Don’t Call It a Comeback — Taking Stock of Best Bitter’s Moment in the Spotlight

London was a city in denial about the pandemic heading its way in February 2020, and I was one of too many bodies crammed into a tiny craft beer bar-cum-bottle shop. I forget now quite why we had gathered there so recklessly. Perhaps it was just a Friday night. But I do recall the beer I drank, a collaboration Best Bitter from London’s Boxcar Brewery and Gloucestershire’s Mills Brewing, 4.6% ABV, in a 440ml (15oz) can. It was the last beer I drank outside my own home for more than six months.

This memory stands out not just for the tone it has since taken on—like the opening scene of a disaster movie—but for the beer itself: that particular style, at that particular time, from those particular breweries. Boxcar is known for its juicy Hazy IPAs. Mills Brewing makes small runs of wild-fermented beers. What were these two doing brewing a traditional Best Bitter hopped with Goldings?

That can proved not to be an outlier: Two years later, Best Bitter is having a moment. (Along with another traditional British Ale style, Mild, but that’s another story.) Breweries the likes of Cloudwater Brew Co., DEYA Brewing Company, Anspach & Hobday, Lost and Grounded Brewers, Northern Monk, and North Brewing Co. have all recently brewed Bitters independently or in collaboration, as have more than two dozen others, per my informal tally.

Some drinkers are delighted to see modern brewers pick up the style, seeing in the trend a welcome opportunity to revisit a much-loved classic. Others are more wary, and wonder what might become of Bitter once it has passed through craft beer’s funhouse mirror. Best Bitter is a varied style that has long resisted easy categorization, and simplistic proclamations of its comeback are hampered by the fact that, in many pubs and among many traditional breweries, it never actually went away. 

Still, Best Bitter’s latest evolution will no doubt impact the style’s trajectory—and at a moment when many aspects of traditional British brewing are imperiled, that change may be what’s needed to awaken a new cohort of drinkers to the style’s long history, its value, and its ongoing vitality.

JUMPERS FOR GOALPOSTS

Jonny Mills says the idea to brew a Best Bitter almost certainly came about while he and Boxcar’s founder Sam Dickison were out drinking together. “Probably cask Bitter,” he adds, “the out-of-vogue beer we were all weaned on. We love it dearly.”

There’s an almost inescapably nostalgic side to Best Bitter. It is a cultural touchstone for an idealized Englishness, like cricket on the village green, orderly queues, and pots of tea. (Perhaps that’s why it was used by some pro-Brexit voters and campaigners as a vehicle for propaganda.) It helps that the style has a strong association with the pub, another institution with deep roots in the British psyche. Best Bitter is usually enjoyed as a cask Ale (sometimes also called real Ale), which is about as Platonically British as you can get. Cut us deep enough and we bleed Best Bitter.

I like to think Best Bitter makes more memories than it obliterates. Mills says it takes him back to his early 20s and his first taste of Timothy Taylor’s Landlord, considered an emblematic example of the style (even though it is officially classed as a Pale Ale—more on that later). “I’d never heard of it,” he says, “and had to wait at the bar for the new cask to be pulled through.” It was worth hanging about for—that first pint out of a fresh cask is a rare treat. “I was taken aback by my first sip. Wonderful hop aroma, then it was just so easy-drinking and flavorful.”

Dickison, too, finds it nostalgic. “Goldings smells like English countryside pubs,” he says, “where the first pint of Bitter seems to magically disappear shortly after it’s placed in front of me.”

When it’s done right, Best Bitter is the ultimate pub beer. You can enjoy it all night without it stealing your attention away from your mates or leaving you unbearably wobbly when the bell rings for last orders. With its moderate strength (typically between 3.8% to 4.6% ABV); gentle carbonation when served on cask; and subtle, balanced flavor profile, Best Bitter remains steadfast in its refreshment. Set against its English hops is what Dickison calls “a decent amount of malt character”; Bitter’s variation is such that some examples taste biscuity and bready while others recall caramel, treacle, and dried fruit. Mills says he likes how the style displays “every ingredient in equal measure. Malt, yeast, hops, water, they’re all there, and nothing too powerful that you can’t taste them all.”

