Black by Day, Red by Night — Mild Ale and the Industrial Heartland Where It Never Died

At The Beacon Hotel, a pub in the post-industrial corner of England’s Midlands known as The Black Country, three friends are at the end of their weekly pilgrimage. It’s Wednesday lunchtime and Lyndon Smith, Dave Gell, and John Pagett have driven 12 miles from their homes in Kidderminster to this Sedgley inn to drink their favorite beer, Sarah Hughes Dark Ruby Mild. 

Glass dimpled mugs, full of foam-topped, deep red Ale, sit in front of them on a small table in the wood-paneled back room. There is laughter and loud chat. The pub, with its Victorian layout and period details left largely unchanged since Charles Dickens’ day—four rooms, including a snug and a tap room; beers served through a hatch from a tiny island bar—is bursting with customers at just after 1 p.m. Many are drinking Ruby Mild, despite its 6% ABV strength. 

“This is the best pint in the country,” says Smith, a youthful-looking 65, dressed in a Ruby Mild sweatshirt. “It’s the perfect beer; such a complex flavor, and it’s got that Mild taste.” What is that, I ask? It’s initially sweet, rich, full of licorice and fruitcake, nutty, and, most importantly, it’s all about malt, he explains. “Mild used to be known as the working man’s drink, but now it’s for connoisseurs,” says Gell, 83. “I love the malt character. Not everyone wants that hoppy IPA flavor—I certainly don’t. I can’t stand them.”

Gell is Welsh, Smith a Londoner, and Pagett, 72, a Kidderminster native, but on this subject they speak with one happy voice. They’re not alone. Mild, particularly Dark Mild, is enjoying a modest revival, both in its native U.K. and in the U.S., thanks to modern brewers who are attracted by its simple drinkability. Thornbridge Brewery, Howling Hops Brewery, Five Points Brewing Company, Boxcar Brewery, and Left Handed Giant are among those in the U.K. to recently produce a Dark Mild, as have American brewers such as Suarez Family Brewery in New York, Holy Mountain Brewing in Washington, and Double Mountain Brewery in Oregon. 

But, as The Beacon demonstrates, there are places where the style, and the traditions surrounding it, never went away. In the Black Country—situated to the west and northwest of Birmingham, Britain’s second-largest city—Mild is part of the local culture, a key element of a rich and cherished identity. At the Black Country Living Museum, you’ll find Mild on the bar at the Bottle & Glass Inn, a 19th-century pub moved brick-by-brick from its original home in Brierley Hill. To get there you can jump on a 1950s trolleybus bearing a huge ad for Highgate Mild Ale. 

Pride in this style is cultivated locally and carried close to the chest. When I spoke to Robert Plant, Led Zeppelin’s Black Country-raised frontman, at the launch of his son Logan’s brewery Beavertown in London in 2012, he had one complaint about the opening line-up: There was no Mild. Pubs up and down the Black Country still serve Mild, a liquid reminder of a heritage of hard work.

Scratch the surface, though, and Mild’s prospects look less certain. When I visited the Bottle & Glass, I found Bostin’ Mild unavailable, replaced by a Chocolate Stout. (Bostin’ is a Black Country phrase, meaning fantastic or wonderful.) At The Park Inn, the taproom for one of the region’s historic breweries, Holden’s, the Mild was also off. 

The previous evening, I’d drunk a Mild brewed by Bathams, another cherished local brewery, at the Fox and Grapes pub in Pensnett. “How much of this do you sell?” I asked the young woman behind the bar. “How many pints of Mild do you drink each evening?” she shouted across to an older man in the corner of the pub. “Three?” “No, four.” “We sell four pints a night,” she told me as she put the beer on the bar.

It’s clearly not the staple drink it once was. Nonetheless, Mild persists here in a way it doesn’t anywhere else (except maybe England’s northwest). The most interesting thing about its survival is what it tells us about The Black Country, about a pub culture as rich as any in these islands, and about the appeal of Mild itself.

