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Bitter
The family of beers known as “bitters” is nothing more than a type of pale ale, hardly overwhelming in its bitterness. Bitters are, at their simplest, definitive session beers.
The name arose as a way to diferentiate them from their often sweet and under-hopped contemporaries. The lineage is the same as pale ale, its modern representatives easily distinguished from the über-hopped, aromatic pale ales and IPAs. Best from a cask, but no stranger to bottles, bitter is the most common real ale in its homeland of England.
History
Pale ale was a term used for beers made from malt dried with coke. Coke had been first used for roasting malt in 1642, but it wasn’t until around 1703 that the term pale ale was first used. By 1784 adverts were appearing in the Calcutta Gazette for “light and excellent” pale ale. By 1830 onward the expressions bitter and pale ale were synonymous. Breweries would tend to designate beers as pale ale, though customers would commonly refer to the same beers as bitter.
It is thought that customers used the term bitter to differentiate these pale ales from other less noticeably hopped beers such as porter and mild. By the mid to late 20th century, while brewers were still labeling bottled beers as pale ale, they had begun identifying cask beers as bitter. While the two terms are still used interchangeably in the UK, the preference is for the term bitter to be used for both bottled and cask beer, and use of the term pale ale has declined, except in the case of India pale ale.
How to make some yourself
Brewing your own bitter at home is easy and rewarding when you use one of the many home brewing kits on the market. In general you’re just adding yeast to a sugar rich solution of malted barley in a brewing bin and then leaving it for 5-7 days in a warm place to ferment. Yum!