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In which we try and find out a little about the beers Squire made
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Through the James Squire beer brand, we’ve been told all sort of things – some of them true, some of them not so much. One thing we’ve not been told is what sort of beer he was brewing.
Which is a strange oversight for a company making beer in his name, don’t you think? I do. Though I wouldn’t expect them to brew a beer designed to replicate Squire’s own concoctions because it probably wouldn’t taste the best.
Unlike other brewers, Squire himself did not put ads in the colony newspaper the Sydney Gazette – at least none that I was able to find. This perhaps suggests that, by the time the paper began publishing in the first years of the 1800s, Squire had already made enough of a success of his Malting Shovel tavern and brewery at Kissing Point that advertising wasn’t required.
This is a small pity, for those ads from other brewers do contain descriptions of the beers they had up for sale. It would have been helpful to have such a list from Squire himself.
Given the time in which Squire was brewing and the country from which he’d just come, I think we can reasonably conclude that Squire was making porter – a dark beer not best suited for the warm Australian climate. In his book about British beers Amber, Gold and Black, beer historian Martyn Cornell mentions that porter was carried to Australia on the First Fleet and “by the time it reached Australia, porter had been the dominant style of beer in London for decades, and was drunk in enormous quantities”.
There is also the possibility Squire was also making a mild ale, which Cornell describes as “almost the only alternative to porter and stout for most drinkers for more than a century” but it is telling that porter is the only beer style mentioned in journals and correspondence in the early years of the colony. In fact it was the first beer drunk on Australian soil – on the very first day the First Fleet landed at Botany Bay. On that day – January 19, 1788 – Captain Philip Gidley King wrote in his diary of getting into small boats and exploring some of the rivers around the bay. “We went ashore and ate our salt beef and in a glass of porter drank [to] the health of our friends in England”.
Also, in 1820, Squire gave evidence to the Bigge Inquiry into the colony, which included a detailed description of his brewing methods. Sadly he chose not to specify what sort of beers he was making. However, when he talked of how much beer he was making and the price, he used “the price of porter imported from England at present” as a benchmark. It would seem strange for him to do that if he himself was not also brewing porter.
So porter was a popular style at the time, there was already a market for it among the beer drinkers in the colony, (and it remained until at least 1820 based in Squire’s testimony to the inquiry) so it’s a safe assumption that would have been what Squire brewed.
It’s also safe to say it probably wasn’t that great. It certainly wouldn’t have been consistent. Squire’s inquiry testimony stated that most of his beers were made with corn rather than barley, and at least some of his brews would have been without hops (perhaps using a similar bittering agent as rival brewer John Boston – the leaves and stalks of a tomato plant).
There is little information about the difficulties of brewing in the first decades of the colony. However, there is information from throughout the 1800s, which describe the problems of consistency. In his paper ‘A new drink for young Australia: from ale to lager beer in New South Wales, 1880 to 1930’, academic Brett J Stubbs shows that Australian beer in the 1880s was pretty shoddy.
Stubbs quotes from the Australian Brewers Journal from the 1880s, which complained that “the greater portion of the beer sold and consumed throughout Australia is really merely ‘swipes’, ‘soft’ tasteless, insipid, sugar-and-water sort of stuff, which the Australian working man drinks because he cannot get anything better at a reasonable price”.
In the same piece Stubbs writes, “Early Australian brewers ... were heavily handicapped by a warm climate and by generally inferior water supplies. In addition their equipment was primitive, raw materials (hops and malt) were often inferior, and highly skilled brewers were unavailable.”
TG Parsons in his essay ‘The limits of technology – or why didn’t Australians drink colonial beer in 1838’ points out a similar dodginess with our beer 50 years before the 1880s; “the real point is that given the existing technology, colonial beer was a poor substitute for the English article”.
These descriptions of brewing in the 1800s can safely be taken as a representation of what beer in Sydney Cove in the late 1700s would have been like. The alternative – that Squire nailed how to make great beer in the 1790s but no-one else took any notice and struggled along brewing rubbish for another hundred years – is just farcical.
Contemporary reports of the quality of Squire’s beer are virtually non-existent. I have yet to come across any reference from when Squire was alive that describes his beers. In 1827 (five years after Squire’s death), Peter Miller Cunningham published two volumes under the absurdly long title of Two Years in New South Wales; a Series of Letters, Comprising Sketches of the Actual State of Society in that Colony; of its Peculiar Advantages to Emigrants; of its Topography, Natural History etc etc. Presumably it was two volumes because the title alone took up most of the first one.
Cunningham wrote in that book that “Squire’s beer therefore was as well-known and as celebrated in this as Meux and Co’s in your hemisphere”. Meux and Co was a popular brewery at the time but, these days, is best known for the London Beer Flood of 1814, where huge vats of porter ruptured and more than a million litres of porter spewed out of the brewery and down the streets.
Before you crack wise about how you’d grab a schooner glass and lean out the window as the torrent rushed past, keep in mind the flood killed people. Eight women and children died; the death toll would have been far greater had the men in those streets not been at work. So not really the light-hearted tale it’s so often portrayed as.
Anyway, back to Cunningham’s description of Squire’s beer. It reads like a second-hand description that someone has given Cunningham and that the author had never had a full cup of the beer in front of him. Cunningham’s book offers another possible reference to the quality of Squire’s product. He quotes a gravestone of one of Squire’s customers in the nearby Parramatta cemetery, which allegedly read “ye who wish to lie here, Drink Squire’s beer!”. Cunningham – who never met Squire – claims the man himself would joke about the epitaph. If you ask me, it doesn’t sound like the epitaph was meant to be a compliment. More a suggestion that Squire’s beers might kill you.
The earliest reference to the quality of Squire’s brews that I could find was in his obituary in the Sydney Gazette. That piece states that his cultivation of hops allowed him “to brew beer of an excellent quality”. Though you’d hardly expect them to be disparaging about his beer in the guy’s obituary.
A review of Squire’s beer in the Sydney Monitor of 1831 - nine years after his death – saw no need to shy away from being disparaging.
“Old Mr. Squires, the patriarch of Kissing Point on the Parramatta River, was, twenty years ago, the only brewer in the colony whose name came before the public with any degree of notoriety. When maize or barley were low and sugar high, he brewed from barley or maize malt. But when grain was high, and sugar low, he brewed either entirely from sugar, or from half and half.
“The fame of Squires’ beer never rose high in the colony among impartial judges; and of the two, his sugar beer was preferred to his malt beer. The latter very soon acquired a pungent acidity in the throat, which the sugar beer was much slower in contracting.”
This description paints Squire as a guy who used whatever ingredients were the cheapest. The statement “when maize or barley were low” is a reference to their prices and it suggests Squire looked more to price than quality when it came to ingredients.
As far as the unnamed author of this article was concerned, Squire was just one example of the problem with Australian beer brewers and beer drinkers. The author said that the beer served in the colony was little more than “fermented sugar and water, impregnated with hops”.
“The hopped sweet-wort drunk in Sydney at this time is drawn out of the vat today and tomorrow may be seen at the taps of all the public houses in Sydney. And the newer it is, the better the Sydney folks like it, because it is the sweeter.”
Which means to modern palates, Squire’s beer would have been hot, flat and sweet. No wonder spirits and ciders were far more popular at the time.