Country House Brewing in England 1500–1900 9781474210003, 9781852851279

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Preface The origins of this book lie in the world of the country house rather than the brewery. As curator to a museum service which took care of an eighteenthcentury country gentleman's brewhouse, I developed a strong practical interest in both the physical remains and the documentary evidence relating to them. The brewhouse formed part of the stable-block at Shugborough, the Staffordshire seat of the Earls of Lichfield. In the late 19605 Shugborough became the property of the National Trust, but was leased out to Staffordshire County Council. The stable-block became part of Staffordshire Museum Service and incorporated kitchens, a washhouse and laundry and a coachhouse, as well as the brewhouse. These were all restored, more or less to working order, by the museum. The work on kitchen, laundry and finally brewhouse went hand-in-hand with documentary research into the organisation of the estates of the Earls of Lichfield. The brewhouse restoration was an especially difficult project, largely carried out by Shugborough's own staff of bricklayers and carpenters. The team was headed by the then assistant curator, Adrienne Whitehouse. It received practical help and encouragement from many people, notably the two brewers from the Earl of Halifax's estate at Hickleton near Doncaster, Ken Lindley and Dave Pickering. These men form a tenuous link connecting the open-copper brewers of the past with the present, for Hickleton is the only private brewhouse in England which has continued to brew right up to the present day. Even here the coal-fired furnace has been replaced by gas and the old brewhouse superseded by another site, but at least the old, discarded fittings were incorporated into the new brewhouse furnace at Shugborough. The team which restored the Shugborough brewhouse and sipped its first brew with secret trepidation is in no way responsible for this present work but it has provided its inspiration. Inevitably, the restoration work saw moments of hilarity as well as heartache. This must have been true, too, of many instances which lie behind the records of times past. Sometimes the tersest of entries in diary or account book can speak volumes; all that is needed is that leap of the imagination which provides its own colour.

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The area under study has been restricted to England and, to a less extent, Wales. This limit is a practical one relating to the cost of modern-day travel. Many of the surviving brewhouses mentioned are in the midlands, a fact which is probably yet another function of the travel patterns of the author. Many of the documentary examples derive from Staffordshire houses. The method used during the original exploration of the Shugborough brewhouse, supplementing archaeological evidence with documentary historical sources, has been retained. Physical objects on their own can be peculiarly obtuse and in this type of subject area the dual approach is essential; an understanding of objects and technique is fundamental to the interpretation of the written record, and vice-versa.

Illustrations 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

The brewhouse at Lacock, showing the copper and the steps leading to it Domestic Brewing, from W.H. Pyne, Mircocosm, 1808 Shugborough, Staffordshire, east front The brewhouse at Shugborough The new mash tun at Shugborough The new copper at Shugborough Tide page from The Compleat English Brewer by George Watkins, 1767 Tide page from Dictionarium Domesticum by Nathan Bailey, 1736 The brewhouse at Lacock The gatehouse at Kimbolton Casde, c. 1810 An eighteenth-century brewhouse at Bishopthorpe Palace The brewhouse at Stanway Plan of the brewhouse at Houghton, 1618 A view of the inside of the brewhouse at Charlecote The brewhouse at Painswick The brewhouse at Painswick, showing ventilating lantern Inside the brewhouse at Lacock Engraving of a small brewhouse, 1747 The brewhouse furnace at Lacock Section through the brewhouse at Stackpole Court, 1843 Diagrams illustrating the method of hanging a brewing copper, 1847 Sketch of equipment in the brewhouse at Pradoe Inside the brewhouse at Aynhoe, 1815 Plan of brewhouse at Shibden Hall Plan of brewhouse at Calke Plan of brewhouse at Lacock Plan of a combined brewhouse, washhouse and bakehouse, 1807 Plan of the brewhouse at Stanway Plan of the brewhouse at Pradoe Plan of the brewhouse at Charlecote The brewhouse at Dorney Court, near Windsor

ii 2 6 10 10 n 14 17 20 25 26 27 28 30 32 33 34 35 36 38 39 40 43 48 48 49 49 50 50 50 51

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32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

Plan and section of the brewhouse at Hickleton Illustration of a small brewing plant, 1857 Brewing utensils from Shibden Hall Head of a brewer's mashing oar Brewer's jet, for ladling worts The copper oudet tap with a chute attached by a leather strap, Charlecote The outside door of the brewhouse, Lacock The beer cellar at Chatsworth Account of the ale vessels at Trentham, 1770 A nineteenth-century primitive painting of a cooper's workshop A cooper at work with a heading knife Plan of a proposed new brewhouse at Wrest Park, 1735 Thoresby Hall, 1948 The ledge at the bottom of the copper underwork, Charlecote The two copper underworks, Charlecote Diagrammatic section through a brewhouse, after Smythson The mash tun fitted under the copper outlet, Charlecote The fermenting tun under the coolers, Charlecote The brewhouse copper at Lacock The cooling tray, Lacock The brewhouse cooler, showing the lead lining Method of cooling wort during fermentation Rowing the mash The fermenting tun, Lacock The brewhouse building, Chastleton Pradoe, Shropshire, taken before 1904 A sixteenth-century brewhouse Charlecote Park, west face Interior of brewhouse, Lacock, showing copper and working platform Cold water inlet and damper, Charlecote The brewhouse at Stanway, seen from outside entrance to kitchen court

55 59 62 63 66 67 69 72 74 75 77 80 88 94 95 97 98 99 101 102 103 104 104 105 no 113 119 124 126 127 130

63 64

Oast house Hop-picking, 1574

131 136

65 66 67 68

Hops A cellarman at Chatsworth, 1835. Painting by W. Baker Eighteenth-century recipe for brewing orange ale Calke Abbey

137 142 145 148

ILLUSTRATIONS

69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104

Production of ale and beer at Calke, 1834 Consumption of malt and frequency of brews at Calke, 1834 The beer cellar, Calke Consumption of malt and frequency of brews at Chillington Hall, 1824 Production of ale, strong beer and small beer at Lilleshall and Trentham, 1746/7 Production of ale and small beer at Arbury Hall, 1781 Consumption of malt and frequency of brews at Arbury Hall, 1781 Production of ale and frequency of brews at Wollaton Hall, 1782 Consumption of malt and frequency of brews at Blithfield Hall, 1795-6 Title page of Anon., Domestic Brewing, c. 1840 Frontispiece from Dictionarium Domesticum by Nathan Bailey, 1736 Portrait of Edward Barnes, Erddig, 1830 Advertisement for domestic staff, Staffordshire Advertiser, 1805 A brewer's salary record, Trentham, 1840-47 The servants at Shugborough in the i88os Tapping of ale and small beer, Calke, 1739 Tapping of ale at Hatherton Hall, 1865-66 Tapping of ale at Arbury Hall, 1788 Tapping of small beer at Blithfield, 1725 Trentham Hall, Staffordshire, west front and main entrance Map of Trentham, c. 18705 Postcard view of Trentham brewhouse, prior to 1908 The brewhouse at Trentham today Brewer's monthly report, Trentham, October 1848 Postcard view of lodges at the entrance of the coach yard, Trentham Production of ale and beer at Trentham, 1848 Consumption of ale and beer at Trentham, 1848 Consumption of beer by laundrymaids, Trentham, 1848 Small, open-top beer cask on a table trolley, from Dunham Massey Daily record of the issues of beer, Ingestre Home Farm, 1829 Posed photograph of a farm labourer, 1862 Haymakers at Rudge Hall Horn cup from Berkshire Weekly record of issue of beer, Hatherton Hall, 1866 Extract from diary of Mathew Boulton, 1800 Extract from the servants' meal book, Trentham, 1879

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156 $6 157 158

l

159 161 161 162 164 165 167 175 177 180 191 194 195 196 197 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 211 217 220 222 223 226 230 231 234

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105 106 107 108 109 no in 112

COUNTRY HOUSE BREWING

Specifications for glasses by John Greene, c. 1670 Glass ale flutes Glass ale or beer rummer, c. 1820 Boot-shaped ale warmer or muller Extracts from the catalogue of Henry Loveridge and Co., 1898 Extracts from the catalogue of Henry Loveridge and Co., 1898 Sketch of west front and main entrance, Trentham Harvesters and their families, Hatherton Hall, c. 1905

242 243 244 244 250 251 256 261

Documentary Illustrations Inventory of the brewhouse at Trentham, 1826 Types of brewhouses according to layout of copper and furnaces Inventory of the brewhouse belonging to Nicholas Blundell, 1737 Inventory of the brewhouse at Petworth, 1869 Inventories of the cellars at Wrest Park, 1779 The Duke of Bedford's cooper's bill, Woburn, 1756 Inventory of the brewhouse at Wrest Park, c. 1700 Second estimate for construction of brewhouse carcase, Wrest Park, 1735 Second estimate for the supply of brewing vessels, Wrest Park, 1735 Second estimate for fitting the copper, Wrest Park, 1735 The brewhouses of the Dukes of Kingston, inventories, 1726 Extracts from brewer's journal of A. Shore, Doddington Hall, c. 1804 Extracts from the journal of Clarence E. Hellewell, Hickleton The process of malting Ale and beer recipes The hop - Humulus lupulus Domestic medical recipes using ale as a base Cures for a hangover

45 47 53 68 71 78 81 82 83 84 87 106 107 128 132 134 146 147

Posset ale Household recipes using ale as a base Ale-based composition drinks Brewing expenses at Thoresby

149 150 151 181

Acknowledgements My sincerest thanks are due to the many people who have helped me, especially those who patiently filled in my initial questionnaire and courageously answered advertisements in magazines; also the numerous officers and administrators of the National Trust who have answered my enquiries and searched for photographs; many archivists, librarians and curators; owners of private brewhouses who gave me permission to explore and photograph, especially Lord Neidpath, Colonel John F. Kenyon, Lord Dickinson, P.P.D. Palmer, Peter Giffard, Mr and Mrs Joynt, Kimbolton School; to the members of the Hickleton and Shugborough staff who started it all; and many individuals, notably Rob Barnett, Peter Brears, Elizabeth Cartwright-Hignett, Peter Day, Ruth Engs, Heather Godwin, Robin Hildyard, Chris Marchbanks, Gary Marshall, Peter Mathias, Alex Pennycroft, Joyce Sleight and Mike Smith; and above all Vera Collingwood and Martin Sheppard. I am grateful to the following for permission to use documentary material: Bass Museum, Burton-on-Trent; Bedfordshire Record Office; Birmingham Central Library; the Earl of Bradford; Calderdale Council Leisure Services, Shibden Hall; Courtauld Institute of Art; Viscount Daventry; Derbyshire Record Office; Dyfed Record Office; Edmund Fairfax-Lucy; Gloucestershire Record Office; Halifax Estates Management Company; Hallward Library, University of Nottingham, Department of Manuscripts and Special Collections; Lancashire Record Office; the Earl of Lichfield; Manvers Trustees and the Hon. Michael Willoughby; the Marquess of Tavistock and the Trustees of the Bedford Estates; National Trust; North of England Open Air Museum, Beamish; Petworth House Archives and Lord Egremont; Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England; Rural History Centre, University of Reading; Staffordshire Record Office; Warwickshire Record Office; William Salt Library, Stafford. The initial research for this book was made with help from a grant given by the Twenty Seven Foundation, London University.

The author and the publisher are most grateful to the Brewers and Licensed Retailers Association for a generous grant towards the cost of the illustrations.

Illustration Acknowledgements The author and the publisher are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce illustrations: Architectural History 13, 47; James Austin 41; R.A. Barnett 91; Barrie and Jenkins Ltd 23; Bass Museum, Burton-on-Trent 7, 8, 78, 79; Bedfordshire Record Office (BRO) 43; Birmingham Central Library 103; Peter Brears 32, 34; Brewers and Licensed Retailers Association (BLPvA) 42, 63, 65; British Library 105; Calderdale Leisure Services 24; Elizabeth Cartwright-Hignett 23; Vera Collingwood i, 9, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 31, 37, 38, 45, 46, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 55, 56, 60, 61, 62; Courtauld Institute of Art 66, 80; Devonshire Collections, Chatsworth 39; Dyfed Record Office 20; English Heritage 50; Cliff Guttridge 3; Clarence E. Hellewell 53; Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust 109, no; Kimbolton School 10; Gary Marshall 25; Peter Mathias 41; National Trust i, 9, 14, 17, 19, 20, 26, 30, 38, 46, 48, 49, 51, 55, 60, 61, 71, 80, 97; North of England Open Air Museum, Beamish 18, 21; Joy Priestley 90, 93; Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England (RCHME) u, 44, 57, 59, 68, 93; Peter Rogers 40, 67, 81, 82, 98, 102, 104; The Rural History Centre, University of Reading 35, 36, 101, 108; William Salt Library, Stafford 81, in; Pamela Sambrook 22; Shugborough Estate 3; Staffordshire Museum Service (SMS) 4, 5, 6, 58, 83, 100, 112; Staffordshire Record Office (SRO) 40, 67, 82, 87, 98, 102, 104; J. Tiernan 29; The Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge 99; Victoria and Albert Museum 106, 107.

