Brewing history

The Sword and the Armour Brewing in Queen Victoria’s day

At the German Brewing Congress of June 1884, the redoubtable Max Delbrück, Director of the Experimental and Teaching Institute for Brewing in Berlin, announced: “With the sword of science and the armour of practice, German beer will encircle the world.” It was no idle boast. In 1887 beer output in the German states exceeded that in the UK for the first time and Germany became the largest producer of beer in the world.

by Ray Anderson

ifty years earlier, when the 18-year-old F Victoria came to the throne, it was unthinkable that Germany would hold such a position. Britain was the premier brewing nation, with London’s massive porter breweries of “a magnificence unspeakable”. The “power loom brewers” as Charles Barclay called them in 1830 operated on a A display of a nineteenth century Czech brewhouse at Pilsner Urquell visitor centre in Plzen. scale unknown anywhere else. The four biggest were all in London and in 1837 were: one of London’s major breweries (Trumans Whitbread, the first brewery to top the got theirs in 1805) and horses and men were 200,000 barrel a year mark in 1796; Truman, reduced in number. Hanbury & Buxton, the first brewery to Quantitative measurement crept into appoint a professional chemist to its staff in brewing from the mid 18th century with the 1831, when the number of such men in application of the thermometer by Michael Britain could be counted in tens; Reid’s, the Combrune, and then the saccharometer, by first brewery to appoint a science graduate to John Richardson. Figure 1 is a representation its staff in the late 1830s and Barclay Perkins of these instruments taken from a brewing which had the greatest output of any London treatise published in 1802. The right hand brewery by 1809 and remained in the lead illustration shows the intriguing ‘blind until the 1850s, passing the 300,000 barrel thermometer’, where the scale is detachable. mark in 1815 and 400,000 barrels in 1839. The more secretive brewer could set the Charles Barclay’s remark invited moveable ‘index’ or rider to the required comparisons between the brewing and textile temperature against the scale, then remove Figure 1. Saccharometer, assay jar and industries but brewing differed in that it the scale and leave the instrument in the thermometers, from Alexander Morrice’s A Treatise on Brewing – 1802. achieved large-scale production without the hands of a brewery worker. This blind benefit of water or steam power. High output thermometer remained popular well into the was achieved by horse and manpower to do 19th century amongst a brewing fraternity pale malt with colouring or black malt rather the mashing by hand with oars. Whitbread jealous of the details of its process. Linking than brown malt in the production of porter. brewed 122,000 barrels of porter in 1782, use of the thermometer with the The greater extract more than compensated two years before they ordered a steam engine saccharometer gave the brewer real for the extra cost of the pale malt and the to grind malt and pump water. A particularly advantage in process control. The beers matured more quickly allowing faster impressive figure when one remembers that measurement of wort strength and turnover. at that time the brewing season was restricted temperature allowed the brewer to determine The great symbol of the porter brewing to the colder months, October to March, as the best ‘mashing heat’ to get the best yield technology was of course the giant storage summer brewing often gave unacceptable from his malt and allowed comparison of vats, necessary to mellow the flavour of the losses in spoilt beer. By the turn of the different malts in this respect. One crude beer by long maturation. Porter was century the improved engines of Boulton and consequence of this new-found knowledge made from cheap ingredients and was easy to Watt and others had been installed in all but was the discovery that it was cheaper to use produce (which made it popular with the

