The Making of a Classic: Bass Pale Ale
Un bar aux Folies Bergère, Édouard Manet, 1882
The story of Bass Pale Ale charts the course of English brewing over the past two centuries. To tell Bass’ story, which is only a year shorter than the United States’, is to describe the rise of the most important brewing nation at the most important time in brewing history. So much that is in one biography is in the other: the use of technology that allowed breweries to grow an order of magnitude in size; the modernization of market economics, branding, and eventual consolidation (or as they say in the UK, “rationalization”); changes wrought by the World Wars; a slow, sad diminution of Britain’s influence. During the period when Britain’s empire wrapped around the planet, it was also the biggest and most dominant brewing country, and for much of that time Bass was its most recognizable emblem. As the painting above demonstrates, Bass transcended its industry to become part of the cultural furniture, like Nike or Apple, sold in the finest establishments in Paris, and a worthy subject of a founder of impressionism.
Bass was also a leading brand during the long, slow shift in beer preferences. The follow-up act to London’s porters, Burton upon Trent’s breweries pioneered pale ales, so popular they began to displace some of London’s porters in the bellies of ships that traveled around that empire. The technique they used of malting barley to a pale hue would in due course travel south to Bohemia and Vienna, where it would further reshape the world of beer. Pale ales wouldn’t become the country’s default style for decades, until after the world wars, when they found home on draft engines (where they were usually called “bitter”). But once they had begun to elbow mild and dark ales aside, they became the country’s overwhelming favorite, as they have remained for more than fifty years. Through all of this, Bass was an enduring and visible ambassador. Of course, the twin narratives of Bass and British beer both come to a sad end, and that is an important, if mystifying, chapter in the story.
Bass had a lot of company along their journey, one that has left us with many classics of the style: Timothy Taylor Landlord, Fuller’s London Pride, Harvey’s Sussex Bitter, Adnams Southwold Bitter—the list goes on. But it’s impossible to overlook the giant in the room, however diminished the brand has now become. Bitters remain the most enduring example of the British art, and it’s impossible to describe the style without contending with the legacy of Bass.
Burton’s Ascent
At the turn of the 19th century, porters were ascendant in Great Britain, and their fame was busy taking them the around the world. The heart of porter-brewing was London, but their northern rival, known for their eponymous Burton ales, was gathering strength. Burton’s local specialty was lighter-colored than porter, if no less sturdy and alcoholic. Martyn Cornell does a more complete job of describing Burton ale than any source I’ve found in his Amber Gold & Black. It was a brownish color, he explains, with what one contemporary observer described as “glutinous” texture. “If a little were spilled on a table,” this source continues, “the glass would stick to it.” Curiously, these old Burton ales were mainly an export product, beloved abroad but considered a bit too strong and sweet at home. Cornell:
“This very strong strong beer was brewed by men such as Michael Bass and Benjamin Wilson (and Wilson’s nephew and successor, Samuel Allsopp) in Burton and shipped to the cities of St. Petersburg, Riga, Danzig, and Hamburg from the 1740s or so up to the early 1820s. It was nut-brown or darker … and fairly sweet, but its high strength seems to have been its special selling point.”
It sounds like a great market, but exports were declining after the turn of the 19th century. Then, in 1822, the Russian government banned the import of Burton ales. In this same period, London brewer George Hodgson was having success with export of a different kind of beer to a different market. He was selling a pale ale to the English colonists in India. It wasn’t a huge market, but the Burton brewers, hungry to keep their coppers humming, jumped at it. They retooled their recipes to make a lighter, bitter, pale beer instead.
Burton only had five breweries at the time, but this moment allowed the city to find its purpose. Burton upon Trent, as its name announces, was a river city, and when brewing started to dominate local commerce, that waterway was useful for shipping. But the water that mattered to the beer came deep underground. It was full of gypsum, or calcium sulfate, which wasn’t especially good for brewing dark beers like London’s porters. It was, however, fantastic for brewing pale ones.
Allsopp probably beat Bass to market with their pale ale, but the latter was sending their own to India by 1823, and within a decade had managed to take over 40% of the market. (Poor Hodgson, the London brewer, couldn’t compete with Burton’s water—he was down to about a tenth of the market.) The whole “India” part of this story is in key ways a red herring. The Burton pales that emerged during this era may have used a little marketing razzle-dazzle to sell them near home (“pale ales as prepared for India” made them seem quite glamorous at the time), but that was a little bit of historical misdirection. These were British, and the main market was domestic. And Burton was just getting started.
