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03-10-2012, 08:07
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Why indeed. We've seen how many attempts to establish British Lager breweres foundered in the 1880's and 1890's. Yet the quantities of Lager imported into Britain continued to increase. Surely there must have been sufficient demand to allow for local production?

You can see here how imports of Lager were increasing:





British beer imports



year

barrels



1860



3,592



1870



5,058



1880



10,742



1890



35,081



1895



44,399



1900



50,875



Source:



Brewers' Almanack 1928, p. 115





(I've assumed all imports were of Lager, which is pretty much true. Britain had no need to import top-fermenting beers which it could produce better than anyone else.)


http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-KsajZEX42SQ/UFm58yY2TPI/AAAAAAAALOg/EEzOeH0acC8/s320/Allsopps_Export_Lager_Beer_1954.jpg (http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-KsajZEX42SQ/UFm58yY2TPI/AAAAAAAALOg/EEzOeH0acC8/s1600/Allsopps_Export_Lager_Beer_1954.jpg)
It seems things were a little more complicated than that.


"LAGER BEER
Under the heading, "Why Continental Lager? "Suum Quique " writes to the "Globe "-There is a delusion in this country that England cannot brew lager beer so well as the Fatherland. Not only can conclusive proof be adduced to the contrary, but there is a geoaphical reason why a German lager can never satisfy a true connoisseur on our own soil. This kind of beer m will not bear shipment without very serious loss of quality. Lager is a most delicate and easily perishable article. The sea voyage involved in its importation, its transfer from rail to ship, and the warm temperatures which it experiences en route would alone suffice to spoil it; but it is also a fact that lager, to be relished, insist he drunk "fresh-drawn," just after it has left the brewery in an almost freezing state. So largely do these circumstances operate that even supposing, for one moment, that the beer, say, of Munich, were twice as fine in quality, before shipment, as the English product, it would be beaten by the letter ere it reached our shores.

Good lager beer is brewed from four elements , only - water, malt, hops and yeast. The erroneous notion that English water does not lend itself to this manufacture is demolished by the fact that specimens of English water submitted to the leading analytical institutions of those great lager centres, Munich and Berlin, were reported to contain every requisite quality for lager brewing. English malt, as is attested by the experiments of our own great specialists, cannot be bettered for this particular brewing, though hitherto the malt employed for English lager has, quite needlessly, been obtained from Bohemia, that Austrian province which possesses the famous Pilsener Lager Breweries. The hops most suitable for lager brewing are imported from Bohemia and Bavaria, the former for light or Pilsener, the latter for dark or Bavarian beer. As to the yeast employed, this originates from Dortmund. a town in Germany celebrated for its excellent lager breweries.

There are two reasons, each of then obvious, why the brewing of lager for English consumption has hitherto been allowed to remaoin so extensively in continental hands. First, the English middle and upper classes have usually formed their taste for lager in the course of continental travel, and have therefore come home with the notion that lager is a necessarily a foreign product. Secondly, the Germans in London, whom it is the fashion to regard as lager connoisseurs, drink so copiously of lager imported from the Fatherland that our own countrymen are erroneously apt to ascribe to the discrimination of their foreign palates what is in fact due simply to their German patriotism; for indeed the German, both in England and America, completely sacrifices taste to patriotism, preferrng even in the United States to drink German lager, which arrves in an extremely impaired condition rather than the American lager, which is produced on the soil in the highest perfection at the finest breweries in the world. As to the rest, lager is not a beer peculiar to any particular climate. It is produced in en excellent condition under the fierce sun of Lima and in the frigid temperature of Tobelesk.

It goes without saying that continental brewers , who have their agents busily at work in England are seriously interested in maintaining the stupid English prejudice against home-brewed lager; but inasmauch as this is an industry at which, as before explained, we can absolutely beat the foreigner, it is only necessary that the public should be acquainted with the facts of this matter in order that they may, in favour of a British industry, withdraw their patronage from the too-enterprising German."
Liverpool Mercury - Friday 09 August 1895, page 7.
There's the reason: British drinkers preferred, for whatever reason, imported Lager.

The author is right when it comes to malt. British malt was the best in the world and imposting it from Bohemia was madness. It was the British, after all, who had introduced the Czechs to modern malting techniques.

Much German Lager still arrives in the USA well past its best. And there's still a demand for it, not just from Germans. It just goes to show how image can override taste.

So the prejudice against British-brewed Lager either came from posh bastards or German immigrants. I'd blame the former. I am married to a German immigrant myself.https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5445569787371915337-920360020808489538?l=barclayperkins.blogspot.com


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