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Abbreviations BEO

Bedford Estate Office

BRO

Bedfordshire Record Office

BCL

Birmingham Central Library

BLRA

Brewers and Licensed Retailers Association

DRO

Derbyshire Record Office

GRO

Gloucestershire Record Office

LRO

Lancashire Record Office

NUL

Nottingham University Library

PHA

Petworth House Archives

RCHME

Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England

SMS

Staffordshire Museum Service

SRO

Staffordshire Record Office

WRO

Warwickshire Record Office

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'Her father was a country gentleman down in your part of the world, and was a brewer. I don't know why it should be a crack thing to be a brewer, but it is indisputable that while you cannot possibly be genteel and bake, you may be as genteel as never was and brew. You see it every day.' Herbert Pocket to Pip in Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, chapter 22.

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I Introduction and Sources Introduction There is no beverage so wholesome and invigorating as beer, nor any so generally palatable; it may, indeed, be justly considered as our national drink; and therefore to procure it cheap and good must be one of the most important points of domestic economy.1

So wrote the anonymous author of an instructional guide for domestic brewers, published in the 18408. In writing about the production of beer at home he was dealing with a tradition which was already many centuries old, though then on the wane — one of the first and most enduring examples of man's intimate involvement with biotechnology. This book will consider this tradition and the place of beer and brewing in the everyday domestic world of the past. In particular it will examine the world of the private gentleman's country brewhouse. Today, the rare survivors of these once commonplace buildings have mostly been converted beyond recognition, into busy tearooms, public lavatories or study areas for schoolchildren. Some of the conversions took place some time ago. One of the most appropriate was the derelict brewhouse at Tyneham in Dorset: according to the daughter of the house, before the First World War it became 'a cheerful garden room . . . a perfect setting for our Christmas tree as well as for small parish teas and meetings, children's treats and servants' parties . . .' 2 Others stand derelict, prey to icy winds and drifts of dead leaves and providing useful storage space for unwanted window frames, rusting bikes and obsolete central-heating boilers. Some are used as fuel bunkers or as temporary salespoints for asparagus and tomatoes. A lucky few have remained unchanged for centuries, complete with boilers, coolers and even their great oak vessels. No stainless steel or plastic here, only a memory of the smell of wet wood and hot copper. Private country brewhouses were once extremely common. It is rare to find a country house of any size or age which has no record at all of the existence of a brewhouse - whether it be a few words in an old cellar-book, a few bricks

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in an outbuilding, a hazy recollection by an elderly employee, or merely a place-name. There was good reason why they were so common, for they provided the staple drink of the household, an early form of bulk catering. The hot drink of modern habit is a mere 300 years old at most. For centuries before the arrival of tea and coffee in the 16505, and for a good 150 years after, most men and women in England depended upon beer for the greater part of their daily liquid intake. In a world uncomplicated by sewerage systems, to drink plain water might invite typhus or dysentery. In any case, for most people pleasures were few, and water boring. Our temperate climate nurtured those cereal grains which provide a good base for a fermented drink. Beer-drinking was 'normal' and 'good' and beer was food as well as drink. Children were given beer from weaning. Beer, or its predecessor ale, was the cup which quenched the early morning thirst, washed down the main meal of the day and, along with a few mouthfuls of bread, provided a late-night supper. It was both reward and stimulus, drink and sustenance. The great majority of beer was brewed at home for domestic consumption. During early centuries the vast majority of brewers were brewsters — that is, female. After all, brewing was a form of cooking - not the chemistry it became in the nineteenth century, and brewing was a normal part of the housewife's duties. Such brewers are unknown and unremembered: some were servants, performing their duties for money or reward in kind, but many housewives did it simply as part of the seasonal round of household chores. They gave it care and energy, working with the ultimate sanction in mind, knowing they had to

FIGURE 2. Domestic brewing. From W.H. Pyne, Microcosm: or a Picturesque Delineation of the Arts, Agriculture, Manufactures, etc. of Great Britain (London, 1808). Aquatint by J. Hill.

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3

drink it themselves; and knowing too that, if it turned out unpalatable, they might have nothing else to drink and no one else to blame. The task of running the sequence of brews efficiently was far more important than doing the washing. In older houses the provision of special brewing premises came long before the appearance of laundries. Many brewers, however, worked in kitchens, butteries or outhouses which varied from the austere to the squalid. On larger farms, the through-put would justify building a special shed or a stone or brick building. In larger and later country houses, a brewhouse might be provided by a fashionable architect as part of the range of stable buildings or domestic offices, alongside the bakehouse and the laundry. There were many such brewhouses built during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and they have survived intact in greater numbers than the humbler versions attached to farms. It is these more lavish establishments that are the subject of this book. The world of the English country house was, of course, a limited one, bounded by wealth and privilege. Even the servants were at the top of their particular employment pyramid. We may well ask what relevance such organisations can have to the wider world of brewing technology, eating habits or life styles. What questions can we reasonably expect to be answered by them? The importance of the private brewhouses lies in their being a missing link between the techniques of the modern commercial brewery and the age-old, and largely unrecorded, processes of the medieval home brewer. The study of commercial breweries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is now a flourishing field of historical research. With the help of surviving documentation and buildings, we can plot the technological and business history of this earliest of food industries. Industrial archaeology, however, is limited by the extent of survival of early plant. A comparison of the records of country house and commercial brewing shows that the two worlds — of the private and of the commercial or 'common' brewers as they were called — began to diverge in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with the introduction into commercial premises of new equipment such as mashing engines and covered coppers. Even the smallest and oldest of our surviving common breweries represents this secondary development of technology rather than the more primitive earlier stage. The country house, on the other hand, was not subject to the pressure of commercial viability and was not concerned with labour efficiency. In brewing, as in so many other domestic fields, they soldiered on in the old ways, refusing to give up the open boilers, the coal-fired furnaces, the wooden coolers. To

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walk into a private brewhouse built even as late as the nineteenth century is to walk back into a common brewhouse of perhaps a hundred or two hundred years earlier. With only minor improvements, the technology of private brewhouses changed little over centuries. The equipment itemised in inventories of the nineteenth century is recognisable in equivalent documents of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The reliance on human muscle and experience rather than technological skill did not change, and neither did the imperatives of the yeast-based process and its dependence on weather. The private brewhouses are time-capsules taking us back into a world which is otherwise usually beyond our grasp. This characteristic relates to the social context of the beer-drinking habit as well as to its technology, for what is true of the brewer is also true of the drinker. The beer-drinking tradition goes deep into the English past, as far back as the early farmers of the Neolithic. It also goes deep into the English psyche, with its affectionate anthropomorphic name — John Barleycorn. In the seventeenth century it was still an important social lubricant: a Frenchman visiting a Cambridge clergyman in 1672 later commented on the necessity to drink 'two or three pots of beer during our parley; for no kind of business is transacted in England without the intervention of pots of beer'.3 The modern world began to impinge in the 1650$, when both tea and coffee were introduced into England. They gradually became established as the preferred staple drinks of the wealthy, but both took a long time to filter downwards into the diet of working people. As far as tea is concerned, this seems to have happened in the second part of the eighteenth century. William Cobbett, with his famous diatribes against tea-drinking - the debaucher of youth and the maker of misery for old age was the most famous but certainly not the only contemporary writer to pinpoint this change.4 By the early nineteenth century both rural and urban workers were drinking large quantities of tea. Yet in many country houses at this time household beer retained its importance in the lives of servants, if not the family. Tea was available as an alternative and was gaining ground all the while, especially with women servants, but many country houses of the 1840$ still operated the traditional allowance system. This meant that money wages were supplemented by food, beer and other perquisites. Beer was still drunk in large quantities, every day, at every meal, and not just by the lower manual servants but by housekeepers and ladies' maids, butlers and stewards. The transition to tea happened by stages, the household beer eventually giving up its place as a daily drink consumed all the year round, becoming a seasonal drink for special types

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of work. In some country houses it was not until the later part of the nineteenth century that beer finally gave way to tea drinking; and even then the traditions of seasonal harvest beer died hard. No doubt William Cobbett was guilty of romanticising the rural past as he saw it, just as we often are now through our heritage industry. On the threshold of the twenty-first century, each day we learn more and more about the effect of diet on our lives, on how the physical material we feed into our bodies can alter our health, our energy levels, our aggression, our good humour. In measuring our quality of life, food and the pleasure it gives are good yardsticks; yet the yardstick continually changes its scale. In the days when beer was staple, alcohol must have had an appreciable effect upon people. Small beer might have been low in alcohol content, but other stronger beers were drunk in quantity too, especially by adult men. Addiction to alcohol must have shortened lives, triggering much of the gratuitous cruelty, violence and carelessness to which so many were subject. No doubt it contributed to the battering of wives, the brutalising of children and the torturing of animals in the name of sport. But it also must have dulled the brain to the awfulnesses of life, anaesthetising some of the pain and the crushing tedium. It warmed and cheered, made shy people more sociable and awful people more bearable. Above all, it quenched thirst. All this is tantalisingly outside our grasp, for how can such an influence be placed in context? How can something be quantified which is so private and ephemeral as the beer-drinking habits of people long dead? It may be that the records of the country house beer drinkers can give a few points of reference in this search. Fortunately, wealthy country households accounted for themselves very well in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By looking at the financial and household records they left behind, we can glimpse the coat-tails of the world so bitterly mourned by Cobbett. Fortunately, too, the history of household beer is bound up with the history of domestic service. From time immemorial, the beer allowance system was one of the traditions of that service. Servants who lived as part of the household in which they worked were rewarded partly by money wages and partly by the provision of board and lodging.5 It is important to remember that such food and drink were not 'free'. 'For what we are about to receive somebody else has paid' was the grace said at the servants' hall table by a butler at Shugborough in the late nineteenth century.6 Irreverent he might have been, but he was also mistaken, for board provisions were part-wages and thus hard-earned and paid for in sweat and no doubt sometimes in tears. Both

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FIGURE 3. Shugborough, Staffordshire. The view shows the east front of the country house of the Anson family, the Earls of Lichfield; built originally in the last seventeenth century, it was transformed in the second half of the eighteenth century. The stable buildings can be seen to the south of the house and incorporate a substantial brewhouse. (Photograph by Cliff Guttridge; Shugborough Estate)

the quality and quantity of drink was a vital part of the conditions of service and if it were absent the servant was entitled to recompense. Because it was an agreed part of the contract, records of consumption were often kept. Country house archives document the beer-drinking habits of servants but conversely the beer-drinking habits also record the wider organisation of the country house. Staff employed by large country houses were ranged into a series of hierarchies: the full-time permanent indoor servants who were paid an annual salary plus board and accommodation; the full-time outdoor staff, many of whom lived in cottages on the estate; the part-time staff, who were employed on a casual basis and paid a daily or weekly rate, usually without meals or accommodation; and self-employed craftsmen and trades people who were contracted to do either regular or one-off jobs. The problem is that, unless all the archives of the household have survived, the full picture of work is not recorded. The servant list usually excludes casuals, who might or might not be recorded in a

