Tag: beer history

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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Isinglass

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There’s some wonderful information in Peter Mathias’ The Brewing Industry in England 1700-1830, especially if you’re looking for funny details about the world of London brewers in the 1730s that could be hacked into alchemical-industrial conspiracy. For example, isinglass: It’s basically made out of fish bladder, and it’s used as a “finings”–that is, you dump some of it into your finished beer (in powder form, I think, though I’ve never used it myself), and it pulls the yeast to the bottom. In other words, it clears up your beer, and it was the main way of doing so prior to mode recent …

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He’s No Isambard Kingdom Brunel, but…

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I know, I’m late to the party, but lately I’ve been reading Sydney Padua’s the webcomic The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage (coming soon as a book, apparently?), and, well: Everyone loves Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and for good reason: though he was more like the Tony Stark of his age–“accomplished” barely touches how important an engineer he was during his short but influential career in early Victorian London–the Wolverine-like look he gets in Padua’s comic (and, well, in the photos, really) is, er… I’ll put it this way: as Padua has noted, he’s an extremely popular character. He even got …

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Yeast, as Understood in 1736

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  I’m really glad I was able to get a second opinion on one little detail that has become of great importance to my ongoing novel project. That is: how well did brewers understand the function of yeast in brewing back in 1736? It might sound strange, but that detail is incredibly important in terms of a lot of things going on in the book! During my visit to Korea, I got a chance to read a fair bit of Jamil Zainasheff and Chris White’s book Yeast: The Practical Guide to Beer Fermentation. I wasn’t particularly blown away by the book: …

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