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Figure 2. A sixty-barrel domed porter copper, Figure 3. A modern Steel’s masher at the Oakham brewery in Peterborough.. from James Steel’s Selection of Practical Points of Malting & Brewing - 1878. brewers) it kept well and did not spoil easily barrels of porter flooded out drowning eight as needed. Mashing machines were because of the high level of hops in it (which people. The brewery petitioned Parliament for introduced r eplacing the manual mashing made it popular with the publican) and it was a refund of the duty and duly received a rebate paddles. Domed coppers appeared in the first flavoursome and undercut the price of – nobody else received any compensation! decades of the 19th century but were slow to competing beers by 25% (which made it The incident did however cause the race for spread (Figure 2), the giant Burton brewers popular with the drinker). The size of the bigger vats to abate thereafter. persisted with open coppers well into the 20th porter vats was something of a matter of pride century when they were enclosed and heated amongst brewers. One such was Henry Meux, Evolving technology with steam rather than coal direct firing. at the Horseshoe brewery at the south end of The early decades of the19th century saw More readily accepted was the use of rollers Tottenham Court Road, where the Dominion further technological innovations. to crush the malt which began to replace Theatre now stands. This brewery contained Attemperators with cold water circulated grinding stones as used in flour mills. External some immense vats constructed with little through copper pipes to maintain mashing machines also came into use at this knowledge of the forces they would have to fermentation temperature became widely time, the most popular version of which was withstand, and in October 1814 a tragedy adopted. The pipes could be fixed to the wall associated with James Steel of Glasgow was occurred. Some of the metal hoops around the or base of the vessel or be portable such that patented in 1853 and may still be found in vessel snapped, the vessel gave way and 3555 they were dangled into the vessel from above almost unchanged form in a number of

Figure 4 far left. An open cooler in use until recently at Hook Norton brewery in Oxfordshire. Figure 5 left. A vertical copper wort chiller makes a fine visitor display at Schneider Weisse in Bavaria,. Figure 6 above. A yeast collection parachute at Robinsons in Stockport.

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Figure 7. The dropping system of fermentation in operation at W J Rogers, Jacob Street brewery, Bristol, from Barnard (1889). breweries (Figure 3). Sparging, which seems to have originated in Scotland, in which the extracted grist in the mash tun is sprayed with water rather than being re-extracted by immersion, spread from around 1800 and was accepted practice for most brewers by the 1860s. A shallow open cooler (coolship), for cooling hot wort from the copper, situated in a well ventilated room usually at the top of the brewery was a feature of Victorian breweries (Figure 4). Open coolers came to be complemented by refrigerators in which circulating cold water cooled the wort to the fermenters (Figur e 5). Initially these were horizontal, but took up much room and were to an extent replaced by vertical refrigerators, in which wort flowed down over the cooled surface. In larger breweries there would be banks of these refrigerators to facilitate relatively rapid processing

