Winter is not Christmas
In 1971 Young’s gave an old beer a new name. Four years later Fritz Maytag visited the brewery while looking for something else.
In October 1975 Fritz Maytag visited Young’s Ram Brewery in Wandsworth. Young’s had Winter Warmer, a strong, dark beer with a name made for the cold. Maytag went home to San Francisco and brewed for Christmas.
As far as he could discover, his was “the only real Christmas brew in the world at that time”. That was his reckoning, and much depended on what he counted. But the two beers make an interesting pair: one named for the weather, the other for an occasion. You can want a Winter Warmer in January without feeling you have missed it.
Winter Warmer had not been called that for long. It was a Burton ale, the old strong dark English style that went out of fashion as drinkers moved to bitter and lager. In 1971 Young’s renamed theirs Winter Warmer. The beer did not change. The name did, and a name like that tells a drinker when to want it.
Harvest, then cold
By late October the harvest was in and there was new grain to brew with. The cold helped as well: before refrigeration, warm weather made fermentation and storage far harder to control. In Bavaria, Duke Albrecht V’s ordinance of 1553 banned brewing between St George’s Day in spring and Michaelmas.
The familiar explanation goes further back, to the monasteries. The story everybody tells is that Advent meant fasting, but liquidum non frangit ieiunium, liquid does not break the fast, so the brothers drank their dinner; and that the cellar ran three grades of beer, the strongest at the top of the house and the thinnest for the pilgrims at the gate. The Latin tag is real, but it is later than the monks who are always said to have relied on it. The grades are read off the Plan of St Gall, a ninth-century architectural drawing, and as the beer historian Martyn Cornell spent years pointing out, what the drawing sets aside is separate brewhouses for the monks, for distinguished guests and for poorer travellers, which is not the same as three strengths. A plan is not a building either.
Hospitality in a Benedictine house was a rule, chapter 53 requiring that every guest be received as Christ.
England’s own winter drink was the wassail bowl, which held strong spiced ale with sugar, nutmeg and ginger, and roasted crab apples dropped in hot until they burst. It was called lamb’s wool, a name usually explained by the pale froth the apples threw up.
Wassailing the orchards is a separate custom with the same word on it. On Twelfth Night drinkers poured ale over the apple roots and fired shotguns into the branches to frighten off whatever might spoil the crop.
Christmas beer had a commercial life as well: the beer writer Will Hawkes found the Phillips Brewery advertising its Christmas specialities in the Oxford Times in December 1888, and reckons Victorian Christmas beers often ran past 10%.
Leadenhall, 23 October
Winter still begins unofficially, on whichever late-October morning Young’s sends the horses out. This year The Lamb Tavern, Young’s pub in Leadenhall Market, listed its Winter Warmer Breakfast for Friday 23 October, the first barrels arriving by horse and cart and the beer poured with a full English. Leadenhall Market calls it the Beaujolais nouveau of the beer world, and in 2023 billed the barrels in at ten and the first pint poured on the Victorian cobbles shortly afterwards.
The White Cross in Richmond kept the same morning, with sittings from eight, a full English and the new beer, and Greensleeves Morris Men dancing in the road at ten.
Young’s is not the only old English brewer still keeping a winter beer, only the one that gives it a morning. Fuller’s pours Old Winter Ale at 5.3%, and Greene King’s Fireside is a 4.5% ruby winter ale with, in their words, masses of grapefruit and lemon citrus characters.
The Christmas beers are a different shelf. Shepherd Neame has its Christmas Ale on draught in December at 5.0%, and in bottle at 7.0%.
Sussex has the ritual. Harvey’s of Lewes had been brewing Elizabethan Ale since 1953 when head brewer Anthony Jenner adapted it, in 1972, into something darker and dry-hopped for the season, and called the result liquid Christmas Pudding. When the brew is mashed, hops are laid around the mash tun and the beer is blessed. Miles Jenner’s favourite blessing was written by the Rev. Judith Egar.
The beer writer Phil Mellows, asked last December to pick ten Christmas beers anyone could find on a supermarket shelf, set a quick test: “Will it stir into a Christmas pudding?” Strength is not his objection. A cask ale a little over 4% “isn’t a problem as long as they’ve got the flavour”. The danger is a bit of tinsel stuck on and the word Christmas applied, when a festive tag on a beer no different from what you would drink all year is “just a marketing thing”. The obvious answer, for him, is Harvey’s Christmas Ale.
Jeff Alworth, writing on Beervana on 23 October this year, went looking for the cold wet afternoon that makes a drinker want a porter and found the thermometer in the mid-70s Fahrenheit instead. He ordered the porter anyway.
The harvest and the calendar still arrive when they always did. The weather is the one that has stopped keeping to them.
The First Friday of Christmas
On the date, and who gets to set it: a Norwegian king, a Danish brewery with a start time, and an American who thought the tradition had gone.
PINtPOINT shows where drinkers have recently logged a beer, and how long ago, from Untappd.