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 Brewer & Distiller International • May 2009 • www.ibd.org.uk 25 Brewing history 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. 26 Brewer & Distiller International • May 2009 • www.ibd.org.uk Brewing history 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.