Fermentation techniques Fermentation vessels were generally quite small (10s rather than 100s of hectolitres), Figure 8. The Burton union fermentation system still in use at Marstons in Burton on Trent. could be either round or rectangular, and be operated on various regimes depending upon (Figure 8). In the union sets, linked casks are The tower brewery the method used to remove the accumulated surmounted by a trough into which the A classic Victorian ale brewery used gravity to yeast from the fermented beer. The parachute fermenting wort rises via ‘swan’s necks’. From do the work once the water had been pumped skimming system was popular in which yeast the gently sloping trough the yeast settles and and the malt lifted to the top of the brewery, was drawn off in an inverted cone placed just beer returns to the casks progressively with the wort and beer allowed to flow beneath the yeast surface (Figure 6). The brightening beer remaining in the casks until it downwards in the various stages. In fact in skimming system developed into the dropping is at the required level for racking. most tower breweries it was not quite as simple system in which fermentation started in an Another cleansing system with similarities as that. Pure gravity systems, where gravity unattemperated fermenter and then after to the Burton Unions which was popular in does all the work, were really confined to small around 36 hours after pitching is dropped to London involved the use of pontos. These breweries as a pure tower brewery was rather rectangular shallower vessel on the floor below vessels were larger than union casks (six rather inflexible, particularly if the brewery was to be for skimming. This system had the advantage than four barrels in capacity) and were set up extended at any time. Most breweries of any of rousing the fermentation making it more on their heads. The yeast flowed over a sort of size used the pumped tower system. Here the vigorous and in leaving unwanted debris lip at the top, and dropped into a trough open cooler is at the well ventilated top of the behind upstairs (Figure 7).Yeast removal, or (Figure 9). Pontos were probably extinct by brewery and lends itself to compartmentalising cleansing was also possible by the transfer of the Great War.Yorkshire squares with of the operations into three houses; the central actively fermenting wort to casks in which capacities of 30 to 50 barrels were made of brewhouse, the boiler house and the fermentation is completed. This developed into stone or slate slabs and had two compartments fermentation house. the best known such system, the Burton Union connected by a ‘manhole’ with a raised collar system, which neither originated in Burton nor through which the fermenting wort emerged, Lager brewing was peculiar to it, but became particularly leaving the yeast on the top deck of the vessel Top, warm-fermentation of ales, where the associated with the town in the production of to be collected as the beer flows back down yeast rises to the surface of the vessel, was of the high quality pale ales which were the great ‘organ pipes’ into the main body of the vessel course not the only system in use in the success story of Victorian brewing in Britain (Figure 10). period we are surveying. There was also

