Allsopp's Arctic Ale And Arctic Homebrew In 1852 - Sales on eBay for $503,300 - New brew batch in 2011?

There is a bit of beery backroom buzz about plans to make a movie about the Allsopp's Arctic Ale, the beer which accompanied a British navy expedition in the Canadian high Arctic in the mid-eighteenth century. The film maker's website is not up yet but there is a Facebook pagewhich reports:

Sir Edward Belcher failed on his journey, abandoned four of the five ships in the ice, and returned to England to be court-marshalled (some thanks... huh?). A few of the bottles of Allsopp’s Ale came back to England, where in 2007 a bottle came up on EBay, and reportedly sold for $503,000 (this is what caught my interest). To my knowledge, there are only two bottles left in the world from the 1852 expedition. I have researched this ale in the deepest of all journals and records, both here and abroad. I now have a recipe for this Ale and intend to brew it near the Belcher Islands of the Hudson Bay in the Canadian Arctic.

There is more information hanging about the internets about this stuff and not just pictures of that eBay bottle. Available Arcticky data includes the passage below from the book The Last of The Arctic Voyages by Captain Sir Edward Belcher, C.B. about the failed search for the expedition of Sir John Franklin from 1852 to 1854. The book can be found in its entiretyat Google books. Belcher was a bit of a tool in an old school way but, as a fellow Nova Scotian, one has to give him some props but we can leave it at that as far as the admiration goes. He did have a thing for the beer apparently - at least when stuck in the ice - as he noted on 21 December 1852 after the presentation of a pantomime on board his firmly frozen ship: "Allsopp. That name will live for ages in the recollection of all Polars."

It seems that in addition to filling the hull with Allsopp's Arctic Ale, Belcher also brought along a home brewing system. Here is the report of the production of beer on board starting around page 339:

Brewing from essence of malt and hops had been practised as early as the 6th of August last season, but the general adoption of our "home-brewed" did not fairly commence until the end of October; with what success I shall leave my readers to judge from the following report of the officer who superintended. It was much esteemed, and at times mixed to dilute the excellent beer supplied by Messrs. Allsopp.

"Her Majesty's Skip 'Assistance,' Wellington Channel,
October 31, 1853.
Sir,

"1. In compliance with your directions, I have the honour to report upon the beer brewed from the essence of malt and of hops on board this ship during the winter 1852-1853, as follows, viz.:—

"2. An experiment was made on the 6th of August, 1852, to brew with the proportions prescribed by the makers (Hudson and Co.). Eighty pounds of malt and three pounds of hops were mixed with boiling water, and then started into a fifty-six gallon cask (filling it), placed by the side of the galley-fire: when the temperature had fallen to 90° there was added half a pound of yeast, in a state of fermentation, made by mixing dried yeast, sugar, and flour, in hot water; but although signs of fermentation were occasionally apparent at the bunghole during the day, yet, from the low temperature that prevailed at night (consequent upon the absence of the galley-fire), it could not be got to work satisfactorily. The beer produced, although palatable and drunk by the ship's company, was so weak, from the inadequacy of the quantity of ingredients used, and so flat, in consequence of the inability to raise sufficient fermentation, that it was scarcely equal to the smallest table beer.

"3. On the 23rd of October, 1852, the ship being fixed in winter quarters, and the Sylvester warming apparatus at work, maintaining a constant equal temperature, brewing operations were commenced, with the view of keeping up a periodical supply for the ship's company.

"4. The proportions used were,—essence of malt, 120 lbs., and of hops 4 lbs., to fifty-four gallons of water: these were boiled together for two hours in the ship's coppers, and then put into a fifty-six gallon cask, which was placed (for the purpose of obtaining the highest temperature in the ship, steady at about 70°) by the side of the funnel of the Sylvester warming apparatus. In about eighteen hours after, the temperature of the mixture had fallen to 90°, when yeast was added, and generally in a few minutes produced vigorous fermentation, which was maintained for seven or eight days, the froth being thrown off at the bung-hole and received from a leather spout, nailed on the side of the cask, into a tub placed on the deck, from which the cask was kept filled as it became necessary, for the first two days almost every hour, and afterwards at longer intervals, as fermentation slackened. As soon as it had ceased to work, the cask was bunged up and removed, to settle and fine for a fortnight; it was then broached for issue.

