- Details
- Written by Tony Morgan
- Category: Mild Ale: It’s Not Dead Yet
“Mild? No one drinks mild!” “Mild is dead, it’s an old man’s drink!” That’s what my Grandad used to drink”.
Mild beer, particularly dark mild, is seen as weak, uninteresting, and old-fashioned. It has the reputation of being a “cloth cap” beer, drunk by the sweaty working classes as they swarmed out
of the factories and coal mines, eager to slake their thirst after long hours of hard physical labour.
Mild is generally the lowest-strength beer in any brewer’s portfolio, if it is produced at all, and it is often very difficult to find. The bigger brewers are usually not interested in brewing a slow selling, low-volume beer, and publicans are not interested in stocking a beer that may have a low turnover and does not keep well in cask because of its low strength.
Pale beers, India Pale Ales and pale lagers are now the most popular beers in Britain, and mild beer makes up only about 3% of total draught beer consumption. Some brewers have succeeded in increasing poor sales of mild by simply renaming it, often leaving out the word “mild” all together. Many see mild ale as, if not already extinct, at least a highly endangered species, which is why CAMRA has run mild promotion campaigns for some years. It wasn’t always that way, from around the end of the nineteenth century until just after the Second World War, mild beer was the most popular English beer.
NO LONGER number one . . .
It seems to have been around the 1960’s when bitter took over from mild as the most popular drink in Britain, and it continued to forge ahead of mild. In some geographical areas, notably the Midlands and parts of the North, mild was still the favoured drink; even in the 1970’s there were close to twenty breweries producing not just one but two milds. But both mild and bitter were to drop in consumption as lager became more popular, with the latter taking over from bitter as the most-drunk draught beer, sometime around 1990. The once-mighty mild ale has now dwindled from being the star to being just a bit-player whose part could be quickly written out of the play.
. . . but NOT DEAD YET!
Perhaps the picture is not quite as bad as it seems. There are still around 50 breweries in Britain who produce a mild, albeit in small quantities. A few of these are producing mild at something
approaching their original strengths. Notable among these is Sarah Hughes Dark Ruby (which has dropped the word mild in recent years) at around 6% ABV, and Father Mike’s Dark Rich Ruby, from Brunswick Brewery, at 5.8% ABV. Rudgate’s Ruby Mild, a 4.4% ABV dark mild, was overall champion at the Society of Independent Brewers’ (SIBA) North Region Festival in 2016.
Perhaps Mild will be saved by craft brewers in North American, where Mild is undergoing a bit of a renaissance. In the USA and Canada several brewers are producing versions of the style. Southern Tier from New York state do a light mild. True North Ale Company of Massachusetts produce an English dark mild called Webster's Mild, (3.5%), No relation to the Webster’s of Halifax, UK who had a Dark or Best Mild of 3.2% in the 1970s and 80s.
US beer Festivals, such as the New England Real Ale eXhibition (NERAX), regularly feature varieties of mild from across the USA.so there is an increasing demand for this style of beer. In recent years British beer drinkers have embraced the styles and flavours which have come over the Atlantic. Perhaps the popularity of mild in North America could save it here if people come to regard it as fashionable, with a resulting surge in availability of mild as it is revived by British brewers. One can hope. In the meantime, get ahead of the fashionistas and seek out a decent mild.
