T|E|H : Into The Mild.

Hello and welcome back to the Eternal Hoptimists!

You guessed it, its May so it wouldn’t be complete without the obligatory look at the modern mild! It is Mild Month after all!

Now when we think of mild, we tend to think of flatcap wearing grandads sitting in a wooden clad dark traditional drinking holes. Well, we at TEH think its about time we let go of that stereo-type, lets face it was not so long ago that fruity beers and cocktails were seen as a “womans” drink so why should mild suffer the same stigma it has for years??

But what is a Mild?

“Mild” was originally used to designate any beer which was young, fresh or unaged and did not refer to a specific style of beer. Thus there was Mild Ale but also Mild Porter and even Mild Bitter Beer. These young beers were often blended with aged “stale” beer to improve their flavour. As the 19th century progressed public taste moved away from the aged taste; unblended young beer, mostly in the form of Mild Ale or Light Bitter Beer, began to dominate the market.

This meant that most breweries produced three or four mild ales, usually designated by a number of X marks, the weakest being X, the strongest XXXX. the latter of which were considerably stronger than the mild’s of today, and some of those reach 6-7%.

What mild’s are we going to be looking at?

Well we have quite a few, despite them being super hard to get hold of for some reason!