Mild ale, once the most popular
of beer styles, is on its death bed.
Does Anybody care?

ild ale is a historic style that has played a pivotal role in the development of beer. In the family of ale, it bridges the gap between the brown beers made for centuries in Britain and Europe and the pale ales developed in Burton-on-Trent in the 19th century. Until the 1950s, it was the most popular beer in Britain, easily outselling pale ale and bitter. But unlike porter, stout and pale ale, it never spread beyond its homeland, never gained a loyal following on an international scale.

While American craft brewers scour old recipe books to recreate great beer styles from the past, few attempt to make mild. Brooklyn Brown is not a mild. Neither, despite its cult status in North America, is imported Newcastle Brown Ale, even though in Britain the bottled version of mild is called "brown ale."

Confusion reigns. So, as with all the best stories, let us begin at the beginning.

Batham's pub, the Vine, with Shakespearean
quotation across the lintel. "If brewing
be the food of love, brew on..."

Cheaper than Pale

For most of its long history, beer has been brown in color. Even the first lager beers developed by Gabriel Sedlmayr at the Spaten Brewery in Munich were a deep brown. The reason was simple: malt was cured in kilns fueled by wood. Before the industrial revolution, forests covered the landscape and wood was in plentiful supply. Later, coal began to be used as fuel, but its fumes could taint the grain. In time, coal was banned from many towns and cities because its noxious gases caused fogs and smogs—the "pea soupers" of Charles Dickens' London.

Pale malt was made on a limited scale in the countryside, using coal-fired kilns with dampened logs on top of the coal to stop the gases from infecting the grain. The early pale ales were produced by country brewers who sold it in small batches to the gentry and the urban rich. It was the development of coke—coal without the gases—that enabled maltsters to make paler malt in coke-fired kilns on a commercial scale from the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

But in Britain, brown malt remained the most popular type for the simple reason that it was far cheaper than pale—coal was taxed by the government while wood was not. The rapid spread of towns and cities in the 18th century created a vast new market for brewers, but beer had to be cheap as the market was composed almost entirely of the new and impoverished urban working class.

The hold that brown ale had over the brewing industry in the 18th century can be gauged by the influential book, The London and Country Brewer, first published in 1754, which ran to nine editions. It went into great detail on brewing techniques and the types of beer available at the timeThe most popular beers were stitch (strong brown ale) and common brown ale, followed by stout beer. Stout at the time referred to the strongest or stoutest beer in a brewery. It would have been brown, not black, as the technology did not exist to make dark, roasted or stewed malts. Pale ale was an also-ran.

Brown malt was an imperfect brewing tool. Wood fires were hard to control and often flared, scorching the malt and giving it a burnt and acrid flavor. Wood also destroyed many of the enzymes in malt that turn starch into fermentable sugars during the mashing process.

Improvements began to be made in the preparation of brown malt. It was more carefully malted to prevent the destruction of enzymes and so produce a better sugary extract in the mash tun. Nevertheless, it is estimated that even improved brown malts produced 10 percent less fermentable sugar than pale malt.

When Ralph Harwood brewed his revolutionary "entire butt" beer, the forerunner of porter, in London in 1722, he used a new "high dried" brown malt made in the important malting town of Ware in Hertfordshire. This is thought to have been prepared, like pale malt, over a fire of coal and damp wood but kilned longer to produce the color required by London brewers. British brewing historian Graham Wheeler, author of Home Brewing, the CAMRA Guide, suggests that high dried malt may have been scorched, or torrefied, and used for color, flavor and head retention.

The spectacular growth of porter—which became "the universal cordial of the populace" in the mid-18th century according to H. Jackson in his Essay on Bread in 1758—led to a breach between the new, powerful, commercial brewers in London and the country brewers and maltsters. The London brewers were not prepared to pay the high prices for pale and mature "stale" beer demanded by their country brethren. They set up their own maltings in the capital and built their own giant vats to store porter and give it the required lactic flavor.

Brown malt and brown beer remained a vital element in porter brewing, and it was from the success of porter that a new type of brown beer—mild ale—emerged.

Beer for the urban poor

A century before the invention of refrigeration and ice machines that were to prove vital to the producers of both pale ale and lager beer, 18th century brewers had to cope with the insatiable demand for beer in London and other urban areas. Brewing remained a largely seasonal activity. Summer-time brewing was difficult as a result of uncontrollable mashing and fermenting temperatures and the risk of infection from wild, airborne yeasts.

But when supplies ran out, the brewers were forced to make a stop-gap beer that was sold quickly in pubs before it lost condition and went sour. The beer had an immature flavor and, at first, brewers blended in some mature "stale" to improve the taste. To their surprise, drinkers expressed a liking for this new type of brown beer that they dubbed with the name of "mild."

