Zythophile

2 months ago | zythophile.co.uk | Martyn Cornell

I confess I love the opportunity to wax on about the history of beer, and I was delighted to be interviewed by the Cardiff home-brewer and podcaster Andy Taylor on the subject of porter, which ended up as 40 minutes of yakking by me. If you want to know the difference between porter and stout, why porter is called porter, how porter and stout became a world-wide beer style, when porter died out in Britain and Ireland and who bought it back, listen here.

2 months ago | zythophile.co.uk | Martyn Cornell

When you’ve been working on a project for more than seven years, finally being given a finishing date is almost anti-climactic. I started writing what became Porter and Stout: A Complete History in January 2018. I’ve now been told it is due to be published on June 4. I feel I ought to be much more excited.

Sep 26, 2024 | zythophile.co.uk | Martyn Cornell

It’s a claim you will find repeated in dozens – possibly hundreds – of places: that the so-called “Hymn to Ninkasi”, a poem in the Sumerian language to the goddess of beer, at least 3,900 years old, known from three fragmentary clay tablets found in and around the ancient city of Nippur, which stood between the Euphrates and the Tigris, is “effectively a Sumerian recipe for brewing beer”, “the oldest beer recipe in history”, with a description of “the detailed brewing process” that “modern...

Aug 29, 2024 | zythophile.co.uk | Martyn Cornell

Warming myself at midnight by an open-air firepit over which half a cow was being slowly and expertly roasted, while 50 or so slightly drunk South American brewers sang a word-perfect rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody loudly and enthusiastically was not a direction I ever expected my beer writing career to take. Still, every opportunity for new experiences needs to be seized.

Aug 2, 2024 | zythophile.co.uk | Martyn Cornell

The sub-title of my new book, Around the World in 80 Beers, is “A Global History of Brewing”. I hope this indicates to potential purchasers that the book is considerably more than just another round-up of international beers in the tradition that goes back almost 50 years, to Michael Jackson’s seminal World Beer Guide of 1977.