The Coronation of Queen Victoria
This picture was painted in 1839 by Sir George Hayter (1792-1871)
and depicts the Coronation of Queen Victoria at Westminster Abbey on 28 June 1838.
On June 28 1838, the day of Queen Victoria's coronation, thousands of people around the country sat down to big, celebratory open-air dinners which consisted pretty much universally, it appears, of three staples: roast beef, plum pudding and beer (www.breweryhistory.com/journal/archive/123/Beer.pdf).
Brewery History was first published in 1973 and appears four times a year. Its prime aim is to promote historical research into all aspects of brewing and related industries, both in the United Kingdom and abroad. The journal comprises original articles, photographic essays, reprints of academic theses and difficult to obtain pieces, and book reviews. The scope of Brewery History includes, but is not limited to, histories of existing and closed breweries, research on associated industries (e.g. malting, hops, retailing, &c.), biographical pieces on key figures, and studies into the social, political and economic impact of the brewing industry. The journal occasionally publishes themed issues on specific topics and provides the option for peer review (www.breweryhistory.com/journal/index.html).
The ‘power loom brewers’ as Charles Barclay called them in 1830 operated on a scale unknown anywhere else. The four biggest in 1837 were:
(i) Whitbread, at the White Hart Brewery in Chiswell Street; the first brewery to top
the 200,000 barrel a year mark in 1796.
(ii) The long established Truman, Hanbury & Buxton at the Black Eagle Brewery, Brick Lane, Spitalfields; the first brewery to appoint a professional chemist to its staff in 1831, when the number of such men in Britain could be counted in tens.
(iii) Reid's, at the Griffin Brewery, in picturesquely named Liquorpond Street (now Clerkenwell Road); the first brewery to appoint a science graduate to its staff in the late 1830s.
(iv) Barclay Perkins, at the Anchor Brewery, Dead Man's Place, Park Street, Southwark. Barclay Perkins had the greatest output of any London brewery by 1809 and remained in the lead until the 1850s, ...
Despite Charles Barclay's remark, which invited comparisons between the brewing industry and the textile industry, brewing differed from the latter in that it achieved large scale production without the benefit of water or steam power. Large output was achieved using horse power to drive the malt mills for example and manpower to do the mashing by hand with ores (The Sword and the Armour: science and practice in the brewing industry 1837-1914 Ray Anderson).
Beer was by far the most popular drink.
Sir Walter Besant, writing in 1887, said that when Victoria succeeded her uncle, ‘Beer was universally taken with dinner’, and ‘even at great dinner parties some of the guests would call for beer. In the restaurants every man would call for bitter ale, or stout, or half-and-half [ale and
porter mixed] with his dinner, as a matter of course (www.breweryhistory.com/journal/archive/123/Beer.pdf).
Sir Walter Besant (Portsmouth, 4 augustus 1836 - Londen, 9 juni 1901) was een Brits auteur en geschiedkundige (https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Besant). English novelist and philanthropist, whose best work describing social evils in London’s East End helped set in motion movements to aid the poor (www.britannica.com/biography/Walter-Besant).
I am the brewery the sole partner in what my lawyer sweetly calls the concern. Why my very nameI reek of beer, I am all beer, my blood is beer.
-Sir Walter Besant, 1836-1901
(www.raysplacekent.com/#!awards/c5la)
In the late 18th century and early 19th century, smuggling provided many citizens of Beer with an income on both sides of the law. According to George Pulman in ‘The Book of the Axe’, published in 1875, “In former days, when the coastguard was inefficient and the exciseman lax, the Beer men were the very kings of smugglers.”
Beer fishermen had always had a fine reputation for their ability to handle and sail boats. With this ability and the ideal geographical location for landing contraband and transportation to remote farms and houses, smuggling became an alternative “trade” for some of the fishermen. By 1750, the area was so notorious that the local revenue officers were reinforced by dragoons posted in Beer, Branscombe and Seaton.
