Great beer facts for International Beer Day

It’s been delivered in fighter planes, flooded London streets, been brewed by revolutionaries and the secrets of its discovery attributed to the gods.

It can cost you as little as £1 a pint or more than £5 but its consumption is also declining in some of its former strongholds.

Although we’ve run through some fascinating beer facts before, to celebrate International Beer Day here are some more beer-related factoids and stories to mull over with your favourite brew.

Do you know the origin of the Red Lion pub name? Or who the patron saint of English brewing is? If not, read on.

It’s the oldest drink known to man

It’s an overused phrase but Benjamin Franklin’s statement that “beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy,” was actually coined many thousands of years ago during the rise of the first true civilisation – that of Sumer in ancient Mesopotamia.

Founded in the 5th century BC and really getting into its stride from 4100BC onwards, the Sumerian civilisation of the early Bronze Age can lay claim to being among mankind’s original brewers.

They attributed the knowledge of how to brew beer to their goddess, Nin-kasi. One clay tablet from Sumer has been translated as “A hymn to Ninkasi” and is a recipe for making beer involving bread and malted grains left to ferment in a pot.

In ancient Mesopotamia, beer was both a staple of the diet and used in religious offerings and events. No imagery of Nin-kasi is thought to have survived the centuries but many Sumerian carvings depict beer drinkers and drinking beer – often through a straw.

The Egyptians were also keen brewers and across the ancient Near East and archaeologists continue to find evidence of widespread brewing dating back over 5,000 years. A recent discovery of Egyptian beermaking vessels in the Negev near Tel-Aviv in northern Israel has shown archaeologists that the influence of the Pharaohs extended much further north than previously thought.

The cheapest city to buy beer…

As revealed in June of this year, Krakow and Kiev are the cheapest cities to buy beer in the world, with a bottle costing just £1.07 on average.

The 2015 Beer Price Index, collated by GoEuro.co.uk, combines data from 75 cities around the world, taking the five most commonly imported beers as well as the main local beer.

It found the Polish and Ukrainian cities to be the cheapest place to buy a 330ml bottle of beer costing just £1.07, with another Eastern European city, Bratislava, coming in at third.

Spanish favourite Malaga came in at 4th, where an average beer costs on average £1.11. Delhi, Ho Chi Minh City, Mexico City, Belgrade, Asunción in Paraguay and Bangkok round out the top 10 cheapest destinations, with the highest average overall price hitting £1.37.

The cheapest Asian cities, when its comes to beer, were Delhi (5th), Ho Chi Minh City (6th), Bangkok (10th), Bali (14th) and Manila (15th), with a 33oml bottle of beer costing less than £1.50 in each destination.

…and the most expensive

By contrast, lovers of a beer bargain should steer clear of Geneva and Hong Kong where 330ml of beer will set you back £4.08 and £3.97 on average.

A brew in Tel Aviv averaged £3.73, Oslo at £3.42 and New York at £3.36. London came in at 63rd, with a bottle of beer costing on average £2.92.

Aussies and Germans are drinking less beer

Impossible as it may seem, according to reports in 2013 and 2014, two of the world’s biggest and most famous beer drinking nations, Germany and Australia, are drinking less of the stuff.

In early 2014 it was reported that annual Aussie beer consumption was at a 69-year low at 4.04 litres per person.

At the time beer writer, Matt Kirkegaard told Australia’s Good Food that he believed beer drinkers were starting to take a ‘less is more’ approach.

He said: “They’d rather have one or two beers that they really enjoy than a six-pack that is really only giving them some refreshment and a hangover.”

The decline of the old Aussie “bloke culture” has also been singled out as a reason with even prime minister, Tony Abbott, copping flak from health campaigners for downing a schooner of beer with a university football team earlier this year.

Meanwhile, in Germany, a changing drinking culture was also blamed for declining beer sales in 2013 when volumes dropped 10.9% year-on-year. Overall sales have been shrinking for nearly four decades from a peak consumption of 151 litres per capita in 1976.

Marc-Oliver Huhnholz, a spokesman for German Brewers Federation, said: “The population is getting older, the drinking culture is changing, alcohol has been banned from the workplace and young people have a much bigger variety of drinks to choose from.”

Beer delivered in Spitfires

Wing commander Arne Berg of 332 (Norwegian) Squadron RAF watches as a 45-gallon fuel tank is filled with pale ale from Henty & Constable brewery in Tangmere, Kent before he takes off for France. Berg, a Spitfire ace, was killed in action over the Netherlands in February 1945.

Normally, alcohol and fighter planes are a bad mix but during World War II, the RAF – and USAAF – used their planes to ship beer to thirsty troops as unofficial “flying pubs”

As related in Martyn Cornell’s “Strange Tales of Ales”, after the “Overlord” landings in June 1944, Allied troops had to contend with fierce German resistance and the local cider which one war correspondent called, “pretty watery stuff”.

So Allied pilots clubbed together and began to fill their spare fuel tanks – or jettison tanks as they were properly known – with beer.

With each tank able to hold up to 150 gallons of beer, flying across the Channel at 13,000 feet also ensured it was kept cool as well.

