Heather Ale: The Picts' Lost Secret and Its Revival

Each major claim carries one of three labels. established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

There is no direct evidence of a Pictish heather ale recipe. Archaeological finds suggest heather was used in prehistoric drinks, but whether those drinks were ale, mead or something else is uncertain.

The legend's written trail is clearer than its history. The folklorist F. Marian McNeill, in The Scots Kitchen (1929; second edition 1963), quotes Thomas Pennant's account of Islay, which in turn cites Hector Boece for the Pictish secret. Her recipe and her report of cottage practice are good evidence for later folk brewing, not for the Picts.

A brew of heather

established Heather ale is a beer in which heather flowers, gathered in late summer, provide flavour and aroma, often with bog myrtle and other herbs. Before hops became the standard bittering agent in Britain from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, many ales were flavoured with herbal mixtures.

established Bog myrtle. The herb most often paired with heather is bog myrtle, also called sweet gale (Myrica gale), a shrub of boggy ground across the cooler parts of the northern hemisphere and unrelated to true myrtle. The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014) notes that its leaves and small winged fruits carry an aromatic wax that smells rather like bay, and that its most general use in Europe was in "gale beer", where the leaves took the place of hops. The wax was also made into scented candles, giving the plant another name, candleberry. Meadowsweet, another wild herb of damp places, was used in the same way to flavour drinks. A heather ale with bog myrtle therefore belongs to a wider northern European tradition of herb beers, not to a uniquely Pictish one.

established Ale and bread. The Companion stresses that the early history of brewing is bound up with bread-making, since both were early ways of using cereals, and that ale supplied the barm, or yeast, used to raise loaves. McNeill's cottage recipe, fermented with barm, sits in that household world, where the same yeast served the brewing tub and the baking.

The Picts' secret

traditional A legend says the Picts brewed a wonderful heather ale, whose recipe they kept secret. When they were conquered, the last two Picts, a father and son, were ordered to reveal it. The father asked that his son be killed first so that he would not betray the secret, then threw himself from a cliff, taking it with him. Stevenson retold the story in his ballad "Heather Ale" (1890), set in Galloway.

established The story is older than Stevenson. Pennant, as quoted by McNeill, wrote that heather ale "was first used among the Picts, but when they were extirpated by the Scots, the secret of preparing it perished with them", and gave Hector Boece as his authority. Boece's Scotorum Historia (1527) is notoriously unreliable, so the trail ends in a sixteenth-century chronicler, not a Pictish record. McNeill adds a sober footnote: the extermination of the Picts "has no historical evidence, though there may have been a local massacre". The Picts were absorbed into the kingdom of Alba, not wiped out.

A cottage brew

established Far from being lost, heather ale was brewed in Scotland in recent centuries. On Islay in the eighteenth century, Pennant reported, ale was "frequently made of the young tops of heath", mixed with about a third part malt and a few hops. McNeill's recipe, taken "from an old coverless book of cottage cookery", has a large pot of heather cropped in full bloom boiled for an hour, the liquor then boiled again with ground ginger, hops and golden syrup, cooled and fermented with barm, and bottled after a day; it was ready in two or three days. It was a light, quick household drink rather than a strong ale, closer to the ginger beers and treacle ales she prints beside it. Notably, both of these Scottish versions use hops as well as heather, so the idea that heather ale was by definition hop-free belongs to the modern revival and to the gruit tradition, not to recorded Scottish practice.

Archaeology

shared Archaeologists have found residues in prehistoric pottery that contain heather pollen, suggesting drinks flavoured or sweetened with heather or heather honey. A find on the island of Rùm has been interpreted as evidence of a fermented heather drink thousands of years old. Experts disagree on whether such drinks were ale, mead or something else.

Fraoch

established Bruce Williams, who ran a home-brew shop in Glasgow, began brewing heather ale commercially in the early 1990s, calling it Fraoch, the Gaelic for heather. The company says it was inspired by a traditional recipe. Williams Bros, now based in Alloa, continues to brew it alongside other historical ales.

• Heather ale uses heather flowers instead of hops.
• Stevenson's ballad tells of the last Picts' secret.
• Heather pollen has been found in prehistoric pottery.
• Fraoch is Gaelic for heather.
• Williams Bros brew heather ale in Alloa.
• Eighteenth-century Islay heather ale contained malt and hops as well as heather.
• The Pictish-secret legend can be traced back to Hector Boece in 1527.
• Bog myrtle, often brewed with heather, was used across Europe for "gale beer" in place of hops.

• Myth: The Picts brewed a heather ale whose secret died with them. There is no direct evidence of a Pictish recipe. The story can be traced to Hector Boece's unreliable Scotorum Historia (1527), not to any Pictish record.
• Myth: The Picts were exterminated. McNeill notes the idea "has no historical evidence, though there may have been a local massacre". The Picts were absorbed into the kingdom of Alba.
• Disputed: prehistoric heather drinks were ale. Residues containing heather pollen, including a find on Rùm, suggest drinks flavoured or sweetened with heather. Experts disagree on whether they were ale, mead or something else.
• Myth: Heather ale was lost until the 1990s revival. Pennant found it made on Islay in 1772, and McNeill printed a cottage recipe in 1929.
• Myth: Traditional Scottish heather ale had no hops. Pennant's Islay ale and McNeill's cottage recipe both use hops as well as heather. The hop-free idea belongs to the modern revival and the gruit tradition.