The boats used were Beer luggers, built in Beer, between 25ft to 35ft in length. They usually had a 4 man crew. Much of the contraband was brought in from the Channel Island of Alderney, but in some cases the smugglers would collect contraband from the North coast of France. As well as casks of brandy, tea, tobacco and silk were other commodities that were smuggled into Beer.
...
One of the most famous smugglers was Jack Rattenbury. He was born in Beer in 1778 .... After thirty years at sea as a fisherman, pilot, seaman and smuggler he wrote about his life in a book, ‘Memoirs of a Smuggler’, which was published in 1837. In 1896 Sir Walter Besant and James Rice wrote a novel based on Jack Rattenbury and set in Lyme Bay. The titleof the novel is “Twas in Trafalgar Bay” (www.beer-devon.co.uk/village-history/smuggling/).
Outside many London pubs was a bench and a table where ticket porters, who waited at stands in the street to be hired, could put down their loads and order a pot of beer to keep them going: a porter
is visible in Hogarth's Beer Street, draining his pot, while another porter can be seen in a picture of the White Hart pub in Knightsbridge from 1841, resting and drinking. There were at least two public
houses called the Ticket Porter in London, one in Moorfields and the other (which was only closed and demolished around 1970) in Arthur Street, near London Bridge. Charles Dickens invented a riverside pub called the ‘Six Jolly Fellowship Porters’ in his novel Our Mutual Friend
(www.breweryhistory.com/journal/archive/123/Beer.pdf).
The Grapes
76 Narrow Street, Limehouse, E14
Dickens is said to have used it as the original of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters in 'Our Mutual Friend.' There is a Dickens Room with a balcony giving a very pleasant view of the river. ..The oldest extent document relating to The Grapes dates from the 13th May 1604. ...It is in the year 1704 that we first have reference to the premises being used for the sale of alcoholic beverages. ...The building, along with its neighbours, apparently burned down at some stage between 1718 and 1723. They were rebuilt by one John Stonehaur. Therefore the present building can be dated to around the year 1720.
It was in the nineteenth century that The Grapes achieved what is, perhaps, its most famous association.
As a young boy, Charles Dickens certainly knew this area. His Godfather, Christopher Huffam, sold oars, masts and ships gear around the corner from The Grapes in Church Row, near Limehouse Hole (now occupied by Aberdeen Wharf).
It was in Huffam's house that John Dickens placed his son Charles on the table and urged him to sing. Indeed Dickens himself, in later life, recalled how on one occasion, one of the audience of neighbours declared the young boy to be a prodigy.
It is interesting to note that Dickens in his novels, always treated marine stores such as his godfathers, as indeed he always did with things of the sea, with the greatest of affection (www.britannia.com/travel/london/cockney/grapes.html). Of was het toch, zoals vermeld in, the Companion to Our Mutual Friend (RLE Dickens): Routledge ..., Volume 4 van Michael Cotsell, de Two Brewers?
Charles John Huffam Dickens (Landport bij Portsmouth, 7 februari 1812 – Gad's Hill Place in Rochester (Kent), 9 juni 1870) was één van de belangrijkste Engelse schrijvers tijdens het Victoriaans tijdperk en de eerste literaire chroniqueur van de grootstad middenin de industriële revolutie. Tot na de Eerste Wereldoorlog bleef hij Engelands populairste schrijver. Hij verwierf bekendheid met The Pickwick Papers (The posthumous papers of the Pickwick Club) dat vanaf 1836 maandelijks verscheen. Daarna verschenen Oliver Twist in het door hem geredigeerde tijdschrift Bentley's Miscellany in 1837-1838, Nicholas Nickleby in 1838-1839, The Old Curiosity Shop en Barnaby Rudge beiden in 1841. Zijn beroemdste romans zijn David Copperfield (1849-1850, deels autobiografisch), Great Expectations (1860-1861), Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby en A Christmas Carol (1843). A tale of two cities staat met 200 miljoen exemplaren op nummer zeven van 's werelds meest verkochte boeken. Kenmerkend voor zijn verhalen zijn de sociale misstanden, de verhaalopbouw, de cartooneske karakters en de humor (https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens). Dickens had always objected to the "total abstinence" principle, preferring moderation to teetotalism. Dickens acknowledges the disastrous effect that alcohol addiction can have on those who try to drink their way out of depression, even those as brilliant and heroic as Carton (the protagonist of A Tale of Two Cities), with whom biographers Kaplan and Ackroyd contend Dickens closely identified himself.