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very pale coloured, delicate, beers. From the 1860s, the increasing availability of efficient artificial refrigeration freed lager brewers from the need for natural ice. Lager and ale brewers alike adopted all year round brewing. Refrigeration was initially used to produce ice but was soon applied to direct cooling via expansion coils (Figure 12). Lager now became a world drink. The first successful commercial brewery in Japan, the Spring Valley Brewing Company set up in Yokohama in 1869, evolved into the Kirin Company. German brewmasters brought brewing to China for the first time in the 1870s; Tsingtao lager from what is now China’s biggest brewer, was an early product. Hampered by lack of suitable materials and the climate, local beer production in Australia only started to outstrip imports in the 1870s. Lager brewing reached the country in the late Figure 9. The Ponto system of fermentation in operation in an unnamed brewery, from Julian L. 1880s, with the American émigré Foster Baker’s The Brewing Industry, published in 1905. Brothers using domestic cane sugar as an adjunct in 1889. They were not above rather underhand Lager had been imported into Britain since behaviour such as secretly taking samples in about 1850 and the first tentative steps at breweries using hollow walking sticks. On brewing what at least was called lager, may their return home Sedlmayr and Dreher have been taken place soon after but the became apostles for lager and applied what evidence for these early attempts is sketchy. they had learnt in Britain’s more advanced ale Experimental brewing of genuine lager took breweries to the production of bottom- place at WilliamYounger’s Holyrood brewery fermented beers. in 1879 and what was probably the first purpose built lager brewery in the UK was First pale lager built in Wrexham in 1882. Tennents started Figure 10. The Yorkshire square system of The first pale straw-coloured lager, for the brewing lager in Glasgow in 1885. But it fermentation in operation at Joshua Tetley & product of Munich was dark brown in colour remained very much a niche drink in the UK Sons Brewery, Leeds in the 1970s. and that of Vienna a reddish brown, is usually (about 1% of the UK market in 1960, by ascribed to Josef Groll a German brewer which time lager made up some 20% of the fermentation carr ied out at lower working in Pilsen in October 1842. Lager was market in Scotland). temperatures with yeast which sank to the first produced in Norway in 1843 and more Concurrent with the spread of lager bottom of the vessel; what became known in famously by Jacob Christian Jacobsen who brewing came more emphasis on a scientific Anglophone countries as lagers from the made the long journey from the Spaten approach to brewing, the most famous early German verb lagern, to store. In this system, brewery to Copenhagen in 1845 with yeast practitioner being Louis Pasteur. Until Pasteur as operated in the mid 19th century, which he carefully preserved in his hat box. A carried out his investigations on wine and beer fermentation would typically be conducted in year later he built a new brewery on a hill fermentations in the 1860s and showed the an ice-house (Figure 11). Brewhouse overlooking Copenhagen and called it after importance of eliminating deleterious procedures were very different as British his young son Carl and its location: hence bacteria, there was little practically useful malts were well modified i.e. produced in Carlsberg. Gerard Heineken also saw which advice available to brewers on how to prevent such a way that the starch and the protein in way the wind was blowing, switched from ale their beers unaccountably going off. The far the malt were made easy to extract and to lager brewing in Amsterdam in 1869. Lager reaching significance of Pasteur’s work on degrade in the brewhouse. Continental malts was to be found on the other side of the fermentation cannot be doubted, what is less on the other hand were undermodified so less Atlantic from the 1840s. Frederick Pabst, clear is the actual impact his work had upon amenable to extraction. Continental brewers Frederick Miller, Joseph Schlitz and Bernard fermentation practice and brewing in empirically arrived at a series of different Stroh exploited Great Lakes ice for lager particular. Pasteur’s Etudes sur la Biere mash temperatures where a portion of the production. Eberhard Anheuser and Adolphus published in 1876 and translated into English mash was boiled and added back to raise the Busch used the cool caverns of St Louis and in 1879, is often cited as revolutionising the heat, sometimes three times in a lengthy Adolph Coors, the Colorado mountains. industry. This is something of an decoction process unnecessary in Britain. From the 1870s these German-Americans exaggeration. The fermentation technology he Until the 1840s, bottom-fermentation was developed a new style of lager brewed with devised, which essentially involved aseptic unknown outside Bavaria and Bohemia readily available cereals, notably maize and in procedures in a closed vessel, found very (where it had been practised since about Anheuser-Busch’s case rice as diluents for the limited application. His advocacy of the 1400). Lager began to spread through the high nitrogen six-rowed barleys grown in the danger of aerial infection in breweries found efforts of Gabriel Sedlmayr jnr from the USA. These adjuncts were used unmalted and more adherents, but in time it became clear Spaten Brewery in Munich and Anton Dreher were gelatinised by boiling before addition to that a greater hazard came from contact of from his family brewery at Schwechater just the malt mash. The Americans used them at wort with dirty surfaces and the drip of germ- outside Vienna. On a trip to Britain in 1833 levels of 50% or more of the grist. This ridden condensations. Even the heat treatment the pair had indulged in what has been coupled with the development of an which bears his name was not recommended described as industrial espionage, learning the accelerated brewing process where storage by him for use with beer on the grounds that it use of the saccharometer and thermometer time was minimised and filtration used for spoilt the flavour. One undoubted practical and the techniques of large scale brewing. clarification, led to the development of unique outcome of Pasteur’s work, however, was the

