If you don’t get bitter, you’ll just get Boddies

In the US market, several beers that would be called Bitter in the UK are referred to as “Pub Ales” or some similar formulation, as in the Boddingtons Pub Ale shown in the photo. This has prompted another round of discussion on social media about how brewers, in the UK too, are increasingly reluctant to actually use the term “Bitter” to describe their products.

This was sparked off by Gary Gillman in this blogpost, to which Boak and Bailey responded here. It is a subject that I addressed back in 2019 in a post entitled The Beer That Dare Not Speak its Name. The main reason for this in North America is that they have no history of beers actually being called “bitter”, and the flavour connotations of the term are thought to be offputting.

However, in this country, as Boak and Bailey point out, it is more a case of Bitter being seen as something old-fashioned that your dad drank, which is the same problem that Mild experienced a generation before. But, as I argued, it is denying your product’s heritage, and there is no consensus as to what should replace it. “Nobody ever, when asked the question ‘what type of beer do you enjoy drinking?’ replies ‘Oh, I like amber ale’.”

Gary is very knowledgeable about the world of beer, and especially its history, but he is writing from a North American perspective, and I think he rather misses the mark in complaining than many bitters “show excessive caution in their hopping level.” That may be a matter of personal preference, but it does not mean that such beers are not true to style.

The origins of the term are obscure, but it seems to have developed in the mid-19th century as a may of distinguishing the new pale ales from the older mild beers. Yes, it was more heavily hopped than milds, but that didn’t mean it was particularly bitter.

We don’t know now whether bitters from before the First World War were more bitter than they are today (although they certainly were markedly stronger), but that is beyond the memory of any drinkers alive today. And, since the Second World War, it has always been the case that many bitters were fairly sweet, and few could be said to be particularly bitter. The term had become a generic description of a particular class of beer, not a descriptor of flavour.

In the late 1970s I went to university in Birmingham , where the main (indeed almost the only) bitters available were Ansells and M&B Brew XI, both of which are described as “sweet” in the 1977 Good Beer Guide. Brew XI then was probably the best-selling bitter in the country. The brewery section contains a number of similar references, alongside such terms as “light” and “subtle” which indicate a similar lack of heavy hopping.

There were some notably bitter beers around at the time, such as Boddington’s, Holt’s, Yates & Jackson and Youg’s Ordinary, but they were very much in the minority. There is probably some truth in the belief that the bitterness of some beers has been reduced in the intervening forty-odd years to make them palatable to a wider market, but within the memory of people drinking today there never was a golden age when Bitter really was bitter.

And today, if asked to give an example of an archetypal British Bitter, most people would suggest a “balanced” brew such as Harvey’s Sussex Best or Taylor’s Boltmaker rather than one noted for being assertively hoppy. And the current best-seller, Sharp’s Doom Bar, certainly isn’t.