some examples out there?
To return to beer – this drink is, of course, often associated with ‘Englishness’, especially when (pace John Major) it is warm and served in the vicinity of a cricket match on a village green. For George Orwell, the bitterness of English beer – along with, among other things, heavy coins, green grass and bad teeth – was a feature that distinguished the country’s atmosphere from that of the European continent. In their advertising, many brewers link their beer with Englishness. Indeed, English Heritage has, or had, an official beer: Charles Wells’s Bombardier.
Questions of beer and nationhood arise in other countries too. In his BBC radio series Germany: Memories of a Nation, Neil MacGregor has recently (10 October 2014) discussed the role of beer in the making of national identity. The nineteenth-century rediscovery of the Bavarian Reinheitsgebot is a good example of an ‘invented tradition’ that was used by nationalists to buttress the link between beer-drinking and the national character – a celebration of ‘the integrity of the national drink’.
Among the real ale community, opinion is likely to remain divided about the merits of Magna Carta Ale. For the record, I rather enjoyed it, though I wouldn’t want to drink it in large quantities, given the high alcohol content. It most certainly isn’t a session beer. It is, though, an interesting take on historical re-enactment: we might call it an historical pageant in a beer-glass.
The Windsor & Eton Brewery website can be found here.
Mark Freeman