Bass Pale Ale
If you’ve ever had one of the classic English bitters, you might have paused to consider that name. Of the many adjectives we might assign to the a Timothy Taylor Landlord or Fuller’s London Pride, “bitter” doesn’t seem particularly germane. Two centuries ago, however, matters were quite different. The pale ales brewed from the 1820s onward were characterized by a striking bitterness. They were more expensive than regular beers, and as a consequence were considered a luxury product, which, combined with the sharp flavor, limited their reach. College students and young professionals favored them, and they seem to have been a marker of a certain upscale class of drinker. They were almost certainly an acquired taste as well.
The Bass Burton union system, which Bass retired in 1983. Source: National Brewery Centre (now defunct)
“Michael Bass, the Burton brewer, revealed in 1857 that even ‘common beer’ used up to 2 or 2 1/2 pounds of hops per barrel, while ‘Pale Ale and every superior quality of beer’ used a remarkable 18 lbs of hops per quarter of malt, around 3 3/4 to 4 1/2 lbs of hops to the barrel. These were beers that needed vatting for twelve months or more to be drinkable.” (Cornell, Amber Gold & Black)
Bass Pale Ale was a sophisticated beer and it had a lot going on. We think of British ales as weak, but that all came later, after the wars. In the 19th century, Bass was a proper, American-style beer. Ron Pattinson has catalogued Bass over time, and it was roughly 7%, both in the bottle and on draft. (British beers bounced around a lot, and Bass was no exception—brewers at the time exercised far less fidelity to a brand than we do today.) A year in a cask, too? You may wonder about Brettanomyces from the long vat-aging, and Ron’s records are suggestive. The examples he lists became drier over time, so that by the 1870s they were below 3° P and by the 1880s they were below 2° P. It seems almost certain those beers were getting secondary fermentation from wild strains. No surprise, Ron also found a 20th-century account of lab cultures that did indeed reveal the presence of wild yeast (Brett wasn’t discovered until the turn of the century, so our 19th-century speculations will have to remain unconfirmed.)
But wait, there’s more! The pale ales of Burton are inextricably linked with the deep wells running through gypsum-impregnated sandstone. That high-sulfate water created a stiffness to the hopping and clarified the sparkling beers. It also carried with it an unmistakable eggy quality known as the “Burton snatch.” I encountered this on my visit to Burton in 2011 and I can assure you it is real and not subtle. If a dry, very bitter, and possibly wild pale ale isn’t enough character for you, add a blast of sulfur to the affair and you have a very interesting beer indeed. Strangely enough, that didn’t deter drinkers—and in fact, it drew them to the pale ales of Burton’s breweries, which grew in fame. This combination of intense flavors came to be seen as critical to the style, so even breweries elsewhere “Burtonized” their water to achieve this character.
Bass’s Rise
Pale ale isn’t the only beer Bass made, but it was the beer. The company sold bottles of Pale emblazoned with a red triangle, which became the iconic symbol artists found so alluring. (It wasn’t just Manet—Picasso had a series of Bass paintings as well.) The triangle was easy enough to imitate, and other breweries slapped it on their bottles, typically with inferior beers within. No wonder, then, that when the British government created a law for companies to trademark their products, Bass was first in line. That red triangle became the very first trademark issued by the British government.
Bass continued to grow, and by the 1880s was making 850,000 barrels, more than half of which was pale ale. If we couldn’t see a Bass as a metaphor for its home country early on, by this time it was unavoidable. Not only did Bass have an international reach, just like the British empire, it also represented the height of British industrial engineering. And indeed, it was engineered. The city’s breweries had adopted steam power and the Burton union system of brewing, an industrial innovation that let them pump out lakes of ale. By the late 19th century, Burton had become one of those cities built on industry, like Detroit or Pittsburgh. In this case, the product was made of liquid, not steel.
In the 1880s, British brewing historian Alfred Bernard toured the breweries of the UK and wrote in detail about them in the four-volume set The Noted Breweries of Great Britain and Ireland. The section on Bass appears in volume three, and runs for 75 pages. The Bass enterprise—it was so much more vast than just a brewery—covered 145 acres and its description was literally unbelievable. Bass maintained an astounding 37 maltings (Bernard visited three), three breweries, a mansion-house with sprawling, manicured gardens, luxurious Victorian offices, a cooperage, two acres of cellars, a masonry plant, a steam house, 17 wells “20 to 25 feet in diameter”, and its own train system to ferry people to and from these holdings. Let’s listen to a description of the union system in the New Brewery to get a flavor of the scale:
“Leaving the square rooms behind us, we descended the principal staircase to visit the union room, said to be as large as any in Great Britain. It is cruciform in shape, 301 feet long, and 114 feet wide. This magnificent chamber will seat 2,000, and contains nearly a mile of avenues between the unions. There are here said to be seen no less than 2,548 unions, averaging four barrels, each, ranged in nine avenues, four one way and five the other.”