"5. The beer thus produced was highly prized, and I think I may venture to state that, both for strength and flavour, it was all that could be desired.

"6. From this time (October 23rd) until the end of the following April, a constant supply of this beer was maintained, at the rate of one pint for each person twice, and sometimes three times, a week, besides other occasional extra issues; for which purpose it was necessary to appropriate three fifty-six gallon casks,—one to issue from, the next to settle and fine, and the third in a state of fermentation.

"7. The total quantities of the essences consumed during this time were—of malt, 1620lbs.; hops, 44lbs.; and the beer produced was 702 gallons.

"8. Although the beer thus necessarily issued a fortnight after being brewed was of good quality, yet I would beg leave to remark, that had it been practicable to have allowed it to stand for a longer period (a3 in the case of beer brewed in England), there is good reason to suppose that it would have become scarcely inferior to English porter of the first quality.

"9. There now remain for brewing (to be commenced, in pursuance of your directions, as soon as the hold is cleared), essence of malt, 780lbs.; hops, 40lbs.

"I have the honour to be, Sir,
Your most obedient, humble servant,
James Lewis,
Clerk in charge."

Captain Sir Edward Belcher, Kt., C.B.,
Her Majesty's Ship ' Assistance,' and Commanding
Arctic Searching Squadron.

Note Belcher actually calls it home brew. Other than that, I will leave interpretation and further explorations of the explorer's libations to others who are, you know, cleverer than me. Suffice it to say thank God for what beer these poor bastards could get their hands on 158 years ago, two or three thousand miles to my north.

http://beerblog.genx40.com/archive/2010/january/allsoppsarctic

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Belcher
http://www.biographi.ca/009004-119.01-e.php?&id_nbr=4819
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Investigator_(1848)

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ALLSOPP'S ARCTIC ALE, THE $500,000 EBAY TYPO

We know having correct spelling in the eBay auction title important. Unfortunately for one seller, leaving out one letter in the title turned out to be very costly.

The item in question is a full bottle of Allsopp's Arctic Ale brewed in 1852, pictured on the left. The item was first listed on eBay with the title:allsop's arctic ale.full and corked with a wax seal. Unfortunately, he left off the second 'p' in Allsopp's. This meant that any potential buyers searching for the correct spelling of Allsopp's would not be able to find it. This error is clearly a typo by the seller as he spells Allsopp's correctly in the description.

The auction had a starting price of $299.00 and closed with a winning bid of $304.00 with 2 bids from 2 different users. The seller was probably satisfied with the sales price until he saw what happened when it was listed on eBay again eight weeks later.

This time Allsopp's was spelled correctly using the auction title: Museum Quality ALLSOPP's ARCTIC ALE 1852 SEALED/FULL!!! The second listing had a much more robust description along with more pictures of the bottle from different angles. The auction received 157 bids from 56 unique bidders and closed with a winning bid of $503,300.00.

It turns out the original seller's typo cost him over $500,000. The $304 he received doesn't seem like much any more.

Validity of the Winning Bid

When you see such a large dollar amount for the winning bid, you have to question the validity of the bids. Looking at the bid history, we see one of the early bidders maximum bid reach $2,200.00. We also see two 1000 plus feedback buyers at $11,111.00 and $78,100.00. After that, we see several "Not a registered user" pushing the bidding over $500,000. This casts doubt on the winning bid being genuine.

After some more research, I found an article on Antique Week about this auction. It looks like the winning bid was a "joke bid" according to the winning bidder. He has no intention of paying the seller. As for the seller, he is storing it in a safe deposit box while he decides what to do next.

You have to feel sorry for the original seller. The bottle has been in his family for over 50 years before he decided to sell it. After all the publicity about the auctions, he has received many nasty emails calling him an idiot. The anonymity of the internet certainly allows people to be heartless.

