All About Beer Magazine

Coming soon to a bar near you: mild ale.

Mild ales are enjoying a renaissance in England, and are starting to show up more in American pubs and bars.

This traditional English beer, once the most popular style in the country, fell from favor in the last century. However, it is staging a comeback in its native land, and has even made its way onto U.S. shores. You’ll have to do your research if you want to try it this side of the Atlantic, but mild—sometimes dubbed the original session beer—has qualities that make it a great choice for American audiences.

Mild is a malty, low-hopped, low-alcohol, and light-bodied beer. The style is highly diverse: milds vary in color from light amber to dark brown and black.  They range from warming roasty examples to more refreshing summer lunchtime choices.

The name “mild” comes from the fact that the style is low in hop bitterness: in that, it is mild compared to the other English pub staple, the style called bitter. Mild dates back to the late 18th century, and grew to meet the demands of a new class of industrial laborers. It became particularly popular in the Midlands, a heavily industrialized area of England. There it was drunk by miners and factory workers looking to quench their thirst after a hard day’s labor—people who were also looking for a value beer.

Then, in the 1950s, the popularity of mild began to slip. Britain’s industrial base declined and, with it, the demand for this sweet, sustaining, low alcohol beer. Mild’s reputation was not helped by the publicans (however few) who dumped drip tray waste and cellar waste, known in the industry as “slops,” back into the beer.

Things became even worse for mild in the 1970s when large breweries introduced keg beer, which was filtered, pasteurized and dispensed with the use of added carbon dioxide. Publicans liked keg beer, which had a longer shelf life and required less care, but the new method displaced the older cask-conditioned method of tending and serving beer to which mild and other traditional beer styles were well suited. Beers dispensed in this manner from the cask declined dramatically. Shortly afterwards, light lagers started to take hold.

Fewer and fewer breweries by the 1970s were producing mild and those that were tended to drop “mild” from the names of those beers. Soon, mild became something that old men drank and “beer” became pretty synonymous with fizzy golden liquid.

Mild stayed out of favor until the 1990s. By then the practice of putting the slops back into the beer had been stopped. “There was a lot of opposition at the time but now it’s virtually unheard of,” said Graham Yates, licensee of The Brunswick pub in Derby in the Midlands, who worked for big brewer Everards at the time of the changes.

“[Adding the slops] was done because the licensees were all being pushed on profit, to make sure any beer that was in the barrels or in the bottom of drip trays was returned to the mix,” he added. “It was easiest to put it in the mild because it’s a dark beer.”

Mild Rebounds

Although mild ale can be served in any format, including bottles and conventional kegs, in its heyday it would have been found most often in pubs as a cask-conditioned beer. So it is fitting that supporters of this form of beer, also known as “real ale,” have been instrumental in mild’s return.

In 1971, CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale was launched to bring cask-conditioned beers back from the brink of extinction. Now 100,000 members strong, the organization is backed by plenty of Brits tired of drinking poor quality beer. CAMRA promotes good-quality real ale (defined as “beer brewed from traditional ingredients, matured by secondary fermentation in the container from which it is dispensed, and served without the use of extraneous carbon dioxide”) and the pub as a focus of community life.

CAMRA has focused extensively on mild and every year runs its Mild in May Campaign, through which it encourages its 200-plus branches (which are spread through the U.K.) to encourage at least one pub in their area to stock at least one mild during the month.

Over the years, more and more pubs have begun participating in Mild in May. But some pubs in England have success with mild all year long. One is The Brunswick, where they’ve always done well, said Yates, constituting 8 percent of sales.

Yates sells two milds at all times, and four during the Mild in May promotion. Recently on tap was Black Sabbath, which at 6 percent ABV is a very strong mild, and Midnight Express, which is a more standard 3.6 percent.

“There’s a general trend back towards traditional beer, brewed in the old way and as part of that, mild’s becoming more popular,” said Yates. “Mild used to be just drunk by old men over 60, or in certain areas, like Birmingham, where a lot of mild is drunk. But I’ve noticed more and more, even young girls come in and drink it now, although not too much of the strong one. It’s because they like the flavor.”

Kelham Island Tavern in Sheffield, in the north of England, always has a mild on tap, such as Thwaite’s Nutty Black (3.5%) or the slightly stronger Cock Mild.

The milds vary from 3 up to 5.5 percent, but people tend to think mild is a weak beer,” said licensee Trevor Wraith. “That’s not true—they’re mild as opposed to bitter; they’re lacking in hops.”

Mild started getting more popular at Kelham Island about four years ago. “We always would try from time to time, but we didn’t always have one on permanently. More people have become interested in it. It did have a bad reputation in this country,” said Wraith.

Iain Loe, research manager and national spokesperson for CAMRA, thinks mild will continue to be popular, but will remain a small proportion of the real ale market.

And much of the mild, he anticipated, will come from the small and medium-sized breweries. “The people in the smaller and medium-sized breweries are coming into the industry fresh and are not burdened down by the fact that they have to make certain numbers for their shareholders and have to appeal to lots and lots of beer drinkers,” said Loe.

“The big brewers tend to brew beers that no one objects to the taste of. The smaller ones make beers that some people love and some people loathe, but that’s great, because the people might hate one beer you produce but love another one. The smaller brewers can afford to be more innovative and experimental. They also network more and get ideas from within the country and aren’t afraid to get ideas and even get ingredients from abroad.”