My own late 1970's bottle ...
goodbeerhunting.com will tell you ...
It was first brewed in 1923 at Gales Brewery in the village of Horndean, Hampshire, eight miles north of Portsmouth, on the southern coast of England. At the time, it was an innovation—or rather, a return to the past—by the firm’s new head brewer, William Barton Mears Jr., aged 31. (Although he has often been misidentified as a Yorkshireman—he was hired from Hepworth’s Brewery in Ripon, Yorkshire—Mears was born in Wolverhampton in the West Midlands.) The kind of strong, dark, long-aged ale he made for Gales had been brewed by many British brewers before World War I. They look to be the beers that inspired Eugene Rodenbach, after he worked in a brewery near London in the 1870s, to go back to Belgium and develop the strong, vat-aged stock ale known in Flemish as “Oude Bruin,” meaning “Old Brown.” A writer in 1920 described aged old ales as “The liqueur of the working man … a delightful substitute for port wine.” Restrictions on brewing strong ales had been imposed during the war, but were removed in 1921.
Mears stayed as head brewer at Horndean for more than 30 years, retiring in 1954. After his departure, Gales continued brewing the beer, which had been known as Prize Old Ale since the late 1920s. The beer began with a mix of pale malt, black malt, and torrefied wheat mashed in a 140-barrel cast-iron mash tun. The resultant wort was then boiled for two hours with Worcester Fuggles and East Kent Goldings hops in an old copper used only for Prize Old Ale, high up in Gales’ classic tower brewery. It was so old, in fact, that boiling wort would run out from between its riveted copper plates and drip down into the brewery below.
The long boil produced caramelization and darkened the wort, which was fermented in wooden vessels and then matured for six months to a year in a washback constructed from New Zealand kauri pine. Over the decades, it became home to multiple colonies of yeast and bacteria that fed on the remaining sugars in the beer, adding flavors and aromas. The ale was then hand-bottled with a small amount of yeast left in each bottle, hand-corked, and hand-labeled in a small outbuilding at the brewery.
In “The Brewmaster’s Table,” Garrett Oliver describes the Prize Old Ale of 2003 as a throwback that George Gale himself would still recognize.
“It pours dark brown with a thin collar of foam. The aroma is dark and complex: Madeira, sherry, malt, rum, kola nut, plum pudding, leather, wool, and wildflowers. Austere, hard hops step in, to balance out the malt, keeping it dry and racy through the center. Connoisseurs prize this beer for its juicy acidity and stunning complexity. It’s beautiful with short ribs, beef cheeks, hanger steak, venison, Manchego cheese, and good ripe farmhouse cheddar.”
Just two years later, however, Gales was bought by Fuller, Smith & Turner. The original Horndean brewery closed in 2006, and production of Gales beers transferred to Fuller’s Brewery in Chiswick, West London. But John Keeling, brewing director at Fuller’s, was determined to see that Prize Old Ale was one of the beers that survived the move. The kauri pine vats, which gave so much character to the brew, could not be moved, so before the Horndean brewery closed, Keeling got the staff there to brew much more Prize Old Ale than they needed for the annual release, some 80 barrels in total. Another 80 barrels were then brewed at Fuller’s in Chiswick, with the help of Gales head brewer Derek Lowe. Twenty barrels of the Chiswick brew were then swapped with 20 barrels of the Horndean brew, so that the yeasts and bugs from the kauri pine vats in Hampshire would inoculate the beer made 50 miles away in West London.
The Fuller’s version of Prize Old Ale was mostly very well received by those who drank it. Unfortunately, Keeling says, it found no love among the Fuller’s sales team, who all hated the beer and wanted him to ditch it. Only two batches were made at Chiswick, the last in 2009, and Keeling hid the remaining 50 or so hectoliters (about 42 Bbl) away in the Fuller’s tank room. There it sat for five or so years until a new recruit to the Chiswick brewing team, Henry Kirk, learned about its existence and decided to sample it.
“I remember opening up the sample tank, and this beautiful, russet-colored beer came out, smelling a bit like Rodenbach Grand Cru, and it tasted just incredible,” Kirk says. “This amazing beer was just lying down in the tank room, neglected, so that started my campaign with Fuller’s to get it released.”
In early 2019, Fuller’s was acquired by the Japanese brewer Asahi, and in November that year Kirk took up the post of head brewer at the Dark Star brewery in Partridge Green, Sussex, which Fuller’s had bought in 2018. His efforts to see Prize Old Ale brewed again took a big step forward when he managed to get a tanker of the beer moved from Fuller’s to Partridge Green, where he then kept it in one of Dark Star’s fermenting vessels at 54º Fahrenheit. By this time, it had risen to 11% ABV and was tasting like a subtle version of Rodenbach Grand Cru. “There is the acetic there, but it’s very soft compared to the Grand Cru,” Kirk says.
The beer sat in Sussex for another two years before Kirk could brew a new batch to mix in with it. “COVID put a block on everything, and I was also terrifying Asahi by insisting that I wanted to have a wooden washback for this beer,” he says. Much of the delay had to do with the cost of the new wooden vessel: some £15,000, or about $18,000. “That derailed the project for about two years, to be honest. But once everyone had calmed down, they said okay, and we brewed it, and mixed the old and the new, and we filled thirty-six hundred bottles, and sold out every time we put a new batch of bottles up, and Asahi went: ‘Hmm.’”
Working from a 1989 brewing book from Gales, Kirk put together a recipe that was 73% English pale malt, 17% invert sugar, 8% percent torrefied wheat, and 2% black malt, with Fuggles and Goldings hops at the beginning and end. Kirk praises that beer’s Maris Otter pale malt, saying, “It imparts a wonderful bready flavor to the beer.” The only invert sugar Kirk and his team could get was the paler No. 1, though he says he would have preferred the darker No. 3 for the extra color and added complexity of flavor. Even so, the beer was dark enough, with 55 pounds of black malt in the mix, that Dark Star’s Anton Paar alcohol meter could not get a gravity reading.
However, just weeks after the first new batch of Prize Old Ale in 13 years was released, Asahi announced that Dark Star would be closing, with production of all its beers transferred to Meantime Brewing Company, which the Japanese firm had acquired in 2016.
The 2022 version of Prize Old Ale was a commercial success, the fastest-selling beer Dark Star had ever released, and Asahi was happy to order another edition for 2023. Sven Hartmann, who had been put in charge of brewing the Dark Star brands at Meantime, found himself having to work out how to make a beer unlike anything else he had ever produced.