In fact, according to American biographer Fred Kaplan, Dickens pulled himself through to the end of his Anmerican lecture tour, like brilliant but alcoholic Sydney Carton (whom he had created nine years earlier) used up but determined to go on to the end, sustained by alcohol at every meal...In "The Poor Man and His Beer" (All The Year Round, 30 April 1859) drinking is a harmless passtime, but Dickens always emphasizes the need for moderation. In his second American Tour, Dickens fortified himself at the intermission each night with a glass of champange, regarding a little alcohol as a useful stimulant (www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/pva/drink.html). While indisputably fond of alcohol and fervently against teetotalers, Charles Dickens preached moderation. Even so, a recent biographer, Claire Tomalin, describes him as a heavy drinker – as well as a womanizer and tyrant (www.wine-searcher.com/m/2012/07/the-alcohol-laced-world-of-charles-dickens).
Victorian porter was already different from the drink as it had been known for much of the 18th century. Previously it had been made solely with brown malt, until the development of the saccharometer in the latter half of the 18th century showed what poor value for money brown malt was in making a strong beer, with much of the fermentable content destroyed by the heating that gave the malt its colour, Brewers then started using pale and amber malts in their porters, with enough brown malt to try to give it some darkness, often adding liquorice or burnt sugar to add to the
depth of blackness. A man called Daniel Wheeler came up in 1817 with a patented method of roasting malt at 400° Fahrenheit or more for up to two hours in an apparatus very similar to a coffee roaster. The resultant black malt, or ‘patent malt’ gave ‘extractive matter of a deep brown colour, ready soluble in hot or cold water … A small quantity of malt thus prepared will suffice for the purpose of colouring beer or porter’. The big London porter brewers all took up Wheeler's patent malt: Whitbread in 1817, Barclay Perkins in 1820, Truman by 1826.
In 1822 John Tuck was lamenting that ‘the real taste of porter, as originally drank, is completely lost; and this by pale malts being introduced … Our ancestors brewed porter entirely with high dried malt; while in the present day, in many houses, high dried or blown malts are entirely omitted’. However, Tuck admitted that although ‘to say the truth, there is little of porter left but the name … the taste of the public is so changed, that very few would be found to fancy its original flavour’. Originally porter had been kept for up to two years before being set out, with the tart, aged beer being mixed in the pub with newer, ‘mild’ porter to the customer's taste. But by the second decade of the 19th century public tastes had changed so much than 90% of porter was being sent out ‘mild’, or unaged.
The London brewers continued to use brown malt in their porter mashes, with Whitbread, for example, in 1850, brewing to a recipe that was 80% pale malt, 15% brown malt and five per cent black malt.
But in Ireland, within a few years of the invention of patent malt, brewers were abandoning brown malt entirely: Guinness, for example, which had been using between 25% and 47% brown malt in its porter up to 1815, was probably using only pale malt and patent malt by 1824, and certainly by 1828. The result was a divergence in flavour between Irish porter (and stout) and London porter (and stout), with the former now drier and, because of the burnt flavours from the patent malt, more bitter.
