Handbook of Brewing

Graham G. Stewart, Inge Russell, Anne Anstruther, Graham G. Stewart, Inge Russell, Anne Anstruther

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781498751919
• eBook ISBN: 9781351230810
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Food Science
• Index: Technology & Engineering

With a foreword written by Professor Ludwig Narziss—one of the world's most notable brewing scientists—the Handbook of Brewing, Third Edition, as it has for two previous editions, provides the essential information for those who are involved or interested in the brewing industry.

The book simultaneously introduces the basics—such as the biochemistry and microbiology of brewing processes—and also deals with the necessities associated with a brewery, which are steadily increasing due to legislation, energy priorities, environmental issues, and the pressures to reduce costs.

Written by an international team of experts recognized for their contributions to brewing science and technology, it also explains how massive improvements in computer power and automation have modernized the brewhouse, while developments in biotechnology have steadily improved brewing efficiency, beer quality, and shelf life.

CHAPTER 1

History of Industrial Brewing

Raymond G. Anderson

CONTENTS

1.1 Introduction

1.2 Brewing in an Agrarian World

1.3 The Eighteenth Century

1.3.1 Porter: The First Industrial Beer

1.3.2 Mechanization and Measurement

1.4 The Nineteenth Century

1.4.1 Porter versus Ale

1.4.2 The Rush to Bottom Fermentation

1.4.3 Science and Practice

1.5 The Twentieth Century

1.5.1 Beer and Society

1.5.1.1 Temperance and Prohibition

1.5.1.2 Consumer Choice?

1.5.2 Fewer and Bigger: The Path to Globalization

1.5.3 Science Applied and Technology Transformed

1.6 The Twenty-First Century

1.6.1 Global Craft

1.6.2 Politics, Pubs, and Publications

References

1.1 INTRODUCTION

For most of its history, brewing was a domestic or small-scale commercial activity supplying an essential element of the diet to a primarily agrarian population. Over the course of the twentieth century, it became an industry dominated by a few large companies striving for global supremacy in the supply of branded recreational alcoholic beverages.¹ In the last couple of decades, this hegemony has been dented by the rapid proliferation of brewers operating at the other end of the scale.² This chapter outlines the complex changes in the organization, economic importance, scale, scientific understanding, and technology of brewing, and attitudes about the social function and nature of beer that these changes have engendered across the world.

1.2 BREWING IN AN AGRARIAN WORLD

Brewing is generally considered to have originated as a by-product of the development of agriculture, although minority opinion holds that the cultivation of cereals originated as a consequence of man’s desire for alcohol rather than vice versa.³ Whatever brewing’s exact origins, surviving historical artifacts allow us to trace it back to the Mesopotamians around 6,000 or 7,000 years ago. The Ancient Egyptians were brewers, and beer, brewed from the indigenous cereal sorghum, is still integral to the politics of African tribal life. The historical development of brewing and the brewing industry is, however, linked with northern Europe, where cold conditions inhibited the development of viticulture.⁴ The Romans commented in derogatory terms on the drinking of barley-based beverages by the Germans and the Britons.

From the tenth century, the use of hops in brewing spread from Germany across Europe to replace, or at least supplement, the plethora of plants, herbs, and spices popular at that time. The introduction of hops was met with resistance, but the pleasing flavor and aroma they provided and perhaps, more importantly, their action in protecting the beer from being spoiled by the then unknown microbes, eventually led to hops’ wide-scale adoption. Brewers of unhopped beer depended upon high alcohol to preserve their beers, but this was relatively inefficient, and such beers generally had poor keeping qualities. Although brewing with hops was a more complicated operation, requiring extra equipment, it did allow the brewer to produce a weaker beer that was still resistant to spoilage and thus to make a greater volume of product from the same quantity of raw material. Hops were introduced to Britain in the fifteenth century and reached North America in the early seventeenth century.

