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.

Professor Phil Withington returns to medieval Europe to find out about the impact of hops on commercial brewing, the European beer trade, the drinking habits of ordinary people.

Guests:

Prof Richard Unger is Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at the University of British Columbia and a specialist in European maritime history in the medieval period.

His books include:

• A History of Brewing in Holland, 900 – 1900
• Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

Dr Mark Hailwood is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Bristol. He is a social historian of England in the period c. 1500 to 1750 with a particular interest in the relationship between historical change and the everyday lives of ordinary men and women.

He is currently working on a book and podcast series on "Everyday Life in the Seventeenth-Century English Village" focusing on his hometown of Portishead in Somerset.

You can learn more here.

Dr Susan Flavin is an Associate Professor of History at Trinity College, Dublin and Principle Investigator for the ERC funded project FOODCULT. Her work is grounded in interdisciplinary approaches to history and she teaches on topics such as the social and cultural history of food and drink, and gender and domesticity in Early Modern Britain and Ireland.

The FoodCult project to recreate historical beer resulted in an exhibition and case study in The Historical Journal.

This episode features two ballads from Christopher Marsh and Angela McShane, 100 Ballads

Copyright details below - CC BY-NC-SA 4.0:

Ballad no. 65 - Christopher Marsh and Angela McShane, ballad no. 65, A pleasant new Ballad to sing both Even and Morne/ Of the bloody murther of Sir John Barley-corne [Pepys 1.426-27]. Performers Giles Lewin and Ian Giles.

Ballad no. 6 - Christopher Marsh and Angela McShane, ballad no. 6, A most sweet Song of an English Merchant/ borne at Chichester [Roxburghe 1.104-05]. Performers Andy Watts, Giles Lewin, Steno Vitale and John Kirkpatrick.

Full transcript available here.

Dr Nick Groat hears how wine was central in the everyday lives of Greeks and Romans and learns how it transformed from being the common currency of the Mediterranean world to one of the drivers of Roman imperialism.

Guests:

Dr Jane Rempel is an Assistant Professor of Classics at Cambridge University and a Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge. She trained as a Classical Archaeologist and her research interests focus on Greek archaeology, specifically issues surrounding colonisation and social interaction at the margins of the ancient Greek world. The Black Sea region is a major focus of her research and teaching.

Prof Mary Beard is a Classicist specialising in Ancient Rome and Classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement. She’s a Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge. She’s the author of numerous books on society and culture in the ancient world and a regular contributor to radio, television and podcasts.

Dr Emlyn Dodd is Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London, and was Assistant Director at the British School at Rome from 2021–23. He has published extensively on ancient wine production in Greek and Roman antiquity, with his research featured regularly in public media, and has authored or co-edited the books:

• Roman and Late Antique wine production in the eastern Mediterranean
• Methods in ancient wine archaeology: scientific approaches in Roman contexts
• Vine-growing and winemaking in the Roman world

Full transcript available ⁠here.⁠

When and why did humans start consuming drinking alcohol?

With the help of archaeologists and archaeobotanists, Dr Nick Groat finds out when humans first started experimenting with alcoholic substances and why they might have done so.

Guests:

Prof Martin Jones⁠ is a Professor of Archaeological Science at the University of Cambridge. He works on archaeobotany and archaeogenetics, in the context of the broader archaeology of food. His current research interests include the spread of farming across Asia, currently in the context of the BUCKBEE project, and recently in the context of the Domestication of Europe project and the FOGLIP project and food sharing in the Upper Palaeolithic, currently in the context of the Moravian Gate project

Prof Li Liu⁠ is the Sir Robert Ho Tung Professor in Chinese Archaeology at the Stanford Archaeology Center, Stanford University. Her research interests include archaeology of early China (Neolithic and Bronze Age), domestication of plants and animals in China and the development of complex societies and state formation.

Recent publications:

• Identification of 10,000-year-old rice beer at Shangshan in the Lower Yangzi River valley of China
• Beyond subsistence: Evidence for red rice beer in 8000-year old Neolithic burials, north China

Dr Catherine Longford⁠ is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Biosciences at the University of Sheffield. She specialises in Near Eastern archaeology and ancient agriculture, in particular the Bronze Age Kura-Araxes culture, and agriculture in Neolithic Europe. She has been involved as an archaeobotanist in field projects in Turkey, Georgia, Israel, Bulgaria and the UK at sites dating from the Neolithic to Medieval period.

Prof Tania Valamoti is a Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece. Her research interests focus on human-plant interactions, anthropogenic landscape and vegetation change and ancient food. She is director of the Departmental lab, LIRA, as well as the PlantCult laboratory at CIRI at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

Recent Publications Include:

• Cooking with Plants in Ancient Europe and Beyond; Interdisciplinary approaches to the archaeology of plant foods.

Full transcript available ⁠here.⁠

Join Professor Phil Withington and Dr Nick Groat as they explore some of the 'moments' when alcohol shaped the world.

Across six episodes, Phil and Nick take you from 80,000 years BCE to the present day, examining how one of the world’s most popular intoxicants has exerted such a profound and powerful influence on human societies.

Full transcript available here.