However, although when Victoria succeeded William IV porter was still widely admired and as widely copied - a writer in 1838 said that although porter was ‘imitated by most of the countries of Europe’, though ‘in the manufacture of this liquor the English have not been excelled by any other nation’, its popularity was declining in parallel with the gradual disappearance of the men who had given the drink its name. Through the 19th century the ticket porters and fellowship porters lost their
economic power, and dwindled in numbers and importance...The railways arrived in London in the late 1830s, and the railway companies easily made sure all portering duties at their termini were
done by their own staff, not the uptown ticket porters, who had once expected a monopoly on parcel and package carrying in the City. Rowland Hill's penny post removed much of their business carrying
letters about. The fellowship porters had fallen to fewer than a hundred men earning their living from the trade in the 1860s, and by the late 1870s the ticket porters had vanished
(www.breweryhistory.com/journal/archive/123/Beer.pdf).
Hier een plaatje van een Victoriaanse porter:
Porter the drink meanwhile had seen output in London hit 1.8 million barrels in 1823 the highest ever, after a continual rise that had lasted 50 years. But this was a peak that would never be surpassed: by 1830 porter production would be down 20 per cent on its 1823 level. Instead the
increasingly popular drink was proper ‘mild’ beers, unaged - which is what mild meant - made for quick consumption, still quite dark, still with an OG or around 1050, made with some higher-dried malt and thus also dark in colour, but because it was unaged, sweeter and less acid than porter.
(www.breweryhistory.com/journal/archive/123/Beer.pdf).
Whitbread, then the third or fourth biggest brewer in London, whose production was entirely porter up to 1834, started brewing mild ale in 1835. Ale quickly rose from nowhere to more than 10% of production at Chiswell Street by 1839, and more than 20% by 1859, when Whitbread's porter sales had dropped by almost 30% compared to 25 years earlier. At Truman's, then fighting with Barclay Perkins to be London's biggest brewer, the swing from porter was stronger still, with ale making up
30% of production by 1859. All the same, London still had the reputation of selling the best porter, and pubs elsewhere would advertise the sale of the local ale, but London porter ...For smaller brewers the fall was even greater: at Young's of Wandsworth, porter had been 70% of production in 1835 and
was down to just 16% in 1880 (www.breweryhistory.com/journal/archive/123/Beer.pdf).
Alfred Barnard wrote in 1889 that in the previous five years Mann's brewery in the East End of London had removed scores of vats of up to 500 barrels capacity, made from 22-foot staves of best British oak and once used for ageing the drink of the masses, because ‘the fickle public has got tired of the vinous- flavoured vatted porter and transferred its affections to the new and luscious “mild ale” … Our old friend porter, with its sombre hue and foaming head, is no longer the pet of fashion, but a bright and sparkling bitter, the colour of sherry and the condition of champagne, carries off the palm’. By the 1860s, brewers were offering a range of nine or 10 different beers. Samuel Allsopp and Sons of Burton upon Trent, for example, sold nine different types of beer in 1861, of which four were milds (www.breweryhistory.com/journal/archive/123/Beer.pdf).
Drinkers in different parts of the country often favoured a particular shade of mild - deep oak-brown in East Anglia and London (where the comparatively chlo- ride-rich well water was said to be good for dark mild ales: the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1911 declared that ‘for ales of the Burton type a hard water is a necessity. For the brewing of mild ales, again, a water containing a certain pro- portion of chlorides is required’); pale in Manchester and Staffordshire; dark again in the West Midlands and Wales. An analysis of English beers conducted for the Encyclopedia Britannica found that milds contained less alcohol for a given OG than pale ales, stock ales and porter: one mild with an OG of 1055, for example, contained the same amount of alcohol, 4.2%, as a bitter ale with an OG of 1047. The mild also contained two thirds more solids in the final beer than the bitter - 6.7% against 4% - suggesting a beer with a much fuller mouthfeel, and a sweeter one as well (www.breweryhistory.com/journal/archive/123/Beer.pdf).