INTRODUCTION

AND SOURCES

7

casual labour book. The trades people may be unrepresented if the cash book, day book or collected accounts are incomplete. The advantage of a detailed beer record is that every group is represented. The brewer's accounts for the Sutherland household at Trentham, Staffordshire, for example, reveal the presence in the house not only of the permanent staff - the housemaids, laundrymaids, porters and so on - but also of servants visiting from the London household, casual outdoor workers such as labourers filling the ice-house, and trades people such as painters, bookbinders and bell-hangers. All were drinking beer, so all show up on the record. Besides giving us a general picture of beer-making and drinking in the past, the country house world may help us to go a little further along the road towards answering some specific questions. To what extent, for example, was beer a staple drink at different times and for different classes of people? Did household beer retain its appeal longer for country households than others? Can we see in their accounts illustrations of the process by which beer-drinking moved away from being a staple to its more modern position as a luxury? Were drinking patterns episodic or daily? Were servants restricted to weak beer or were they allowed stronger drink? Were there other issues of gender or status which divided beer-drinkers? To what extent was the beer allowance system supervised? Who were the brewers? Were they male or female? What were the reasons for building private brewhouses? Were they provided by only the wealthiest country house owners? Why did they bother to make their own beer when they could have bought in their supplies? More technically, when did permanent built-in boilers become common? Or when did hand pumps begin to lighten heavy labour? Or lead-linings come to the 'aid' of hygiene? Today we accept almost without question a picture of brewing in the past as being a highly seasonal activity; is this accurate? Above all, how strong was the drink, how much did people drink - and were they in a permanent alcoholic haze? These are the sort of questions which the book will address, but can hardly hope to answer fully. The sources for the study are widespread and numberless and only a tiny fraction of the available material has been tracked down. The work presented here merely sketches the main processes, issues and questions. The aims are several: to open up a hitherto neglected area of food history and to encourage more detailed micro-studies of the food and drink of individual houses and families; to illuminate further the nature of the contract between servant and master in the country house system; to explore the importance of the buildings which survive; to provide a summary of equipment and skills

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which will be of use to those studying the social or architectural history of the English country house; and to widen the focus for those interested in beer history. The book does not set out to be a technical work and readers who know little or nothing about the processes of brewing should not experience difficulties. One of its aims is to get inside the head of the household brewer of old, and to see his problems as he saw them, without hindsight. For this reason, a highly unscientific account of the process of brewing as it might have been explained by an eighteenth-century private brewer has been included. A modern scientific brewer will find numerous points of issue here, but it is hoped that this will help to set the buildings in the context of their times. Neither is the approach that of the academic. The book deals with practicalities and the patterns created by them, rather than theoretical constructs. The aim is to provide some of the groundwork which is necessary before conceptual issues such as the cultural norms of beer-drinking can be addressed. The book is divided into four main sections which correspond to four main areas of interest. The brewhouses are central to the study; the first section, therefore, examines the siting of brewhouses, their internal structures and fittings which are so characteristic and the problems of maintenance and cost of building. The focus then moves to beer and its production — a summary of the process of brewing as operated in the eighteenth century is followed by an identification of different types of beer produced by private households and the ingredients which went into them. The third section explores seasonal patterns of brewing and the brewers who were employed by the estates to provide beer. The fourth chapter considers the various categories of drinkers of household beer and the social patterns which governed consumption. The concluding chapter deals with those changing circumstances which brought about the end of the household beer system.

Sources In identifying likely sources of information, the first line of inquiry must be the buildings themselves. Allowing for the fact that most private country brewhouses have been disused for a hundred years, a surprising number remain intact. A very small number have survived complete with internal structures, movable fittings and small-scale equipment. The best working example is beyond the geographical

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scope of this book, at Traquair in Scotland, where the brewhouse has been brought back into use after a period of dereliction. In England, the best examples are in the ownership of the National Trust, at Charlecote in Warwickshire and Lacock in Wiltshire (Fig. 9). Another Trust property, Shugborough in Staffordshire, has restored its brewhouse to working condition whilst conserving its original coopered tuns and planked coolers (Figs 3—6). The brewhouse at Calke Abbey patiently awaits rescue from present delapidation. At least one privatelyowned brewhouse is being brought back into working condition, and a number of others in private ownership are substantially intact but in a state of disuse. Others are unhappily derelict. The vast majority have been converted to various uses, with or without retention of identifiable features. The list of brewhouses which have some internal fittings remaining and which have been visited during the course of this work is far from complete; it is hoped that the book may be the mechanism by which many more will come to light. Almost without exception, the owners of brewhouses are keen to see them preserved or at least recorded. They are often difficult buildings to understand or even to identify, and this book may help in this direction. For the moment at least, a building record in bricks and mortar survives. The problem is that this record is very fragile and may not be with us for much longer. Understandably enough, buildings which are unused but which offer clear working-space are sitting targets for diversification plans. They are threatened by shortage of conservation resources, neglect or even overenthusiasm. It is therefore important to raise the level of interest in the structures themselves. Remembering that we are dealing with extremely modest buildings, it is not surprising that the National Building Record at the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments of England has few references and drawings of private brewhouses, and not a single photograph of an interior. As part of the preparation work for this book, sketch-plans have been made of a number of brewhouses. Others have a meagre photographic record only, and yet others remain completely unrecorded. The small-scale equipment and utensils used in brewhouses have survived even less frequently than the buildings and fittings. The little brewhouse set up at Shibden Hall, Halifax, has good examples of smaller brewing equipment, as has Charlecote, Breamore in Hampshire and the reserve collections of Birmingham City Museum. These last were collected from various sites in the 19508 and 19608 by the (then) Museum of English Rural Life, the University of Reading. Brewhouses are evocative, but viewed on their own they are frustratingly

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FIGURE 4. The brewhouse at Shugborough, Staffordshire, part of a range of domestic buildings built in the eighteenth century for the Anson family. The brewhouse retains part of its original staging, with the tuns and coolers. A new copper and mash tun are capable of producing beer. (SMS)

FIGURE 5. The new mash tun at Shugborough doubled as a cooling back, using a dairy milk-cooler fitted temporarily under the tap. (SMS)

reticent; something more is needed to set their physical remains into context to help reconstruct both the processes associated with them and the social significance of the tradition. Fortunately for modern researchers, paranoia seems to have been a common affliction amongst country house owners in the past, to judge by the extent to which they required of their servants a written record of every detail of domestic life. Within the household, opportunities for waste or theft were tempting, so stores had to be recorded, expenditure listed and accounts rendered. A documentary record therefore exists. It is piecemeal and dates mainly from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Occasionally, promising household accounts have survived in number — not only cellar-books but also flour-books, account-books, stewards' books, housekeepers' vouchers, wage-books, records

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II

FIGURE 6. The new copper in the Shugborough brewhouse. (SMS)

of casual labour, inventories, tax returns, monthly brewer's reports and manuscript receipt books. In other cases only individual documents have survived, each contributing some small point of interest or colour or puzzlement. The potential sources are endless, and only a tiny number of family archives have been explored, mainly from the midlands. The difficulty lies in finding relevant documents: such insignificant scraps of information are buried deep in family collections; they are hardly ever cross-referenced and are wildly variable. For every piece of useful material found, mainly by chance, large quantities of irrelevancies have to be faced. Since history is never neat, it should not come as a surprise that the houses which have good records are rarely the houses which have retained their brewhouses.7 A few are lucky enough to have both - notably Calke Abbey and to a lesser extent Shugborough. This is therefore yet another reason for this book — to enlist the aid of other researchers, who are working on specific household collections for other reasons, in pinpointing likely records. There are other difficulties with country house records. Malt liquor coming into the great households of the seventeenth century or earlier was accounted for by the Clerk of the Kitchen. Unfortunately, the record usually took the form of weekly amounts coming in and out, consumed by the whole household,

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COUNTRY HOUSE BREWING

with little or no differentiation as to drinkers. In the wealthy country house of the eighteenth century and later, records of ale and beer consumption were kept by the butler, the underbutler or the usher, occasionally by the brewer. They usually recorded the numbers of casks tapped — normally hogsheads, sometimes barrels or butts — not actual consumption by the gallon or pint. It is therefore difficult to relate consumption to individuals rather than households; this presents a major limitation. Records also vary enormously in the amount of detail given and care taken. It is always worth remembering that they were kept by the servants themselves, for whom beer was allowed in part payment of wages, so the record may not always be strictly accurate. Again, in many households the main concern of the butler was the recording of wine and spirits; the malt liquor was given only scant attention. Sometimes, as at Shugborough in the nineteenth century, nothing remains of the monthly or annual receipts or disbursements from the cellars; only the occasional stock-take survives. At the other extreme, some houses kept two-foot-wide cellar-books, each page printed in columns and totals. Some family cellar-books are enclosed in cheap brown card covers, some in exquisitely tooled leather. A few households took their beer-drinking extremely seriously: incoming and outgoing amounts were recorded meticulously, month by month, with notes of where the beer went to. The ultimate achievement in efficiency can be seen in the printed report sheets which the Sutherlands' brewer at Trentham was required to complete each month (Fig. 87). The Shugborough record of a couple of centuries earlier exemplifies another problem: in the 16905 George Anson, the proud new owner of a rebuilt Shugborough, kept a tiny personal notebook in which he recorded his expenditure. When he had filled a series of pages with notes — about brews or bricklayers - he followed common practice and turned his notebook sideways and began again. The result is not easy to follow. As well as a body of contemporary archival material there also survives a substantial number of contemporary printed books. For sixteenth-century writers on domestic matters brewing was an essential element. Thomas Tusser (1557) has a few well-chosen words on the practical aspects of the subject; Andrew Boorde (1542) devotes more space to the effects of drinking; but both Sir Hugh Platt (1594) and William Harrison (1577) were highly exercised about the qualities of beer and the techniques of beer-making. One of the first writers to give a comprehensive account of how to brew was Gervase Markham, whose manual of domestic economy was published in 1615. Two other important sources from

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the seventeenth century are highly idiosyncratic and hugely enjoyable: Thomas Tryon (1690) was no professional brewer but a 'student of physicke', an early advocate of temperance and a mild eccentric. He certainly held strong beliefs about brewing and health at a time when new ideas were spreading. Randle Holme (1688) was less knowledgeable about the specifics of brewing but had obviously talked to brewers and visited brewhouses during the course of compiling his dictionary of terms used in heraldry - an unlikely origin, perhaps, for one of the most useful sources on seventeenth-century domestic interiors. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were splendid times for both brewers and builders: many brewhouses were built to serve the new elegant country mansions of the rich; so many, in fact, that finding experienced staff to operate the new brewhouses became a problem. Women were no longer considered suitable to run such prestigious structures, which, in any case, needed to produce beer on a large scale requiring heavy manual labour. This difficulty explains in part the plethora of instructional books which were published during the eighteenth century, aimed at giving practical guidance to private brewers. Such manuals provide an invaluable aid to the modern researcher, making sense of otherwise obscure points within the household record. The most useful of these texts were produced by professional brewers contributing to the great eighteenthcentury burgeoning of the written record on brewing, part of the developing technology of an emerging industry. One of the earliest and perhaps the best-known of all the brewing manuals amongst modern writers is William Ellis's The London and Country Brewer, published between 1734 and 1738. Ellis's book was useful to both commercial and private brewers. Many of these early writers were aware that their books would be read by the private brewer and took account of this - like George Watkins, a brewer of some thirty years experience who wrote The Compleat English Brewer in 1767 (Fig. 7). Some were deliberately designed for the private house: one of these was written by a butler — Thomas Poole, butler to Sir William Aston - who wrote A Treatise on Strong Beer in 1783, specifically for the novice country house brewer. His book is a practical, common-sense guide, the product of hard-won experience. By the end of the eighteenth century, the technology of commercial brewing was leaving private brewers behind, so that books aimed particularly at the latter became even more necessary. One of the most important of these was The Compleat Family Brewer, or The Best Method of Brewing or Making any Quantity of Strong Ale and Small Beer in the Greatest Perfection for the Use of Private Families, written in 1802 by Thomas Threale. The commercial sector was, of course, developing its