This is just one part of one facility. (With the two other breweries, Bass had 4,296 casks in their union systems. They consumed—again, unbelievable—60 tons of hops a week). They even had “15 houses and 150 cottages” for workers. The description goes on and on.
This was British brewing at its most titanic—imperial and unrivaled in scope. In the early 1900s, Bass advertised its beer as “The Drink of the Empire” and surely it was.
And Its Fall
Brewing history is a series of repeating cycles going back at least a thousand years. Success creates a new market and technology and innovation allow breweries to grow. They brew at a new scale, export, and grow bigger and bigger. Eventually, however, they grow too much and the whole edifice begins to collapse. Anyone might have predicted what happened in the middle teens in the US by studying Bass and the Burton breweries. Those 145 acres and all the infrastructure were hugely expensive. Bass’s sales took a dip around the turn of the 20th century, but the company was far too top heavy to lose barrelage. Inevitably Bass did what every big brewery does when it comes to this place—it started buying up competitors. The first came in 1923 and Bass would ultimately acquire around ten by the 1960s.
The World Wars changed brewing and the beer itself. With the introduction of microbiology, British brewing largely scrubbed Brettanomyces from their breweries. Gravities fell during the war, so the 7% pale ales of the Victorian era lost almost half their strength by the end of WWII. Bass was no longer a vatted, strong beer; it had become a post-war bitter. There’s nothing particularly wrong with that, but it illustrates the challenges a brewery set up to make one kind of beer confronts when the market shifts and people demand another.
In the 1980s, the British government made a move to break up Britain’s Big Six brewing empires, which included Bass. At the time Bass had an astonishing 7,200 pubs, but this was the beginning of the end. The company decided to sell off the brewing side of the business to Interbrew in 2000, keeping its pubs—much like Fuller’s did twenty-odd years later—but due to monopoly concerns that company had to sell off the old Burton brewery to Molson Coors. Years later, Interbrew became part of the AB InBev borg. It’s strange to see the old, very much smaller erstwhile Bass facility flying the Coors flag while the brand fell to ABI, but that’s what happened.
It’s a bit hard not to follow the metaphor along. British beer has taken such a hit since the World Wars—as has Great Britain, whose holdings no longer look very imperial. Once again, Bass’s trajectory remains coupled to Britain’s in a strangely eerie way.
Bass Today
I keep thinking Bass will die, and it keeps not dying. It is a tiny brand now—ABI doesn’t even mention it on their website—and yet a surprisingly beloved one. Writing for Pellicle, Phil Mellows details its strange afterlife as a cult classic. Old beers never really die so long as those who love them remain, but it seems like Bass’s modern existence is more than just the vapor of nostalgia. Mellows mentioned a Facebook page devoted to Bass, and it remains quite lively with fans discussing where to find pints of their beloved bitter.
Bass is currently brewed at Marston’s, the last of the great old Burton breweries, and in March of this year Ron Pattinson visited the brewery for a tour. What’s Bass taste like today? Listen to his description:
“We start with some Bass that’s been open for a few days. It’s dry and finishes satisfyingly bitter. And no trace of sulphur. Quite like the pint in the Smithfield. Moving on to a freshly-tapped Bass, the contrast is striking. It’s full of sulphur on the nose, not as dry and with less perceived bitterness….”
[Later, at a pub.] “The landlady is dead impressed by Mike’s Bass jacket. It is rather loverly. With an embroidered red triangle and the word ‘Bass’. Guess what we’re drinking? You’ll never get it. Bass! It’s very good. The sulphur is almost all gone and there’s the dry bitterness that I liked in the older sample at the brewery. I can see why Bass still has a following. It’s excellent when looked after properly.”
Matthew Curtis, Pellicle’s Editor-in-Chief, was kind enough to send me his reflections on Bass as well.
“My own Bass story is quite recent. I used to dislike the stuff, but while I was researching my book on Manchester I found two pubs, The Swan and Railway in Wigan and the Fox and Pine in Oldham, that both have Bass on cask permanently, and boy, it was sensational! It is really on form at the moment, and my local Heaton Hops will get a cask or two a month that it will fly through on a weekend. It’s pretty easy to track down anyway, and I can only describe it tasting as how an English bitter tastes in the mind’s eye. I'm really into it at the moment.”
People have been eulogizing cask ale for over fifty years in Britain, but it never really dies. It’s too good and there are too many people who still love it. Once the breweries making these beers were lucrative enough to build mansions and impossibly large industrial campuses. Today an old brewery is lucky to make 50,000 barrels. Pub estates may seem expansive, but they number far fewer than 7,000. Yet Bass remains a sneakily complex simple little beer, and it still has the capacity to delight. Bass is dead, and yet thousands of people drink it throughout the country. The metaphor still holds—Bass is as British a beer as has ever been brewed.