The flavor of Scotland

Heather Ale has long history

by Michael Jackson

"Chew on this sprig of heather," suggested Bruce Williams. "Now try this one. See! The bell heather is sweeter, but the ling heather has more perfume. Do you get the spiciness, the astringency?"

Such matters are of great importance to Williams. He wants us to enjoy the flavors of this particular flower of Scotland.

Some people have appreciated the taste of heather since it was used in fermented drinks made with flower nectar and herbs on the island of Rhum in Neolithic times. Heather ale was probably the "magic potion" that rendered the Picts so frightening to the Romans; it inspired verses from Robert Louis Stevenson; and it has never totally vanished. The 1956 classic, The Scots Cellar, by Marian McNeill, offers a lengthy discussion of the drink, and the 1978 book, Recipes from the Orkney Islands, by Eileen Wolfe, explains how it can be made.

The tradition of brewing as a culinary activity never died out in Scotland as it did in England. This is especially true in places remote from a commercial brewery.

Bruce Williams likes to say that he was "born in a bucket of homebrew" on the grounds on which his father had a shop supplying malted barley, hops (though not heather), and the equipment required to turn them into beer. Today, Bruce Williams himself has homebrew shops in Aberdeen and Glasgow. He developed his own kit, called Glenbrew, for the production of a typically malty Scottish ale and sold it in the United States.

Inspired to make a brew that was even more Scottish, he then hit upon the heather tradition.

One problem was to find a brewery sufficiently small to make the modest batches he proposed. Heather ale was likely to be an acquired taste, and he did not envisage it flooding the country. The smallest brewery he could find was the one established by an enthusiast in 1989, in spare buildings in the railway station at Taynuilt, near Oban.

He then set out to pick the required springs of heather, in the nearby Glen Lonan, with his children, Chris, age 8, and Amy, 5. What he wanted was just the flowery tip of the plant, about 2 inches long. After whole day's picking, the measuring bucket totted up 10 gallons. This was just enough to make one four-barrel brew at Taynuilt.

Williams decided to advertise in the local paper, offering $3 a gallon for heather tips and inviting the pickers to meet him at Oban pier. At the appointed hour, he found himself surrounded by a dozen triumphantly tired pickers, grasping bags, baskets and all manner of containers filled with heather. In his first year, he spent $5,000 on heather, most of it picked by students.

To meet the growing demand for his Pictish specialty, Williams has moved production to a larger brewery, Maclay's of Alloa. With distinctly hard water from the Ochil Hills and, in the past, local coal to fire the brewkettles, Alloa once produced enough beer to ship down the Forth to Edinburgh or London. It was a famous beer town, with at least five breweries at the turn of the century, and it still has a couple.

One is owned by the former Allied Breweries, now called Carlsberg-Tetley, but Maclay's is still independent. Behind at 1896 facade in pink sandstone, it has a grist mill from the turn of the century, an 1870s brewkettle, and copper-lined fermenting vessels.

New management has encouraged the production of revived specialties like a chocolatey oat malt stout and a seasonal fruit beer using raspberries from Perthshire. Now, it is producing 50-barrel batches of Williams's creation, sufficient to put the brew into bottles for a wider sale in specialty beer shops on both sides of the border.

The beer begins conventionally enough, with barley malted in Berwick, on the border of Scotland and England. Then the springs of heather flowers are added as though they were hops, to impart aroma and dryness. They also provide, albeit to a very small degree, further fermentable sugars in the form of nectar. Their perfume is not carried through as assertively as Williams would like, and he has been working on this problem. The hot brew is also filtered through a bed of heather tips. There are five parts of barley malt to one of heather.

The family recipe, which Williams reckons is 10 generations old, also calls for the addition of ginger. For a time, he additionally used the shoots of bog myrtle, another traditional ingredient, but found this excessively medicinal. He dropped the myrtle, and now does employ some hops as a concession to modern times (the first definite evidence of the use of hops in beer is in the twelfth century). In another such compromise, Williams has eschewed the use of sea water.

The beer has a delightfully refractive amber color, a flowery-fruity bouquet, an almost oily firmness of body, with spice and apple notes in its slightly winey, very dry finish. Its alcohol content is 5 percent, and it is labeled Leann Fraoch, which is Gaelic for Heather Ale.

This column originally appeared in All About Beer Magazine in November 1995.