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own literature addressed primarily to commercial brewers; one example of many is A Practical Treatise Explaining the Art and Mystery of Brewing Porter, Ale, Twopenny and Table-Beer, published in 1810 by Samuel Child. One of the earliest to try, sometimes mistakenly, to introduce an element of scientific observation and system into his instructions was Michael Combrune, whose Theory and Practice of Brewing, published in 1762, was aimed primarily at the common brewer. In his introductory remarks we can see a sign-post to the future: The business of brewing was, and now generally is, in the hands of men unacquainted with chemistry and not conscious that their art has any relation to that science, though it is in reality a considerable branch of it. Many other brewing manuals were published in the eighteenth and early FIGURE 7. Title page from The Compleat nineteenth centuries. Most of them English Brewer by George Watkins, first pubran to numerous editions; the dates lished in 1767. (Bass Museum, Burton-on-Trent) given in this book relate not necessarily to the first edition, but to the ones used in this work. Some of the texts are derivative, copying from each other. Most of the ones which have been used extensively here, however, have a clear individuality stamped on them. Some of the eighteenth-century instructional writings took the form of more general compendia of domestic wisdom — the forerunners of the more famous nineteenth-century household guides. Perhaps the most useful of these is Nathan Bailey's Dictionarium Domesticum published in 1736 (Figs 8 and 79). The first women writers to include sections on brewing drew heavily on other works but are useful and practical — for example, Penelope Bradshaw's Valuable Family Jewel (1748) and Eliza Smith's The Compleat Housewife or the Accomplished Gentlewoman's

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Companion (1758). Other writers compiled general dictionaries, such as John Worlidge's Dictionarium Rusticum et Urbanicum (1704). T.H. Croker's three-volume Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, published in 1764-66, appears to be derivative from Worlidge's book, at least as far as brewing is concerned. With the exception of J.H. Walsh's Manual of Domestic Economy published in the 18508, domestic manuals written in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries usually have little to say about beer and brewing - family life had moved on for most people. One or two pamphlets from this period have proved interesting, however, such as that published anonymously in the 18405 under the title Domestic Brewing: A Handbook for Families (Fig. 78). In addition, as the temperance movement got under way, instructional tracts or 'catechisms' were published to warn young, and especially female, servants of the pitfalls of domestic drink. Many country house brewhouses were designed and built by professional architects and a number of works by these have proved useful. These include a collection of seventeenth-century drawings by the Smythson family, the published designs of John Flaw (1795) and R. Lugar (1807), as well as the works of such well-known architects as John C. Loudon (1833) and Robert Kerr (1864). Beer was the subject of a number of books written around the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Some of these are extremely helpful, such as Nineteen Centuries of Drink in England by Richard French (1884); others, though highly informative, are sometimes annoyingly facetious to modern taste, such as The Curiosities of Ale and Beer: An Entertaining History by Charles Henry Cook writing as John Bickerdyke (1886). The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have also left behind numerous autobiographical accounts by people of varied social origins, including servants. Many make occasional references to beer as part of their daily life. A few of these have been used in the present study, but, as we now know, this type of source is much more numerous than used to be thought and much work remains to be done.8 When we come to twentieth-century sources, one in particular stands out. These are the unpublished memoirs of the brewer at Hickleton on the Earl of Halifax's estate near Doncaster. They cover a crucial period when Hickleton was the only country house brewhouse in England to carry on the old traditions. Clarence Hellewell's detailed, honest and highly enjoyable account is both invaluable and memorable.9 During the nineteenth century the modern brewing industry evolved its highly complex technical and business structures. This was indeed a different world

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from that described in this book. Many modern books are available which cover the history of commercial brewing, notably of course the standard work of reference written in 1959 by Peter Mathias and the books by H.A. Monckton, H.S. Corran, T.R. Gourvish and R.G. Wilson.10 The consumer side of the story is presented by the classic book on alehouses by Peter Clark.11 Other recent works by brewing writers include several books which have a considerable input relevant to the country house context. Modern studies of actual brewhouses are rare and twentieth-century architectural studies of the country house in particular have been extremely neglectful of the subject.12 Peter Brears, however, has published a useful record of the Hickleton brewhouse; John Steane has written on Chastleton; and Gary Marshall's work on the Calke brewhouse remains uniquely comprehensive.13 The study of household beer in the past relates to modern historical research in a number of distinct fields. During the last few decades, the history of food has become an established subject. Useful background is provided by the earlier, but still standard, texts on food and diet by writers such as J. C. Drummond and Anne Wilbraham, John Burnett and C. Anne Wilson.14 The food history world has realised that country house sources can be useful. Recent papers from the Leeds Symposium on Food History, for example, have included material on country house diet.15 Food and drink have also been recognised as important elements in the history of everyday living: though dealing with an earlier period, Christopher Dyer's work on medieval standards of living provides a pertinent context and P.W. Hammond gives a useful overview; the academic discussion about the nature and position of brewers within the medieval household has been summarised and extended by David Postles and others.16 Studies on historical drinking patterns and the cultural origins of alcohol addiction are also relevant.17 Modern scholarship on the history of domestic service also provides a vital component. Studies which use country house archives and make reference to beer allowances include JJ. Hecht's classic text on eighteenth-century domestic history and Pamela Horn's work on servants.18 A book which provides a wealth of detail on country house life is Adeline Hartcup's work on selected country houses.19 More recently, writers such as Leonore Davidoff, Theresa McBride, Ann Kussmaul, Jessica Gerard and Edward Higgs have illuminated the nature of the employer-servant relationship, so central to the issue of household beer.20 Finally, it is perhaps surprising to find so little material relevant to household beer amongst fictional sources. Occasional references will be found in the works

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of George Eliot and in Esther Waters by George Moore; otherwise there seems to be little enlightenment to be found on this most fundamental aspect of household life.

Definitions A glossary of brewing terms encountered in historical sources is included (below, pp. 269-72), but it is worth drawing attention here to a few definitions as they are to be used in this context. Throughout this book, the twin themes of 'ale' and 'beer' run parallel but distinct. As explained by Peter Mathias, the terms give rise to considerable confusion, as their meanings have changed over the centuries.21 Until perhaps the seventeenth century FIGURE 8. Title page from Dictionarium the word 'ale' referred to unhopped Domesticum by Nathan Bailey, published in fermented malt liquor, what Andrew 1736. (Bass Museum, Burton-on-Trenf) Boorde referred to as the natural drink of an English man. 'Beer' - the 'naturall drynke for a Dutch man' - was the hopped malt liquor introduced from the Low Countries in the fifteenth century.22 Since the new fashion for hops took time to spread into the country districts, the word 'ale' gradually came to apply to the country drink, even though it might be hopped, and 'beer' the product of town breweries. Because of the way these two different traditions developed, by the eighteenth century 'ale' was a light-coloured drink typically brewed in the provinces, as opposed to 'beer' the darker, thicker drink of the cities, especially London. It was this eighteenthcentury definition which was used by Mathias throughout his book. Later still, 'beer' has come to be the generic name for all malt liquors, including ale. In the context of country house brewing, the terms were used in a slightly different way. The private house produced only a restricted choice of liquors. Their main concern was with various strengths of what would be generally called

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BREWING

in the eighteenth century 'ale'; porter and the heavier beers were rarely brewed. In this specialised rural world the word 'ale' seems to have been used to describe the first-drawn worts of each brew; the word 'beer' was used for the later worts of the same brew, products either of a second or even a third mash with a single charge of malt, or of a continuous run of liquor through the mash after the first worts had been run off. In other words, 'ale' denoted the quality drink of higher strength, whilst 'beer' referred to weaker household, table or small beers. It is this meaning which is generally adopted in this book, whenever the distinction between ale and beer is important. At other times, more general use has been made of the generic meaning of the word 'beer', as an all-embracing term for malt liquor. A word is necessary about measures of ale and beer. Within the country household, the vast majority of accounts of malt liquor used the hogshead as the measure, presumably because it was actually stored in hogshead-sized casks, now reckoned to hold a standard fifty-four gallons. Occasionally barrels or butts were used also. In order to simplify the record, amounts have usually been converted to gallons or sometimes pints, as being easier to quantify in the imagination. For this conversion, the modern standard gallonages have been used even though measurements were far from standard in the past. (See pp. 273-74).

Brewing A few notes explaining how beer is made may be useful at this point, though a more detailed account of the process of brewing as used in a country house brewhouse will be found on pages 90—92. Brewing is essentially a chain of conversion processes: i. Malting. Each grain of barley contains a store of food in the form of starch and protein. Germination of the grain releases enzymes which will change the starch into sugar. In order to activate this change the barley is steeped in water. Germination will start but, as soon as rootlets appear, the malt is dried in a kiln in order to stop further growth. The kilning also adds a variable degree of colour to the malt. At the end of the process malt is a stable product which can be stored or marketed. Some country houses did their own malting but increasingly the process was contracted out or malt bought in.

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2. Mashing. Brewing begins by reactivating the conversion of starch to sugars by the further application of moisture and heat. The malt is first ground and then mixed with hot water (called by brewers 'liquor'). During this stage, which is called 'mashing', a complex chain of fermentable sugars is released from the starch. These dissolve into the liquor to make a sweet extract (called 'wort'). This is then drawn off and the spent grains left behind. In a country house brewhouse, mashing was carried out in an open coopered mash tun. 3. Boiling. The wort is returned into a heated vessel where hops are added. The mixture is boiled for between one and two hours. Hops add flavour and help to stabilise the wort, while boiling helps the solids to coagulate and thus aids clearing. The length of the boil, and the consequent evaporation, also governs the strength of the beer; this was particularly the case in a private brewhouse where the boil took place in an open copper furnace. 4. Cooling. The spent hops are strained from the wort, which is run off and cooled in shallow coopered tubs or wooden trays. 5. Fermentation. The cooled wort is run into the fermenting tun, where yeast is added. Yeast is a single-celled microscopic plant which feeds off sugar and produces alcohol and carbon dioxide. Surplus yeast collects on the top in a froth or head. The fermentation vat of a country house brewhouse was a large coopered tun, positioned usually in the brewhouse, sometimes in the cellars. 6. Racking. When the process of conversion to alcohol (called 'attenuation') is complete, the beer is run off from the yeast debris into casks; it is left to settle and treated with finings to help in clearing. This process took place either in the brewhouse itself or sometimes in the cellars.23

FIGURE 9. The brewhouse at Lacock Abbey. The brewhouse door is centre; next to the clock tower is the room which gives access to the brewing furnace as well as to a first-floor walkway from which people could view the brew; it also housed a bread oven. (Photograph by Vera Collingwood; National Trust)

2

The Brewhouse This study was stimulated by a particular brewhouse, at Shugborough. The best starting point for this account, therefore, is the evidence of the buildings and fittings which have survived in country house brewhouses, interpreted with the help of contemporary brewing manuals. A discussion of the component parts of the private brewhouse will help with the identification of objects, as well as giving an appreciation of the work involved and the expenses incurred, both in the capital outlay required for building brewhouses and in the long-term commitment to maintenance. Pause for a moment to record the pleasure which brewhouses have given both to their original owners and to present-day explorers. There is a magic about the country gentleman's brewhouse, captured in this piece of pure romanticism written by Christopher North in the last century about his own estate in Scotland: A gentleman's brewhouse, like his greenhouse, his hothouse, his dairy, or even his cellar, is no such unpleasant place . . . There is our own brewhouse at Buchanan Lodge; it might pass for a summer-house . . . It stands . . . at the back of the house, just at the edge of the little ravine or dell, and half hid by the laburnums. It is also separated from the other offices by a lowish beech hedge. Around, below, and opposite are growing the wild cherry, the tall chestnut, the sycamore, the fir, the thorn, and the bramble, which clothe the sides of the deep glen. From its chimneys, as soon as the soft March gales begin to blow, curls the white smoke before the hour of dawn. The fire within burns brightly. Everything is clean and 'sweet as the newly-tedded hay'. Precisely as six o'clock strikes we march forth . . . with our old fishing jacket and our apron on; our old velvet study cap about our ears, and our thermometer in our hand. The primroses are basking in the morning rays; the dewdrops are sparkling the last upon the leaves; the unseen violets are breathing forth sweets; the blackbird trills his mellow notes in the thicket; the wren twitters in the hedge; and the redbreast hops around the door.1

Even in their present state of decay, it is fairly obvious that over centuries the

