14th March 2025

I confess I love the opportunity to wax on about the history of beer, and I was delighted to be interviewed by the Cardiff home-brewer and podcaster Andy Taylor on the subject of porter, which ended up as 40 minutes of yakking by me.
If you want to know the difference between porter and stout, why porter is called porter, how porter and stout became a world-wide beer style, when porter died out in Britain and Ireland and who bought it back, listen here....

When you’ve been working on a project for more than seven years, finally being given a finishing date is almost anti-climactic. I started writing what became Porter and Stout: A Complete History in January 2018. I’ve now been told it is due to be published...

It’s a claim you will find repeated in dozens – possibly hundreds – of places: that the so-called “Hymn to Ninkasi”, a poem in the Sumerian language to the goddess of beer, at least 3,900 years old, known from three fragmentary clay tablets found in...

Warming myself at midnight by an open-air firepit over which half a cow was being slowly and expertly roasted, while 50 or so slightly drunk South American brewers sang a word-perfect rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody loudly and enthusiastically was not...