THIRSTY WORK

The Black Country earned its name due to the ferocity and variety of industrial works that took hold here in the 19th century. Geologically rich in coal, iron, and limestone, its landscape was home to mines, iron foundries, glass factories, brickworks, and steel mills. Canals criss-crossed the region’s hilly landscape. Different areas developed different specialities: Netherton, for example, was known for anchors and chains, while Lye made (and makes) holloware, galvanized steel “hollow” products such as bins and buckets.

The name “Black Country” was first recorded in the early 19th century, but it was an American, Elihu Burritt, a diplomat based in Birmingham, who brought the term into general use. This place is “black by day and red by night,” he wrote in 1868, and “cannot be matched, for vast and varied production, by any other space of equal radius on the surface of the globe.” 

Industry is thirsty work. Mild was how the laborers of the Black Country restored lost fluid and energy, or so the story goes. It was cheap and plentiful, not too strong, and just tasty enough. In that respect, the Black Country wasn’t unique: Mild was the beer of working-class men throughout England and Wales for much of the 20th century. 

Dark Milds arrived at the end of the 19th century, according to beer historian Martyn Cornell in “Amber Gold & Black: The History of Britain’s Great Beers.” Before then, Mild had been generally pale in color, but with fewer hops and a lower level of attenuation than Pale Ale; pre-World War I Milds (like Sarah Hughes Ruby Mild) were also stronger. 

Dark Milds dominated the English market until the 1960s, when Bitter and then Lager took over. In 1959, Mild outsold Bitter two pints to one, making up 60% of all draft beer sales; by 1976, it represented just one in every six pints sold on draft in the U.K. Britain was shaking the dust off its boots, moving into a technological future, and Mild didn’t appeal anymore. It was an old man’s drink. It was the past.

Its survival here in the Black Country owes much to the region’s unique qualities. Unlike Britain’s other former industrial centers—Birmingham, say, or Manchester—this is not a city but a collection of places, mostly towns and villages. It does not have a center of gravity. It is a huge suburban sprawl, but it is not bourgeois. The culture here is working-class, and some areas still suffer from significant deprivation due to the rapid decline of local industry since the 1960s.

At the Black Country Living Museum’s gift shop, you can buy a mousepad (£3.99) or a hoodie (£25.95) emblazoned with the Black Country flag, which is black, white, and red with a chain running across the middle. (Its design is the result of a competition in 2012 and it remains controversial; some argue it evokes the use of local steel in the slave trade.) Then there are gift cards featuring Black Country dialect (“To A Bostin’ Mom!”). This strong identity is largely for local consumption. The Black Country is not boastful—and when it is, it’s with tongue at least partly in cheek.

BANKS’S OF ENGLAND

According to Simon Yates, Banks’s Brewery in Wolverhampton is the world’s biggest producer of Mild. “That’s what we tell everyone, anyway,” he says as we wander through this warren of a place. Here, much of the structure dates back to the Victorian age, cask beer is racked by hand, and beer ferments in open vessels. 

Yates is the assistant head brewer at Banks’s. Now 65, he can remember when Mild was the dominant beer style in the region, and when being the world’s biggest producer really would have been something to shout about. He began his beer drinking (“at rather an unhealthily early age”) with Hanson’s Mild, once brewed in Dudley in the heart of the Black Country.

In those days, Mild made up the majority of Banks’s output. “It had a bit of a cult following,” Yates says. “It was a local hero.” Now it’s a fraction of the brewery’s output, brewed “two weeks out of three,” mostly at the minimum quantity (200 British barrels). In terms of volume, it’s behind a host of other brands: 23 different beers are brewed regularly, with Shipyard American Pale and Wainwright, an English Golden Ale, dominant. (The brewery is now part of Carlsberg Marston’s Brewing Company.)

There’s no fatalism here, though. “Mild is far from dead, it’s still hanging in there,” Yates says. “In small pack it’s still got a big part to play. It’s still doing OK in keg. In cask it’s really stuttering; we probably rack it about every three weeks. The number of pubs stocking it on cask is slowly dwindling.”

