20 MR ROBERT C. MACLAGAN ON 



carried out, and a cask of heather ale of a highly satisfactory appearance was 

 prepared and ready for bottling. Then the brewery unfortunately took fire, 

 and afterwards all that was found of the heather beer that could be recognised 

 were two hoops of the barrel and some charred staves. It had been fined and 

 stacked with some special samples, of which as little remained. As the question 

 was not one of flavouring malt, but of fermenting heather itself, and it being 

 clearly proved that this was impossible, it was unnecessary to make further experi- 

 ments. Nor has the result of our trials led Mr Melvin to introduce to his consumers 

 heather ale. 



The truth is that the heather harvest is troublesome and not productive. To 

 gather a pint of the flower, carefully stripped from the stalk, takes about one hour 

 of diligent work. One of my gatherers was of opinion that the man who suffered 

 martyrdom rather than tell the secret of how the heather ale was made deserved 

 a monument by a, grateful posterity. If the few bottles of beer we had got caused 

 so much labour and expense, to what would it have been possible to compare the 

 slavery of those unfortunate wives from whom their lords demanded it in bucketsful ? 



The whole story of heather beer has, I should fancy, arisen from a pre- 

 conception as to the presence of honey in the heather flowers as we know it 

 in the comb. The experiments so far go to prove that honey as such does not 

 exist in the flower, and that bees are something more than mere gatherers so far 

 as honey is concerned ; but if the heather flower is extracted with ether the residuum 

 on evaporation is ordinary beeswax, showing that this product exists already before 

 gathering. 



How misconceptions arise was proved by one who, seeing the heather being gathered 

 and asking what it was for, said, " I will tell you who made heather ale not long ago : 

 Mrs J. of E." " Who told you ? " " Dr J., her son, was bad with asthma, and it is used 

 as a cure for that." 



As Dr J. was a professional brother, I took the liberty of writing to try to get at 

 the bottom of the matter, and in a few words it turned out that from a paragraph in a 

 paper, which stated that heather tea was a cure for asthma, A. had been dosed with it 

 even by his own account with but little perceptible benefit. A. says that whether it 

 would make beer or not he does not know, but that it was bitter enough to act, if it 

 acted at all, as a tonic. 



It was suggested that, by oxidation or other changes induced after plucking, the 

 fermentable honey in the heather flowers might have altered. To see if this 

 could possibly be the case, an attempt was made to ferment a decoction made of 

 heather flowers gathered within thirty-six hours. There was no more evidence of fer- 

 mentation under these circumstances than when the flowers had been kept for some time. 



Further, to exclude any source of error in a statement that heather will not make 

 ale in any way, experiments were made with a solution of honey, gravity by saccharo- 

 meter 1056, to try if old blooms, or perfectly fresh, would act as a ferment in what 