The bottle is clearly worth several thousand dollars. Whether it is worth $10,000, $100,000, $500,000 or more is anybody's guess.

Finding Auctions with Spelling Mistakes

The person that found the Allsopp's auction with the spelling error made a handsome profit. Surprisingly, auctions that contain spelling mistakes are fairly common. By finding these auctions, you may discover some incredible bargains too. To help you find auctions with spelling errors, we have created the Misspelled eBay Auction Search Engine. Try it out and you may find that diamond in the rough.



Arctic Ale: a 158-year-old adventure revived

Back in Victorian times, no polar explorer worth the name set north without as much Allsopp’s Arctic Ale stashed in the hold of his ship as it could carry. This was a mighty brew, more than 11 per cent alcohol, descended from the strong, sweet ales Burton upon Trent once exported to the Baltic. Now an American home-brewer, Christopher Bowen, has decided to recreate Arctic Ale – by actually brewing it in the Canadian arctic, taking a 2,000-mile journey to the shores of Hudson Bay with brewing equipment and a film crew.

You can read about his plans here, while more information is available on the Arctic Alchemy Facebook page here, and the Canadian beer blogger Alan McLeod has some very interesting stuff about the original Arctic expedition in 1852 here.

Pete Brown, who famously went the other direction, to the tropics, for his bookHops and Glory, transporting a cask of Burton’s better-known product, India Pale Ale, has declared himself filled with “admiration mixed with seething jealousy” over Chris Bowen’s plans, and I feel about the same. Arctic Ale is the king of Burton Ales, the strongest of a family of beers that have almost vanished now (Young’s Winter Warmer is one of very few left, and Fuller’s 1845 can claim to be a modern revival of the style). I feel a great fondness for Burton Ales, since to my knowledge I was the first person to write about them in the “modern” era (post-1970) when I had an article on the subject printed in What’s Brewing in 1998. I’d love to be standing in the frozen Canadian north with a glass of Arctic Ale held in my mitten.

I devote several hundred words to Arctic Ale in the “barley wines and old ales” chapter of Amber, Gold and Black (just 12 weeks to publication day, people – order it through this link and put a little extra money in my pocket) and I thought, as a teaser for the book and as a way of spreading interest in what Chris Bowen is up to, I’d put up the Arctic Ale extract here:

Arctic Ale

Among the drinks mentioned in the Vade Mecum for Malt-Worms, the rhyming “Good Pub Guide” to London written about 1718, are “Humming Stingo” at the Peacock in Whitecross Street; October at the Fountain in Cheapside; Bull’s Milk Beer at the Bull in Wood Street; and Burton Ale at the Guy of Warwick in Milk Street. This last beer was probably the same as or similar to the nut-brown, sweet, extremely strong ale that brewers in Burton upon Trent were exporting to Baltic cities such as St Petersburg and Danzig, Riga and Königsberg from at least the 1740s. This trade lasted, with hiccups during the Napoleonic Wars, until the Russians imposed heavy tariffs on beer imports from Britain in 1822, and the Burton brewers turned to brewing paler, more bitter beers for the Indian market.

However, the Burton breweries continued making darker, sweeter beers, at a range of strengths, the strongest being around 1110 OG, and 10 to 11 per cent alcohol by volume, (The top-of-the-range Burton ales were generally known as Number One, as they were at the Bass, Ind Coope and Truman breweries in Burton, though Worthington, in typically perverse fashion, called its best strong ale “G”). These were beers with astonishing longevity: the Ratcliff Ale, a version of Bass’s No 1 strong ale brewed and bottled in 1869 to celebrate the birth of a son, Harry Ratcliff, to one of the company’s partners, is still drinkable today, 140 years on. After surviving unopened for the whole of the 20th century in bottles in the cellars at the brewery in Burton, the beer is now completely dry, with a flavour like a cross between sherry and smoky Christmas pudding.

