Month: July 2014

The Brewing Industry in England, 1700-1830 by Peter Mathias

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Well, I’ve finally finished studying Peter Mathias’ masterpiece of brewing history, The Brewing Industry in England, 1700-1830. It is regrettable in the extreme that this book is both out of print, and as difficult to obtain as it seems to be. (I was lucky, as I’ve mentioned in the past, to get help from a friend in Germany who aided me in dealing with online bookseller there; apparently the demand of Mathias’ book in Deutschland is less than in the English-speaking world, and I got it for a relative song.) I’ve mentioned the book in many a recent post, so I’m just going …

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Write-a-Thon Progress Report, Week 4

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Week 4 of the Write-a-thon ended yesterday night. (For me, since I’m doing my writing on a week that runs Monday-Sunday, that is, but since I was sick last night I took a night off…) Here’s my weekly update! If you don’t know what this Write-a-thon is, and want to know more, see here. (While I have a few generous sponsors already, I’d still love a few more, and if you’d like, it’s easy. More info on what’s in it for you at the link above.)

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Got Hops?: Southwark Borough High Street

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This is a post on the geography of the hop trade in London in the 1730s, but it’s really more than that. It’s actually the product of research I had to do to figure out where exactly my protagonist was walking in one scene of the novel I’m writing, and what it probably looked like. As such, it veers between all of this: the main hop market in London, urban geography, the architecture of London bridge at the time, how Londoners internalized the systematic cognitive infrastructure of being urban people, the state of capital punishment in London, hop packaging and transport in the early 1700s, a …

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Write-a-Thon Progress Report, Week 3

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Week 3 of the Write-a-thon ended yesterday night. (For me, since I’m doing my writing on a week that runs Monday-Sunday, that is.) Here’s my weekly update! If you don’t know what this Write-a-thon is, and want to know more, see here. (While I have a few generous sponsors already, I’d still love a few more, and if you’d like, it’s easy. More info on what’s in it for you at the link above.)

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Cats in the Brewhouse

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A short post, because I’m busy…  While searching (fruitlessly) for a picture of the brewer John Perkins at Shut Up At Barclay Perkins, I found a great post about another sort of animal laborer in the old London brewhouse: cats. Probably anyone who’s lived on a farm isn’t surprised, but this was news to me, even if it immediately made sense.   I’ve mentioned before how work-animals–specifically horses–were an important part of the brewhouse. But I hadn’t realized that cats, too were used by brewers. It makes sense, of course: rats like to eat grain, and cats like to hunt …

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