I thought I’d been missing the latest Sessions, since the last one I took part in was #149 last summer. But it turns out, no, it just wasn’t happening. Now Boak & Bailey have brought it back, encouraging us to write something inspired by Martyn Cornell’s final work – Porter and Stout: A Complete History. It’s fitting to do so a year on from his death and also not long after what would have been his birthday.
This topic has prompted me not just to flick back through the book, but think again about my interactions with Martyn. I didn’t know him very well, but we corresponded on and off from around 2019 and had many fascinating chats in person when we happened upon each other at events and the like. He always had an interesting tidbit or two to share – like when I quizzed him on the source for the 150th anniversary of the Fuggles hop in 2021. He emailed me back, characteristically honest about where the credit lay:
“It wasn’t me who pinpointed it, but a local historian from Horsmonden in Kent called Lionel Burgess, who found the original advertisement in the Maidstone and Kentish Journal announcing the sale of 100,000 sets of “the new hop called Fuggle’s Goldings” on Wednesday November 8 1871, and who also discovered that George Stace Moore, in whose flower garden in Horsmonden the first Fuggle hop was found growing, was the uncle of Richard Fuggle, who grew the hop up to commercial quantities.”
It’s fair to say we had plenty of heated debates too, always on beer-related history topics. That’s part of the fun though really – there is no such thing as definitive history. Interpretations and new source material is always coming to light, never more so than now in the Age of the Internet. A vast swathe of digitisation has been ongoing for many years and there is always something new to consider, if you dig hard enough.
Martyn knew that. His “complete history”. the product of five years work, was not a full stop, but an invitation. He had planned a website where mistakes and misinterpretations in the book could be reported and the record duly set straight as a result. An essential reference word, Martyn’s is not the last word any more than the writing of any historian can be.
I picked up my copy a few months after release when I found myself working a lot of Guinness history. It would be wrong to research that without seeing what Martyn’s latest opinion was on the subject. The bit that caught my eye for our purposes here today was the very end of his section on Guinness, which brings us up to present day. The alcohol-free Guinness 0.0 – it’s launch in 2020, problems in the following months and then a huge leap in sales after its relaunch in 2021 leading to a huge investment in production capacity at St James’s Gate in Oct 2024.
That takes him as far as he could possibly have gone in terms of his publication schedule, yet his commentary on Guinness 0.0 is just a paragraph long. I can’t help but feel that alcohol-free stouts and porters deserve a little more investigation. What they are, how they’re made, who drinks them – all of these aspects are part of the modern history of the styles that is being written now.
Perhaps to Martyn that would have been mission creep. Maybe he just wasn’t interested enough to want to include it in his research. He was, I found, sceptical about alcohol-free beer generally. In fact, one of the few times I quoted him in my own work was in a blog about AF for Crisp Malt:
“In 2017, renowned beer writer and historian Martyn Cornell boldly proclaimed, “No, Heineken, the alcohol free beer market is NOT going to double in the next four years.”
He was sort of right. According to the Financial Times, writing in 2022, it only actually nearly doubled in five years.”
I wonder what he would have made of Guinness 0.0 sales surpassing those of the original in September 2025. It brings me to my point. We (those who write about beer history) are all keen to write the current definitive story of whatever topic that interests us. But inevitably we have blind spots, personal bias and interests that may make us miss the wood for the trees when it comes to an important part of any subject. The reader would do well to be as cautious about their sources (us!) and look for bias as much as we would when interrogating a piece of primary material during the research.
Secondly, I clamber carefully on to my contemporary history soap box and say that the brewing, cider and pub industries need to be more conscious about how they preserve their own stories. I’ve had the privilege of writing almost as much about very modern history – in the last generation or two – as I have about the deep roots of British brewing. The thing that never fails to surprise me is how little organisations know about themselves.
When was that beer brewed for the first time? No one can remember.
How old is this part of the pub? No idea.
Why did your parents pick that name for the beer? They never mentioned it.
Alcohol-free Guinness is already proving to be a major chapter in that company’s story. Doubtless in a century’s time the chapter on their marketing success in the 90s/00s will be shortly be followed by one on 0.0. But you wouldn’t know that from Martyn’s book. As I say, I don’t consider this a failing on his part. It would be pretty unfair to take 400 pages and five years work and say that his history isn’t up to date enough! But I do think that it suggests a cautionary tale for us all not to be so taken up in the business of the day to day (which basically means just surviving for a lot of these companies right now) and take the time to record your decisions, dates and motivations.
Martyn’s blog was a mine of useful information and thorough research. Already the hosting has expired and it has slipped away, save a few snapshots on the Wayback Machine. All the chats we had on Twitter once upon a time are gone, because his account is suspended. We assume that information will endure from our own lifetimes because there is so much information about in the world now, but much of it has very little in the way of permanence.
If we are not careful, there is going to be a very big gap where the beer history of today should be and many key protagonists who are obvious to the contemporary viewer will disappear from our shared story altogether.