Brewers such as John Barras (later a cornerstone of Newcastle Breweries) and Reid & Co pronounced themselves brewers of the ‘celebrated’ Newcastle Mild Ales. However, although
Newcastle Mild was said to be the only beer brewed in the town in 1863, by 1890 it was disappearing from Newcastle itself and the larger towns of the region, its place taken by more bitter ales from the
brewers of Edinburgh and Burton. The North East was ahead of the rest of England: Julian Baker, writing in 1905, declared: ‘mild or four-ale [so called for its price of four old pence a quart in Victorian Britain] … is still the beverage of the working classes’. The popularity of mild with the labouring classes of late Victorian and Edwardian England meant that ‘four-ale bar’ became a synonym for public bar, a nickname that lasted long after mild ale stopped being four pence a quart. While mild was to continue as Britain's most popular beer until the start of the 1960s, the middle classes in Victorian Britain preferred the pale beers of Burton on Trent and their equivalents from
Edinburgh. There were two main types of pale beer from the east Midlands brewing town, one the India Pale Ale class of bitter beers, and the other, rather sweeter, called simply Burton Ale, although it was also made by other brewers right across the country. Burton Ale is almost forgotten now - almost the only surviving version is Young's Winter Warmer - but it was once very popular, particularly in winter and as a mixed drink. Its other name was Old Ale, and a mixture of Burton and mild was called an Old Six, from its cost, six pence a quart, Burton on its own being eight pence a quart. Burton and bitter together was known as ‘mother-in-law’ - old and bitter (www.breweryhistory.com/journal/archive/123/Beer.pdf).
Burton Ale had its roots in the strong beers Burton had exported to Russia and the Baltic lands until high tariffs in the 1820s destroyed the trade. They turned instead to selling the beer in Britain, where a less sweet and more bitter version of the Russian original won a wide following. Burton Ale was generally extremely strong, even by pre-First World War standards. An analysis from 1843 by Jonathan Pereira gave ‘Burton ale, first sort’ an OG of 1111 to 1120, ‘Burton ale, second sort’ an OG of 1097 to 1111 and ‘third sort’ an OG of 1077 to 1092. For comparison, Pereira found porter had an
OG of 1050 and ‘good table beer’ 1033 to 1039, while IPA was generally around 1065.
Bass, which used a red diamond trademark for its Burton ales, to distinguished them from the famous red triangle used on Bass India Pale Ale (the diamond mark was used for Burton ale from 1857, two years after the firm first put the red triangle on its pale ale labels), brewed four different strengths of Burton ale for the on-trade in the second half of the 19th century. They ranged from the powerful
No 1, at over 1110 OG down through Nos 2 and 3 to No 4 at around 1070 OG. There were also two more grades for the private family trade, Nos 5 and 6, at around 1060 and 1055 OG. Worthington
had a completely illogical lettering system which saw its best strong Burton ale called G, its second-best F and its thirdbest C or CK (www.breweryhistory.com/journal/archive/123/Beer.pdf).
At more or less the same time as the Burton brewers were developing Burton ale they were also beginning to make the highly hopped pale beer that, because it had famously been exported to Bombay, Madras and Calcutta, became known as East India Pale Ale, India Pale Ale, or IPA. This had developed from the strong, pale October stock pale ales of the 18th century, which were normally kept to mature for up to two years. Even in 1898 Waltham Brothers' brewery in Stockwell, South London could say of its own India Pale Ale: ‘This Ale is heavily hopped with the very best Kent hops, and nearly resembles the fine Farmhouse StockBeer of olden times’. A century earlier, meanwhile, when officers of the East Indiamen ships began shipping October ale out with them to sell to the civil and military employees of the East India Company, they found the four-month sea voyage round the Cape of Good Hope, crossing the Equator twice, magically matured the beer by the time it reached India.