Dickison says Best Bitter is one of the most comforting and moreish beers you can find. That’s a lot to live up to, but the Boxcar x Mills Best went down well. “People who liked Bitters loved it,” Dickison says of their collaboration. I’ve spoken to a lot of brewers since—ones that would all be classed as bleeding-edge craft brewers—who recall the beer also, and who enjoyed it as much as I did. Not bad for a canned example of a style that lives for cask.

CONTENDERS

For most beer fans, the town of Lewes, Sussex, is synonymous with the august institution that is Harvey’s Brewery—but there’s another brewery making a name for itself locally. People who know Beak Brewery will tell you most of its beers are super-pale, super-fresh, and super-hopped. But not too long ago, you would have seen drinkers in its taproom sinking a cask beer called Bampa by the dimpled jugful.

Head brewer Robin Head-Fourman is in the middle of a Friday clean-down when I turn up. Tanks whir through an automated process, pumping and rinsing different cleaning agents through the brew kit—disinfectant, caustic wash, acid wash. It takes a while to run its course, so we go next door to chat over coffee as it chunters away.

I want to know more about Bampa. Is it a Best Bitter? Head-Fourman says probably not, if you’re being strict about it. “It’s got this weird heritage grain in it. It’s got rye in there. It’s got wheat in there. It’s got this slight edge to it. So, is it? Who’s to say? It drinks like a Best.”

The idea of “drinking like a Best” is an important one, because Best Bitter is one of those ill-defined styles that doesn’t always fit neatly into the category definition the BJCP lays out for it. In his book “Amber, Gold & Black: The History of Britain’s Great Beers,” beer historian Martyn Cornell tracks how brewers have used the terms “Bitter” and “Pale Ale” interchangeably from the mid-19th century right through to the 21st. Even Marston’s Pedigree and Fuller’s London Pride, archetypal Bitters if ever I supped them, first bore the label “Pale Ale.”

What drinkers expect when they call across the bar for a “pinta Bitter” changes around the country. Traditional London Bitters are often weaker and less hop-forward than elsewhere in the U.K., with a cap of loose foam that soon fades away. Those from northwestern England are paler and biting on the palate, served with a thick, persistent head. Those from the Southwest are sweeter and less attenuated. Those from the Midlands are often sweet but thin. Those from Kent are often heavy on the hops. Who’s to say if these are all the same sort of beer? Little wonder the further subdivisions of Ordinary, Best, and Premium (or ESB) have always felt arbitrary at best—no pun intended.

Best Bitter both is and is not, like some quantum conundrum that disappears if you try too hard to measure it. Instead the style relies more on individual beers displaying what you might call Big Best Bitter Energy. This may be magic conjured up through the admixture of Goldings and Fuggle hops, blended with some compound buried deep within each kernel of Maris Otter malt. Even after thinking about it far too hard for far too long, I’m not sure I can explain, other than say you’ll know it when you taste it.

I want to know why Beak made Bampa, given how much it differs from the brewery’s usual output. For Head-Fourman, this is simple. “We love the style,” he says, with an unspoken “and that’s that.” Picture him sitting back in his chair, dusting his palms together. Next question!

Then he relents and gives me more. “Beer’s about bringing people together over a table and having a nice pint,” he says. “We don’t only make these hazy hoppy beers. Sure, they’re what pay the bills, but we love [Best Bitter] and we thought we could brew it well, so why not?”

But it goes deeper than just taking a crack at a different style. Head-Fourman says he doesn’t want a reputation as someone who only makes Hazy Pale Ales. He says it’s important to show the breadth of his brewing skill to the market. New England IPA won’t always be as popular as it is today. He also says this latest uptake of Best among certain circles might be because he and other brewers see Best Bitter as more grown-up. “It’s partly brewers wanting to be taken more seriously,” he says.

CATHEDRAL

Some people might try to tell you Harvey’s Sussex Best is not a Best Bitter—that its fermentation character is too prominent, too crazy. I don’t care what they say and nor should you. This is a delicious beer that balances a fine toffee-and-biscuit malt body against quintessentially English hops, struck through with red apple and aniseed, the smells of the brewery, before ending with just enough residual sweetness to give it a lip-smacking finish. Glory hallelujah, what a beer.

