The History of Beer – Part 2 – Commercial Brewing

The third part in an exclusive series of articles about the history of beer by one of the world's best beer writers

For most of our history, beer has been drunk on the same premises it was made: in homes, monasteries, inns, taverns and alehouses.

But naturally, some people are better at making beer than others, and from the Middle Ages onwards some brewers had outstanding reputations for their art. The problem is, when we say beer doesn’t travel well, until relatively recently that was true in ways we can barely imagine now. Beer is heavy, and when the roads were deep mud for nine months of the year, drinking local was the only option. The Industrial Revolution changed this, along with almost every aspect of beer and brewing.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, works were undertaken to make rivers navigable for transport. In the 18th century, this was followed up by the creation of the world’s first national canal network. Suddenly, people could move stuff around, and make things on a bigger scale.

Like everything else, brewing benefited from economies of scale. ‘Common brewers’ emerged when pubs expanded and started selling beer to their neighbours, or even further afield. (There are reports in the East India Company’s records of Burton ale being consumed a little too heartily in Madras in 1717.)

With brewing becoming a full-time rather than occasional activity, yeast could be pitched from one brew to the next. Although brewers had no idea what was happening with the foamy stuff, re-pitching it kept the yeast healthy, and it evolved to suit the environment in the specific brewery where it was kept. A brewer’s beers would have become more consistent at this point.

This is when named breweries emerged. You often see claims on beer labels such as ‘Brewed since 1366’. But when you explore them, it turns out that the date refers to the earliest evidence of brewing on that site, or even in that town, not the foundation of the actual brewery. Truman’s began brewing in 1666, Shepherd Neame in 1698, Whitbread in 1742, and then they start coming thick and fast, with Worthington in 1745 and both Bass and Hall & Woodhouse in 1777 being among the names we still recognise today.

That these breweries survived when thousands of other common brewers didn’t is in large part due to their early adoption of the technologies thrown up by the Industrial Revolution. Steam power allowed brewing vessels to be built bigger than ever before. The microscope and the hydrometer allowed brewers to control and analyse the brew. What had long been considered an art slowly became a science, though not without its hiccups. Horace Tabberer Brown, a brilliant scientific brewer at Worthington in Burton-upon-Trent, remembered strong resistance to the idea of setting up a laboratory in the brewery:

I soon found out that the real objection on the part of my chief was due to a fear that the display of any chemical apparatus might suggest to customers who went round the brewery the horrible suspicion that the beer was being ‘doctored.’

The Industrial Revolution had profound effects on the demand for beer too. For centuries, most of the population had lived a rural lifestyle, working on farmland. The enclosures displaced huge numbers, who found themselves drawn to cities where the men were put to work in factories, mines and mills. Before this point, whole families had lived and worked together. But the factory system’s need for heavy manual labour created a large, concentrated male work force, with women and children doing separate jobs or keeping the home. In jobs such as mining or glass blowing, large quantities of liquid were needed at the end of the day to replenish what was lost in sweat. Pubs became places for men – just men – to indulge in heavy drinking. Beer itself, and the breweries that made it, took on a distinctly urban character, in contrast to the cider that was still drunk in farming country.

The improving science allowed the consistency that saw particular styles begin to develop. And the concentrated demand favoured brewers who could brew those styles consistently and at scale.

The first beer of the Industrial Revolution was porter. There are many myths and suppositions about its origins, but nothing can be known for sure. This is because beer styles are invariably evolved rather than invented. Beers were often stored and aged for up to a year before being drunk. Today, Belgian gueuze beers are a blend of sharp, fresh young beers and more mellow, complex aged beers. Some British ales used to be made in a similar fashion (and very probably had a similarly sour edge to their character as a result). One rumour is that porter was the result of a brewer trying to replicate the taste of old and new beer mixed together in one brew. Whatever the truth of it, porter emerged in the first half of the 18th century and quickly became the drink of choice of London’s working classes (the term ‘porter’ was used to describe a much wider selection of jobs than we think of today.)