There are actually three different Milds made here: Mild, Dark Mild, and Mansfield Mild. Banks’s Mild is, Yates says, somewhere between a Bitter and a typical Mild in terms of flavor. “It’s slightly more bitter than most Milds, the color is paler than a Dark Mild, and it’s 3.5% in strength,” says Yates. “It gets most of its flavor from brewer’s caramel, which is added in the kettle and brings a slightly vinous quality to it. It’s all pale malt, with a mixture of English hops, plus some Herkules from Germany.”

Mansfield Mild is a little more complex. “It is a classic Mild recipe. It’s got roast barley, and it’s got chocolate and crystal malt. It’s a mini-Porter, almost. It’s a really, really nice beer. If I drink a Mild I’m looking for something with a bit of roast character, I guess. Not everyone agrees, but that’s what I want—a little bit of dark malt.”  

Banks’s recently rebranded its Bitter; it’s now sold as Amber Bitter, partly due to the perception that customers find the word “Bitter” offputting. Yates thinks something similar might be necessary for Mild. “Bitter is a bit of a dirty word at the moment,” he says. “I guess Mild probably would benefit from a similar overhaul. We tried just calling it Banks’s at one point, but that was confusing. Maybe it needs a marketing genius.”

A FAMILY TRADITION

Yates’ youthful passion for Mild was (and is) matched by his support for another Black Country staple: Wolverhampton Wanderers, one of the region’s two big football (soccer) clubs. His old school friend and fellow brewer, Tim Batham, supports their fierce local rivals, West Bromwich Albion. Their school, Brierley Hill Grammar School, was a virtual brewers’ academy, Yates says: former Bathams head brewer Martin Birch was also there “around the same time” in the early ’70s, as was Ian Davies, who was involved in the nearby Kinver Brewery for many years. 

“Tim was a bit of a celebrity, because of Bathams,” Yates says. “He was very popular.”

The owner of Bathams is still popular in this beer-loving part of the world, but it doesn’t appear to have gone to his head. On a cool Wednesday morning, he and daughter Alice are racing around Bathams’ tower brewery in Brierley Hill, in the Black Country’s southwest. They’re short on brewing staff and Bathams, sold in their 12 pubs and select freehouses, is always in demand.

Alice is brewing Bitter. It’s what she does, most of the time: Mild is made every week or so, she says, but Bitter makes up about 90% of the brewery’s output. I mention the scene at the Fox and Grapes, where I’d been the previous evening. “It’s really difficult because we want to keep Mild on the bar for people like that,” she says. “We want to keep it going. It’s just the fact that it’s Mild, it’s low-ABV [3.5%; the Bitter is 4.3%], and it doesn’t keep as well as Bitter. We desperately want people to drink it, to keep up that tradition.”

Alice, 28, is one of the youngest people I’ve spoken to in the Black Country beer world. Do her friends drink Mild? “I’ve got quite a lot of friends in the brewing industry,” she says, laughing. Until recently she was learning her trade at Brewster’s Brewery, in Grantham, and Thornbridge. “And my other friends—and it’s maybe because they’ve grown up with me—we all drink pints. The girls too. If I’m driving, I’ll drink Mild. It’s nice to have something that isn’t too strong.”

Bathams has been here since 1905, although the brewery was founded elsewhere in 1877. Its flagship pub, The Vine—also known locally as the Bull and Bladder, apparently because it was a butcher’s shop in pre-Victorian times—is next door. It’s another period delight, with a central corridor and a variety of cozy rooms, although the brewery itself is perhaps even more evocative of a past era. 

At the top is the brewhouse, mash tun and copper, both of which are over 100 years old. The copper is heated by a gas-fired direct flame. The shiny, stainless-steel grist case is more modern, but the liquor tank is another centurion. The circular, open-fermenting vessels a level down are of a similar vintage, for the most part, while Bathams is one of the few breweries to still package some beer in huge, hogshead-sized casks, which contain 420 British pints. (The typical cask, a firkin, holds 72 pints.)

