The following lines were composed on a brewer who, becoming too big a man for his trade, retired from business—and died:—
Ne’er quarrel with your craft, Nor with your shop dis’gree. He turned his nose up at his Tub And the bucket kicked he.
And so the old Brewers are dead and gone, with their virtues and their faults, their troubles and their successes, and the modern Brewers reign in their stead.
“The Almaynes with their smale Rhenish wine are contented; but we must have March beere, double beere, dagger ale, and bracket . . .” _Gascoygne’s Delicate Dyet for Daintie-Mouthed Droonkards._
Alum si fit stalum non est malum Beerum si fit clerum est sincerum. _Old Rhyme._
_VARIOUS KINDS OF ALES AND BEERS.—SOME FOREIGN BEERS. — RECEIPTS. — SONGS. — ANECDOTES._
An attempt to describe, or even to specify, all the ales and beers that have gained a local or more wide-spread fame, would be a lengthy task. Nearly every county in England, and nearly every town of any size, has been at one time or another noted for its malt liquors. The renown of some localities has been evanescent, having depended probably upon the special art of some “barmy” brewer or skilful ale-wife, whilst of others it may be said that years only increase their fame and spread their reputation.
From a perusal of those queer old collections of quackery, magic, herb-lore and star-lore, the Saxon Leechdoms, it may be gathered that our Saxon ancestors brewed a goodly assortment of malt liquors. They made beer, and strong beer; ale, and strong ale; clear ale, lithe (clear) beer; and _twybrowen_, or double-brewed ale, the mighty ancestor of the “doble-doble” beer of Elizabethan times. Besides all these, there was foreign ale for those whose tastes were too fastidious to be satisfied with their native productions. { 152}
On the authority of the _Alvismál_, it may be said that no distinction was originally drawn between ale and beer, except, perhaps, that the latter was considered to be a somewhat more honourable designation; “öl heitir meth mönnum en meth Asum bjoor” (_i.e._, ale it is called among men, and among the gods beer).
The _Exeter Book_, a collection of Anglo-Saxon poems, contains the expressions, “a good beer-drinker,” “angry with ale,” “drunken with beer,” in close juxtaposition and apparently without any distinction of meaning. A distinction must, however, have arisen in very early times, for in the collection of Saxon Leechdoms, mentioned above, a direction is to be found that a patient is on no account to drink beer, although he may partake in moderation of ale and wine; and the same work contains the remarkable and apparently impossible statement that while a pint of ale weighs six pennies more than a pint of water, a pint of beer weighs twenty-two pennies less than a pint of water.