Professor Phil Withington and Dr Nick Groat reflect on the last 60 years in the history of alcohol. They discuss technical innovation, life-style choices, ‘healthy’ drinking and the Craft Alcohol Movement and wonder whether we're living through a new moment when alcohol changed the world.

Guests:

Cynthia King and her husband John Cherry run Locksley Distilling, a small-batch distillery in Sheffield. Among many initiatives, they’ve created a Co-Lab range of spirits, working in collaboration with select businesses and organisations such as historic properties and top restaurants. They’ve recently launched two new Co-Labs Chocolate Chilli Rum and Bloody Mary Vodka

Pete Brown is an author, journalist and broadcaster specialising in food and drink. He’s the Sunday Times Magazine’s weekly beer columnist and has published numerous books including:

• Clubland: How the Working Men’s Club Shaped Britain
• Craft – An Argument: Why the term Craft Beer is completely undefinable, hopelessly misunderstood and absolutely essential

Prof Stephen Charters is Professor of Wine Marketing and a researcher at Burgundy School of Business in Dijon. He is responsible for developing teaching and research programmes focusing on all aspects of the culture, history and business of wine. His research interests are in consumer behaviour, wine and place (including terroir, wine tourism, and territorial wine management) and cultures of consumption and production. He is currently involved in a project aiming to deepen our understanding of the Pinot Noir grape worldwide.

Prof Alex Mold is Professor of Public Health History and Co-Head of the Doctoral College at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Her research interests include the changing nature of public health over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the history of substance abuse, especially illegal drugs and alcohol, and health education messaging around alcohol.

Her publications include:

• Alcohol, health education and changing notions of risk in Britain, 1980-1990

Full transcript available here.

Professor Phil Withington hears how the mass-production of beer and spirits was closely connected to industrialisation and the rise of big business, popular political movements like Temperance, and the emergence of what is sometimes called the 'bio-state'.

Guests:

Pete Brown is an author, journalist and broadcaster specialising in food and drink. He’s the Sunday Times Magazine’s weekly beer columnist and has published numerous books including:

• Clubland: How the Working Men’s Club Shaped Britain
• Craft - An Argument: Why the term Craft Beer is completely undefinable, hopelessly misunderstood and absolutely essential

Prof Virginia Berridge is Professor of History and Health Policy and former Director of the Centre for History in Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, the Royal Historical Society, the Faculty of Public Health and of the Royal College of Physicians. She is deputy chair of the London Drugs Commission reporting to the Mayor.

Her books include:

• Demons: Our changing attitudes to alcohol tobacco and drugs
• Public Health: A Very Short Introduction
• E-Cigarettes and the Comparative Politics of Harm Reduction

Pete Evans is the Archives and Heritage Manager at Sheffield City Council.

Dr David Beckingham is Associate Professor in Cultural and Historical Geography at the University of Nottingham. He has published widely on aspects of alcohol regulation and temperance, most recently in the journals Rural History and Journal of Historical Geography.

Full transcript available here.

Professor Phil Withington learns how alcohol in general and spirits in particular shaped European encounters with the peoples of Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas. He also learns how elite views of indigenous drinking were not so very different to caricatures of working-class consumption closer to home.

Guests:

Dr Lila O’Leary is a historian of race, slavery and commodification in the early modern Atlantic, and a research fellow at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge. She is also the co-founder and an editorial board member for the online magazine Insurrect!

Recent articles include:

• Alcohol Diplomacy, Gender and Power in the Late Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast Slaving Complex in Past & Present.

Dr Deborah Toner is an Associate Professor of Modern History at the University of Leicester, whose research interests include the social, cultural and literary history of alcohol and drinking places in Mexico. She is co-convenor of the Drinking Studies Network, an interdisciplinary research group that brings together scholars who work on any aspect of drink and drinking culture in any society and in any time period.

Publications include:

• Alcohol and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Mexico

Dr Angela McShane is Honorary Reader in History at the University of Warwick. She has recently worked collaboratively on a book and website and with Christopher Marsh and Andy Watt on 100 Ballads.

Currently she is completing a monograph on the history of the ballad trade and its politics.

Full transcript available here.