Mild Ale: History, Brewing, Techniques, Recipes

Classic Beer Style Series #15

by David Sutula

Mild ale is a simple beer to make, but an extremely difficult style to pin down. Although light in body and alcohol, it is complex and full of flavor.

Genres: Beer, Brewing, Nonfiction

200 pages, Paperback

First published May 25, 1999

Reviews

[Stuart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Comprehensive and easy to read, but could do with a second edition.

Mild Ale doesn't have the shiny glamour associated with other, brawnier styles like IPA. It's a quiet, easy companion rather than a boisterous bruiser. Its also a difficult beer to pin down, as Sutula shows - it embraces the whole beer colour spectrum, ABV range, and bitterness range.

Sutula breaks down this cloudy past and demonstrates just why it's so hard to pin down what "mild ale" actually *is*. He clearly delineates historical and contemporary styles and then kindly provides some recipes for throwback mild as well as contemporary interpretations of the style.

While covering a lot of history he doesn't get bogged down in too much detail, but the history doesn't feel like it has been too heavily handwaved, a difficult balance to strike.

The history of the style is where the need for a second edition shows itself. Amongst other issues he repeats as fact the "three threads" theory for the development of porter, which has been thoroughly debunked*... although the debunking happened more than a decade after the book was published!

This one quibble aside, if you're interested in historical British ales you should give this book a read. Just tread gently in the history chapter.


* see Ron Pattinson (Shut Up About Barclay Perkins) and Martyn Cornell (Zythophile) blogs for more on the recently discovered history of British ales

[Geoff Young · Rating 3 out of 5]

This useful tome needs to be updated. Chapters on flavor profile and ingredients are informative and interesting, while those on brewing equipment/methods and conditioning/packaging/dispensing get bogged down in details that are better suited to a more general treatise on brewing. Chapters on style history, commercially produced examples, and recipes would benefit from a major overhaul; much of the material is outdated, being irrelevant at best and misleading at worst. These deficiencies are offset somewhat by vintage photographs and a thorough glossary. Despite its flaws, this was an enjoyable read that makes me want to brew a dark mild and visit England, though probably not at the same time.

[Hershel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short read. Gives history, techniques and some recipes for brewing one of the traditional English styles of beer, the mild. Mild is interesting as it’s historically defined by more of what it isn’t rather than what it is. This why there are dark,pale, strong and weak milds.

[Cody · Rating 4 out of 5]

The brewing advice seems kind of dated, but I enjoyed the historical parts and the old pictures.

[Christopher Murtagh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Compared to the early books in the series I was elated to find this one so thick. It's like a real book.

A book about mild a style obscure and quite unloved. A name that shouldn't exactly entice, well only mildly, victim to its great age, a name old enough that the meaning of the word changed from Fresh as opposed to Old to get to meaning light in alcohol, watery, sugary, bland, just kind of unassuming, kind of that will do, nothing special. What's he like? Mild...

I live basically in the home of mild. The English Midlands and I've only ever drank a couple. The first I tried tasted of soot and that was it. An old mans drink two generations back, dad was lager, grandad was the generation for bitters and milds. When you would find it, you found it not much looked after by the pubs that sold it. Not much cared for by the people who made it, either.

Then the second mild I drank was the famed Sarah Hughes Ruby Mild, 'No you will like it... No it's a strong mild... It's a different type of mild... A proper type.. Older... a dug up throw back mild'. And true enough it was decent.

But what actually makes a mild? It is like most of the styles pretty slippery and a hell of a lot of different things at different times, a lot of half baked heavily compromised components put out as milds that aren't really, and then later milds put out as other things when the name acquired such a whiff of crusty bland negative connotations. This makes a stab at answering all of this and goes into some of the famed examples. Bathams, Sarah Hughes.

I haven't checked the recipes but so far all the recipes in the other books in the series have been great and so I am sure these will be too. I would bear in mind as with all the others these books are a little old, and written by passionate Americans with the home brewer in America a little while ago in mind. So they might not be 100% accurate in ingredients but will no doubt get you very close to something like the original product. They clearly know what they are doing but you might have access to things they don't. I would give them a shot and then more research start swapping things out. Go wild.

Underneath the dust there is something lovely about this fruity malty working mans style of beer. Refreshing. So without bullshit. Simple. Wholesome. Even when this book was written it was an endangered species, now it's much worse. Do your bit, let's bring it back. Wild Mild. Raw Mild. Kiwi Mild. Where people haven't been recently is fresh ground to experiment.