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growing adoption of that great Victorian gentleman’s high tech. plaything, the microscope, for use in breweries (Figure 13). Pasteur was not the first to use a microscope in a brewery as Trumans were involved in the launch of the Royal Microscopical Society in 1839, but it was certainly he who popularised it. A technology which was quickly accepted in most quarters of the brewing world was pure yeast culture introduced by Emil Christian Hansen at Carlsberg in 1883. Where Pasteur had identified bacteria as the causes of brewing problems, Hansen extended this to the presence of harmful yeasts. Pasteur had purified yeasts by acid washing to kill the bacteria. Hansen selected a single strain of yeast from the unreliable and variable mixed cultures then in use in the brewery and in so doing significantly improved the consistency of fermentations and the reproducibility of beer flavour. Hansen’s pure yeast propagation plants spread around the world and only in Britain was there significant resistance with only one British brewery, Combes, getting one within the first ten years. The reasons go beyond mere English conservatism, and centre around the impossibility of producing English stock ale with a single strain of yeast and the negative influence this had on the thinking of UK brewers.

Technical training and quality control Germany had the most Hansen yeast propagators as well as the earliest and most examples of trade and technical journals Figure 11. Lager fermentation and maturation in an ice-house, consisting of an underground which started to appear in the 1860s. The first store-cellar with a fermenting cellar above it, both cooled by the natural ice in the upper part of record of lectures being given on brewing is in the building, from Julius E. Thausing’s, The theory and practice of the preparation of malt and Prague in 1818, but by the end of the century the fabrication of beer , published in 1882. Germany provided the most widespread technical education at Weihenstephan, Nuremberg, Worms and most impressively in Berlin. The first brewing school in Britain was founded in 1899 at Birmingham University and then at Heriot Watt College in Edinburgh in 1904. Training of brewers in the UK was, and continued to be, by a pupilage system, in which the trainee paid a fee for the privilege of on the job tuition by a brewer or consulting chemist. There was no institutional analytical service available to UK brewers, indeed attempts to provide one were opposed by the private consulting chemists who derived a steady income from the industry. By the 1880s there were many of these consultants to choose from. At least a dozen in London and others in provincial cities and of course in Burton. Particularly prominent was Edward Ralph Moritz, who was appointed Consulting Chemist to the Brewers’ Society when only twenty-six and he was the founder of what became the Institute of Brewing. However the unregulated system encouraged quite a lot of quackery, and one must question the ability of even the most knowledgeable chemists to deliver quite what they promised. Indeed Moritz was not above earning the odd guinea Figure 12. An ammonia compression refrigeration machine in a US brewery (1882).

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Figure 13 above. The brewers’ microscope as advertised in the Brewers’ Journal in 1882.

Figure 14 left. An ‘Analytical Report’ used as a testimonial.

or two by having his rather overblown reports bench in a separate room called a laboratory, used to advertise his customers’ beers. Figure six had a chemist in his own laboratory 14 is an example, with much said about (Figure 15) and four Burton breweries and “absolute purity… wholesomeness… Simonds in Reading had a chemist and tonic…” etc. assistants thus supporting Charles Graham’s This raises the question of the nature of contention. Certainly many of the smallest quality control in UK breweries. To what breweries lacked such a facility, but so did the extent was in-house analysis carried out and biggest of them all, Guinness, which had no who did it? Charles Graham, Professor of laboratory when Barnard visited Dublin and Chemical Technology at University College would not have one until the 1890s. Nor does London, was able to tell the Royal Barnard note a laboratory in most of the big Commission on Technical Instruction in 1882 London breweries. One wonders what had that amongst breweries there was “scarcely a happened to the legendary microscope the laboratory anywhere else in England except at directors of Whitbread are said to have bought Burton”. Alfred Barnard travelled all over the after Pasteur’s visit to the brewery in 1871? country in the late 1880s visiting breweries Four of Burton’s brewers’ chemists rose to and recorded clearly what he saw. In the 112 particular distinction. Peter Griess at Allsopps breweries inspected, 55 had no mention of wrote over 100 original papers on synthetic quality control, 21 had a bench in the brewers organic chemistry and became a world office with basic instruments, 25 more had the authority. At Bass there was Cornelius

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decades until stainless steel took over. In 1911 Leo Wallerstein, a first generation German-American consulting brewers’ chemist, noting the increasing propensity of Americans to store their beer in the ice-box, came up with a method for chillproofing beer to stop it going hazy in the fridge by treating it with proteolytic enzymes. The economies thus provided were soon to have particular appeal to brewers when, as a consequence of the First World War, excise duties rose to unprecedented levels and stayed there.

