The Ghost Revealed: How Ena Sharples Killed Stout
The face of milk stout.
I was recently thumbing through Martyn Cornell’s Amber Gold & Black and came across a passage that I somehow missed the first seventeen times I read it. The account was near the end of the chapter on stout, where we’d reached that melancholy moment when a style dies. Over the centuries, stout had lived through a number of weird diversions—nursing stout, oyster stout, super low-ABV sweet stouts—but it couldn’t survive this:
“The regular sight of the television battleaxe Ena Sharples and her two equally elderly female pals ordering milk stout in the Rovers Return in the ITV soap opera Coronation Street in the early 1960s must have been undoing everything the brewers’ marketing departments were then trying to achieve.”
Who was Ena Sharples? A yank like me must turn to Wikipedia: “Ena was the widowed caretaker of the Glad Tidings Mission Hall and spent much of her time criticising the activities and loose morals of the street's other residents…. Almost always wearing a double-breasted overcoat and hairnet, she spent much of her free time in the serials' early years with her two cronies, Martha Longhurst (Lynne Carol) and Minnie Caldwell (Margot Bryant), in the snug bar of local pub The Rovers Return Inn, drinking milk stout.” Oh, my.
One of the things that most fascinates me about beer—the thing, really—is how styles come to be. Playing historian, we can trace the development of style backward, and then when we play the tape forward, it seems to make sense. Everything falls apart, however, when you look around the world and see all the different kinds of beers people have made across the millennia. The example I always turn to is Düsseldorf and Cologne. Why do the people of one only drink altbier and the other only kölsch? “Culture,” as a wholly inadequate shorthand, functions as the ghost in beer’s machine. We look at those two Rhenish neighbors and their strange rivalry and think 🤷♂️. “Culture” may be the most important factor guiding regional traditions, but predicting it or even explaining it remains elusive.
That’s why I love this case. Here the ghost emerges. Ena Sharples is not a pleasant woman. You can get a sense of her personality in this video clip—when she is indeed drinking milk stout. That photo at the top of the post basically captures her essence—a sour, sharp-tongued woman few of us would enjoy spending more than a few minutes with (though on screen she’s hilarious). In my brief acquaintance, she seems like the classic character people love to hate.
And so, when the writers decided that she would enjoy milk stout, they basically doomed the product. Mrs. Sharples is the living embodiment of the antiquated, and not in a good, nostalgic way. Milk stout, by association, was old and terminally uncool. That was probably extra true in 1960, when television was a young medium and seeing things in your living room was an especially potent form of messaging.
I’m so glad Martyn mentioned this cultural touchstone. Poring through sales statistics and old advertisements would yield no clue about stout’s demise. It would remain another mystery. Yet five minutes with Ena Sharples and it all makes sense.