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design of brewhouses developed very much along standardised lines. Regional variations exist in building materials and architectural styles, but the consistency of internal functional features over both time and place is remarkable. While it may be that greater regional variations will become obvious as more examples are studied, the standardisation of fittings surely implies a technology which changed little over long periods of time. The design of surviving brewhouses may show a high degree of technological stability but what were its origins? The country house brewhouse derives from an even older and a much simpler tradition - that of making beer at home over an open domestic hearth. This would have been laborious work, but no more so than many other culinary or household chores. A weekly brew occupied space around the hearth, but would be economical as the fire could be used for ordinary cooking at the same time. There was, however, clearly a restriction on the size of brew which could be accommodated; brewing would therefore be frequent and the beer not expected to last long. Eventually, a large cauldron over the open fire might well prove inadequate in size and be replaced by larger copper or brass furnaces. Probate inventories of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries show frequent mention of furnaces; since only movable equipment was usually included in such inventories, these were presumably not permanently bricked in; but they would too large to hang over an open fire like a cooking pot, so they would need some sort of brick surround from which they could be lifted; rare surviving examples have handles at the side. Presumably such furnaces might also have been used out-of-doors or for other purposes, such as boiling meat. A serious drawback of kitchen-scale brewing equipment lay in the high risk of scalding or burning. The risk was not limited to the brewer; large-scale fires could result. A kitchen brew was responsible for the burning of a large part of the Cheshire town of Nantwich: a great fire started on the afternoon of Tuesday, 10 December 1583, in the kitchen belonging to Nicholas Browne, where beer was being brewed. The fire under the cauldron got out of control and soon the whole house was ablaze. A strong westerly wind fanned the flames which leapt from house to house, spreading to the centre of the town. By morning, despite the frantic endeavours of the townspeople in organising chains of buckets from the nearby River Weaver, a large part of the commercial area was destroyed and two women had been killed. A third of the population was made homeless; rubble was still smouldering in cellars after twenty days.2 We can see that fear of fire in primitive brewing premises was well-founded and long-felt; there was

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good reason for the twelfth-century regulation that all London alehouses were to be built of stone. There were, therefore, advantages in providing purpose-built fixed equipment in a special room; like the bread-baking oven, a fixed brewing furnace must have been one of the earliest forms of specialist cooking structure. It has been postulated that increasing investment in more sophisticated equipment was connected with the spread of brewing with hops; further, the need for better equipment and greater expertise may have been linked with declining domestic production in the sixteenth century.3 All of these connections may be true, but no systematic work has yet been done on the spread of humbler built-in domestic brewing facilities. Evidence exists in the form of probate inventories. A cursory check through such evidence from Steyning in Sussex shows that by the i66os one-third of all inventories from the area include references to brewhouses; they were common even in houses belonging to small farmers and skilled manual workers. Before the i66os the few scarce references to brewhouses relate only to gentlemen or yeomen.4 This increase in small-scale brewhouses at this time indicates a pattern which seems to be the opposite to that suggested by research into alehouses. No doubt the picture which would emerge from more detailed analysis would show a complex regional pattern, but this is beyond the scope of our present enquiry. The building record offers further evidence to supplement documentary sources: the number of brewhouse references on the historic building database at Cambridgeshire County Council, for example, suggests that small domestic brewhouses were extremely numerous. One of the few brewhouses recorded in the National Building Record belonged to a farrier's house in the main street of Yarwell in Northamptonshire; this had a separate brewhouse, wash house and forge, in that order, running back from the house.5 Many of the simplest brewhouses were housed in similarly separate shacks in the back yard - plain, homely structures reminiscent of the romantic tree-shaded bothy described by Christopher North above. They were built in the vernacular style and stood detached on their own site. It was a common arrangement on farms, where space was not constricted and where they could offer a degree of isolation and safety from fire. Small country houses sometimes show examples of brewhouses whose position and size relate back to this tradition. At Nunton in Hampshire a brewhouse like this has survived, but with barely a trace of its original function. A more complete example has survived at Pradoe in Shropshire. Built by the newly-married Thomas

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Kenyon, sometime shortly before 1806 when the coolers were paid for, the rough sandstone brewhouse backs onto the pigsties, the midden and the farmyard (convenient for disposal of brewer's grains); it rubs shoulders with the dairy and faces the back porch of the house; the latter is equipped with both seat and shade for the enjoyment of visiting tradesmen as they imbibed their customary pint. Pradoe began life as a farm, only growing into a gentleman's country house at the end of the eighteenth century. While the enlarged house incorporated the usual domestic offices (kitchens, housekeeper's quarters, servants' hall and so on), brewhouse and dairy remained close to the farm buildings rather than to the house, from which they are separated by a string of modest but useful stone-built shacks which served as boot room, ash pit, slop room and privies. An alternative siting is found in some modest households. Thousands of brewhouses were physically attached to the back of the house — mere single rooms tacked onto the traditional backwards-spreading sequence of kitchen, scullery, dairy, brewhouse. Most have long been demolished or converted into kitchens, granny flats, utility rooms or garages. Occasionally they have survived as featureless brick-built rooms with few if any physical remains of their former use, with only tradition or hearsay to stand as evidence. This is the case with the brewhouse at the back of Pickford's House in Derby. Yet even here there may be tell-tales, perhaps in the traces left by pipework or drains and the patterns of repair on the floor. Again records of many examples survive in building and conservation archives, though in the vast majority of cases nothing substantial remains of the former use. Even country houses of some size may show this backyard sequence, with the brewhouse built up against the rear wall of the kitchen or scullery, but under its own roof span (Fig. 15). An example of this is to be found at the seventeenth-century house of the Throckmorton family at Harvington Hall, near Kidderminster, where the brewhouse was originally built behind the kitchen and dairy, separated from them by the great spit shaft which is such an amazing feature of the house. Here the brewhouse was converted into a washhouse in the nineteenth century. Its former function can only be traced in the layout of fire and flues. Sometimes during a modernisation programme a new kitchen was built and the old kitchen retained as a brewhouse. This was the case in the house of Francis Goble, a yeoman of Steyning in Sussex who died in 1732. In his probate inventory the old name - 'the old kitchin' - was retained, but the room was equipped with three furnaces, one complete with 'grates'. Besides various brewing

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equipment the room also held a butter churn, three cheese presses and a cider press - a useful room all round. By contrast, the brewhouse of the larger eighteenth-century country house was more specialised and formal in its siting. The eighteenth century was, after all, the hey-day of the country house brewer. Beer quality improved with the spread of bottom-mashing and access to training manuals. Many new country houses were built or modernised at that time, and the period saw the spread of specialised 'domestic offices' - warrens of kitchens, sculleries, stillrooms, washhouses, dry laundries, pheasantries and so on. Purpose-built brewhouses were thus conceived as an integral part of a planned layout and in some cases designed by the most prestigious of architects. At Kimbolton Castle, in Huntingdonshire, Robert Adam incorporated both brewhouse and laundry into the gatehouse, designed around 1764 to complement the Vanbrugh facade on the main house (Fig. 10). Architectural brewhouses shared a common elevation and roof line with other functional interiors; decorative features used in the overall design

FIGURE 10. The gatehouse at Kimbolton Castle, Cambridgeshire, designed by Robert Adam, c. 1764, incorporating a brewhouse and a laundry either side of the archway. Water came from a well in front. Engraving by Charles Challon, c. 1810. (Kimbolton School)

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FIGURE 11. An eighteenth-century brewhouse at Bishopthorpe Palace, North Yorkshire, undergoing conversion to domestic use in 1985. (RCHME)

(parapets, stone quoins and arched windows) were followed through on the brewhouse elevation. Some eighteenth-century brewhouses, however, were more functional, easily converted to domestic use, as at Bishopthorpe in North Yorkshire (Fig. n). Some were themselves converted from other uses. Despite the architectural pretensions of some brewhouses, functional imperatives still held sway. In repose, country brewhouses are quiet and modest. When the furnace was firing they drew attention to themselves by the steam drifting through the cracks and by their unmistakable aroma. For this reason much thought went into their position in relation to the rest of the house and the domestic interior. They were usually sited well away from both family and senior servants' quarters but they were not usually tucked away at the back; they were often fairly prominent, visible even from the drive, as at Shackleford House, Surrey; or the first building at the entrance to the service courtyard, as at Chillington and Stanway (Fig. I2).6 Often they were structurally part and parcel of the main stable courtyard, but equally often they opened in an opposite direction, outwards away from the stable or carriage working areas, as at Calke Abbey.

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FIGURE 12. The brewhouse at Stanway, seen from inside the kitchen court; the door to the brewhouse is under the entrance arch on the left. (Photograph by Vera Collingwood]

The architect John Loudon told his readers that the brewhouse should adjoin the washhouse and the bakehouse; this advice seems sensible enough.7 On the one hand, brewhouses and laundries share a common technology - that of boilers and a copious water supply; on the other, the brewer shared with the baker the problems of using and caring for yeast. All three produced strong and pervasive smells, especially in the days when washing had to be steeped in an alkaline lye. The aromas of brewing and baking may seem pleasant in small doses, but they can become overpowering and they hardly provide a suitable ambience for an appreciation of an aristocratic life of leisure. As late as 1865, when one would have thought that few people were building new brewhouses, Robert Kerr was advising the readers of his book The Gentleman's House that 'the Brewhouse itself ought to be so placed that its vapours shall not penetrate into and around the house'.8 These interiors were to be situated as far as possible from the family quarters. On the ground, proximity to either laundry or bakehouse seems to have been a common arrangement. ChiUington's brewhouse was built next to the bakehouse

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FIGURE 13. Plan of the brewhouse at Houghton, 1618, showing a brewhouse sharing the bakehouse flue. After S mythson's original drawings reproduced in Mark Girouard, 'The Smyths on Collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects', Architectural History, 5 (1962).

and just a step from the laundry; Scotney Castle's was next to the bakehouse and dairy; and at Shugborough it is adjacent to the coachhouses and stables, but also very close to the building which used to be the bakehouse. Calke's brewhouse is some distance from the main domestic offices, tucked into a corner of the stable yard, but connected to the cellars and kitchen area by an underground tunnel. If space was really at a premium, a smaller house could make do with a shared brewhouse-cum-bakehouse. Several of the designs by John and Robert Smythson in the 17505 show this combination.9 This was a perfectly sensible arrangement since brewing furnace and bread oven could be used at different times and did not interfere with each other. Services such as access to fuel and flues could be shared (Fig. 13). It was a common solution to the problem of space lying unused for days on end. There are many references to the practice in building conservation documentation, as well as the occasional architectural survival. The elegant little brewhouse at Painswick, for example, has one bread oven built out from the back wall, next to the brewing furnace, with the traces of an earlier bread oven arch and chimney still visible within the side wall (Fig. 16). The ultimate in common services can be found at Charlecote, where the brewer's fireboxes and water supply share a single room with both the laundry coppers and the bread oven (Fig. 30). Such shared arrangement was frowned on by brewers, but favoured by architects.10 A shared 'brew and wash house' was provided by John Gibson at Dobroyd Castle, and in 1807 R. Lugar published a design for a combined brewhouse, washhouse and bakehouse; Lugar specialised in planning gentlemen's farm and estate buildings, so presumably this shared design was aimed that level of society (Fig. 27)."

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Because brewhouses were both dark and well-ventilated they were often used for fruit storage. Indeed, according to sale particulars of 1797, the brewhouse at Shackleford in Surrey had a permanent fruit chamber built over it.12 Still logical but more ambitious was an idea by the architect John Flaw, who was commissioned by John Morant to design an elegant bathhouse at Brockenhurst House in the New Forest: the bathhouse was set in woodland and incorporated a shower bath and dressing-room complete with couch and stove. It was described as 'situate a small distance from the brew-house and reservoir, by which it is supplied with hot and cold water, sufficient to make a full tepid bath'.13 This is not the only record of a bath being supplied with hot water from a brewhouse boiler: an inventory of the house at Canons Ashby mentions a bathroom, now long gone, which was situated adjacent to the brewhouse and the laundry. This brewhouse is one of the many which is now in use as a tearoom.14 A malthouse or malt store was a more normal close neighbour than a bathroom. Harvington Hall still has its malthouse, situated near to but separate from the main block of the house and brewhouse; all are within the curve of the moat. Even establishments which did not kiln their own barley usually milled their own malt; a store room fitted with a malt mill was provided, usually next door to the brewhouse and often at first-floor level. This helped in the control of vermin and allowed a convenient supply of malt to be fed into the brewhouse at the level of the mash tun. This was the situation at Stanway, but smaller farm brewhouses were also provided with an upper store for malt, as at Westerleigh in Somerset.15 A good example exists at Calke, where the malt store and malt mill have survived, next door to the brewhouse and separated from it by a connecting doorway at first-floor level; since the wooden staging which led across to the copper and mash tun has rotted away, the door has been left stranded high up in the brewhouse wall. A yard for the coal also needed to be handy; at Chillington it is situated immediately opposite the brewhouse door.