The key moment in the brewery’s modern history came in 1972, when a report on the state of British beer in the Daily Mirror, a national newspaper, picked out Bathams for special praise. The Bitter particularly impressed the paper’s judges. “Prior to that, we were brewing 80% Mild, 20% Bitter,” Tim says. “By the early ’80s, when I came back from doing my brewing pupilage at Banks’s and Hanson’s, it was the other way around.”

Another pivotal moment came in 1982, when Round Oak Steelworks, which had dominated Brierley Hill since the middle of the 19th century, closed. Local unemployment rose to around 25%. “The guys who worked in the steelworks would drink a gallon of Mild a day,” says Tim. “When the steelworks closed it was like somebody turned the lights off. We’ve got hundreds and hundreds of people who’ve got no work. Mild sales plummeted, they died a death.” The site of the former steelworks is now partially occupied by Merry Hill, a huge shopping mall.

Bathams’ Mild is not a complex beer, ingredient-wise. It’s the same as the Bitter, brewed to gravity, with brewer’s caramel added in the fermenting vessel. Bathams’ beers are made with a significant portion of brewing sugar—more expensive than malt, as Tim is keen to point out—which is perhaps why they have such zip, such a delicate and hard-to-express sense of balance. They are unshowy but very drinkable. 

Tim, now 64, says he’s drinking more and more of the Mild. “I’m getting a bit older and I’m finding a 4.3% beer, especially in the volumes I like to drink it, too much. Our Mild is a great drink. It really is a great drink.”

VICTORIAN REVIVAL

Old Hill is a fairly typical Black Country community. There’s a row of shops—“Welcome to Old Hill Shopping Centre,” a sign on the end of the row reads, “A Good Selection of Shops”—from which radiate terraced streets filled with Victorian houses, churches, and schools. There’s a mini-supermarket, Hazra, and plenty of takeaway food, including Sam’s Bostin’ Bites, where you’ll find “Traditional Black Country Fittle.” What makes it a little different is the local drinking venue, a micropub called Wheelie Thirsty, which opened in 2019.

It’s owned by Fixed Wheel Brewery, which was set up in 2014 in nearby Blackheath by partners Sharon Bryant and Scott Povey, the latter of whom is waiting for me inside Wheelie Thirsty. Povey’s background is in the motor trade, but the brewery reflects his passion for two wheels. Weekends spent in Belgium with cycling friends introduced him to what beer can be, he tells me, but the beers produced by Fixed Wheel are much more in the session-strength British tradition. They’re clean and very drinkable, but they’re also mostly pale and crisp: Through and Off, a 3.8% ABV session IPA, is hopped with Citra. It goes down very easily. 

80% of Fixed Wheel’s output is cask beer, Povey, originally from Birmingham, tells me. “The key thing for me is that you want someone to go back to the bar and order another,” he says. “You can brew some crazy stuff now and then but they’re not beers you sell every day, are they? With the beers we brew all the time, we want drinkability, but they have to be full of flavor as well.”

Povey and team have brewed three Milds: one pale, one dark, and one strong. The latter is Mild Concussion, a 5.5% Mild inspired by Sarah Hughes. “It’s completely inspired by Dark Ruby, because I drank that beer quite a bit before we started the brewery,” Povey, 43, says. “I really love that beer. [Mild Concussion] has got a lot of crystal malt, a lot of toffee notes, it’s really dark in color.”

How popular are these beers? “In The Black Country there’s a lot of dark beer fans, definitely, we notice that. Could we get away with having two or three dark beers on across six or seven taps? We’re limited to one, really, occasionally two. Pales are most popular around here.”

There are plenty of dark beer drinkers at The Beacon Hotel the next day, although it’s not clear how many of them are from the Black Country. “Dark Ruby is not the most popular beer in the pub, but it is the one that brings people to us,” says Alex Marchant, The Beacon’s general manager. “It’s people from further afield, people who haven’t been here before, who tend to drink it. Our regulars drink Surprise, our Bitter. But Dark Ruby is still about a third of our production.”