For a time, the terms ale and beer were applied to distinct beverages made by separate communities of brewers. Ale described the drink made without hops, whereas the term beer was reserved for the hopped beverage. By the sixteenth century, ale brewers had also come to use some hops in their brews, but at a lower level than was usual for beer, and an element of distinction remained. Ale was recognized as a heavy, sweet, noticeably alcoholic drink characteristic of rural areas. Beer was bitter, often lighter in flavor, and less alcoholic—but frequently darker brown in color than ale, and was popular in towns.⁴ Unhopped ale virtually disappeared from Europe during the seventeenth century, but there remained a vast variety of different beers available. Each region offered its own favorite brews influenced by availability and quality of raw materials and climate. The dominant cereal in use was barley, the easiest to malt, although it could be supplemented or even replaced by other cereals, particularly oats and wheat. In some regions, notably in parts of Germany and Belgium, wheat beers became a specialty. Taxes on beer became a growing feature along with a degree of consumer protection over serving measures and prices enforced by local authorities to regulate sales in taverns. In 1516, the Reinheitsgebot, literally “commandment for purity” was introduced in Bavaria. This early consumer or trade protection measure (outside Germany, views differ)⁵ decreed that only malt, hops, and water were to be used in brewing. Yeast was later added to the list when its necessity (if not its identity) became clear, and wheat was allowed for specialty beers.

Beer was integral to the culture of the agrarian population of northern and central Europe in the medieval and early modern period. The weaker brews were accepted as an essential part of everyone’s diet and the stronger beers as a necessary source of solace in all too brief periods of leisure in a harsh world. There is no reliable information on the level of consumption except for the frequent assertions that it was “massive” and “immense.”⁴ Also, alcoholic strength cannot be estimated with any accuracy without any data apart from general recipes. It was often the practice to carry out multiple extraction of the same grist in order to yield beers of different strengths. “Strong beer/ale” was fermented using wort drawn from the first mash, with weaker beers derived from the second and third mashes. These latter brews (table or small beer) were everyday drinks consumed by all classes and ages at meals in preference to unreliable water and were an important source of nutrients in a frequently drab diet. The strong brews were particularly favored to celebrate church festivals and family events. Only the elite ever saw wines or spirits. Brewing was restricted to the period roughly between October and March; attempts at summer brewing often led to spoilage as a result of contamination.

The scale of brewing ranged from a few hectoliters (hL) annually in the average home to hundreds, or occasionally, thousands of hectoliters in the largest monasteries and country houses. Domestic brewing still accounted for well over half of the beer produced at the end of the seventeenth century. Commercial brewing was generally confined to taverns and small breweries. The latter produced a wide selection of beers of different strengths, light to dark brown in color, predominantly for local consumption. The biggest of these breweries could run to tens of thousands of hectoliters, but true industrialization of brewing did not begin until increased urbanization and concentrated population growth provided a ready market for beer produced on a massive scale.

1.3 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

In general, brewing changed little during the eighteenth century, with a mix of domestic and small-scale commercial production still the norm. Trade in beer remained predominantly local everywhere, whether by the tens of thousands of European brewers or the less than 150 breweries that existed in the fledgling United States by 1800. What little regional or national trade that took place was distributed by canal. International trade was exceptional and confined to the most enterprising merchant brewers who could defray the cost of moving a bulky low-value product with reciprocal deals in other goods. Benjamin Wilson of Burton upon Trent, who traded extensively in the Baltic in the second half of the eighteenth century, is a prime example, but even here, quantities were small at around a few thousand hectoliters per annum at best.⁶

The growth in population of Europe’s cities was to prompt step changes in the scale of operation of breweries. London, capital of the first industrialized nation and the world’s biggest and fastest growing city, provided the earliest example of this phenomenon.⁷ Even at the beginning of the eighteenth century, beer production in London was dominated by “common brewers” who distributed beer to a number of public houses, many either owned or otherwise tied to them. Output from this source exceeded that of “brewing victualers,” who brewed beer only for sale in their own taverns, by a factor of more than 100 to 1. In the country, as a whole, the output ratio at the time was 1 to 1. By 1750, the average output of London’s top five common brewers was an impressive 80,000 hL, and by 1799, it was 240,000 hL.⁸ The breweries of Thrale/Barclay Perkins, Whitbread, Truman, and Calvert were wonders of the age! The product of these mammoth breweries, which far outstripped in size any others elsewhere, was a vinous, bitter-tasting, inexpensive brown beer commonly known as porter.

1.3.1 Porter: The First Industrial Beer

The origins of porter, and indeed its very name, have long been unclear and controversial.⁹ The most likely etymology is that the name derives from a contraction of “porter’s ale,” a nickname for a local brown beer popular among London’s laboring classes, and may be found in print as early as 1710 in a poem by Johnathan Swift.¹⁰

But what to me does all that love avail,

If, while I doze at home o’er porter’s ale,

Each night with wine and wenches you regale?

