Rogue Brutal Bitter

Beer-a-Day #364

An Imperial bitter with exotic traditional floor malts, citrusy, hoppy flavor, stupendous hop aroma.

I don’t think this is a commentary on the year just ending, but Freud would probably have something to say about it.

Orangey with a chill haze. Big citrusy hops aroma. Fairly big hops, but lighter than something that proclaims itself as an “Imperial” anything. It’s good.

Rogue Brutal Bitter

Origins of the word “beer”

Our friend Zythophile is at it again. This time with the first part of an article that explores the origins of the word “beer” with explorations of its equivalent in other languages. Etymology fascinates me; I think maybe I should have been a linguist.

Here’s an excerpt:

In Britain, as on the continent, that change from m to v meant that the old Brythonic (British Celtic) word for “beer”, *korm, altered its form, becoming *cwrf (pronounced “coorv”) in old Welsh, then cwrwf, before losing the f to become modern Welsh cwrw, pronounced “cooroo”. (Welsh being what is known technically as a “mutating” language, incidentally, certain initial consonants change when nouns are used with prepositions, and that includes hard “c”, which becomes hard “g”: I am grateful to a young woman called Kat for imparting the information that the essential order at the bar in grammatically correct Welsh would be “Dau peint o gwrw ac baced crisps, plis.” This is particularly important in the Lleyn peninsula, where you wouldn’t want the locals to think you were from Swansea.

Zythophile: Words for beer

He promises to actually get to the word “beer”, and “ale” as well, in a future article.