A Brief History of Brewing
Brewing may have been invented by the early Egyptians. Archaeologists digging in ancient Egyptian ruins have discovered drawings of bakeries and breweries as well as actual baking chambers for yeast-raised bread and early grinding stones. These have been dated to 2,000 B.C. Brewing however almost certainly dates back many millenia before this.
Yeast
The most important part of brewing is the fermentation of sugars into alcohol caused by the yeast. Yeasts are eukaryotic, single-celled microorganisms classified as members of the fungus kingdom. The yeast lineage orginated hundreds of millions of years ago and today we can identify around 1,500 different species. By fermentation, the yeast species Saccharomyces cerevisiae converts carbohydrates to carbon dioxide and alcohols - for thousands of years the carbon dioxide has been used in baking and the alcohol in alcoholic beverages such as beer. Yeast microbes are probably one of the earliest known domesticated organisms.
Yeast Technical
By the late 18th century, two yeast strains used in brewing had been identified: Saccharomyces cerevisiae (top-fermenting yeast) (so called because it forms a foam at the top of the "wort" during fermentation) and S. carksbergensis (bottom-fermenting yeast) (these yeasts are commonly used in the brewing of lagers and ferment well at lower temperatures). "Wort" is the sweet infusion of ground malt or other grain before fermentation, used to produce beer and distilled malt liquors. S. cerevisiae has been sold commercially by the Dutch for bread-making since 1780; while, around 1800, the Germans started producing S. cerevisiae in the form of cream. In 1825, a method was developed to remove the liquid so the yeast could be prepared as solid blocks. The industrial production of yeast blocks was enhanced by the introduction of the filter press in 1867. In 1872, Baron Max de Springer developed a manufacturing process to create granulated yeast, a technique that was used until the first World War. In the United States, naturally occurring airborne yeasts were used almost exclusively until commercial yeast was marketed at the Centennial Exposition in 1876 in Philadelphia, where Charles L. Fleischmann exhibited the product and a process to use it, as well as serving the resultant baked bread.
It wasn't until 1876 when Louis Pasteur discovered the true nature of yeast being an organism that yeast's role in fermentation was finally discovered.
Brewing in the UK
Nobody knows exactly when it started, but brewing in the UK certainly dates back many thousands of years. It was certainly well-established by the time the Romans invaded, early beer (made from cereal grains, water and yeast) would have been chiefly produced by individual households and farms, as well as in alehouses or inns.
By the Middle Ages, beer was considered far safer to drink than the water because the water was often dirty. Beer was one of the most common drinks available, accompanying almost every meal. Particularly popular was "small beer", which was watered down to make it less intoxicating. At this time, brewing was often managed by monasteries and abbeys.
Around the 15th century, a major development came in the form of hops, which were imported from the Low Countries (probably The Netherlands and Belgium) to provide flavouring. For many hundreds of years, if the "beer" didn't contain hops, the drink was known as "ale", but if it did then it was known as "beer".
In the late 1700s, the invention of the beer engine allowed drinking establishments to pump beer up from casks in a cellar up to a spout on the bar. Before then, beer would have been taken directly from the cask.
From the early 18th century, beer's main rival was gin. The 1830 Beer House Act, which liberalised the laws concerning the brewing and selling of beer, was designed to wean people onto what was seen as a more nutritious, less dangerous beverage and led to the establishment of many more pubs. Early advertising contrasted beer drinkers in a healthier environment against gin drinkers who were pictured as a degenerate society.
By the 18th century, virtually all beers contained some hops, and hundreds of workers were needed to harvest them every year. In late Victorian times, Kent became synonymous with hop-picking as this was where most hops were grown in the UK.
In mid to late Victorian times, as the industrial revolution took off, large commercial breweries of the type we recognise today began to appear. As a result pubs were serving all manner of beers such as those below:
X Mild Ale
XX Mild Ale
XXX Mild Ale
XXXX Strong Ale
PA Pale Ale
IPA India Pale Ale
LBA Light Bitter Ale
BA Bitter Ale
S Single Stout
DS Double Stout
P Porter
Basically the more "X's" an ale had next to it's name the stronger and more expensive it was. Pricewise from cheapest to most expensive:
1) X Mild Ale and Light Bitter Ale (LBA).
2) XX Mild Ale and Bitter Ale (BA).
