BACCHUS AND BEER.
IT is an undeniable fact, that the English are the greatest
beer-drinking people in the world. The assertion may be disputed in
favor of the Germans (and their beverage, lager bier,) but who can
compare the thin resinous beer of Munich and Vienna with the heavy
bodied, soporific, and sinewy London pale ale, Edinburgh ale, or
Guiness Brown Stout, that has ever drank the latter malt liquors.
To believe in his native beer is a necessary part of the Englishman's
religion, and it is with the proverbial Briton a trite saying, when an
exile at Chicago, New Orleans, New York, Madrid, Constantinople, St.
Petersburg, or Calcutta,
"You cawnt get a glass of hale in this blessed country--you knaw. You
hawvent got the 'ops you knaw, and ye cawnt make it ye knaw."
English literature and English poetry are full of beer and redolent of
malt and hops, from Chaucer and Shakespeare down to the present day.
Tom Jones, Roderick Random, the Spectator, the Tatler, the Guardian,
Fielding, Hume, Smollett, Pope, Addison, Dryden, Goldsmith, and Samuel
Johnson, never let slip a chance to prove the virtues and efficacy of
beer, and 'Alf and 'Alf.
It was in a room in Barclay & Perkins' brewery in Southwark, then owned
by Mr. Thrale, that Samuel Johnson, (who, if he was an obstinate,
dogged, and overbearing old rascal,--yet was the father of modern
English,) wrote the famous English Dictionary, and when Mr. Thrale
died, Johnson being one of his executors, the property was sold to the
Barclay & Perkins of that day for the sum of £135,000. The present
brewery encloses fifteen acres of buildings and vats, and is the
largest in the world but one.
The tribes that came from India and settled in Germany, to which
Tacitus refers, were the first to introduce beer into Europe. The
descendants of these long haired, fair skinned tribes, were long after,
(in the sixteenth century,) the first to teach the English brewers the
use of hops, for the people of England, of that day, made their beer
after the manner of the ancient Egyptians, by the admixture of herbs,
broom, and berries of the bay and ivy.
In 1585, there were twenty-six brewers in London and Westminster, who
brewed in that year 648,960 barrels of beer, and, six years after, they
exported 24,000 barrels of beer to the Low Countries and Dieppe. In
1643, the first excise duty was imposed on beer. In 1722, the brewers
stored their beer to keep it mellow, for the first time, and sold it
to all house-keepers to be retailed at three-pence a pot--holding over
a pint. In 1869, 500,000 barrels of beer, valued at £1,800,000, were
exported from London to foreign places, being one-fourth of the total
amount that was exported during the same time from other ports in
England.
British India took 201,000 barrels, Australia and New Zealand, 148,000
barrels, China, 35,000 barrels, Cape of Good Hope, 15,000, British West
Indies, 30,000 barrels, Spain took 209 barrels, Brazil, 15,000 barrels,
Russia, 6,000, and France 7,000 barrels.
Barclay and Perkins employ a capital of £2,000,000 annually in their
trade, and 300 huge horses, brought from Flanders, at a cost of from
£60 to £100 each. These horses consume 9,000 quarter hundreds of oats,
beans, or other grain, 900 tons of clover, and 290 tons of straw for
litter. The manure hops that are spent, and other refuse, are taken
by a Railway Company. There are five partners in the house; the firm
being worth £8,000,000, and the head brewer receives a salary of £2,000
a year.
[Sidenote: CATS ON GUARD.]
The water used for brewing purposes is that of the Thames, pumped by
a steam engine, on the same ground where Shakespeare's Globe Theatre
stood three hundred years ago. One hundred and fifty thousand gallons
of beer can be brewed from this water, daily. There are two engines
of 100 horse power each, which are nearly a hundred years old. The
furnace shaft is 19 feet below the surface and 110 above it. The malt
is carried from barges at the river-side, by porters, and deposited in
enormous bins, each of the height and depth of a three-story house.
Rats are fond of malt, but to keep them off a staff of sixty large cats
are constantly employed on the premises, and all these cats are under
the supervision of a big-headed or chief cat, with a long moustache and
Angola blood.
[Illustration: CATS RECEIVING RATIONS.]
It is quite a sight to witness the anxious solicitude of this Chief
Cat for the honor of the house of Barclay & Perkins, and for the
discipline of his subordinate cats, the chief being a Thomas of the
purest breed.
Thirty-six tons of coal per day are used here for brewing purposes, and
the malt is stored in a huge room, with light windows, called the Great
Brewhouse, built entirely of iron and brick. There is no continuous
floor, but looking upwards, whenever the steaming vapor rises, there
may be seen, at various heights, stages, platforms, and flights of
stairs, all occupied by the Cyclopean piles of brewing vessels.
There are also huge buildings next to the brewhouse, with cooling
floors, into which is pumped the "hot Wort," as it is called, or beer.
The surface of the floor in one of these buildings is 10,000 feet
square, and I saw men with gigantic wooden shoes swimming about in this
beer, which looked like a vast lake. The beer is sometimes cooled by
passing it through a refrigerator which has contact with a stream of
cold spring water. The cold beer is then allowed to ferment in vast
rooms or squares, as large as an ordinary block of houses,--which are
made to hold 2,000 barrels. It is a strange sight to look at one of
these lakes of beer, the yeast rising in masses like coral reefs in
a southern sea,--upon the surface of the water, and these rock-like
elevations yield, after the force of the yeast is spent, to the
slightest wind, giving it the appearance of a vast ocean of beer in a
storm. There is one huge vat for porter that will hold 5,000 gallons,
which at selling price is worth £12,000. The Great Tun of Heidelberg
holds but half of this quantity. One thousand quarter-hundreds of malt
are brewed daily by Barclay & Perkins.
