The Recipes Project - Fueling beer breweries in early modern London
http://recipes.hypotheses.org/
By William M. Cavert Detail from the panorama of London by Claes Visscher (1616). Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
The shop down the road that sells alcoholic drinks offers such a
variety of beers and ales that while shopping I sometimes imagine myself
newly arrived from a communist planned economy into some bewilderingly
choice-laden consumer paradise. Beer made in ever-so-small batches by
Belgian monks, or by siblings in post-industrial Chicago, or wacky young
guys working out of a garage in rural Oregon – all compete to position
themselves as small-scale and artisanal, sharing nothing with the huge
conglomerates that offer cheap prices but little taste. Such producers,
as well as the growing numbers of home brewers, suggest that drinkers
increasingly value the idea that beer should be a carefully-crafted
product, something that connects us to a bygone (and yet recoverable)
age of natural foods and careful cooking. As much as I applaud this
shift in taste and values, as a historian I smile at the association
between beer brewing and simpler modes of making food and drink.
This is because four hundred years ago in England the beer brewers of
London operated businesses that helped inaugurate a modern world of
environmentally-damaging industrial production. London, already during
the reign of Elizabeth I and the career of Shakespeare, burned huge
amounts of polluting mineral coal, and no one burned more of it than
brewers. Hell, according to 17th-century English authors, was like the smoke emitted from a brewhouse chimney.[1]
But exactly how much Newcastle coal would be required to brew varied
enormously, according to factors including the brewer’s preferred recipe
and method, the kind of drink being prepared, and, in all likelihood,
the brewer’s skill in conserving expensive fuel. One 18th-century
expert on brewing, Michael Combrune, explained that brewers disagreed
regarding how long to boil the wort, with preferences ranging from 5
minutes to 2 hours, concluding that experience and careful observation
were the best guides. Once the hops were added, a further boil of 2-3
times the first was necessary. In general, he found, 6-7 hours of
boiling was typical, but the entire discussion seems to be as much
prescriptive and descriptive, a guide to what brewers ought to do.[2] Jacob
Adriaensz Matham, “View of the De Drie Leliën Brewery at Haarlem and of
Velserend Manor, Owned by Johan Claesz van Loo” (1627). Image courtesy
of the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem.
Given this variety, it is no wonder that different brewers required
different inputs of energy. The detailed records of the brewery within
Westminster College, part of the complex surrounding Westminster Abbey,
shows that in the decades around 1600 they were able to brew about 30
barrels of beer per ton of coal.[3]
But in 1592 when the Brewers Company explained to the crown how much
grain and fuel they required, their numbers suggest a ratio of about 3
times as much.[4] In the mid-18th
century the brewhouse for Corpus Christi College in Cambridge made only
about 25 barrels per ton, while at the end of the century the huge
commercial brewhouse of Truman and Hanbury in London made almost 80.[5]
Economies of scale must have mattered a great deal here; Truman’s
produced more than 1000 times more beer than Corpus, and spent around
£2000 per year on 1400 tons of coal during the 1790s. A business like
that would have had both the experience and a powerful motivation to
economize on fuel consumption. But even 200 years earlier some London
brewers used around 500 tons per year, or 1-2 cubic meters of coal
burned in a day’s brewing. Brewing, already in the 16th century, was undertaken by ambitious business people who employed dozens of workers and used a great deal of energy. [1] This is explored in my new book, The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). For detailed
calculations on industrial burning, see also William M. Cavert,
“Industrial Fuel Consumption in Early Modern London” Urban History (2016), available here on FirstView. [2] Michael Combrune, The Theory and Practice of Brewing (London, 1762), 186-88. [3] Westminster Abbey Muniments 33,906-33,063, Abbey Stewards’ Accounts. [4] Guildhall Library MS 5445/9. [5] Corpus Christi College Cambridge Archives CCCC/O2/2/71; London Metropolitan Archives B/THB/B/150-1.
*****
William M. Cavert teaches early modern English, environmental, and
world history at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, MN. He is the
author of The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City (Cambridge
University Press, 2016). Besides urban and environmental history, he
has recently turned his attention toward England during the Little Ice
Age.
