Home Brewed

History by the Glass by | May 2013 | Issue #76

When does a beer name evolve into a fully-fledged style? It’s difficult to say. Usually when it’s adopted by enough brewers to become common usage. But what of names that only ever break through regionally—can they be considered true styles?

Home Brewed is a good example of a name that never quite made it nationally, despite being in use for over 100 years. On the face of it, there’s something odd about a commercial brewery making a beer called “Home Brewed”—a name that implies the complete opposite method of production.

The name emerged at the end of the 19th century, when there were still large numbers of pubs brewing their own beer. These “homebrewed” beers often enjoyed a better reputation than those made by larger enterprises, as can be seen in advertisements of the period:

“CLINTON ARMS HOTEL,
SHERWOOD STREET, NOTTINGHAM
HOME-BREWED ALES,
Guaranteed to be Brewed on the Premises, from the Finest Malt and Kent Hops (No Chemicals Used).”
Nottingham Evening Post – Monday 18 March 1895.

The general distrust of commercial brewers is demonstrated by the emphasis the advertisement puts on no chemicals having been used. But what sort of beer was Home Brewed? An advertisement from 1891 for the St. Anne’s Well Brewery in Exeter gives us some clues as to its character:

“H.B. St. Anne’s ‘Home Brewed,’ a Mild Ale, but not Pale.”

That’s pretty clear: It was a type of Dark Mild. If you’re wondering why they bothered to mention that it wasn’t pale, it’s because in the 19th century, Mild wasn’t dark. It’s only at the very end of the century that Dark Mild appeared.

In the 20th century, Home Brewed became principally a bottled beer, along the lines of a strong Mild Ale. The version from Georges of Bristol was a good deal stronger than a Mild, clocking in at over 5-percent ABV in the 1920s and 1930s, when Mild was rarely much above 4-percent ABV. It looks very similar to a London Burton, except that Burton was a draft beer.

One of the oddities of 20th-century British brewing was that bottled beer was rarely called Mild; it was usually called Brown Ale or something vague, like Family Ale. Or Home Brewed.

“Home-brewed’ is a title often given to brown ales, and will be met especially in the West Country. An average gravity for brown ale is about 1033º, which is a little above the weakest milds.”
The Book of Beer by Andrew Campbell, 1956, page 85.

That’s the usual tale: that Home Brewed was mostly limited to the Southwest of England. But local knowledge told me this wasn’t the full story. I’d seen labels for one brewed by Warwick’s, a brewery in my hometown of Newark-on-Trent. I also remembered seeing bottles of Home Brewed in Home Ales (another Nottinghamshire brewery) pubs in the 1980s. A little more digging confirmed my suspicion: The name was used by many breweries in the East Midlands—Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and Derbyshire.

76FermentedCulture2I suspect that Home Ales were the last to brew a beer called Home Brewed. The version from the 1990s looks like a bottled version of their Mild, which was also 3.6-percent ABV. When the brewery closed in 1996, another type of beer slipped unnoticed into oblivion.