[Sidenote: THE GREAT PORTER TUN.]
The great rival house to that of Barclay & Perkins, is that of Hanbury,
Buxton & Co., in Brick-Lane, Spitalfields, covering eight acres; in
which 275,000 gallons of water are used daily, obtained from a well 530
feet deep;--600,000 barrels of beer are brewed here annually. There are
150 vats, the largest of which contains 3,000 barrels, or about 100,000
gallons of beer. There are eight brewing coppers, three of which are
capable of containing 800 barrels each. 700 quarters of malt can be
mashed at one time in six mash tubs;--10,000 tons of coal are used
annually, and there are 200 huge horses, each horse consuming 42 pounds
of food per day, or about 2,500,000 pounds per annum.
There is a library with 5,000 volumes, a billiard-room, reading-room,
and savings-bank, on the premises, with a benefit Club for the workmen,
each member paying sixpence a week, and receiving fourteen shillings
a week in case of sickness; and on the death of his wife, £8, and in
the event of his own death the family receives £18. Two companies of
volunteers were raised from the 800 employees of the firm, and the men
are allowed one holiday in a fortnight.
The brewery of Mr. Salt, at Burton-on-Trent, has been established for
eighty years, and brews annually 25,000 barrels of that peculiarly
strong and bitter ale.
[Illustration: THE GREAT PORTER TUN.]
In London it is calculated that about 6,500,000 barrels of ale, beer,
and porter, are brewed annually, valued at about £20,000,000, and I
think I am therefore correct in calling the English a beer-drinking
people.
Everybody drinks beer in London. You can see laborers and dockmen
sitting on benches outside of public houses, swilling what they call
swipes, at two pence a pot. So if you drink at a Club you will see men
as eminent as Mr. Bright, or Mr. Disraeli, calling for a "pint of Bass'
East India Ale," or "a bottle of Stout." Even in work-houses beer is
kept on tap, and were the paupers to be deprived of their beer, they
would, I believe, rise and annihilate their masters. A quart bottle of
good beer or porter can be got anywhere in London for sixpence, and
of all the beverages that I have ever tasted, I never found anything
to equal in fragrance a drink of good London "Brown Stout" on a warm
summer day. A man may procure as much good beer as he can drink at a
draught, for three pence, in London, at any public house or restaurant,
and it is the common custom with the Cockneys to have it at every meal,
and also between meals.
They have also a fashion in large parties among the working and middle
classes, of ordering what is called a "Queen Ann," which is simply
three pints of beer in a large, brightly burnished metal pot with a
handle, and the man who calls for it having paid, takes a drink, then
wipes the edge of the pot with the cuff of his coat-sleeve, to remove
the foam from his lips,--then passes it to his wife, sweetheart or
his eldest child, who each in turn drink and wipe the edge of the
measure; then it is passed to the stranger, and all around the board,
each person being careful to wipe the "pewter" in the same fashion.
This custom seems rather strange and savage at the first sight to an
American, but it is the custom of the country, and therefore cannot be
quarreled with.
Benjamin Franklin, as we learn by his diary, was disgusted by the
beer-swilling Londoners. When a journeyman printer in London before
1776, he says--"I drank only water; the other workmen, near fifty in
number, were drinkers of beer. We had an alehouse boy who attended
always in the house to supply workmen. My companion at the press drank
every day, a pint before breakfast, a pint at breakfast with his bread
and cheese, a pint between breakfast and dinner, a pint at dinner, a
pint in the afternoon about six o'clock, and another pint when he had
done his work. I thought it a detestable custom, but it was necessary,
he supposed, to drink _strong_ beer, that he might be _strong_ himself.
He had four or five shillings to pay out of his wages every week for
the detestable liquor."
This is pretty strong testimony from Franklin, and I find that
although he frequented alehouses in London, where all the men of wit
and learning of the time were to be found, yet he never indulged in
beer.
[Sidenote: QUANTITY DRANK IN LONDON.]
Any foreigner passing through a London street which is inhabited by
working men and their families, or in the neighborhood of factories or
other industrial establishments, if the period of the day be between
twelve and one o'clock, or just after twelve, cannot fail to notice
a sudden commotion and rush of men, women, and half naked children,
with jugs, pewter measures, tin cans, and earthen vessels, to the
neighboring tap-room or beer-house. All this large multitude are in
quest of beer for the noonday meal.
At noon and night the pot boys of the innumerable beer-shops may be
seen carrying out the quarts and pints daily received by those families
who do not choose to lay in a stock or store of their own beer, or the
mothers and children of the same families, to whom the half-penny given
to the pot boy is a matter of consequence, may be seen journeying to
the beer-conduits themselves, and the drinking goes on from morning
until night, among truckmen, coal heavers, street pavers, mechanics in
the "skittle grounds," medical students in the hospitals, law students
in the Inns of Court, and "swells" in taverns.
From the gray of the morning until the hour of dark, you may see in
the London streets those large drays, larger horses, huge draymen, and
large casks of beer, ever present and never absent from the Londoner's
eyes. Go down to the Strand, that street which borders the river, and
you will see the same drays and Flemish horses emerging from the huge
brewery gates, preparatory to carrying barrels of beer to tap-houses,
and nine-gallon casks, the weekly allowance of a private London family,
to dwelling-houses.
A competent authority has estimated that each and every inhabitant of
London will drink, averaging young and old--80 gallons of beer in the
year. The population is 3,500,000.
Therefore, Great is Beer, and Barclay and Perkins are its prophets.