And porter really benefited from being brewed on a larger scale, to the point where most pubs could buy beer cheaper from a big brewer than they could brew it themselves. London was the centre of porter brewing, and its brewers began building bigger and bigger vats to store it in. A fashion emerged for celebrating the completion of new porter vats – or tuns – by having dinner inside them before they were filled with beer, and these dinners grew to seat over 200 people.

This fashion was curtailed by the Meux brewery disaster of 1814, when a colossal porter tun holding over a million pints of 10-month old porter exploded, crushing a second vat holding an additional 700,000 pints, and caused a tidal wave of beer to cascade through some of the poorest parts of London, killing eight people.

Aftermath of the Meux brewery disaster

But porter remained the drink of Georgian and Victorian England, becoming a symbol of Britishness, with one foreign visitor declaring it ‘the universal cordial of the populace’. Roast beef and porter were the defining features of an Englishness that was starting to assert itself at the head of a powerful empire, superior to the over-fussy wines and cuisine of the French. The Prince Regent, later George IV, went so far as to boast that ‘beer and beer have made us what we are’.

Porter’s challenger to the title of the most important beer of the era was another gradual evolution. ‘India Pale Ale’ was first mentioned in the British press in advertisements in the 1820s, appealing to civil servants who had made their fortunes in India, returned home, and missed the flavours of the sub-continent. By this point, pale ale had been exported to India for at least forty years, probably longer. It most likely evolved from October ales, brewed strong to be kept and aged.

Even when IPA was drunk domestically, it was aged in cellars for a year, just like porter. But the six-month sea journey seems to have accelerated and altered the maturation process so the beer arrived in India perfectly ‘ripe’. The flavours suited the climate and the cuisine, and while porter was still drunk at least as widely at home and abroad, IPA was the more celebrated beer. Bass became the world’s first global brand, recognised on every continent by its red triangle, Britain’s first ever registered trademark.

IPA’s growth at home was influenced by the arrival of affordable glassware. It was pale and sparkling rather than dark and murky, and pale ale became the fashionable drink of the empire.

But its success was assured by that other great engine of the Industrial Revolution: the arrival of the railways. Pale ales brewed in Burton were simply better than those brewed anywhere else. For a long time, no one could figure out why, and then the town’s brewing scientists worked out that it was the composition of the water. London brewers who wanted to brew pale ale as well as porter had to open up satellite breweries in Burton if they wanted to compete. The railways allowed this little landlocked town to be linked to the ports of London and Liverpool, and, from there, the world. When St Pancras station was built in London in the 1860s at the terminus of the Midland Railway, the station undercroft (now the Eurostar terminal) was specially designed to hold thousands of hogsheads of Burton ale. Beer had become big business, and the world’s first industrialised nation had transformed its scale, production and flavour. London had given birth to the two greatest beer styles.

But Britain’s supremacy was already under threat. As we’ll see in the final part of this series, in a few short decades, IPA and porter would be swept aside by another beer flood: the rise of Pilsner lager.

• Pete Brown’s new book Miracle Brew: Hops, Barley, Water, Yeast and the Nature of Beer, is out now.

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HISTORICAL TIMELINE

Middle Ages: Individuals begin to establish reputations as good brewers.

16-17th centuries: Rivers were made navigable, allowing beer to be transported relatively quickly, which allowed brewers to export.

18th century: The world’s first canal network was established allowing brewers to efficiently transport beer around the country.

17-19th centuries: Beer, now made by industrial brewers, was being transported around the world, in particular to the colonies of India.

1666: Truman’s begins brewing Shepherd Neame in 1698, Whitbread in 1742 and Worthington in 1745.

18th century: Steam power allowed brewing vessels to be built bigger than ever before.

1760-1840: Industrial Revolution had profound effects on the demand for beer too.

18th century: Porter emerged in the first half of the 18th century and became the drink of London’s working classes’.

1814: A colossal porter tun holding over a million pints of 10-month old porter exploded. Eight people drowned.

19th century: Porter remained a drink of early Victorian England, a symbol of Britishness.

1820: ‘India Pale Ale’ was first mentioned in the British press appealing to civil servants who had made their fortunes in India and missed the flavours.