Handling the Water Of great importance to a brewer was a convenient supply of large quantities of water, not only for the brewing process itself but also for washing and soaking vessels. Before being piped or ladled to the copper for heating, water for brewing was stored in a large tank or cistern. Inventories and bills show that often these were made of lead, though sometimes they were hewn out of a solid chunk of

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FIGURE 14. A view of the inside of the brewhouse at Charlecote, showing the height needed to give gravitational flow and to ensure good ventilation. (Photograph by Vera Collingwood; National Trust)

stone, as at Pradoe. Shugborough's cistern was built into the brick structure of the passageway next to the brewhouse and given a waterproof lining of Welsh slate. (Everything at Shugborough was lined with Welsh slate: in the late eighteenth century, the cousin of the contracted architect, Samuel Wyatt, was agent to Lord Penrhyn, owner of a vast slate quarry in North Wales.) In order to give a sufficient head above the copper, cisterns were sited high up under the roof, often left partly open to the air. To those with a nose for such things, many surviving brewhouses carry the romance of neglect. In use, they were extremely functional buildings, within the confines of the technology available at the time. The most obvious example of

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this was their height. (Fig. 14) According to John Pitt, a brewhouse for private use needed to be at least twenty-six feet long, by twenty-two feet wide and twelve feet high.16 He seems to have been a bit mean with the height, for private brewhouses of any size usually occupy the height of two substantial storeys. This was to allow water to be taken to the top of the building; from there it could be fed by gravity down into the copper, which should be at the height of the ceiling of the lower room, about eleven foot from the ground. This enabled the copper to command the mash tun and coolers, again allowing the liquor to run by gravity. In turn the coolers were to be placed high enough to allow the beer to run freely into the fermenting tun. Moving large quantities of hot liquor around was a major problem. Like a corn mill, the brewhouse worked from the top downwards but, unlike milled corn, the liquor had to be returned up to the copper level at least once. At this point romanticism certainly gave way to reality, for lifting several hundred gallons of scalding beer back up to the copper was no job for a weakling. The lucky brewer's mate had a hand pump, the less fortunate was condemned to carrying wooden pails up a steep narrow staircase or a ladder. Since brewers and their assistants seem to have been given unlimited beer allowances, this process was likely to have been both dangerous and stupefying. Where hand pumps were fitted, it was important not to make the total lifting height more than thirty-three feet as, according to a contemporary source, this was the greatest height water could be raised using a common single pump.17

Ventilation The other feature of critical importance in the brewhouse was ventilation; this had to be good, especially at that end of the building where the cooling and fermentation took place. With no artificial means of controlling temperature, heat loss into the atmosphere was important. For this reason successful brewhouses were appallingly draughty places. They usually had unglazed windows, fitted with wooden louvres, shutters or trellises to protect from the sun but to allow free movement of air. At Dorney Court, near Windsor, the louvres are huge and take up most of the outside wall space (Fig. 31). Many brewhouses have ventilated roofs, as at Chillington where both the ridge and a square section of the tiled roof has a sliding panel. Some brewhouses are also fitted with a ventilating lantern on the ridge, built with adjustable louvred sides. Good examples of these have survived at Dorney Court and Painswick (Fig. 16).

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Commercial brewers always recommended that the brewhouse should turn its back on the sun, showing a solid wall without windows to the southern aspect. This was obviously a problem if the building had to take its allotted place within a service yard. Very often convenience in relation to other domestic offices seems to have outweighed considerations of aspect.

The Copper and its Underworks The copper was perhaps the most important feature inside the brewhouse (Fig. 17). At the level of small-scale domestic brewing, it was usual practice to have a single domestic copper (sometimes also called a furnace or boiler in contemporary sources). Such a single copper would be used for laundry, brewing and the general provision of hot water. This was true of many farms even within

FIGURE 15. The brewhouse at Painswick. The brewhouse is the small building nestling alongside the huge kitchen stack. (Photograph by Vem Collingwood)

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FIGURE 16. The brewhouse at Painswick showing the ventilating lantern and the little chimney on the side which once served a bread oven. (Photograph by Vera Collingwood]

living memory, and there are many recorded examples of home-brewing using a domestic copper.18 Larger country houses and early commercial breweries were fitted with specialised brewing coppers which differed from the domestic version in a number of ways. First and most obviously the brewing copper was usually bigger. The common nineteenth-century domestic copper (very often made of cast iron) held around twenty gallons. The large specialised country house laundry coppers (usually made of copper) held around forty gallons, the size also recommended for farmhouse brewing. By contrast, brewing coppers in country houses often held more than eighty-five gallons, all the way up to 400 gallons, although only the largest brewhouses - at Chatsworth and Shugborough for example - went in for giants of this size. Secondly, the shape of the English brewing copper differed from the normal domestic copper. The latter was a simple inverted dome, whereas the brewing copper had a convex bottom. This was crucial in achieving the correct rolling

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FIGURE 17. Inside the brewhouse at Lacock Abbey, Wiltshire. (Photograph by Vera Collingwood; National Trust)

boil of the wort, and in draining all the liquor or wort out of the copper through a tap. (By contrast, the traditional German copper was downwardly curved at the bottom to enable the contents to be lifted with a dipper.) Thirdly, most brewers reckoned it was worth having the copper actually made of copper - it took less fuel, lasted longer and was easier to clean than the more usual cast-iron of the domestic so-called copper. In addition, a copper vessel kept half its value as scrap metal. Early on, copper was more expensive than brass and the early boilers used for brewing were often made of brass; this explains an inventory quoted by Bickerdyke which included 'a brasse pan set in the walle'.19 They could also be made of lead, hence Gervase Markham's instruction to put 'your liquor in your lead ready to boil'; the Blundells' brewhouse at Little Crosby had '2 old lead boylers' in both 1821 and 1737, by which time most up-to-date brewhouses would have been fitted with coppers (p. 53).20 Even when made of copper, to save cost brewing boilers could be made of two weights of copper,

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with a deep curb at the top made of lighter-weight copper than the base.21 Alternatively, they could be made of a combination of copper and lead; in this case, the lead was fitted around the top of the copper, above the point at which the furnace flame would hit it. The specifications for the copper at Bramham Park, Yorkshire, included a two-foot lead sheet at the top.22 Fourthly, the 'underwork' (the contemporary name for the surrounding brickwork of a brewing copper) was highly characteristic. From early times the copper was made from several sheets of metal riveted together. Later it developed a lip or flange at the top, from which it could be 'hung' inside the permanent brick structure; earlier versions were no doubt used over more temporary supports or over the open fire of the kitchen. By the time Randle Holme was writing in 1688 the brewing copper or pan was 'usually set upon a furnace or fireplace

FIGURE 18. Engraving of a small brewhouse, showing: a) copper and underworks; b) wort pump; c) fire pump; d) mash tun; e) rudder or oar; f) underback; g) 2 jets, one with a long hand); h) coolers; i) outside water inlet and pump. From Universal Magazine, January 1747-48 (North of England Open Air Museum, Beamish)

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made either of brick or stone, which is termed the setting of the pan'.23 This formed a circular or near-circular tower; in early primitive domestic premises this might be fairly small, but in the larger brewhouses it formed the dominant feature of the whole room (Fig. 18); as at Dorney Court, it loomed over the brewhouse floor. Generally the brewing copper was hung much higher than a laundry copper, which was usually fitted into a low squaredoff underwork. Finally, the furnace beneath a brewing copper was larger than that provided for a domestic laundry boiler. The firebox doors were usually set in a foot or so and at approximately shoulder height, the exact position being dictated by the height needed for the copper to command the mash tun. FIGURE 19. The brewhouse furnace at LaTo accommodate this the characcock Abbey. Built under the copper but accessed from the room next to the teristic ash hole was thus several feet brewhouse, the firebox is placed at shoulder deep (Fig. 19). The large size of the height to allow the copper to sit high ash hole had other advantages: keeping enough to command the mash tun. (Photothe copper safe was one of the graph by Vera Collingwood; National Trust} brewer's perpetual worries; after the boiling liquor or hopped wort had been run out of the copper, the brewer had only a few seconds before the dry copper would start to burn; as the copper was emptying, the stoker either had to cool the fire quickly, or someone else had immediately to recharge the copper with fresh liquor - Thomas Threale urged the brewer to be 'very expeditious' about this.24 The quickest way to lower the fire was to open the fire doors wide and rake the hot coals down through the fire-bars to fall into the ash hole — hence the need for a large one. Most simply, the firebox and ash pit were accessed from the base of the underwork tower on the ground floor, as at Dorney Court. In some later brewhouses the copper with its underworks, including the firebox, was raised onto a substantial staging built at first floor level. At Calke the single brewing copper was built into a bank of brickwork which also provided the framework and surround of the mash tun and underback. Although the Calke copper has

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gone, enough remains of the underwork to show that the firebox was situated at first-floor level. Coal had therefore either to be taken up the steep and narrow stairs or brought from the neighbouring malt store. This apparently inconvenient situation was also present in the brewhouse, now converted into a garage, at Queen's College, Oxford, and at Stackpole Court, Pembroke (Fig. 20).25 It was, however, a design which placed the firebox at waist rather than shoulder height and potentially reduced the number of staff needed - the brewer could both watch the boil and tend the firebox. The main advantage, however, was that both copper and mash tun could be set very high, providing space for a good sized underback; this could be large enough to hold the whole of the first wort whilst the copper was being emptied into the second mash; once the copper was emptied, the wort in the underback could be pumped into it. The alternative solution to this problem was to have more than one copper. Many eighteenth-century brewhouses had two coppers — the second one often half the size of the main one. Shugborough's two coppers held 425 and 200 gallons respectively.26 John Walsh estimated that the combined copper capacity needed to be at least two-thirds of the gallonage to be brewed.27 Two coppers made life a great deal easier if several mashes were following immediately after each other. The double copper system enabled the brewer to get on with heating more boiling water for the later mashes at the same time as the first worts were on the boil. The design of the layout of a brewhouse with two coppers was considerably more difficult than with one. In practice, many brewhouses were probably not originally planned with two coppers but had a second one added; this may have happened at Charlecote, for example, where the height and finish of the two underworks differs (Fig. 46). There seem to have been several slightly different approaches to the problem of siting two coppers. It was convenient to have them sharing a flue and with adjacent fireboxes, so that only one man was needed to stoke both. In many cases, coppers, furnaces and flues were therefore built either side of a fireplace positioned more or less centrally against a gable wall. The coppers were built into separate underworks, both fitting neatly into a corner, and their separate flues joined the central flue at about first-floor level. The central open fireplace was useful for boiling small quantities of water and for general heating in very cold weather. A good example of this layout survives at Stanway, complete with fireplace, both coppers and their furnaces, and the coolers slung against the opposite wall (Fig. 28). The same layout was probably also used at Shugborough, Erddig and many others.

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BREWING

FIGURE 20. Section through the brewhouse at Stackpole Court, Dyfed. From original plans dated 19 January 1843. (National Trust and Dyfed Record Office) The copper and firebox are lifted onto first-floor staging, giving plenty of room for a large underback. The instructions on the plans read: 'The eastern flue of the stack to be 1-6 square opened below the roof into the Brewhouse to carry off the steam from the copper over which there may be a board with a funnel. 'In order that the beer may be conveyed by a pipe from the Brewhouse into the cellar, it will be necessary to fix a lift pump on the upper stage, by which the beer may be raised to the mouth of the pipe, which should be so high as to give a good fall to the barrels in the cellar . . . for this purpose (if it is found necessary) the pump may be worked from a step raised two or three feet above - or the head of the pump may be kept up and the handle lengthened.' The pipe ran through an open court, down the length of the cellar passage, through the servants' hall, all at a level above the door heads.