The Burton brewers occasionally reproduced beers of the strength of the kind once exported to the Baltic, for Arctic explorers to take with them. Alfred Barnard, on his trip to Samuel Allsopp & Sons in Burton in 1889, wrote that “the celebrated ‘Arctic ale’ of which we have heard so much in days gone by” was specially brewed at the request of the government for the five-ship Arctic expedition in 1852-54 under Sir Edward Belcher (which was looking for Sir John Franklin’s famously lost expedition of 1845). Belcher reported that the ale was “a valuable antiscorbutic” (that is, scurvy-preventer) and “a great blessing to us, particularly for our sick, as long as it lasted”, and that it refused to freeze until the temperature dropped to 12 degrees Fahrenheit, or -11 degrees Celsius. Even when the temperature went down to -55 Fahrenheit (-48 Celsius) the beer was unharmed by being frozen, Belcher said.

It was brewed again for the 1875 Arctic expedition under Sir George Nares, which set out to reach the North Pole and managed to get to within 400 miles of the top of the world before scurvy forced the men, by now on sleds, to retreat, four of them dying. Nares wrote of the beer in February 1875: “Excellent. Would recommend as large a quantity as can possibly be stowed away to be supplied to every future voyage.” The expedition’s senior medical officer wrote to Allsopp’s that it “kept splendidly in the Arctic region, and the fact of its freezing did not appear to detract from its good qualities in any way. It was highly appreciated by the men.”

Barnard was disappointed to find there was none of the 1852 vintage left, but he tried the 1875 version, then 14 years old, and “found it of a nice brown colour, and of a vinous, and at the same time, nutty flavour, and as sound as on the day it was brewed.” He wrote that it “did not show a very high alcoholic content”, though the OG was all of 1130, about 47lb per barrel of extract, and an analysis in 1881, he said, “proved that it contained not much more than about nine per cent alcohol by weight” (though since this is 11.25 per cent abv it sounds about right) and “owing to the large amount of unfermented extract still remaining in it, it must be considered as an extremely valuable and nourishing food.” For comparison, William Molyneux writing in 1869 said the ale brewed for the old Russian trade varied from 42 to 48lb of extract to the barrel, while the brewery’s “normal” strong ale in the 1860s only went up to 42lb, an OG of 1116.7.

The Arctic Ale was, again, a long-lasting brew. William Henry Beable, writing inRomance of Great Businesses, published in 1926, said “favoured visitors” to Allsopp’s brewery in Burton upon Trent were “sometimes invited to taste a bottle of ale similar to the celebrated ‘Arctic Ale’ supplied to the Polar expedition of 1875″ [ie 50 years earlier]. Beable said of the beer: “It is mellow as old Burgundy and as nourishing as a beefsteak.”

Some time in the 1930s, after the big merger with its Burton neighbour Allsopp of 1934, Ind Coope renamed its No 1 Burton barley wine Allsopp’s Arctic Ale. The beer returned to the polar regions in 1952 when cases went off with that year’s British North Greenland Expedition. However, while contemporary advertising in the 1950s called Arctic Ale a barley wine, The Book of Beer by Andrew Campbell, published in 1956, described it as “less sweet than a barley wine”, suggesting that 50 years ago not everybody put all strong ales in the barley wine category.

Arctic Ale appears in an Ind Coope price list of 1959 at a public bar price of one shilling and five pence ha’penny a “nip” bottle, that is, one third of a pint. However, it looks as if Arctic Ale was no longer as strong as it used to be, because Colne Spring Ale, which had an OG of 1093, was a third dearer at one shilling and elevenpence ha’penny the nip (a pint of bitter, for comparison, was one shilling and threepence, three and a half times cheaper, per fluid ounce). By 1961, the beer’s name had changed to Arctic Barley Wine. It was still being brewed in 1965, but the brewery knocked it on the head a few years after that.

(end of extract

---

Chris Bowen tells me that Arctic Ale was also brewed in 1857, and he has full bottles of the 1852 and 1857 brewings, the lucky barsteward. I shall be following his venture with lolling tongue.