To watch Miles Jenner—Harvey’s head brewer, High Sheriff of the County of East Sussex, and familiar figure on the stage of the Lewes Little Theatre—brew a batch of Harvey’s Sussex Best is to witness a lifetime of experience at work. Before he begins the brew, Jenner whips a stick of chalk from somewhere and marks on a gauge the amount of hot liquor he expects to use. It’s an old analog contraption that uses a weight, suspended from a float in the tank above, to record how much liquor goes in and show how much wort the resulting brew will yield, measured in barrels, firkins, and gallons. As the tank empties and the float sinks, the weight rises and its marker creeps with all the inevitability of a Greek drama unfolding towards Jenner’s line.

The twin strands of Harvey’s and its Sussex Best wrap tightly around one another in the double-helix of Jenner’s DNA. His father was Harvey’s head brewer before him, so Jenner grew up in the cottages by the brewery gates. He still lives in them now, though they’ve been knocked through internally to form one larger house. He’s worked here all his life, apart from a stint learning the trade at Greene King in his 20s. He joined the brewery in 1980 and took over from his father in 1986. The year after that he became a company director. He’s been the joint managing director since 2000. And all that time he’s been brewing Best.

Jenner’s father created the recipe, and first brewed it in 1956, the year after wartime rationing finally ended. Ten years later, Sussex Best made up close to half the brewery’s output. Ten years after that, it was three-fourths. Ten years after that, just before Jenner took over as head brewer, it hit 85%. Ever since then it has been the mainstay of Harvey’s output, bobbing somewhere around that same 80 to 85% level. If you poured all of Harvey’s beer production into a pint glass, Sussex Best would be the beer itself, shining amber as if lit from within, while its monthly specials and other beers would be the head on top.

Jenner says Sussex Best has shown incredible consistency over all this time, despite the variations from one year’s hops to another’s, or changes in malting barleys and in the brewing sugars he uses. “I’ve been drinking Best Bitter since I was a small child,” he tells me. “I used to go into the sample room with my father at the weekends. There are times when I […] have a glass of beer [in the evening] and think it’s exactly how it tasted in the 1950s.”

From above comes the rhythmic rumble of the grain mills, a choral call-and-response with the slap and slop of liquor and grist mixing together in the tun. Jenner moves through the room like a seasoned thespian for whom the stage blocking has long since become muscle memory. He seems to sense just when the brew will hit its target temperatures along the way, checking thermometers to confirm what he knows deep down already. He can tell when the grain chute clogs, and loosens the malt inside with a thwack from a mallet. The chute’s near side is gently concave from years of such treatment. This is a dance, not so much choreographed as long-rehearsed, and Jenner, sleeves rolled up to the elbow, eyeglasses fogged with steam, waltzes through it all with seeming ease. He’ll soon be 70 years old.

Jenner says this reassuring consistency is mostly down to Harvey’s house yeast, which gives his beers a dough-like quality. “I think it’s fundamental, the fingerprint on all our beers,” he says. The brewery has kept its yeast alive through a continual process of cropping and re-pitching since the 1950s, through 65 years and generations beyond number.

But even with his focus on consistency, Jenner warns me not to think it’s a matter of “pressing a button and out comes the finished article.” There are two different strains within the Harvey’s yeast culture that weave in and out of phase with one another. Sometimes one dominates, sometimes the other, but “by and large you work within those parameters,” Jenner says, and try to maintain the status quo. For Jenner, brewing remains a process of discovery. “No two brews are the same. Even if you’re brewing Best Bitter week in week out, every brew is an adventure.”

Adventures sound fun, exciting, and memorable. But adventures also come with uncertainty, hardship, and peril. “The thing about a brewery like this is the overheads,” Jenner tells me. “The unit costs are phenomenal.” Just recently Harvey’s saw its energy costs rise by 50% as a result of the U.K.’s energy pricing crisis. The cost of its sugars went up 25%, a result of Brexit and pandemic supply-chain issues. Malt is up. Hops are up. But Jenner says he can’t pass on the full increase to his customers. “Everybody in the craft beer market says: ‘We need progressive beer duty, we haven’t got economies of scale.’ Well, try brewing at a brewery like this where the unit costs are so high. A small drop in barrellage and you really are up against it.”

