Ale, beer and cider

Comparing the dietary components of England and Ireland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Clarkson and Crawford noted that beer was in short supply in Ireland. Army victuallers apparently found it difficult to buy hopped beer in Ireland, and English soldiers disliked the local unhopped ale. In 1580, for example, Lord Burghley instructed a Bristol Merchant, John Bland, to ship 2,000lb of hops to Ireland, telling him that there was the ‘gravest want of hopps in that country’. Bland was also instructed to send brewing equipment and four coopers for a month, at a total cost of £106.

Contemporary evidence also suggests that the taste for hopped beer was slow to develop in Ireland. Fynes Moryson noted that the ‘common sort’ of ‘English-Irish’ drink was ‘not English beer made of malt and hops, but ale’. While he noted that the Gaelic Irish did not have:

Nevertheless, Gaelic Irish literature suggests that beer was consumed by the Gaelic Irish elite and was even considered to have restorative properties. In 1592, the Annals of the Four Masters record the escape of Hugh Roe and Art and Henry O’Neill from prison in Dublin and their subsequent adventures in the Wicklow mountains, where:

Clearly then, by the 1590s, the taste for hopped beer had to some extent penetrated even the most ‘secure and impregnable’ parts of Gaelic Ireland. It is likely, however, that its use was restricted to the upper classes initially. Luke Gernon, writing in 1620, noted a distinction between the drinking habits of different classes in Ireland, remarking that in the ‘baser cabins you shall have no drink but bonyclabber, milk that is sowred to the condition of buttermilk’.