It was popular taste rather than science alone that led to further changes in brewing techniques for by the 1880s demand for strong, durable IPA’s was tailing off. In particular the export trade was declining. The brewers were complacent – as has often been the case – and failed to take seriously the opening of lager breweries in India and Australia, which shifted demand towards beers that were lighter still and colder.
“ It is, however, essentially within the last ten years than these lighter ales, both of pale and mild character, have come especially to the front. The public in this period has come to insist more and more strongly upon extreme freshness of palate with a degree of brilliancy and sparkle that our fathers never dreamt of.” xii
This shift in tastes was assisted by the growing popularity of bottled beers in the 1880s. The added sparkle that bottle conditioning produced, plus the premium nature of bottled beer, and the growing size of the middle classes, who were its core market, gave non-Burton brewers the opportunity to replicate the style of mass distributed Burton beers with which they could not directly compete in the draught market. Like young arrivals in London in the 1960s who rapidly learnt to drop their regional accents for received pronunciation, the effect was to make much of the beer everywhere – Scotland excepted – increasingly resemble the Burton ideal of what ale should be like. This trend accelerated as ‘Burtonisation’ or the treatment of brewing liquor to give it a mineral salt composition similar to the natural Burton water became widespread. By 1900 the era of modern ‘bitter’ had dawned.
“ Roughly speaking, they [beer styles] may be divided into strong, medium and light. In the strong we may include stock or old ales, and the heavier stouts. The medium, comprises the lighter stouts, superior bitter beers, mild or fourpence ale, which latter is still the beverage of the working classes, and porter. The light beers of which increasing quantities are being brewed every year, are more or less the outcome of the demand of the middle classes for a palatable and easily consumable beverage. A good example of this type of beer is the so-called ‘family ale’, and the cheap kinds of bottled bitter beers and porters.” xiii
One effect of the switch to ‘bitter’ – mild not yet being the weaker less hoppy version of bitter it would become after the First World War – as these running ales came to be known, was a reduction in strength. The average strength - bearing in mind averages were just that, as much stronger and much weaker beers were being brewed – fell from 1057° original gravity in 1880, to 1057° in 1889 and 1048° by 1907. This was of course nothing to the falls in beer strength that took place during the first world war, and from which British beer strengths have never recovered.
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