Mild ale became a regular part of brewers' portfolios. It was cheaper than porter, which made it popular with the urban poor. Its quality improved in the 19th century when brewers were able to use pale malt, now made on a large commercial scale from coke-fired kilns. They darkened their beers with the new roasted "patent" chocolate and black malts. New hop varieties, such as the Fuggle and the Golding, gave more pleasant and less harsh flavors to the beer. In his Cyclopedia published in 1819, A. Rees recorded that "the greatest number of the London brewers have given up the brown malt altogether, using pale and amber malt…from these they procure a liquor of proper strength and they give it both color and flavor by the addition of coloring matter made from burnt sugar [caramel] or by burning the sugar of the concentrated wort."

Sales of mild ale were boosted by several scandals in the late 18th and early 19th centuries involving porter brewing. In a crude attempt to keep costs down and profits up, unscrupulous brewers added all manner of cheap ingredients to porter, including molasses, Spanish licorice, elderberry juice, coriander, capsicum and caraway seeds. Some brewers were not above poisoning their customers. Government inspectors found vitriol, opium, tobacco, nux vomica and extract of poppies in beers they tested.

Consumers moved away from porter and stout, the better-off drinking the new pale ales, while the poor took to mild ale in droves, appreciating its fullness of flavor, slight sweetness and low price. Brewers deliberately formulated their mild recipes to suit the sweet taste buds of their customers, adding oatmeal and chocolate malt.

No Weakling This

Such is the decline of mild ale today that the name is synonymous with "weak." It was not the case in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Mild then was smooth, slightly sweet and less heavily hopped than pale ale or porter. In Herbert's Art of Brewing, published in 1871, the typical original gravity of mild was 1070 degrees, close to 7 percent alcohol by volume. By 1900 it had fallen to 1055 to 1060 original gravity but was still high in alcohol.

In common with all British-brewed beers, mild suffered from a heavy fall in strength during World War I, when the government clamped down on the use of barley to preserve grain for "essential" foodstuffs. But the style remained popular, even though it had become low in alcohol. It 1959 it accounted for 42 percent of beer consumption in Britain . Twenty years later, it had fallen to just 10 percent, and today it hardly troubles the annual brewing graph.

Survival in the Black Country

Mild ale became victim to the inexorable rise of pale ale and the creation of giant national brewers who could not be bothered with small volume brands. From the "Swinging Sixties" onward, mild was perceived by younger drinkers as old-fashioned and "cloth cap," a derisory description in England of older, working-class people. The de-industrialization of Britain in the 1980s and the closure of steel works, coal mines and car factories were body blows for mild as its captive, blue-collar market disappeared.

The style survives, hangs on and is still drunk in some quantity in one region of England, the central belt around the major city of Wolverhampton, in the region known as the Black Country. It would be tempting to think the name comes from the popularity of the local dark ales, but the area was once an industrial powerhouse, with chimneys and furnaces belching black smoke into the skies. The major producer of mild today is Wolverhampton & Dudley Breweries, the biggest regional producer in Britain. It owns 850 pubs, produces half a million barrels of beer a year and 60 percent of that is accounted for by Banks's Mild.

For this mild, Maris Otter barley is contract-grown and floor malted in the company's own maltings. Hops are whole flower Fuggles and Goldings, with a small addition of Bramling Cross from British Columbia. The finished beer is 3.5 percent by volume and has 40 units of color and 25 bitterness units. The deep amber color of the beer comes from the use of caramel.

W&D is an aggressively growing company, but in its new pubs away from its Black Country base, it badges its leading beer as "Banks's Ale." It is an odd marketing concept to think the term "mild" will frighten people.

And elsewhere

The Vine pub in Brierley Hill carries an inscription from Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona across its exterior: "Blessings of Your Heart, You Brew Good Ale." Next door to the pub is Batham's Delph Brewery, still run by members of the Batham family. The brewery supplies the Vine and eight other pubs. It was founded in 1881 by Daniel Batham and his company had been in business for 70 years before it first brewed a pale ale. Today, bitter beer accounts for 90 percent of Batham's annual output of 6,000 barrels but sales of mild are increasing slightly.

Owner and head brewer Tim Batham "Burtonizes" his brewing "liquor" with gypsum and uses Maris Otter malt and East Kent Goldings and Northdown hops. Caramel is added in the fermenter for mild. At the end of primary fermentation, the beer is racked into casks, heavily primed with sugar to ensure a powerful secondary fermentation, and dry hopped in cask with Goldings. The mild, 3.6 percent volume, is unusually hoppy for the style and has a pleasing dark, vinous fruitiness on the palate.