The maker of the beer taken out to India was Hodgson's brewery in Bow, just up the river Lea from the East Indiamen's docks at Blackwall. However, early in the 1820s Hodgson's upset the East India shippers by trying to monopolise the supply of beer to India, and they invited the Burton brewers to see if they could match Hodgson's brew. They quickly proved they could surpass it, in large part because the gypsum-impregnated well waters of Burton are much better for brewing bitter pale ales than London water is (www.breweryhistory.com/journal/archive/123/Beer.pdf).
Attempts to imitate Burton pale ale were hampered by the need to brew with similar hard sulphate-impregnated water, which could be found in only a few places. From the 1850s several London brewers had set up branch breweries in Burton to try to brew the pale ales they could not make properly with London water. Eventually, a chemist called CW Vincent discovered how to reproduce
Burton water everywhere. His analysis of the town's water in 1878 identified the minerals particularly gypsum, or calciumsulphate, that gave pale ales brewed in the town a drier, more bitter flavour and a
brighter appearance than ales from areas without Burton's mineral advantages. From this, brewers in soft water areas now knew what to do to emulate North Staffordshire's finest: no need to move to
Burton, just add gypsum to your mashing water.
A perennial problem facing brewers was what to do with the excess yeast the brewing process generated. If the yeast was left in the beer it would make for a cloudy pint, with the danger that the yeast would ‘autolyse’, or dissolve through its own enzymes, giving a yeast-bitten flavour to the beer. In 1838 a Liverpool brewer called Peter Walker, originally from Ayr in Scotland invented a system of banks of casks arranged in double rows, called unions. Each had a swan-neck pipe in the top of the cask through which the excess yeast foamed, dropping into a trough above the twin rows of casks. The yeast and beer separated out in the toughs, and the beer flowed back down into the casks. Walker's patent system was taken up by brewers around the country, from Edinburgh to London. However, it was the brewers of Burton upon Trent who took most eagerly to this method of brewing,
which became known as a result as the Burton union system. When the journalist Alfred Barnard visited Burton around 1890 he found all the brewers he saw using the union system to finish off their pale ales. Each brewer had hundreds, sometimes thousands of union casks, joined in sets of up to 30 (www.breweryhistory.com/journal/archive/123/Beer.pdf).
exactly the same as when it was first brewed in 1864, while casks of its Special bitter are marked ‘SPA’.
However, there were no pump-clips on the handles of the beer engines in Victorian pubs (pump-clips did not come into wide use until the 1950s), and while brewers could dictate the nomenclature of the new drink on labels of the bottled versions (which is why we have bottled pale ale, not bottled bitter), drinkers themselves could decide what they were going to call the draught version when they ordered it. They kept the name ‘ale’ for the old, mild style of drink and called the new one by a name that defined and contrasted it - bitter. By 1855 Punch magazine was making jokes about the ‘fast young gents’ who drank ‘Bitter Beer’ living an ‘embittered existence’ (www.breweryhistory.com/journal/archive/123/Beer.pdf).
There was a style of hopped pale ale that existed independently of the IPA tradition, which went by the name KK or AK. Although the K style of bitter pale ale was probably an old one, evidence is lacking: one of the first mentions in print is in 1855 in an advertisement for the Stafford Brewery, which was selling ‘Pale India Ale’ at 18 pence a gallon, and AK Ale, ‘a delicate bitter ale’, at 14 pence a gallon (www.breweryhistory.com/journal/archive/123/Beer.pdf).
Brewers seem to have maintained a deliberate difference between the two types of bitter beer: lower-gravity, lightercoloured, less-hopped AK light bitters; and slightly darker, hoppier, stronger ‘Pale Ales’, often designated PA. The brewing books of Garne & Sons of Burford, Oxfordshire in 1912 show AK being brewed at an OG of 1040 and with a colour of 14, a reddish-brown hue, while PA was brewed to an OG of 1056 and with a colour of 18, a darker medium brown. The difference is confirmed by contemporary comments on the two beers. Alfred Barnard sampled an AK brewed by Rogers of Bristol in 1889, which he described as ‘a bright sparkling beverage of a rich golden colour and … a nice delicate hop flavour’. Of Whitbread's Pale Ale, on the other hand, a more standard bitter, he wrote that it tasted ‘well of the hop’, though it too looked ‘both bright and sparkling’. Crowley's brewery in Croydon High Street in 1900 described its AK in one of its advertisements as ‘a Bitter Ale of sound quality with a delicate Hop flavour’, and the frequent description of AK in Victorian advertisements as ‘for family use’ suggests a not-too-bitter beer (www.breweryhistory.com/journal/archive/123/Beer.pdf).
