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If there's one thing Ireland's known for, apart from shamrocks and leprechauns, it's beer. Specifically dark, malty stouts and ales like Guinness. Yet as anyone who's ever read their Guinness bottle knows, Arthur Guinness only started brewing beer at the St James's Gate brewery in Dublin in 1759. Surely, the Irish can't have been without beer before that, can they?
The answer, obviously, is that of course they weren't. Beer recipes were recorded in ancient Mesopotamia before even bread recipes were, and it's been brewed in Ireland for thousands of years. While those ancient brews bore little resemblance to that pint of stout you enjoyed on St Patrick's Day, they were the drink of choice for the inhabitants of the British Isles for millennia before the beers we drink today were created.
The world's first beers were likely created by accident, when grain storage pots were flooded and the mixture fermented naturally, at least 7,000 years ago in the middle east. By the time the technique reached Ireland, around 5,000 years ago, the science of fermentation was well-known. Early brewers in Ireland (and elsewhere in Europe) were usually women, who produced beer in their homes mainly for the use of their families. These early beers were lower in alcohol than the modern varieties, and would have tasted quite different, since they were not flavored with hops, which isn't native to the British Isles. Ale was made in pits in the ground, and these beers were quite malty, made with barley and water, and flavored with various herbs, particularly gentian. The resulting ale was the drink of choice in homes and at royal banquets durring the bronze age, and by Roman times, the strong Irish ales were known on the continent.
Production of mead, a beverage made by fermenting a mixture of honey and water, began during this period. It was used for ceremonial purposes and was drunk in wealthy households throughout the middle ages, but has since declined in popularity.
Production of cider, made by fermenting apple juice, probably began around the same time, about 2,000 years ago, though this may have begun earlier. Apples have been cultivated in Ireland since the early years of Irish agriculture, 5,000 years ago, and it was only a matter of time before someone tried to make them into alcohol. While the first written record of cider in Ireland appears in the 12th century, there are many legends involving St Patrick and apples which date back further than that, and it is known that the ancient Britons were making cider in England in Roman times. Even though Ireland was never a part of the Roman empire, the Irish had many things the Romans wanted, like furs and wolfhounds, so there was a great deal of trade back and forth (St Patrick is said to have escaped slavery in Ireland by stowing away on a ship transporting hounds to Roman Britain). It stands to reason that if cider wasn't already being made in Ireland, the technique was imported along with French wine and Mediterranean pottery while the Romans occupied Britain.
Whenever cider making started, we know that its popularity took off in Ireland when the fall of Rome made the import of wine from France impractical. The Irish climate makes growing wine grapes impossible, so cider became the closest substitute for wine, and has continued to be popular for the last fifteen hundred years or so. In fact, with the recent gluten-free craze, cider is gaining popularity again.
After the arrival of Christianity in the 5th century, monastic communities started brewing, mostly for their own use, just like the home brewers. Some medieval monasteries did sell their ales, though, and brewing was frequently associated with religious centers in Ireland just as it was elsewhere in Europe. One of the miracles attributed to St Bridget, the first Abbott of Kildare in the 6th century, involves turning bathwater into beer, and it was in one of Ireland's many monasteries that someone got the brilliant idea to distill beer, thus inventing whiskey.
The brews that the monks nicknamed "liquid bread" were very similar to the Iron Age ales of their ancestors, still made from malted barley and flavored with a variety of herbs. Unlike the Iron Age variety, though these beers were made in large metal tubs made specifically for brewing. We also know that these ales were a dark red in color, like modern Irish red ales. While the arrival of the Normans in the 1170s seems to have slightly increased the preference for cider, it likely made little difference to the production of ale in Ireland. Real change didn't come until the 16th century.
Enter HenryVIII, the king who simply couldn't leave anything alone. In 1533, he effectively told the Pope to go to hell, and made himself head of the Church in his own kingdom, which consisted of England, Wales, and Ireland, just so he could marry his mistress, Anne Boleyn (who he had beheaded three years later). Ireland was in open rebellion within a year of the break with Rome. The rebellion, led by the Earl of Kildare, failed rather quickly, but others followed, and Henry and his children spent most of the century trying to "reconquer" Ireland. While this had many very bad effects, like the downfall of the Gaelic aristocracy, the plantation of Ulster, transfer of land to English owners, the closure of abbeys, and general religious persecution, the English settlers who started arriving in Ireland around this time did bring one good thing with them: hops.