Batham's was not alone in brewing just mild ale in the last century. The Highgate Brewery in Walsall was built in 1898 and for most of its life produced just dark mild. Walsall today is a leafy suburb of Birmingham, capital city of the Midlands region of England, but at the turn of the century it had coal mines, leather factories and thirsty workers. By 1939, Highgate was producing more than 50,000 barrels of dark mild a year and owned 50 pubs. It was a tempting buy for a larger brewery and in that year it was bought by the large Birmingham brewery of Mitchell's & Butler's. M&B planned to close Highgate but the brewery was saved, ironically, by the outbreak of World War II.

The wartime government rationed brewing materials and each brewery in the country received supplies of malt and hops based on its size and annual production. M&B kept Highgate open in order to draw its rations. In the post-war world, the popularity of its Dark Mild and its winter Old Ale (a stronger version of the mild) helped the brewery survive, even when M&B was bought by the giant Bass group in the 1960s. Finally, in 1995, Bass allowed one of its top salesmen, Steve Nuttall, and head brewer Neil Bain to buy the brewery.

A working museum

Dark Mild and Old Ale, along with some new beers, are crafted in an imposing red brick brewery based on the "tower system," that utilitarian Victorian method that ensures maximum productivity and simplicity. The brewing process flows logically from floor to floor, liquor tanks on the top story feeding well water to two mash tuns with wooden lids. The sweet wort from the tuns flows down a floor to two giant coppers where the whole flowers of Challenger and Goldings hops are added to the boil. The hopped wort in turn runs into fermenters, a mix of round and square wooden vessels. The complex house yeast is 90 years old and is made up of four strains that attack the brewing sugars at different stages of fermentation.

In this fascinating working museum of brewing, malt is screened to remove dust and stones in a device known as "the coffin," installed in 1899 and still in good working order. The long wooden box is driven by belts and rattles to and fro on springs made from willow. Highgate Dark Mild, 3.2 percent alcohol by volume, is brewed from pale, crystal, amber and black malts with a touch of caramel. The finished beer has a rich aroma of sweet malt, toffee and delicate hops, with smooth, chewy malt in the mouth, followed by a creamy, nutty finish underscored by a late burst of hops.

If seekers for the mild ale holy grail consider 3.2 percent alcohol is a trifle on the low side, they should visit the Beacon Hotel in Sedgley, a short drive from Batham's brewery in Brierley Hill. The hotel was built in 1850, complete with a tiny tower brewery in the yard at the back. The complex was bought in 1921 by Sarah Hughes, who ran it for 30 years until her death in 1951. Her family closed the brewery, but Sarah's grandson, John Hughes, decided to resume brewing when he found her recipe for Dark Ruby Mild in a cigar box in 1987.

All the old wooden vessels had rotted away and had to be replaced by stainless steel ones. To watch the brewing process, you have to clamber up narrow wooden stairs to the top of the tiny brew house where Maris Otter pale malt is blended with 10 percent crystal malt in the mash tun. After mashing and sparging, the wort is dropped a few feet into a tiny underback, and from there into an original, open-topped copper where it is boiled with Fuggles and Goldings hops. The hopped wort is pumped to five fermenters converted from brewery cellar tanks.

The finished beer, Sarah Hughes' Dark Ruby Mild, is sold on draft in the hotel, a shrine to Victoriana with tap room, smoke room and snug, all with open fires and tiled floors. Each room is supplied with beer through hatches in a central servery. The beer is also a true Victorian one—6 percent alcohol, with a ripe, fruity nose where black currant dominates, laced with earthy Fuggles hops. The palate is wonderfully complex, summoning up every dark fruit imaginable. The finish becomes stunningly dry with a powerful Fuggles character.

It is how dark mild ales tasted a century ago. We shall not see its like again.

And Britain is in danger of losing all its milds unless interest in the style can be rekindled. Porters and stouts have been revived and now flourish. Let us hope that success can rub off on their dark cousin.

Roger Protz, editor for 10 years of CAMRA's newspaper What's Brewing, steps down in December to take up the reins of the Campaign's annual Good Beer Guide. Protz was named Beer Writer of the Year in 1997 by the British Guild of Beer Writers and in the same year won the Glenfiddich Drink Writer of the Year award. In September he won a silver from the North American Guild of Beer Writers for his profile of Prince Luitpold of Kaltenberg in Bavaria: the profile appeared in All About Beer Magazine. Protz's latest book, The Taste of Beer, was published in Britain in October.

The feature photograph is Nuptial Ale from Gritty McDuff’s, ME. It is one of the very few milds brewed in the United States, all by brewpubs. Nuptial Ale is brewed every summer to celebrate the wedding anniversary of brewer Ed Stebbins and his wife Audrey, and is available only on tap. It is made with pale ale and crystal malts, with chocolate and roasted barley, and Whitbread Goldings, Yakima Cascade and Yakima Kent Goldings hops. It has an original gravity of 1041, and the final product is approximately 4 percent alcohol by volume.

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This story originally appeared in All About Beer Magazine in December 1998.