Beer Genie | Beer and Weddings | Beer and Barbeques, World of Beers, The History of Beer, Beer through the Ages, Beer and Women, Beer Facts, Beer Knowledge, Everything You Wanted To Know About Beer, Beer and Christmas, Beer and Xmas, Beer and Food, Entertaining with Beer, Beer and Weddings, Beer Gallery, Beer Photos

"Marriage is based on the theory that when a man discovers a particular brand of beer exactly to his taste he should at once throw up his job and go to work in a brewery" - H. L. Mencken, American satirist

Beer has been closely betrothed to the act of matrimony for centuries. The word "bridal" is a corruption of "Bride-Ale" – a special beer brewed for weddings, while wedding presents were traditionally given by guests in exchange for beer. Unless of course, the gift was a fondue set or a fish spoon in which case you had to drink lime and soda.

Without beer, there would be no "honeymoon". In Babylon, 4000 years ago, it was common practice for the bride's father to provide a month's supply of mead (a sort of honey beer) to his new son-in-law for an entire lunar (moon) month.

Contrary to current popular belief, this honey beer was said to increase fertility and heighten the chance of producing a male heir. In fact, the bride would often be sent to bed on the night of the wedding to allow the groom to drink as much honey beer as he could. He would then be brought, hell bent on some honey hanky-panky, to the bride's bedside. If, nine months later, a son was somehow sired then the brewer of the mead would receive high fives from everyone.

The biggest beer festival in the world began life as a wedding celebration. In 1810 when Crown Prince Ludwig married Princess Therese of Saxony-Hildburghausen, the citizens of Munich were invited to celebrate the occasions in fields on the outskirts of the city.

As well as beer, there was eating, horse racing and other jolly japes. Such was its success, the party was repeated every year and, two hundred years later, the Oktoberfest is now the biggest beer festival in the world. Over the 17 day festival, it attracts nearly 7m visitors who drink more than 6.9m litres of beautiful Bavarian beer. They also eat a lot of pretzels and chickens too. It's a right laugh.

Rather than give them another toaster or a Soda Stream, British brewers have traditionally brewed a commemorative beer every time there's a Royal Wedding.

More than 70 small and regional breweries celebrated the marriage of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer in 1981 with a bespoke bottled beer, thus exposing the sheer rubbishness of a commemorative tea towel. More than twenty years later, when Charlie married Camilla, enthusiasm among the nation's ale-makers had, for some reason, waned a little.

Here are some top beers with which to toast the bride and groom. But, remember, these beers are best served in flutes or wine glasses.

Honey Beer
Champagne Beer
Fruit Beer
Royal Beer

Tap up the traditional angle with honey beers, they're the...wait for it... bees knees. Named after the boogie a bee does to alert its hive to a rich source of nectar, Waggle Dance from Wells & Young's is a glorious golden gulp brewed using South American honey and British hops. Fuller's Honey Dew from West London, is the UK's leading organic ale and it is superb, especially served over ice with a wedge of lime. Belgian beer lovers, meanwhile, could put Barbar behind the bar. Copper coloured with a flame-like flicker, this brawny Belgian beer brings strength (8% abv), balanced sweetness and a fantastic floral aroma to the wedding party. It's also got a cool picture of a barbarian on the bottle. For the full honey beer experience, the bride can wash her hair with honey beer shampoo!

Proper posh, rightly pricey and often referred to as 'bière de brut', Champagne beers are the natural choice for a wedding. In the last few years, brewers have worked out how to tame the notoriously disobedient champagne yeast and have begun adopting techniques used by fancy French Champagne houses such as lengthy maturation, 'remuage' and 'dégorgement'.

DeuS Les Brut des Flandres is the nearest beer gets to Champagne. It looks like Champagne – Dom Perignon style bottle, cork, foil and wire – and it's made like Champagne. Fermented in Belgium by the Bosteels Brewery, it is trundled over to the Champagne region of France, where it is laid down in cellars for 12 months of indulgent maturation. Bottled and brewed with similar pomp and ceremony is Malheur Bière Brut, lemon coloured feast of fruit, crisp bitterness and, at 11% ABV, wine-like strength.

