Tag: beer history

Some (Admittedly Unkind) Words for Henry Thrale

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I mentioned recently that I’d been reading Lee Morgan’s biography of Henry Thrale. I’ve finished it, and collected some material on beer history–what little there was in the book. For the life story of a man whose wealth was gotten in the making of beer, the subject comes up much less than you might imagine… but then, as I mentioned last time, Thrale was always more interested in fox-hunting and clever conversation with upper-class people than the business that gave him such a wealthy lifestyle. Morgan’s text is a funny sort of book: it has lots of things that make it worth reading, including …

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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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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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Distillers vs. Brewers: Tabulated Expenses from 1736

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I know I promised a post on the South Sea Bubble next, but, well… it’s become a series, and the series isn’t done, so in the meantime, an interesting snippet from an anti-Gin tract.   Take note: Thomas Wilson’s Distilled Spirituous Liquors The Bane of the Nation (1736) has a clear agenda. (Also, an amazing title. 18th-century people just did titles like nobody else!) The agenda was to get the trade in gin banned in England; with that in mind, one should be careful how seriously one takes its content, especially concerning anything about distilling. It is, after all, a pamphlet written to rebut …

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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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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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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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