The first flight of beer-carrying Spitfires included pilots from 412 Squadron Royal Canadian Airforce and went from Tangmere in southern England to Bény-sur-Mer on 13 June 1944.

It was reported that the first loads didn’t taste particularly good because of the lining of the tanks (they were clean) but with “chemical means” later loads were “delicious. Just like the corner pub at home,” as Time magazine reported.

USAAF pilots flying P-47 thunderbolts quickly caught on to the wheeze and began to copy it.

Soon British, Canadian, Norwegian and Polish squadrons were all involved with the Polish 131 Squadron claiming it invented the “beer bomb” whereby bomb racks under the Spitfire’s wings were converted to carry two whole kilderkins (81 litres each) of beer (see picture below).

By November 1944 more official channels ensured a regular supply of beer to the front and the “flying drays” were discontinued.

A Spitfire fitted with “beer bombs”

Origins of the Red Lion

John of Gaunt

Another tale also plucked from Cornell’s book of ale (thoroughly recommended) this time on the origin of one of the most common pub names in the UK, The Red Lion.

It is sometimes claimed to be the most popular pub name in the country although with 650 registered examples Cornell suggests it may still lag behind the “Crown” in numbers.

It is often said the name derives from James VI Scotland on his ascension to the English throne as James I in 1603 declaring that all buildings of public importance bear his device, the red lion of Scotland, as a sign of allegiance.

However, there is no evidence he ever issued such a decree nor would it have been particularly sensible for him to have pushed such a demand on his new subjects when his hold on the crown was not entirely cemented.

Another theory is that it was the heraldic device of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster (1340-1399).

A powerful lord, the fourth son of Edward III, scion of the House of Lancaster that would bear Henry IV, V and VI and, through a remarriage, Henry VII first of the Tudors, all subsequent British monarchs can trace their ancestry back to him.

However, he wasn’t much liked by the peasantry and when they sacked his palace, the Savoy (hence the name of the modern hotel on the Strand), during the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 they preferred to throw his treasure into the Thames rather than take it themselves.

Although he could claim the Red Lion of Léon as a heraldic device through his second marriage to Constance of Castile y Léon, as a son of the King of England he, like his brothers, would have preferred the royal arms with a “label”.

So not him either.

Rather, there is no one person responsible for the name or use of the lion on pub signs.

The lion, especially red ones, was a very popular heraldic symbol across the country. More than 150 families from Northumberland to Cornwall and including at least one family of brewers – the Stewards in Norfolk – used and still use the device.

As those that bore coats of arms were also landowners it is no surprise that many pubs might bear the same or part of the same arms as the local lord.

The Russell family, the Dukes of Bedford, has a coat of arms including a “lion gules rampant” and it is no surprise that many pubs around their ancestral holdings in Buckinghamshire are either called “The Bedford Arms” or “The Red Lion”.

Furthermore, when lords went travelling around the country or even abroad they took with them heraldic “escutcheons” which they would put outside their lodgings to show who was staying there – and occasionally, perhaps if they stayed regularly, the name stuck.

The patron saint of English brewing

There are many beer saints (several chronicled in our collection here), Arnold of Soissons (whose Saint’s day is next week) and Lawrence of Rome being two but the (unofficial) patron saint of English brewing is Thomas Becket.

Famous for his friendship then feud with Henry II, then murder/martyrdom in Canterbury Cathedral by Reginald FitzUrse, Hugh de Morville, William de Tracy, and Richard le Breton in 1170, the Archbishop was also, it is claimed, an amateur brewer in his youth.

Legend has it that as a young parish priest in Bramfield, Hertfordshire in 1142, he brewed beer using water from the local pond – unhygienic perhaps but common at the time and still in practice as late as 1800 when the landlord of the Rose and Crown in the same village used water from what had become known as “Becket’s Pond” to brew ale for the pub.

Bramfield’s vicars are also said to have brewed beer well into the 19th century.

Sadly though, legends are called legends for a reason and Becket, it appears, was never in Bramfield at the time but was instead studying in Paris.

He did his best to promote English beer in later life though. In 1158, visiting France in a bid to win the hand of a French princess for Henry’s son, he took with him an extraordinary train filled with cloths and mastiffs and soldiers and two carts, “laden solely with iron-bound barrels of ale.”

The beer apparently impressed the French who, “wondered at such an invention, a drink most wholesome, clear of all dregs, rivalling wine in colour and surpassing it in flavour.”

After his death and subsequent canonisation by the pope in 1173 his cult quickly become popular, especially in his home town of London.

The Brewers’ Company claimed him as their founding saint – one of many to do so – and used as their coat of arms Becket’s armorial super-imposed with wheat sheafs.

Becket’s arms were dropped in 1534 on the orders of Henry VIII who – as he dissolved the monasteries – declared Becket a traitor for having defied a king.

However, the links with Thomas were never entirely broken. The Brewers’ Company substituted Becket’s coat of arms with a dark-skinned woman with fair hair; a nod to another Thomas legend that his mother was a Saracen who came home with his father from the crusades. It is still there to this day (see right).