Category: BEER & HOMEBREWING

Scumbags & Con Men of Georgian English Brewing, #1: Humphrey Jackson

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The other day, I posted about folk magic in modern England, but aside from that, I’m also plowing through the piteous biography of Georgian London’s most hapless brewer. The biography, Dr. Johnson’s “Own Dear Master”: The Life of Henry Thrale by Lee Morgan was one I would probably have passed on, had it not been remaindered and on sale for only a few dollars, but it has proven entertaining so far, in part because Morgan seems eager to paint Thrale sympathetically. It’s not hard to understand why: Thrale was, at one time, head of the biggest brewery in England; he married up, he was …

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Imaginable Beers: A Primer for Writers of Speculative Fiction

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This entry is part 6 of 6 in the series For Writers

Recently, a writer friend was asking around on Facebook for some information about the history of brewing and distilling. Since I’ve been studying up on these subjects (and blogging on the subject: see here for brewing, and there’s some stuff about distilling mixed into this tag), it was suggested I might be of some help. I started writing a longish response, and then decided that rather than toss all that information down into the Facebook crevasse where it would never be seen again, I would make a blog post about it. Note, this is primarily directed and writers of fantastical or speculative fiction, but …

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More on Dr. John Perkins, Yes, Of THAT Perkins Family

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This has nothing to do with beer itself, but is an interesting footnote to brewing history. A while back, I mentioned a tantalizing rumour that the son of the brewer John Perkins (of Barclay Perkins fame) had led a life of adventure, ultimately fighting under Simón Bolívar in the Venezuelan War of Independence, but noting there was no more information than that about his fate. Well, today I heard back from the source of that information, Nicholas Harding (who sprouts from the same family tree, apparently?) with more information, in the form of an obituary confirming that indeed, a Dr. John Perkins …

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A Recipe for Mum(me)

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One of the things about writing about historical brewing practices is that, while the methodology is likely not to be too different from what a homebrewer does–mash grain, run off wort, sparge, run off sparge, boil, ferment, package, imbibe–the technology used to complete those steps is absolutely going to differ. Fiction-writing requires details, so I’ve been hunting through brewing manuals of the 1700s, which is a manifold pleasure. It’s fun for a few reasons, but I’ll focus on one for now: the recipes. Among the most amusing is the recipe for Mum that I discovered in The Whole Duty of a Woman, …

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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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How John Perkins Saved Thrale’s Anchor Brewery From the Gordon Riots

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Long story short? Free (as in “free beer”) beer. And food. And a horse-drawn cart. But you want the long version, right? In a very recent post, I speculated on parallels between Georgian England and other societies that are in a comparable stage of internalizing modernity, industrialization, urbanization, and so on. I specifically suggested that what had sounded so odd to me about the handling of the Bin Duong rioters here in Vietnam–trying to appease them, and even give them a refreshing drink–might have a parallel in Georgian England. Well, whaddaya know. While reading a paper on the hop trade …

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