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FIGURE 21. Diagrams illustrating the method of hanging a brewing copper. From Anon., Practical Masonry, Bricklaying and Plastering (1847). (North of England Open Air Museum, Beamish)

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COUNTRY HOUSE BREWING

A different approach was used by the builder of the brewhouse at Pradoe (Figs 22 and 29). Here two coppers were fitted side by side in a continuous bank of brickwork, against a side wall, not a gable wall. The single flue was fitted in between the coppers and against the side wall; there was thus no open fireplace. A third option was to site the coppers more or less side by side, and then to build the firebox access, and therefore the stoking function, completely outside the brewhouse in an adjacent room. This was the solution adopted at Charlecote, where again there was no open fireplace (Fig. 30). 'Hanging' or 'setting' the copper was a skilled bricklaying job. The fire had to hit the copper base at the correct point and be made to wrap around the sides of the copper. At Stanway the bricklayer used a method similar to that given in Baxter's Library of Practical Agriculture (1846), simply supporting the copper on four columns of bricks, with gaps between them to allow the flames to be pulled upwards; the pull from the carefully positioned flue then created a circular draught around the sides of the vessel.28 This arrangement can be seen to advantage at Pradoe, where both FIGURE 22. Sketch of equipment in the coppers have been removed but the brewhouse at Pradoe, Shropshire, as it might bottoms of the brick supports remain have appeared when complete. The two (1994) (Fig. 21). Chillington's huge coppers, one slightly larger than the other, were fitted side by side, sharing a flue but copper was supported on a more subwith no open fire between them; the workstantial, solid, curved-walled firebox, ing platform was made of timber and stone with a flue opening out at the back, and edged with iron railings; a ladder gave access to the platform. The firebox is approx- opposite the door, but with a void imately five foot from the floor. The above the firebox walls which again coppers and their taps have been removed, created a circular draught. For some which has damaged the surrounding brickreason, these 'wheel draughts' were work, but the structure below the platform always anticlockwise. In refitting the level is substantially intact. (Pamela Sambrook)

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new copper at Shugborough, in 1990, the museum bricklayer copied the brickwork arrangement at Hickleton, which was similar to Chillington's. Much of the internal structure of the brewhouses was timber, so fire was still an ever-present hazard. Thomas Poole recommended a gap of at least eight inches between the flue and any woodwork, which should be further protected by nailing copper sheeting over it; if sheeting was too expensive, the builder was recommended to beg 'decayed pots', pans and kettles from the kitchens and to beat them flat.29 The efficiency of the flue was important for reasons other than the immediate comfort of the brewer. George Watkins emphasised that the brewhouse should not be smoky, but always sweet and dry, so that the whole business will be carried on with pleasure, and the master may look in from time to time without disgust. This is a very essential consideration, for however diligent and intelligent servants are, there is no advantage like the eye of their master.30

The majority of surviving brewhouse furnaces were probably intended to fire mainly on coal or coke, although they could be used equally efficiently with wood fuel. Wood was no doubt the usual fuel in earlier centuries: the household records of Algernon Percy for the year 1515 included items for the purchase of faggots to be used in brewing and baking - what used to be called 'ovenwood'.31 Some estates, such as Stanway on the Cotswold escarpment, were so rich in timber resources that they carried on using wood until brewing ceased. Unlike the old kitchen open hearth, the brewing furnace needed little adaption to coal; as with kitchen hearths, the date of this changeover varied widely from region to region. In areas where coal outcropped near to the surface, it was commonly used domestically by the sixteenth century. Even after the widespread adoption of coal as a common fuel a vestige of the old days remained: until the end of the whole domestic tradition of brewing, many stokers used a wood fire to get the first copperful of water boiling before the mash or for cleaning down after a brew. The old brewers knew from experience that a wood fire would raise water to boiling-point quicker than a coal fire. Using coal for brewing was potentially expensive, wastefully so according to some brewers. W. Brande recommended using only small, rubbishy coal mixed with earth: If at any time it [the copper] boils too fast, or with too great an impetuosity, open the door, and throw in some slack, that is, small coal wetted and mixed up with clay, which should always be used to brew with, reserving the round coals for

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the parlours . . . The best method is to pass the coals through a screen of iron; then all the small rubbbish that passes through, will serve for washing and brewing with; and let all the cinders be kept to lay fires or malt with; and before brewing, mix all the small dust with clay, and wet them well, to make them cake; for any thing will burn under a copper; but small coals are very wasteful.32

One very real practical problem was keeping the brewhouse reasonably clean. The pile of fuel tended to spread itself over the floor and dust and ash from the firebox flew everywhere. Occasionally a thoughtful builder provided accommodation for the fuel; the furnace tower at Dorney Court incorporates an arched recess at the base, a neat solution to the problem and similar to that sometimes found under stew hearths in the grander kitchens of the aristocracy. Another solution adopted by larger brewhouses was to site the firebox access in a completely separate room, backing onto the copper. This arrangement had advantages in cleanliness but must have made communication between brewer and stoker more difficult, but it was adopted in brewhouses with both one and two coppers. The outside of the copper tower presented a challenge to the bricklayer. The circumference was very tight and created problems unless the estate made its own shaped bricks. Maybe this is one reason why many brewing towers, though brick or stone built, were finished with several layers of cement and plaster, often with a thick layer of scrim binding them together and fixed with largeheaded nails. The whole was finished with limewash and formed a rendering which acted as an insulation layer. It tended to crumble over time and must have needed to be repaired fairly frequently. (An original layer has survived, somewhat precariously, at Chillington.) Sometimes the brick structure needed to be reinforced by metal bands tightened around the circumference, as in the brewhouse at Queen's College, Oxford.33 Some thoughtful builders of towers incorporated square holes giving access to the outsides of the copper for cleaning away the soot — presumably these would be fitted with small iron doors. They are most obvious at Lacock (Fig. 50). At a level convenient to the rim of the copper some sort of staging or platform was needed, so that the brewer could watch the boil and stir the hops. This platform varied greatly in size. In some brewhouses - Lacock and Pradoe, for example - the staging is made of timber and is generous, allowing several people to contemplate the boil in comfort. At Aynhoe, in Northamptonshire, and at Calke this platform must have been wide enough to become a sort gallery or upper floor, fit for women and children to walk on (Fig. 23).34 It seems to have been common, however, to provide only the top step of a stone or brick

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FIGURE 23. Inside the brewhouse at Aynhoe, 1815. A wash drawing by Nattes showing the first floor; in the centre is the top of the mash tun and to the right is the copper. (Elizabeth Carttmght-Hignett and Barrie and Jenkins Ltd)

staircase, allowing only the most restricted and precarious movement. This is the case at both Chillington and Painswick. Most platforms were made of timber, but by 1826 the Sutherlands' brewhouse at Trentham in Staffordshire had an iron platform. Even with a correctly fitting copper and the greatest care in use, parts of the copper could become worn with exposure to the fiercest part of the fire. The copper then needed to be turned, an expensive business, involving refixing the cocks and a good deal of new brickwork. For the open-copper brewer, the nightmare awaiting him was losing the wort from the copper. This could happen if the wort was brought up to the boil too quickly, when it could overspill like a pan of boiling milk. The boil was a nerve-wracking time for both brewer and assistants. The ever-practical Poole urged great caution. You need a quick boil, he said, but you must be careful when it begins to swell in waves in the copper. He went on:

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if you have no assistant, be particularly attentive to its motions; and being provided with an iron rod of the proper length, crooked at one end, and jagged at the other, then with the crook you are enabled to open the furnace or copper door and with the other end push in the damper, without stirring from your station. Once you have got a proper boil going, you can quicken the fire a little.35

In many brewhouses this was an impossible arrangement, for the firebox was out of reach from the copper staging and in many cases was in a separate room altogether. Where this was the case, as at Lacock and Charlecote, a damper control was often fitted within reach of the brewer as he stood on the staging next to the copper (Fig. 61). Certainly the boil was a time when teamwork and understanding between brewer and stoker were essential. In a well-ordered brewhouse, no distractions were allowed at this point, just quiet concentration, sitting, watching the quietly seething wort, and waiting for the first sign of the breaking of the boil. Once it had settled into a rhythmic rolling motion, the worry was less, but if the fire was too fierce it was possible for the boil to erupt in a great bubble, like the first split-seconds of a geyser. Spillage of the boiling wort from an over-full copper was always a danger; although self-preservation dictated a safe margin, sometimes economic considerations pushed the brewer into filling it as full as possible. As a precaution against such occurrences, many of the eighteenth-century writers of brewing manuals recommended the fitting of a curb to the copper. One version was a piece of sheet lead, a foot deep or more around the edge, soldered to the top edge of the copper and supported with brickwork or stone (as at Painswick). Much cheaper was the wooden curb described by Thomas Poole: let your carpenter prepare good seasoned pieces of elm or other proper wood and shape it out like the velloe of a stage waggon wheel, but only half its thickness, then join them round, to comprise the dimensions of the well of your copper.

The brewer was instructed to beat up the edge of the copper, instead of turning it over, then to nail it to the woodwork, and to seal it with a cement composed of bullock's blood and whitening.36 Lacock still has a wooden curb (Fig. 50) and Chillington has a thick leaden sheet beaten over the top edge of the copper. One of the main problems at this level of brewing was to know the 'gauge' of the copper accurately, that is to know what quantity of either cold liquor or boiling wort was present in the copper. Instructions were available as early as 1605, when James Lightbody wrote a small book on gauging coppers and coolers.37 Describing himself as a 'philomath', Lightbody designed his book for

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the common brewer, though his arithmetical methods were suited not only to rectangular cooling trays but also to the round or oval cooling tubs which were still common in the seventeenth century. By contrast, few of the manuals written in the eighteenth century explained how a beginner could calibrate his copper; an exception was Michael Combrune, who published a table of depth in inches converted into measures of capacity of both cold water and boiling worts, the relationship being nearly 7 : 9. A simple gauge-stick could be made but, since

Inventory of the brewhouse of the Duke of Sutherland at Trentham, 1826 (SRO, Sutherland Mss, D^/R/y/iob) Brewhouse i mash tub and underback 1 copper pump - 2 copper boilers Iron staging and landings 3 coolers - 3 working tubs 9 tubs for barrels to work into 2 lading pails - i bowl - i bucket i working tub - i hop strainer i waggon - i small iron boiler i step ladder

Inventory of the Ansons' brewhouse at Shugborough, 1842 (SRO, Anson Mss, 6i5/E(H)n). Large hop bag, cleansing sieve, 2 wooden scrapers, copper pump, 2 mash rules, large mash tub, 22 tubs of different sizes, 5 pails, 2 tun dishes, 2 lade gawns, 2 benches, pair of small steps, 4 beer shoots, 4 casks of different sizes, 2 trucks, 2 beer coolers, copper 432 gallons, with lead and underwork, copper 200 gallons and underwork.

Description of the contents of the Cecils' brewhouse at Hatfield in 1866 (Adeline Hartcup, Below Stairs in the Great Country Houses, p. 116). The brewhouse . . . had one long deal and three smaller beer shoots, three mash rules . . . and a stout beer-truck on wheels. There were two long lengths of leather hose, a large iron fire hoe and rake, a pair of twelve-foot beer pulleys, and a wooden beer funnel. There were also two fir working stillions . . . a jigger pump, a six-foot oak drink stall, and an iron-bound yeast tub. A giant 144-gallon beer vat and twentyone thirty-six gallon casks stood ready to hold the brew.

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coppers were hand-made, each one was different, so each needed its own gauge.38 Baxter's Encyclopedia of Practical Agriculture (1846) gave the same method. It is difficult to say how many part-time brewers bothered to work out such calculations; presumably many people went by guesswork and experience. Using a gallon bucket (the 'gaun' so often found in inventories), the brewer could fill up the copper with water to the amount of beer required, plus an allowance for absorption by the malt (one bushel of malt absorbed roughly five gallons of water), spillages, sediment and evaporation in the open vessel. Sometimes instead of a gauge, copper or mash tun were marked with the crucial levels for different mashes. Gauges occasionally appear in inventories but, as at Hatfield, they usually relate to the mash rather than the copper, for it was even more difficult to measure how much liquor was remaining in the tun after the mash than how much was in the copper. One surviving feature of some furnace underworks is a shallow curved indentation cut into the front of the brickwork, immediately under the tap. It is present at Stanway, Pradoe and Painswick. The curves are usually crudely cut, and appear to be an afterthought. This shaping may simply have enabled the mash tun to be fitted snugly up to the brickwork under the copper outflow, the heat of the copper being used to keep the mash tun warm. Alternatively it may have accommodated the edge of a holding vessel for charging the mash tun. The number and positioning of the coppers were crucial; for this reason they have been used as a basis for a systematic summary of the characteristic types of brewhouses (p. 47 and Figs 24-30).