3) XXX Mild Ale and Porter (P).
4) XXXX Strong Ale, Pale Ale (PA), and Single Stout (S).
5) India Pale Ale (IPA) and Double Stout (DS).
India Pale Ale and Double Stout were nearly twice as expensive as the X Mild Ale and Light Bitter Ale.
Two of the most popular varieties of beer in the 18th and 19th centuries were stout and porter. Made from roasted malts, these rich, dark beers were particularly popular in London. Guinness is a direct descendant of this type of beer - the Guinness company being founded in 1759.
Another popular drink was India Pale Ale which was brewed originally for export. By the 1840's it was also in demand back home, and, alongside mild ale, eventually overtook porter and stout in popularity. Today's popular "bitter" developed from ales like these.
By the late 19th Century, beer consumption began to fall; water supply became purer, and improvements to diet meant it was no longer required to boost calorie intake. It decreased further during World War One because restrictions were placed on alcohol and this dampened the national fervour for beer, with the amount of barrels drunk a year dropping from 36 million in 1913 to 13 million in 1919. Consumption of beer would never again reach its pre-war peak.
In the 1930's, artificial carbonation arrived. Red Barrel a drink brewed by Watneys was an experimental pasteurised drink with carbon dioxide added chiefly designed for the export market. This was one of the first beers of this type to hit the market. By the late 1960's, serving sterilised beer from a metal keg under pressure as opposed to "live" beer, which is left to mature in a cask or bottle, without added gas had become the norm in many pubs.
Lager was first introduced to England in the mid-20th century. It is crucially different from more traditional English beers (ironically, now usually called "ales") in that it is brewed and stored at a lower temperature, using yeast that ferments on the bottom of the brewing vessel instead of the top. In the early 1960's lager accounted for just one percent of the beer market in the UK, but today it represents more than half.
Not everyone has been happy with this development. The Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) was set up 1971, to fight against beer which was "too fizzy" and "has no character and no taste". CAMRA also fights on behalf of the UK's small independent breweries, many of which have been squeezed out by a handful of big corporations over the past century. Comfortingly, however, local "microbreweries" are seeing something of a resurgence, with over 600 believed to be in operation today in the UK.
Beer Bottles
According to myth, the invention of bottled beer can be credited to Dr Alexander Nowell, a 16th-century dean of St Paul's, who used to take his beer in bottles when fishing. One day, he found an old bottle that had not been opened, and was amazed that the beer was still drinkable.
However, in the UK, bottles were not specifically used in alcoholic drinks at all until just prior to Victorian times in the late 1820's. The only real exception to this was black glass wine bottles, some of them with seals, which can date back as far as the early 17th Century. This of course ignores Roman glass bottles which did exist for certain things but were not used after the Roman period.
Up until early Victorian times beer was served directly from a barrel or via a tap from a barrel directly to the drinking vessels from which it would be consumed. As a result very little physical evidence remains for the bottle collectors. Early ginger beer and porter bottles started to appear at the dawn of Victorian times along with early flagons. Gallon and two gallon flagons were often filled directly from casks so that drinks could be transported and distributed more quickly and more easily. Below are pictures of early porters, ginger beers and a 2 gallon flagon:
All "beer bottles" at this time were made from stone and were salt glazed. These are rearly the earliest remnants of bottles for any bottle collector. As time moved towards the 1850's, ginger beer increased massively in popularity. At this time ginger beer wasn't really seen as an alternative to general beer and in 1855 the government limited it's strength to only 2% alcohol. General beers, even mild ales were stronger than this and extra strong ales went up to around 14% alcohol strength. Beer in general was part of the normal diet and part of the calorific intake for the average person in the street.
When popularity of ginger beer had grown still further by the late 1870's, individual bottles of ginger beer were massively in production. These bottles nearly always contained around 1/2 a pint of ginger beer. Victorian water was impure and not that clean and ginger beer was seen more as an alternative to drinking the water than an alternative to general beers. This is why so many ginger beer bottles were made as at this time as they were portable for workers consumption througout the day. Another factor in ginger beer having it's own bottles was in the brewing itself. Different yeast was used in brewing ginger beer to general beers or ales. It was known that yeast was airborne at this time and cross-contamination of yeast was possible. As a result ginger beer had to be brewed at different premises to general beers and ales. This is why a lot of ginger beer manufacturers were actually mineral water manufacturers as this could be done on the same site. To produce both ginger beer and general beers meant that the companies had to be larger concerns as they needed to have two locations in operation. As a result there was quite a surge in beer bottlers. These were concerns that did not brew the beer themselves but only bottled it direct from kegs for sale.