For Harvey’s, Sussex Best is significant not just in its own right, but because it allows the brewery to produce other beers that its customers want. Jenner says this is vital if the brewery is to stay relevant and viable in the modern market. Harvey’s puts out a different seasonal brew every month so it can cover a broad range of beer styles. “I’m not averse to innovating or looking at trends that people want,” he says. “I don’t mind what people drink, but I’d rather it was one of ours.”

As for the recent uptick of interest in Best Bitter, Jenner has noted it and suspects some smaller brewers would like a slice of the regular sales that Best Bitters offer to a brewery like his. (I’m not sure I agree, as many of the recent examples made by craft breweries have been one-offs.) Jenner says he likes to see other breweries make a Best Bitter. The only time it wears thin is when, rather than put their own spin on the style, brewers try instead to imitate other beers. It’s as close as we can make it, they’ll tell him, hoping for praise. 

“I think, well, why? Do something that’s of your own style, because that’s far more important if you’re a true brewer.” He says some even go as far as to make their pump clips resemble other brewers’ designs. That said, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. “I’m sure there are plenty of actors who have seen their performances imitated on the stage,” he says.

JUNCTION

The Pembury Tavern in Hackney, East London, is a great spot to get a pint of Best Bitter. The pub belongs to the Five Points Brewing Company, and it serves Five Points Best on cask. Every pint that crosses the bar does so in superb condition: fresh, bright, and with a gorgeous head of glossy white foam that leaves rings down the side of the glass with each sip, all the way to the bottom.

The technical term for this is lacing, and Greg Hobbs, Five Points’ head brewer and co-founder, loves it. “There’s a chat group at work called The Lacing Post,” he tells me. “It’s just pictures of really good lacing.” It’s worth noting that, unusually for London, pints of Best in this pub are served sparkled. In other words, they’re poured through a small plastic nozzle attached to the spout of a beer engine. This forces the beer through tiny perforations, aerating and agitating it with each pull, giving it a lovely head, and is so popular in the north of Britain that it’s basically the default way of serving cask ales. For old-school drinkers down south, though, it is pretty much beer heresy.

Five Points Best joined the brewery’s core range in 2019, but Hobbs sold the first pint a year or so before at Whitelocks Ale House in Leeds, during a fringe event for Hop City, a beer festival that celebrates all the things that Best Bitter is not. “Suddenly on the day I was like, ‘What the fuck are we doing? This is going to be embarrassing,’” says Hobbs. “‘No one is going to drink that boring brown beer.’”

Boring brown beer? Hardly. Five Points Best gleams a seductive copper-amber, set off by that generous white head, and it drinks like a dream. It has the balance you want from a Best, with the malt piping its caramel and toffee tune to lead the mint and white pepper Fuggle hops on a dance across your palate. But it feels modern, too. Perhaps because Five Points hops it at 6g/L, about twice the amount that goes into Harvey’s Sussex Best.

Serving a Best at Hop City may have felt like sticking a middle finger up at the whole event, but it went down well. “There were so many brewers there afterwards who were just drinking it and absolutely loving it,” says Hobbs. “That’s when we knew that we could be onto a really good thing.”

It’s hard to remake something people know well. Speaking on BBC Radio 4, choreographer Sir Matthew Bourne described the trepidation he felt in the 1990s producing an all-male Swan Lake: “You’re on slightly dangerous territory. You’re taking something that people love and they want to know that you love it as well. They want to know that it’s coming from the heart rather than just a desire to shock or be sensational about it.”

Bourne says he decided to stage an all-male version of the ballet because he wanted to attract a new, younger audience of people who hadn’t seen Swan Lake before, and perhaps hadn’t even heard of it. His production went on to become the longest-running ballet on the West End and Broadway, and has performed around the world.