Claimed first-hand evidence as to its origin comes down to little more than a pseudonymous letter published in the London Chronicle in 1760 from “Obadiah Poundage,” who said he was an 86-year-old brewer’s clerk with 70 years of experience in a London brewery.¹¹ Embellishments on the story have it that porter was “invented” in 1722 at Ralph Harwood’s Bell Brewhouse in Shoreditch in East London to provide a more convenient form of “three threads.” This drink was a mix of three beers, most usually given as: fresh brown ale (mild), matured pale ale (two-penny), and matured brown ale (stale).¹² One explanation of why Harwood’s beer had the contemporary name “entire butt,” or just “entire,” is because it was served as a single product from one cask rather than by the then practice of filling a glass from three separate casks containing different beers—a task that publicans found irksome.

The reality of porter’s origin is almost certainly more complex than the mere result of a move to lighten the potman’s workload. A “reconstruction from the fragments of contemporary testimony” by Oliver MacDonough makes a case for the origins of porter lying in the reaction of London brewers to the increased cost of malt and the relative cheapness of hops as the eighteenth century dawned.¹³ H. S. Corran builds on this and links the emergence of porter with the earlier tradition of brewing strong “October” beers.¹⁴ The science historian James Sumner questions whether porter was a discrete invention at all or rather a “retrospective construct that telescopes a century or more of technical change.”¹⁵ Sumner’s scenario is that London brown beer brewers, in seeking a beer that became “spontaneously transparent,” adopted longer aging, which necessarily required higher hop rates (to keep the beer sound) and more storage space. This in turn led to an unprecedented change in production scales and a rise in giant porter breweries. The size of these spectacular new breweries became part of the mythology that built up around porter’s “enshrining of large-scale production as a ‘secret ingredient’ in its own right,” allowing porter and its highly capitalized brewers to become dominant. Alan Pryor stresses the leading role played by Humphrey Parsons, owner of the Red Lion Brewery, Wapping, in the development of porter brewing in the 1720s. Parsons’ crucial innovation was to increase the storage capacity in his brewery by the installation of an aging cask of the unprecedented size of 160 barrels.¹⁶ Parsons’ master stroke as seen by Pryor is not so much in the adoption of such a large vessel but in the marketing of his beer as having been drawn entirely from this great butt, thus obviating any suspicion of mixing/adulteration when such practices were common by the brewery and by the publican. The drinker could therefore expect consistency and quality from Parsons’ beer. The name he gave to this improved version of porter was “Parsons intire butt.” “Intire” increasingly became “entire” and the terms porter and entire butt beer soon became interchangeable terms; the former was used by the drinker and the latter by the brewer for the same beer.

These recent publications by Sumner¹⁵ and Pryor¹⁶ do much to clarify the technical and commercial success of porter, but they do not fully explain ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Editors
• Contributors
• Chapter 1 History of Industrial Brewing
• Chapter 2 Beer Styles: Their Origins and Classification
• Chapter 3 An Overview of Brewing
• Chapter 4 Water
• Chapter 5 Barley and Malt
• Chapter 6 Adjuncts
• Chapter 7 Hops
• Chapter 8 Yeast
• Chapter 9 Lean Manufacturing Including High Gravity Brewing
• Chapter 10 Processing Aids in Brewing
• Chapter 11 Brewhouse Technology
• Chapter 12 Brewing Process Control
• Chapter 13 Cleaning in Place (CIP)
• Chapter 14 Fermentation
• Chapter 15 Aging, Dilution, and Filtration
• Chapter 16 Packaging: Historical Perspectives and Packaging Technology
• Chapter 17 Microbiology and Microbiological Control in the Brewery
• Chapter 18 Design and Sanitation in Pest Control
• Chapter 19 Brewery By-Products
• Chapter 20 Beer’s Nonbiological Instability
• Chapter 21 Quality
• Chapter 22 Craft Brewing: An American Phenomenon—A Trend Situation that Was Never Expected to Survive
• Chapter 23 Developments in the Marketing of Beer
• Chapter 24 Product Integrity
• Chapter 25 Brewery Health and Safety
• Chapter 26 Sensory Evaluation of Beer
• Chapter 27 Brewery Effluents, Emissions, and Sustainability
• Chapter 28 Making Spirits in a Brewery
• Index