This week my guest is Ron Pattinson, who is an expert on historical beer brewing. Ron joins us to discuss Vintage English beers and covers a wide variety of topics including English historical styles, classic ingredients and beer brewing techniques. Ron is the author of a new book “The Home Brewer’s Guide to Vintage Beer.
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[audio:http://traffic.libsyn.com/beersmith/BSHB-75-Vintage-Pattinson2.mp3]Topics in This Week’s Episode (58:26)
- Ron Pattinson joins me this week to talk about historical English beers. Ron is the author of a new book The Home Brewer’s Guide to Vintage Beer (Amazon affiliate link – supporting this site), as well as several other books on beer you can find here at his personal store. He also runs a blog called Shut Up About Barclay Perkins where he frequently posts about historic beer brewing. Ron lives in the Netherlands.
- We start with a discussion on about what is meant by the term Vintage beers.
- Ron shares how he got into brewing and researching historical beers.
- Ron talks about how some classic English styles developed around London, and popular styles like Porter. We also talk about how many of the classic styles almost went extinct before their recent revival.
- Next we move into a talk about ingredients starting with malts and how it is very difficult to obtain historically accurate brown and amber malts.
- Ron explains how hops were handled and processed traditionally.
- Yeast, while not fully understood, has been cultured and used for thousands of years and many historical strains live on today.
- We talk about how mash and brewing techniques have evolved over time, though many traditional techniques used were very efficient.
- Ron shares with us how many classic English beers were aged extensively before they were shipped out for consumption.
- We discuss Rons books, blog and his upcooming book tour dates here in the United States.
- Ron provided a link to his historical recipes mentioned in the show here.
Thanks to Ron Pattinson for appearing on the show and also to you for listening!
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Brad,
Thank you for having Ron Pattinson on your show. I don’t typically have the time to watch (or listen) to podcasts, but I made the time for this episode. Often brewers talk about the science of brewing or the artistry of brewing, Ron best talks about the frequently overlooked third category– the history of brewing. Those of the liberal arts persuasion find that he bridges the gaps among the three brewer categories and presents a better big picture of brewing complete with details and actual solid evidence. Now if we only could get him to research some American beers such as Albany Ale, Philadelphia Porter, Pennsylvania Swankey, Kentucky Common (or dark cream ale), California Common (aka Steam) Beer, and some more obscure brews…