Category: Beer History

Hop-Pickers and Pagan Ritual, from the 1750s to the 1930s

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I’m still working on a series of posts on the South Sea Bubble. It’s kind of fractal: the more you look, the more you see, and it all links so complexly that it’s hard to fit into a single series of posts. So anyway, in the meantime, here’s another subject I’ve been reading up on: the tradition of hop-pickers. It seems like there’s been a surge of nostalgic memory for the tradition of Londoners from the East End making their yearly pilgrimage–a pilgrimage involving 250,000 people at its height, at the beginning of the 20th century–out to East Kent, where a large proportion …

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Books For Malt-Worms

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Today, a light post, but still relevant to beer and brewing in the early 1700s, following my recent post on “Books of Secrets.” Like all industries, beer and brewing are connected to both the industries that produce their raw materials, and spawn other industries as well. One of the more interesting industries that has been spawned by the beer business is the “beer book” business. Most homebrewers think of “beer books” as books on homebrewing–either style guides and recipes or technical manuals. Some beer history buffs will also think of books on beer history, of which a few great ones exist out there. The former has been …

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Geneva: a Poem. (1729)

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Today, another post with some fun stuff (more fun than fungemia, at least) from my ongoing novel research… Back in the early Georgian era, pamphlets were used to do the kind of advocacy and political consciousness-raising we see going on today on Youtube and other social networking sites. One of the more famous ones–and certainly, a poem of interest to anyone concerned with the conflict between gin distillers (who were linked to free-marketeers) versus brewers (who were linked to religious and social reformers) was Elias Blunt’s “Geneva: a Poem” (1729). The full title text is: Geneva: a Poem. Addreſs’d to the Right Honourable Sir R— W—. By Alexander Blunt, Distiller. In …

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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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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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