Talk:Beer in Scotland/Archive 1

Archive 1

Comment

Much of this article appears to have been written by someone engaging in a strange form historical revisionism. The logic behind these claims is fundamentally flawed, as well as much of the information on which the author purports to draw unreferenced.

While it has long been assumed for various reasons that Scottish brewers didn’t make much use of hops, the available information from brewing and trade records show that brewers in Edinburgh used as much hops as English brewers,[citation needed] and that the strong, hoppy ale that Hodgeson was exporting to India and which became known as IPA, was copied and brewed in Edinburgh in 1821,[citation needed] a year before Allsopp is believed to have first brewed it in Burton. Robert Disher’s brewery in the Canongate area of Edinburgh had such a success with his hoppy Edinburgh Pale Ale that the other Edinburgh brewers followed, exporting strong, hoppy Scottish beer throughout the British Empire, and into Russia and America. The beer historians Charles McMaster and Martyn Cornell have both shown that the sales figures of Edinburgh’s breweries rivalled that of Dublin and Burton upon Trent.

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However, Dr John Harrison in Old British Beers gives a recipe for the English brewery Brakspear's 1865 50/- Pale Ale in which 1.8 oz of hops are used per imperial gallon, along with the Scottish brewery W. Younger's 1896 Ale No 3 (Pale) which also uses 1.8 oz of hops per imperial gallon. These both indicate that there was no difference in use of hops, even for the everyday domestic beers, and that the shilling designation was used in other parts of the British Isles.

This actually indicates nothing of the kind. It is anecdotal evidence at its crudest. The fact that one Scottish beer used the same proportion of hops as one English noes not indicate that "there was no difference in use of hops" between English and Scottish brewers in general. This is a classic case of generalising from the particular; it does nothing to disprove the assertion that in general English beers are more heavily hopped than Scottish.

Similarly, the claim that Edinburgh IPA was as hoppy as that produced in Burton-on-Trent does nothing to establish that this was the case in general, especially as IPA was a very atypical beer not intended for domestic consumption. What's more, that claim, and the claim that "brewing and trade records show that brewers in Edinburgh used as much hops as English brewers" are unsourced.

I'm going to extensively rewrite this section over the next few days.193.195.75.20 (talk) 16:27, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

It's true that this needs more reliable sources. I'll dig up the sources that I used. SilkTork *^YES! 14:13, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

3000 or 5000?

"Beer has been produced in Scotland for approximately 5,000 years" or "Brewing in Scotland goes back 3,000 years". I don't know enough about the subject to know which is correct. Wolfhound668 (talk) 12:20, 1 October 2009 (UTC)