Made with Maris Otter pale and crystal malts, caramel, invert sugar, and traditional English hops, it’s initially sweet, before a complex mixture of preserved fruits, vinous bite and roast notes lead to a dry but not bitter finish. The flavor lingers in the mouth. It’s a composed, cohesive experience, despite the complexity. 

The brewery, which is behind the pub, was revived in 1987 by John Hughes, grandson of the eponymous Sarah, and the beer is still made to the same recipe he created then, inspired by a Victorian recipe that, according to Marchant, he found “in an old cigar tin when he was renovating the place.”

It’s noticeable how busy the pub is at lunchtime, even if it’s one of the few British pubs that still closes for a few hours each afternoon. “Things have changed since we opened back up again [after the COVID lockdowns]—people’s habits seem to have changed,” Marchant says. “Lunchtimes have really picked up. They were busy before, but they’re really busy now.”

THE MEANING OF MILD

The more Black Country Mild you drink, the less clear it is what constitutes a Mild. Banks’s is different to Bathams, which is different to Sarah Hughes. In this sense, it’s similar to many classic European styles, which bridle at the constraints placed upon them by beer-judging parameters. Organic cultures do not develop along straight lines.

What unites them is an easygoing drinkability, even those with the complexity of Sarah Hughes Dark Ruby. They reflect a desire for good beer as part of the pub experience, not its sole focus. This is a convivial, friendly culture. Before meeting Scott Povey, I dropped in at The Old Swan (also known as Ma Pardoes), another historic pub with a brewery at the back, and was disappointed to discover the Victorian front bar shut—so I was given a tour, which included a chance to marvel at the bar’s original enamel ceiling (one of only two in the U.K.; the other is in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum). “The Black County is friendly,” says Povey. “It’s relaxed.” 

Good value, too. A pint of Sarah Hughes Dark Ruby will set you back £3.40 at the Beacon; a pint of Bathams Bitter at The Vine is £3.15, Mild just £2.50. “I think beer ought to be cheap, it should be a staple thing everyone can afford,” Tim Batham says. “Nowadays some people are charging £5 a pint! Good God!”

That’s one big-city trend the Black Country can do without, but another may be of interest. Dark Mild is currently fashionable, admittedly in a limited way, among some of Britain’s younger beer drinkers. In London, nobody has done more to stoke this than Sam Dickison, the 34-year-old co-founder and head brewer at Boxcar Brewery in Bethnal Green. He launched a Dark Mild in 2019, and is still brewing it, albeit on a bi-monthly rather than weekly basis, and only during the colder months.

Made with a variety of crystal malts and a touch of chocolate or black malt, depending on the batch, its popularity has been such that Boxcar last year launched Double and Triple Dark Milds, which, whatever traditionalists might think of the nomenclature, have sold very well indeed. “They are actually our fastest-selling beers,” Dickison says. “We only brew them once or twice a year, but when you put them on sale, they move the quickest. It’s the Instagram crowd—when we dropped the Double Mild, the image was really showy, the label is purple and gold, and the people who tried it were shouting about it constantly.”

He’s confident about Dark Mild’s future, too. “It fills a gap in the market,” he says. “It’s a softer, smoother dark beer, it’s not really roasted and dry. Since the pandemic, [we’ve seen that] people have been craving cask ale, they’re drinking more Guinness—I think that crowd that was only drinking hazy hoppy stuff is now [embracing] a more diverse palate.”

Even if Mild makes the greatest comeback since Lazarus, though, the Black Country will continue to abide by its own tastes. There’s something about its beer culture that can’t be replicated elsewhere, just as you’ll struggle to find Bathams outside its heartland. “That was always my father’s business philosophy,” says Tim. “If people want to drink Bathams, they can do it in a Bathams’ pub. You want those people, with their mates, in your pubs.”

People are still happy to travel for Black Country beer, as those three friends in The Beacon demonstrate. I leave them enjoying a second pint, but not before getting their thoughts on this delightful pub. “There are nice pubs where we live but they’re lacking something,” says Smith. “This pub has got the lot: atmosphere, the interior, and, of course, the beer.”  

Words by Will Hawkes
Illustrations by Colette Holston