In reality, beer tended to be mainly consumed at ale houses and pubs. For the middle classes beer was probably filled by the flagon and delivered to individual homes as they were unlikely to be seen drinking with the lower classes. Porter bottles had become somewhat out of favour for most of the UK at this time and the collector does not see many late Victorian porter bottles at all. Flagons were also generally used for ginger beer of course depending on how much was going to be drunk or how much needed transporting somewhere.
There are many many flagons to collect for the bottle collector. Not just beer brewers, but even larger grocery stores or perhaps chemists had flagons with their names on selling beer or ginger beer. The idea was that once consumed the flagons were returned to the stores to be washed and re-filled for resale.
In a similar way this applied to ginger beer bottles. Ginger beer brewers had their names on their ginger beer bottles so that they could be returned to be washed and re-filled for resale.
Mineral Waters
The alternative to ginger beer was really mineral water. Early mineral water bottles known as "hamiltons" date from the 1830's all the way through to around 1910. These were so named after William Hamilton the inventor. Again this drink and therefore these bottles had steady growth in popularity through to the early 1900's. In the early 1880's these started to become succeeded by Hiram Codd's bottle. By this time, in the industrial revolution, technology had developed enough for large gas bottling plants to produce moulded bottles. As a result large scale bottle manufacture ensued and the more technologically advanced Codd bottle took over slowly over the years as the choice of drinks bottle for mineral waters. It wasn't until around 1910 that hamilton bottles finally became extinct. Interestingly the carbonisation of mineral water developed much early than that of beer. Codd's bottle was specifically designed to ensure that the marble closure kept drinks fizzy. Codd's bottle was popularly used up until the early 1930's. After this time, internal screw bottles were used and represented very much the look of a modern lemonade bottle. Below are pictures respectively of an early hamilton, a late hamilton, an early codd and a late codd bottle:
Beer in the 20th Century
Ginger beer, although on the decline, was extremely popular up until World War One. Unfortunately the restrictions placed on consumption of alcohol at this point made demand fall massively. Ginger beer never really recovered from this decline after the War. By this time ginger beer was starting just to be produced in glass bottles, but because water quality was now becoming quite good it was seen very much as a redundant drink.
The consumption of general beers during World War One dropped massively also but because pubs and ale houses still existed, general beers never really dropped out of favour because pubs were regarded as meeting places and places of discussion and entertainment. Where ginger beer was not really consumed at pubs, this contributed to it's final demise.
By the 1930's the introduction of carbonated beer meant that beer had to be sold in containers with proper closure to them so that the product kept it's fizz. This meant that flagons could no longer be used for fizzy beer as the product simply didn't keep it's fizz with a cork closure. The growth in fizzy beer was slow however and flagons were used right up until the 1950's. The invention of the internal screw bottle in the late 1880's did have an impact on bottles. Some mineral water bottles were produced as competition to codd's bottle in the late 1880's without much success. In truth the closure was not as good as codd's bottle which is why codd's bottle was so popular for so long afterwards. Rare examples of bottles have hamilton's bottle with an internal screw thread - perhaps the last desperate attempt to defeat the codd bottle as the no. 1. bottle for fizzy mineral waters. Eventually for a short time, bottle and internal screw manufacturing became accurate enough for codd's bottle to be succeeded by internal screw bottles. In the early 1930's around 60% of bottles were produced as internal screw. By 1935 no more codd bottles existed. At this time the crown cap closure was started to be used in the UK. In the U.S.A., this closure had been used for years before it caught on over here in the UK. The very last ginger beer bottles to be produced were of the crown cap closure variety in the late 1930's. Crown cap closure ensured a much longer shelf life of the beer. Crown caps of course are still used to today for bottled beers and lagers, partly because they are so effective as a form of closure protecting the product for up to around 6 months normally.
Needless to say the number of beer bottles to collect are endless as so many different brewers and bottlers existed over the years. Even collecting perhaps your local county is a near impossible task!