"AV requirements: data projector and screen; electric kettle; pint pot..." Talk on beer chemistry and adulteration at the Briton's, 2008
I have been researching brewery science in history since 1999. A few years ago, a colleague asked if I could offer anything to one or another of various public events programmes that were being put together at the time. "You could do something on beer," was the suggestion. "In a pub."
"AV requirements: data projector and screen; electric kettle; pint pot..." Talk on beer chemistry and adulteration at the Briton's, 2008
I thought about it. It made a lot of sense. People like pubs. Pubs attract more passing trade than museums or science centres. Some pubs also have decent function rooms for small audience events. Plus, they sell beer. I reasoned that people who are interested in this kind of thing would still turn up as usual, whereas people who didn't enjoy it could always slope off to the bar. People who found they were only halfway enthused, of course, could go to the bar and come back, relying on beer either to put them in a better frame of mind or to reduce their awareness of the whole experience.
Since 2006 I've given several public talks in public houses for Café Scientifique, the Manchester Science Festival, and the Museum of Science and Industry's "Crazy Chemistry" week (not my title). Venues in Manchester have included the Lass O'Gowrie, the Briton's Protection -- both excellent cask beer sources with trad pub "upstairs rooms" -- and the (licensed) café in the Manchester Museum.
In 2009 I managed some sort of step up the scale by appearing at a brewery, as the Brewery History Society and Institute of Brewing and Distilling kindly invited me to talk at a meeting held at Marston's (the former Wolves & Dudley plant) in Wolverhampton.
These have always varied depending on the aims and audience of the event, but have tended to cover one of two themes:
The origins of porter. A look at the Industrial Revolution of beer, covering the large-scale production culture of London porter, an iconic beer variety of the eighteenth century. Also usually deals with some of the legendary stories about the "invention" of porter, and what they can tell us about times much later than the period they describe.
Chemists, brewers and beer-doctors. How do you know what's in your beer? This talk looks at public fears and chemists' authority claims about adulteration and contamination in the nineteenth century. Can the people who detect poisons be trusted not to have a sideline in supplying them? I sometimes run this one with practical demonstrations, allowing patrons to adulterate their own beer (focusing on harmless additives such as liquorice and grains of paradise: I find that breaking out the strychnine and picrotoxin substantially complicates the risk assessment form).
A bit of a departure for me is Drinking Up Time, first tried out at the Lass for Manchester Science Festival 2009. Previous events have all been more or less traditional lectures; DUT veers a long way towards performance monologue territory, with me 'playing' an erratic version of an academic historian who tells quite a lot of impossible stories -- but there's also more direct use of primary source research than usual. This one also goes beyond beer, looking at the nature of 'spirit'/'alcohol'/'ethanol' as a substance. A piece I wrote for BSHS Viewpoint explains the rationale behind all this.
The usual disclaimer | Last modified at 18:54, Tuesday 26 July 2011