History Not Right

There's nothing better than something being much more than you expected. When we originally thought of creating a side-project for Pretty Things we knew we had to anchor it in reality. After all, there's very little "reality" employed in making this line of beers. And if you know us at all you know we don't do the "earnest" or "precious" brewer thing. So we went with history: honest, unquestionable and unknown to almost everyone!

Partnering to make a beer with friend Ron Pattinson was just the ticket. If you're not familiar Ron is the extremely prolific author of Shut Up Barclay Perkins: http://barclayperkins.blogspot.com/, and based out of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Last September we met up with him and asked if he had any particularly style-twisting beers from the past (something Ron seems to specialize in). And in no time we had a brewsheet from February 27th, 1832. This is a beer that was brewed in a brewery on Brick Lane, London, which we had coincidentally walked past two days earlier and photographed. The recipe takes us back to Dicken's London and a time in beer making that seems positively fantastical today: many thousand barrel kettles, two-ton hop additions, pre-sewer industrial practices. This was before Tower Bridge or Big Ben. An honest profession was the duty of pulling bodies from the Thames. History was giving fantasy back to us!

Last Wednesday we embarked to recreate that day. It took two days to clean the brewhouse after this eyebrow-raising experience. The result will be premiered on February 27th, 178 years to the day it was first brewed.