Scottish Export Ale

Historical Development

Beer styles have a way of telling you a little bit about themselves. Belgian and French beer often carries a rustic, farmhouse character. German beer is clean, crisp, and drinkable by the liter. American beer has the common thread of just being more of whatever the base style was. Scottish beer is in many ways similar to English ales–though as we mentioned in our post on Scottish Light, the early beer influence went the opposite direction–but with less hop and yeast character. They are caramelly, biscuity, and sometimes butterscotch-like malt showcases, whereas their English counterparts have a firm bitterness and lots of ale yeast character.

Geography and agriculture play a big part in why these beers evolved this way. Since at least the Norman Conquest, brewing in Scotland and England has followed similar trajectories: ales brewed with malt and hops from the British islands and fermented with ale yeast. The predominance of estate brewing was common as well, meaning that before industrialization, and with it commercial refrigeration, climate would have played a much bigger role in finished beer.

A common axiom in the brewing industry is, "Brewers make wort, yeast make beer." It's true, to a certain extent, that brewers have only a small role to play in the grand scheme of things. It isn't us, after all, that actually create any of the alcohol or carbon dioxide that make beer amazing. We like to be in control of things, though, so we play with our yeast's health in a lot of ways to achieve what we want in a finished beer. One of the ways we do this is to change the temperature at which yeast do their thing. In general, cooler temperatures create beer with cleaner yeast profiles–less fruity esters and spicy phenolics–than warmer temperatures do. There are a ton of other factors impacting this–including how much yeast you add to the wort, whether it has the nutrients it needs, what yeast strain you're using, and what the moon phase is–but this general rule tells us something about why Scottish and English beer are different. When estate brewers would add yeast to their wort in the pre-industrial period, fermentation temperatures in Scotland would have been cooler than in its southern neighbor. What would have resulted, then, was a finished beer with less yeast character, which certainly influenced production after warming and cooling became more scientific. That cooler climate had another major impact on brewing. Because the hop growing season in Scotland was (and is, though unfortunately not for long) shorter than in its southern neighbors, brewing traditions in Scotland developed around recipes with far less hops than in England. As hops gradually replaced gruit–a spice mixture used to bitter beer–during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Scottish brewers, recognizing the steep import prices, stuck to their recipes and kept hop usage low.

Though industrialization and globalized trade made hops cheaper and more readily available, Scottish beer, which was envied enough to incite violence at various points in history (more on that in an upcoming post on Heather Ale), remained true to its lineage. Their enduring popularity, especially those in the Export and Wee Heavy range, speak to just how wonderful these beers can be: malty, caramelly, and biscuity, they're a malt-lover's dream in a glass.

Modern Evolution