Hobbs felt those same hopes, felt that same trepidation, and was coming from that same place of love. His introduction to beer came from Fuller’s London Pride and other cask Best Bitters, and it’s a style that remains important to him. He admits his own Five Points Best felt like a vanity project at the start. “It was what we wanted to drink,” he says. But beyond that he wanted to spread the word to others.

You’ll find all types enjoying pints of Best in the Pembury Tavern. “It’s not just the old boys in the flat caps,” Hobbs tells me, “and it’s not just people that are really into their craft beer. The whole pub could be enjoying it.” Hobbs says he hopes his Best is also encouraging younger drinkers to try other cask ales. “I would like to think it’s a gateway,” he tells me. “Cask beer is a passion of mine and it’s had a tough couple of years with the pandemic, but even before that it was not in the most healthy state.”

REAL

Best Bitter has been around a long time, but individual beers have come and gone. Of the seven beers Randy Mosher listed as classic examples of the style in the first edition of “Tasting Beer” from 2009, four are no longer made. Two of the remaining beers are not sold as Bitters; one is now badged as a Golden Ale, and the other a Red Ale. Only one is still going strong and still flying the Bitter flag: Coniston Brewing’s Bluebird Bitter.

Yes, there have been a lot of new Best Bitters from modern breweries over the last couple of years. But if you look at the big picture, they don’t account for much more than noise, and it’s best not to fall into the trap of equating online buzz with sales. At the beginning of 2022, the 10 best-selling cask ales by volume, according to CGA figures published in the Morning Advertiser, were Sharp’s Doom Bar (Molson Coors), Greene King IPA, Timothy Taylor’s Landlord, Fuller’s London Pride (now brewed by Asahi), Greene King Abbot Ale, Marston’s Wainwright and Pedigree, St Austell Tribute Ale, Caledonian Deuchars IPA (Heineken), and Ruddles Best (Greene King).

The reality of Best Bitter—above all on cask—is that it’s a volume game where overheads have risen, consolidation has narrowed the field, margins have shrunk, and the core customers are getting older.

Best Bitter also relies on British hops, and vice versa. So few international brewers make British-style beers that the export market for U.K. hops is nowhere near large enough to sustain growers if domestic demand falls away. When the pubs closed during the pandemic, it was Best Bitter and other cask ales that suffered most. Brewing volumes plummeted, so brewers—who beforehand would order their hops four years ahead—stopped buying. Some like Harvey’s still place advance orders, but the situation generally is dire. British hop-growing is an industry on a knife-edge. Worse still, if Britain loses many more hop growers there may no longer be enough demand among those remaining to sustain supporting trades, such as the installation and maintenance of hop-yards and trellises. The whole lot could go.

Just four in 10 drinkers surveyed by Marston’s Brewery in 2019 said they drank Bitter. A closer look shows the average Bitter drinker is male (half of men drank Bitter but only a quarter of women) and middle-aged. The number of Bitter drinkers peaked at three in every five for those aged 55 or more, and declined with each step down through the age groups to reach its nadir among those aged between 18 and 24 years old, for whom it was just one in five.

The U.K. loves its Bitter. Yet in 2019, the last year of the pre-pandemic pub, eight out of every 10 pints we drank were something else. Make that eight pints and a chaser—all Bitters up to 7.5% ABV accounted for 18% of total beer sales. Of these, the largest scoop was draft Bitter up to 4.1% ABV, which made up 8% of total beer sales. We’re left to guess how much of the 18% was Best Bitters (3.8% to 4.6% ABV), but what’s clear is this: we love Best Bitter much as we do an aged relative we don’t visit often enough.

To love something is a balance between preservation and ossification. You must learn to hold on to what’s valuable without making the object of your love a museum piece. It’s a good thing modern Best Bitters like Five Points Best exist. We should celebrate them. But we should also celebrate the other examples, the ones that never went away, the Coniston Bluebirds and Harvey’s Sussex Bests. The ones that played such an important role in our culture and our national identity. The ones we might lose if we don’t support them now. Seek some out on cask, in a pub that knows how to treat its beer well, and tell me if I’m wrong.

Words by Anthony GladmanIllustrations by Colette Holston