The description of AK as ‘for family use’ is a reminder that beer was still a highly popular mealtime drink at home, despite Gladstone's attempts in his 1861 budget to popularise wine drinking by reducing tariffs. Even in the second half of the 19th century the cask of ale at home, delivered by the brewery roundsman, was still common, and many small concerns advertised themselves specifically as ‘family brewers’. ...But by the 1880s, while a pint of beer with dinner or supper was still popular, there was less demand for a whole 4 1/2 gallon cask of dinner ale to be delivered to the family home. Overall beer consumption was falling, and the chances of the beer turning sour before it was used were too great.
Even a gallon was too much for many families, however: fortunately the hour had brought forward its hero: Henry Barrett. Bottled beers had been available for centuries, and Whitbread had started a considerable bottling operation in 1870. But these were corked bottles, which meant brewers needed an army of workers to knock home the corks (Whitbread employed more than a hundred corkers, each man working a 12-hour day, in 1886). They were also inconvenient for the drinker: a corkscrew was always required, and bottles could not be easily resealed. In 1879 Barrett invented the screwtop beer bottle, a cheap, convenient, reusable container that meant little or no waste for the man desiring his lunchtime or suppertime pint.
The screw top caught on rapidly (Whitbread started using them in 1886) and brought in 30 years when almost every brewery had to have a bottled dinner ale or its equivalent.
...
But all these early bottled beers were naturally conditioned, which meant a yeast deposit, and the chance of cloudy beer if the customer did not take care. In 1897 the brewing scientist Horace Brown was reporting to the Institute of Brewing that in the United States they had solved the problems involved in chilling and filtering beers so that they would remain ‘bright’ in the bottle. It did not take long for the technology to cross the Atlantic. By 1899 the Notting Hill Brewery Company in West London was advertising its ‘Sparkling Dinner Ale’ as ‘a revolution in English bottled beers, produced entirely on a new system … no deposit, no sediment, brilliant to the last drop, no waste whatever’ (www.breweryhistory.com/journal/archive/123/Beer.pdf).
The other newly popular beer at the end of the 19th century was stout, the dark beer originally known as ‘stout porter’, meaning ‘strong porter’, which was increasingly drunk for its supposed restorative qualities. When the Russian market was closed to strong English ales in the 1820s, porters and stouts were exempt, and the London brewers soon produced very strong versions of stout aimed at the Russian court and known for that reason as ‘imperial’ stout. But weaker versions of stout were gaining popularity at home. Even in 1861, Mrs Beeton, in her Book of Household Management, was
recommending it for nursing mothers (www.breweryhistory.com/journal/archive/123/Beer.pdf).
brewing with lactose, which was put into the wort at a rate of nine pounds to the barrel, half an ounce per pint. The new beer was called ‘milk stout’: ‘stout’ was now on its way to having the meaning
‘black beer’ rather than strong beer. Mackeson soon licensed the production of milk stout to other brewers: Massey's Burnley Brewery was advertising its ‘new Milk Stout’ by January 1911, for example, and 13 other brewers were also making milk stout by 1912.
Two years later came the First World War, which, apart from the appalling loss of life, was to have a devastating impact on Britain's brewing traditions. But that is another story (www.breweryhistory.com/journal/archive/123/Beer.pdf).
Een buitengewoon interessant verhaal uit The Journal of the Brewery History Society.