Was Delbrück right? To go back to where we came in. Was Max Delbrück correct in his prediction of 1884? Has the sword of science and the armour of practice enabled German beer to encircle the world? With over a hundred years of hindsight the answer is a qualified yes, but not quite in the way he meant. In the years that followed Delbrück’s statement, German Figure 15. The laboratory at Hanson’s Kimberley brewery, from Barnard (1890) brewing scientists proved rather more adept at accumulating data than using it – to an O’Sullivan who made his name in in it, came to Britain in 1897 via the USA. extent handicapped by German practice, carbohydrate chemistry and the enzymology Lager produced quickly using straight single which was governed by the Reinheitsgebot , of the mash tun. Worthington’s Horace temperature infusion mashing and minimal which restricted their freedom of action. On Brown did ground breaking wo rk on barley maturation time arrived two years later, with the other hand, German brewmasters proved germination. Adrian Brown worked for Salts the launch of Allsopp’s lager. The first extremely influential across the world. If you Brewery specialising in problems to do with brewery research laboratory in the UK was go into any large brewery today, you will see yeast before becoming the first professor of established by Guinness in 1901. After five equipment originally designed for use with brewing at the Birmingham in 1899. All four year’s of allowing free publication when run bottom-fermentation and it is frequently men were elected Fellows of the Royal by Horace Brown (ex Worthington’s) this manufactured by German firms. Society. became a very secretive place, with Guinness But all is not as it seems at first glance. banning its staff from publishing anything of Outside Germany and the Czech Republic The spread of the brewers’ their work for the next 40 years. Mash filters lauter tuns are seldom used in complicated chemist were first used in the UK by Benskins in decocti on mashing regimes, rather Probably the greatest tragedy to affect the Watford in 1903, followed a few years later programmed infusion mashing is the norm; brewing industry in England came about in by Vaux in Sunderland, but found few other you don’t see many mash coppers any more. 1900 when Bostock & Co inadvertently used takers in the country for another 90 years. Mash filters for ultra swift processing are also sulphuric acid contaminated with arsenic in What was effectively keg ale (although it increasingly replacing lauter tuns and they the production of glucose and invert-sugar. was of course not called that), chilled, filtered have their origins in Belgium. The ubiquitous The sugar was used to brew beer over a and carbonated draught beer dispensed with cylindro-conical ferm enter originates in period of some nine months before its effects CO 2 top pressure came to Britain in 1905, Switzerland, not Germany as Ludwig Nathan were spotted. Seventy people died and at when William Butlers’, Springfield Brewery was from Zurich. But, there is no denying least 6000 others had symptoms of arsenic launched it in Wolverhampton. They that lager, cold-produced bottom-fermented poisoning. On the positive side, the affair led persisted with the experiment until 1914 but beer, has encircled the world. With sales to the realisation that arsenic, at low but not then dropped it because of consumer dislike buoyed by increasing consumption in negligible levels, was present in many of the product. “All foam and no flavour” was developing countries, lager is truly the world batches of malt due to the fuel used for one comment at the time. Breeding of hybrid drink. kilning. Indeed it is likely that arsenic strains of barley originated in 1905 with the Even in the UK, which has steadfastly poisoning from this source had been an crossing of the varieties Plumage and Archer maintained volume ale production longer unrecognised danger for generations before by E. S. Beavan to give a new variety than anywhere else, over 70% of the beer the poisonings of 1900. The Royal destined to dominate the malting crop from sold is lager. However, I doubt if Max Commission established the concept of the the 1920s to the 1940s. E. S. Salmon’s hop Delbruck would recognise the lager of maximum permitted level of materials in breeding programme which started the unrivalled delicateness which now sells the foodstuffs, arsenic being the first worldwide movement to improved varieties most worldwide as having much to do with environmental hazard to be controlled in this began at Wye College in Kent in 1906. Also what he knew as German beer. I way. The scare also led to much work for in 1906, Ludwig Nathan was granted an consulting chemists but also led brewers English patent on a vessel with a ‘rigid increasingly to recognise the virtues of cylindrical iron shell and a glass lining made having a chemist on site to test materials for up of curved glass plates’ for use in brewing; safety as well as brewing value. the first step towards the cylindro-conical fermenter which 60 years later would start to I This article is based on a paper given at Things to come come into its own. Young’s Brewery in February 2006 to a joint The seeds of many other changes were also Aluminium was used for fabrication of meeting of the Brewery History Society and the Victorian Society. The full text is available in the laid as the 19th merged into the 20th century. fermenters and storage vessels in Germany in Journal of the BHS No. 123, Summer 2006, pp55- Chilled and filtered bottled ale, called non- 1909 and a year later in the UK and the metal 83 and it will be available on line on deposit beer because it had no yeast sediment would have a certain vogue for a couple of www.breweryhistory.com from July this year.

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