As mentioned above, hops are not native to Ireland. The plant comes from central Europe, where it has been used to flavor beer for centuries. Yet traditional regional brewing practices prevented hopped beer becoming common outside of this region until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Why cultivate a new crop just for flavoring beer when something that already grew locally could do just as well? But as the preservative properties of hops became known in the late middle ages, the plant began to be cultivated across northern Europe. The English began importing hops and hopped beer from Europe in the late 15th century, and the plant was first grown in England by Dutch settlers in the 1520s. The English took it to Ireland a few decades later, though most of the hops used in Irish brewing until the 19th century were imported.
The decline and closure of Ireland's abbeys- and their breweries- as a result of religious and political turmoil in the 16th and 17th centuries meant that by 1700, most of the brewing in Ireland was once again done on a much smaller scale, mainly in the home. In 1700, though, the western world was on the brink of change. The religious turmoil of the 16th and 17th centuries was dying down (though it would flare up occasionally in 18th century Britain and Ireland) as people all over Europe shifted their attention away from the spiritual issues that had been the primary concern of previous generations and towards more secular issues. The scientific revolution had begun in the Renaissance, but hadn't really gained much momentum until the late 17th century, and was well under way by 1700. Politically, this is the age of absolute monarchy, designed to glorify the state rather than God. Writers and philosophers once again turned from theology to the study of the classics. This is even reflected in the art and architecture of the era; how many Greek temples can you spot in London, Paris, or Washington today? That's the legacy of the 18th century.
More important for our purposes, though, the shift towards secular concerns that followed the turmoil of the Reformation allowed for a greater focus on commerce. The age of exploration had opened up a whole new world, and thus a lot of new markets, to European traders, and the English in particular were inclined to take advantage of it. Trade brought with it a great deal of wealth, and anyone with a product to sell could make a fortune. The result was larger-scale production of trade goods, the beginnings of the industrial revolution.
What does this have to do with Irish beer, you ask? Well, Ireland has an excellent climate for barley production, and a remarkable talent for producing delicious alcoholic beverages. Besides which, the introduction of hops prevented spoiling for a longer time, so it was really just a matter of time before someone got the brilliant idea to make large quantities of beer and sell it all over the country and even abroad.
Ireland's first commercial brewery was founded on the site of an old abbey in Kilkenny in 1710, brewing a traditional red ale. This early entrepreneur's name was John Smithwick, and you can still buy his beer (or a modern version of it) in most supermarkets today. Others followed, and by 1815, Ireland was exporting more beer than it was importing.
Guinness drinkers will also know that there was another important change in the world of Irish beer in the 18th century. As brewing became more commercial, English brewers started trying to sell their products in the Irish market, resulting in a shift in tastes away from red ales and towards darker, but still very malty porters, brewed mostly in England. Naturally, Irish brewers soon started to make their own porters, with great success; by 1799, Guinness had stopped making ale altogether and exclusively brewed porter.
Then someone had another brilliant idea, this time aimed at cutting costs. At the time, malted barley (the kind traditionally used in brewing) was more highly taxed than unmalted barley. So a few Irish brewers decided to start using unmalted barley to make their porters, resulting in the bitter, dark beer Ireland is most famous for today.
The trend toward larger breweries continued through the 19th and 20th centuries, and Ireland still produces far more beer today than its population could ever consume. While Guinness is no longer the largest brewer in the world as it was in 1900, it is still the largest producer of stout, and owns most of the other large breweries in Ireland, including Smithwick's. Tastes have shifted again in the 20th century, and imported lagers make up about 60% of Ireland's beer consumption today.
Another change is in the air, though, and with it, a shift back toward stouts and ales. The decline of Guinness and other industrial breweries has created a space in the Irish market for craft brewers, who started marketing high quality beers made in small breweries and brewpubs all over the country in the 1980s. As in any other industry, many of these startups fail, but many others have been highly successful, and Ireland's craft brewers are growing in number and popularity every year. It's a shift that bodes well for the future of traditional ales and stouts, which I, as a stout drinker, can only see as a good thing. At the very least, it means more choice for consumers, after all.
