It’s IPA season. The time of year when the original India Pale Ales arrived at docks in India to refresh parched English throats.

Today, I’d like to introduce you to one of the giants in the history of the style. Seventy years after the first IPA appeared on the scene, Samuel Allsopp’s 1823 version would come to dominate the British export market. His brewery would rise with the fortunes of Empire to become synonymous with British pride. We’ll get into that story next week. For now, let’s stretch our imaginations and consider what was it like to be a British expat experiencing this beer for the first time.

This week’s Time Machine transports you back two hundred years to explore why IPA became the flavour of the British experience in India.

A steward walks the edge of a walled garden with a list in his hand. Sage. Mint. Coriander. Caraway. He checks each bed against the king’s instructions, then heads to the brewhouse to make sure a skilled brewer is at work. The king isn’t here, and may not come all year. But the king’s court and his armies have to eat and drink, so everything must be ready all the same.

There is one plant missing from the list: hops.

Today we think of hops as a fundamental part of beer. Popular culture celebrates the Reinheitsgebot, known today as the Bavarian Purity Law of 1516 decreeing that beer be made only from barley, hops and water (people did not yet count yeast as an ingredient). But for most of history hops were absent from brew kettles. During the early Middle Ages they grew on some monasteries destined for use as medicine, rope, or die. So how did a bitter climbing vine go from the margins of the medieval estate to the centre of European brewing? And what did the first hopped beers taste like?

This week’s story begins with a mother’s prayer, passes through the court of Charlemagne, and ends in a merchant’s cargo hold. It’s context for our latest brew Cervesia, a beer re-created from the early 9th Century and an example of one of the earliest hopped beers.

A grassy plain drops sharply into the sea. It’s surrounded by mountains. There’s a waterfall on one side feeding a small retention pond and a large turf-roofed house surrounded by small outbuildings nearby. A large boat has just landed, with a dragon head prow. Cargo is being unloaded. Treasure is being unloaded. Even wine is being carried up the bank.

Women are preparing a meal. One dips her wrist into a barrel of sweet liquid. Finding it blood-warm she lifts a set of interlocking carved rings off a shelf. They’re covered in thin white flakes, caught in the rough surface grooves. She dips it into the liquid and stirs. Soon the wort will begin to ferment. It won’t be long until the next batch of ale is ready.

For millennia, European women were brewers and brewing happened at home. By the high Middle Ages men had largely taken over as brewing became a profession, taxed and regulated like it is today.

What was beer like before it shifted from a household chore to an industry? Let’s find out with a journey to medieval Norway, when people longed for ales, like the ones mum used to make.

The earth sways as the northern hemisphere tilts back from the sun following the autumnal equinox. Days get shorter. The air gets colder. It’s time to come in off the patio and relax in the warm embrace of a cozy pub.

Once inside, surrounded by friends, we’ll raise our glasses and say Cheers! in an invocation of friendship and well-wishes. But why do we do this?

This week’s Time Machine explores the origins of the word cheers as we use it today.

The craft beer world has in recent years began to produce in a style called Mexican Lager, but that’s more marketing than history. Craft “Mexican lager” is pale lager, often flavoured with something like lime, and riffs off Corona (or for those who have spent time in the USA, possibly also Tecate). But these pale lagers aren’t Mexican styles, they’re European styles brewed in Mexico.

In this week’s Time Machine we explore the roots of contemporary Mexican brewing, and it starts in Germany during the 1830s.

The timber-framed buildings are pressed so tightly together that when the floorboards creek underfoot the neighbours hear it. Beautiful cross-hatched Bavarian facades decorate the houses starting just above the worn cobble streets before zig-zagging all the way up to the wooden shingled roofs. It’s a beautiful summer day. Hot, dry, with just enough breeze to take the edge off.

Around a corner the shops share the same architecture. A fire is raging beneath a giant copper kettle in one of the units. Dried wood cracks in the heat, bang!, firing a red-hot cinder across the room.

This is a bad idea. Or so thought Duke Albrecht V, when he banned brewing in Bavaria between April 23 (St. George’s Day) and September 29 (St. Michael’s Day).

Five months is a long time without beer.

The world’s largest beer festival starts on September 19. Each year, six to seven million revellers enter Oktoberfest’s giant tents.

Oktoberfest serves Märzen/Festbier in 1 litre steins at long tables beneath thick wooden beams decorated with hops and Bavarian bunting. But it wasn’t always that way. The first Oktoberfest wasn’t a beer festival at all. It was a wedding.

Well, that’s an over-simplification. Since the beginning, Oktoberfest has been a cultural event. It weaves history, nation-building, and the human need for conviviality and celebration into the background of a turbulent and ever-changing world.

In this week’s Time Machine, we’re going back about ten years, to a time when hops looked like the new cash crop and craft beer was not only the hottest trend in drinks, but a cultural phenomenon.

Independent hop yards popped up across North America in the mid-2010s, riding a wave of demand. But consumer tastes changed and agriculture struggled to keep up.

This is a story about agricultural entrepreneurs fighting for survival in a past-paced 21st century economy.

When was the last time you got together with friends?

It can seem that at times we live private, parallel lives with our friends. We know they’re out there, but we don’t often see them.

Creating a third place where people can connect is the driving idea behind Good Cheer. And it’s nothing new. People have always created communal places to connect with one another and, as we’ll see in today’s Time Machine, sometimes those places haven't just sustained morale. They have sustained life itself…

It began with twelve monks, two horses, and a patch of soggy forest nobody wanted.

It became one of the most remarkable breweries in the world.

The beer they make is outstanding, but that’s perhaps the least impressive part of the story. This brewery was founded in a monastery and run by monks with the goal of improving life in the surrounding region.

But the Nazis almost destroyed it. And yet it only got better.