Kasteel Cru, a delicate, pale straw champagne beer from Northern France is deliciously delicate and dry, furnishing a flute with a firm and fluffy white head. Kasteel Cru Rosé, meanwhile, is crafted with the addition of elderberry and makes for an excellent aperitif option.

Not content with looking fairly funky in a flute, fruit beers are deadly with desserts and awesome as a dry aperitif (Kir Royale is SO last season). Brewers are forever flinging fruit into their beers, be it mango, raspberry, apricot, peach or passion fruit. But cherry lambic beers, brewed in Belgium and commonly known as 'kriek beer', are particularly wonderful as a wedding beer.

Tart with bone-dry champagne-like acidity and hints of almond, the likes of Drie Fonteinen Oude Kriek; De Cam Oude Kriek; Mort Subite Oude Kriek and Oude Kriek Boon are incredible served as a pre-dinner drink alongside foie gras and duck canapes. Or, alternatively, with dark chocolate as an after-dinner option.

c AD 43: Cunobelinus (Cymbeline), the Celtic king of much of south-east England pre the Roman invasion of AD43, loved his beer so much he had an ear of barley stamped on his gold coins.

c AD 950: Hywel Dda ("The good"), the Welsh king who died around AD950, decreed that the tribute paid by a farmer to the king should include "two vats of braggot" (honey ale), each vat "nine fistlengths in diagonal length", and if braggot was not available, four vats of cwrw, ordinary Welsh ale.

c 1157: When Henry II sent his Chancellor, Thomas a Becket, to France in 1157 to demand the French king's daughter as a bride for the English king's son, Thomas took with him 250 footmen singing anthems in English; 28 packhorses bearing gold and silver plate; and two chariots "laden solely with iron-bound barrels of ale, decocted from choice, fat grain, as a gift for the French, who wondered at such an invention, 'a drink most wholesome, clear of all dregs, rivalling wine in colour and surpassing it in flavour".

c 1509: Henry VIII (ruled 1509-1547) had two personal brewers, one for ale (the older English drink, in his time still brewed without hops) and one for beer, the hopped drink that had arrived from the Continent around 1400. Hampton Court Palace, Henry's main residence, consumed 600,000 gallons of ale and beer a year, more than 13,000 pints a day. Even the lowest officer of the household received four pints every evening; dukes were to get two gallons a day (presumably not all for themselves).

Henry VIII's father, Henry VII, had built a royal brewery in Portsmouth to supply the navy with beer on board ships, and by the time of Henry VIII's daughter, Elizabeth I, there were royal military and naval breweries in operation at Tower Hill and in Dover as well.

c 1666: The royal household continued to have its own brewer: in the time of Charles II in 1666 the King's brewer was a man called Josiah Child, whose brewery alongside the Anchor pub by the Thames in Southwark would eventually, under two Quaker families called Barclay and Perkins, develop into one of the biggest breweries in the world in the 19th century. Barclay Perkins exported a very strong stout to the court of the Empress Catherine II of Russia in St Petersburg, which became known as Imperial Russian Stout.

c 1902: Edward VII visited the Bass brewery in Burton upon Trent, and while there ceremonially started the brewing process for a beer that was subsequently bottled as "King's Ale". Bottles of King's Ale still exist today, and generally prove to be perfectly drinkable, despite being more than a century old.

c 1929: Edward VII's grandson, then Prince of Wales and later to be Edward VIII, also visited the Bass brewery, and the brew he started was known as Prince's Ale.

c 1977: Although brewers made special bottled beers for several royal occasions in the 20th century, including the marriage of the then Princess Elizabeth to Prince Philip in 1947, the first big boom in commemorative beers was at the time of the Queen's silver jubilee in 1977, with more than 70 different silver jubilee brews available.

c 1981: Four years later, when Prince Charles married Princess Diana, almost 147 different Royal Wedding ales were produced by Britain's brewers.

Search results