Burton vs. Pilsen

Burton vs Pilsen - Why Your Imported Playbook Tastes Like Pond WaterThere is a version of business history in which two towns in the nineteenth century held a competition to see who could brew the better beer, and Burton upon Trent won, and then Pilsen won, and the lesson is that you should try harder. That version is wrong in an interesting way. Burton and Pilsen did not brew different beers because one of them was cleverer. They brewed different beers because they were standing on different rocks. And the rock, it turns out, was not a detail. The rock was the recipe. Two towns, one impossible swapBurton sits on Triassic sandstone shot through with gypsum. Its well water arrives loaded with calcium sulphate at concentrations that would make a modern water treatment engineer file a report - historically something in the range of six to eight hundred parts per million of sulphate, with calcium in the high two hundreds. Drink it and you notice. Brew with it and something strange and…