The Mash Tun The mash tun was invariably a stave-built coopered vessel, slightly tapered. The older ones tapered upwards, whilst the later ones, as at Charlecote, tapered downwards (Figs 48 and 55). They were usually round, though occasionally one finds ovals or even a rounded rectangle, as at Teddesley Home Farm on the Hatherton Estate in Staffordshire.39 These last must have been extremely difficult for the cooper to make, so there must have been some particular problem of layout to solve. Making a mash tun was a great test of skill for the cooper, for most of them are so big that they were brought to the brewhouse as a 'bundle of staves' and put together in the brewhouse. They were always made of oak, quartered, about an inch and a half in thickness. It was important that they

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47

Types of private country house brewhouses according to layout of copper and firebox 1.1. Single copper, firebox access inside the brewhouse, at ground level. The simplest layout, common in brewhouses which are detached or attached by one wall, but also found in brewhouses built as part of a whole block. Surviving examples: Dorney Court, Painswick, Chillington, Hickleton (until recently), Shibden. 1.2. Single copper, firebox access inside the brewhouse, at staging level. Surviving examples: Calke Abbey, Stackpole Court 1.3. Single copper, firebox access in adjacent room. Surviving example: Lacock Abbey 1.4. Single copper, above or next to washing copper and bread oven. Fitted in smaller houses and farms. Example: R.Lugar's design for farmhouses, 1807. 2.1. Two coppers, firebox access inside the brewhouse at ground level, in corners either sides of central fireplace. Surviving example: Stanway 2.2. Two coppers, firebox access inside the brewhouse at ground level, side by side without fireplace. Surviving example: Pradoe. 2.3. Two coppers, firebox access in adjacent room. Surviving example: Charlecote.

were very well made - according to William Ellis the mash tun should be 'as smooth within side as if it was turned'.40 They should not be too deep, but not over-shallow, to allow a successful 'row'.41 They should be fitted with some sort of cover - ideally made of wood, in three pieces, otherwise sacking. The mash tun needed to be at least big enough to hold the copperful of wort plus the necessary amount of malt, with room for stirring; thus a farmhouse copper containing forty gallons needed a mash tun of about sixty in capacity. It had to be sited near the copper, but not right up into a corner, for the brewer needed to get round it to stir. The mash tun underwent more changes before and during the eighteenth century than any other brewing vessel, largely because of the switch from topto bottom-mashing. In top-mashing the malt was poured into the mash tun from the top. At the end of mashing the liquor was run off through a drain-hole,

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FIGURE 24. Brewhouse Type i.i. Plan of the brewhouse at Shibden Hall, West Yorkshire. The brewhouse at Shibden was built c. 1718, but the present equipment was brought to Shibden in 1953 from the White Bear Inn, Norwood Green, Halifax. (Calderdale Leisure Services)

FIGURE 25. Brewhouse Type 1.2. Plan of the brewhouse at Calke Abbey, Derbyshire. (Gary Marshall)

THE BREWHOUSE

FIGURE 26. Brewhouse Type 1.3. Plan of the brewhouse at Lacock, Wiltshire. (National Trust)

FIGURE 27. Brewhouse Type 1.4. Plan of a combined brewhouse, washhouse and bakehouse suitable for farmhouses. From R. Lugar, The Country Gentleman's Architect (London, 1807), pi. 21.

49

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FIGURE 28.

Brewhouse Type 2.1. Plan of the brewhouse at Stanway House, Gloucestershire. (After English Heritage)

FIGURE 29.

Brewhouse Type 2.2. Plan of the brewhouse at Pradoe as it was in 1993. (After J. Tiernan)

FIGURE 30.

Brewhouse Type 2.3. Plan of the brewhouse at Charlecote Park, Warwickshire. (National Trust)

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51

usually in the centre of the tun. Before the eighteenth century large-scale top-mashing tuns had this central drain hole fitted with an upright wooden plug, called variously a penstaff, tapstaff, capstaff or mash staff. These were rather like a larger version of the long metal bath-plugs still occasionally provided in ancient hotels. In a large tun this plug was weighty and was attached to a large timber lever constructed overhead, which in turn was sometimes harnessed to the horse or ox which drove the malt mill. Where possible, the drain hole where the penstaff fitted was lined with a circular piece of brass or copper and the penstaff itself ferruled with copper. The end of the penstaff was tapered at the bottom to allow the wort to run from the thinness of a thread to the fullness of an inch tube.42 Around the bottom of the penstaff was fixed some sort of sieving device to hold back the grains once the plug was lifted. The whole process was a bit hit and miss, mainly because the sieve seems to have been difficult to anchor satisfactorily and often caused trouble. In under-mashing, on the other hand, the mash tun was fitted with a removable inner wooden base fitting into a groove cut into the sides of the tun about two inches from the bottom. This false bottom was pierced all over with tapered holes, bored with a hot iron. The malt was laid evenly over this bottom. At the

FIGURE 31. The brewhouse at Dorney Court, near Windsor, built next to the church and opposite the service door of the house. With huge louvres and a lantern on the roof, this would have been extremely well-ventilated. (Photograph by Vera Collingwood)

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side of the tun nearest to the copper, and anchored by a staple and hook to the staves of the tun, a vertical wooden chute fed the liquor straight down under the false bottom; the mash therefore took place as the liquor level gradually rose through the malt. After mashing, the wort was run off from under the false bottom and most of the grains were left behind on the top surface. The mash tun at Shugborough still shows the groove cut to carry the false bottom, and that at Charlecote has its vertical wooden chute, though a fairly recent copy. Birmingham City Museum has a good example of an original tun with chute, collected in 1968 from a farm brewhouse at Sacker's Green, Great Cornard, near Sudbury in Suffolk.43 The great advantage of this method over top-mashing was the more efficient removal of the wort from the grains, but it also gave more room to stir the mash without being hampered by a central plug and sieve. According to eighteenth-century trade brewers, the mash was quicker and freer, and the flavour more delicate. It may well be that it was the spread of bottom-mashing which enabled the production of the clear, very strong pale ales which became so fashionable amongst the aristocracy in the early decades of the eighteenth century. Bottom-mashing enabled the brewer to cope more easily with larger volumes of liquor, but this was true only if other technology kept apace. It is usual to find mention of false bottoms in inventories accompanying those other luxuries of the progressive brewer, the tap and the hand pump. It is difficult to be certain about when bottom-mashing was introduced. The earliest reference I have found is possibly in an inventory of 1635, which mentions a mash tun and its bottom-boards. Certainly by 1700 bottom-mashing was available as an option, as is shown by the quotation for building and fitting a new brewhouse at Wrest, the home of the Lucas family, a specification which included a mash tun and double bottom.44 An inventory taken in 1735 at Stanway mentions a false bottom to the mash tun.45 Writing in the 17305, specifically about private brewers, William Ellis mentions both the central plug used in top-mashing and the false bottom used with a brass cock.46 By the 18305 William Roberts could declare categorically that a false bottom was a must for any serious brewer, though top-mashing survived for the small-scale domestic brewer. Yet as late as 1845 a false-bottomed mash tun was described as a 'new kind of mashing tub' by Jane Loudon.47 John Walsh advocated bottom-mashing even on a small scale; it was a relatively easy job to make a false bottom to fit a cut-down sherry butt and to pierce this with a burning tapering iron.48 Many brewhouses had only one mash tun, but it is by no means rare to find mention of two mash tuns — one large and one small. This was the case at

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53

Inventory of the brewhouse belonging to Nicholas Blundell of Little Crosby, Lancashire, at the time of his death, 21 April 1737 (LRO, Blundell Mss, DDBi) In the brewhouse - 21 barrels big and litle £3 35. od., 2 old lead boylers, coolers, and 2 troughs (left to the Heir), 5 tubbs 55. 6d., i lading piggin 15. od., 4 drippers 25. 8d., 2 pailes and boull 35. od., i tun-dish is. od., i hop sive 6d., 6 iron racks 8s. od., 2 salting tubs 35. od. Total £4 175. od. In the cellars - a wooden beam and scales 25. 6d., 128 Ib of old weights i6s. od., 3 stillages 35. od., 3 barrels 125. 6d., i old table 8d., 9 doz. of glas botles 155. od., 2 candle box and cuppard 2s. 6d., i punchbowl Leverpooll ware. Total £2 135. 2d.

Inventory of the brewhouse and other effects belonging to Thomas Fitzherbert at Swynnerton Hall, Staffordshire, 1821 (SRO, Fitzherbert Mss. D641/5/P(I)4) Butler's pantry 13 cut ale tumblers 4 tall ale glasses Stillroom 14 ale jugs different sorts 2 ale glasses Cellar at the bottom of the stairs Ladder, buckett, pair double steps, wood tundish, mash tub, old cowl and staff, two large mash tubs, bath upon wheels lined with copper. Ale cellar 21 hogsheads and one upright ditto Stool, tilter, wood bowl and dripper Wood thralls round, brass lock on door Brewhouse Large copper furnace and underwork, pump, large mash tub, 2 wort backs, smaller mash tub, 8 old round coolers, 4 wort spouts, water cock and pipe, 5 old hogsheads, i small barrell, 2 quarter barrells, one small ditto, tin scraper, cupboard against the wall, clensing sieve, pail, bowl and lade gaun, lock on door, pair steps, old bench.

Swynnerton and at Beaudesert, both in Staffordshire. It is likely that they were used for the production of ale with small beer running on. On the other hand, it was possible to brew without a mash tun as such, with a single vessel acting both as mash tun and fermenting vessel. At first glance, this seems to have been

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the method used at Lacock, where only one vessel survives. An examination of the floor, however, shows a shape in the stone kerb where another vessel perhaps an underbuck to a missing mash tun — could have been positioned. A single-vessel system was available much later: John Loudon, writing in the 18305, illustrated two possible layouts for a brewhouse, for large and small establishments. The small-scale system, to be manufactured and erected in your home by Messrs Cottam and Hallen, included a single boiler holding a hundred gallons and a single vessel placed under the coolers; the system could be quickly converted for use as a washhouse.49 Amongst the many new ideas introduced into the trade in the eighteenth century was the double-skinned mash vat, similar in principle to the later jacketed cheese vat. The double skin enabled hot or cold water to be run around the mash, which allowed close control of the temperature of the mash. One early version of this, in 1747, was simply an existing tun standing inside another slightly wider and shallower vessel filled with hot water. No record has been found of this arrangement being used in a private brewhouse, though it could easily have been adopted on a small scale.

The Underbade Unlike the name 'mash tun', the word 'underbuck', or in its usual early form 'underback', is not a specialist brewer's term in derivation. Underbucks were used in many domestic operations. The name was literal; a buck was a large stave-built vessel, a smaller version of which was called a bucket. The underbuck was any stave-built tub which stood under the buck to catch the liquid draining out of it. It was thus used in the process of 'bucking' or bleaching linen either commercially or in the normal household wash. Underbucks were wide, shallow, stave-built vessels, usually with two staves opposite each other made long to project upward as handles. They could be circular or oval. The underbucks in small-scale domestic brewing differed not at all from underbucks used generally around the kitchen. Both versions of the name are common in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century brewing sources, although 'underback' eventually became the usual brewing term. Underbacks used in purpose-built brewhouses tended to be too large to lift, so the two handles were omitted. They were still wide, shallow vessels; it was usual for them to be greater in diameter than the mash tun, and half its depth, holding between 80 and 90 gallons. Sometimes they were lined with milled

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55

FIGURE 32. Plan and section of the brewhouse at Hickleton, South Yorkshire, as it was in 1984. The section shows the equipment used in the process of mashing: the liquor and malt were delivered from above, and the combined mash tun and fermenting tun had a movable false bottom. Brewing has since moved to other premises using a gas-fired boiler. The circular room was possibly originally a cellar for beer or water storage. Traces in the brickwork seem to indicate that the position of the copper has been changed at some time in the past. See notes by J. W. Buckley in Clarence E. Hellewell, 'The Hickleton Brew' (1984). (Peter Brears)

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lead, as shown by the inventory from Stanway, and sometimes they were substantial lead troughs, as at Bramham Park.50 The main bone of contention about underbacks was whether they should be sunk into the floor or not. If the floor could be shaped to enclose the vessel in a depression, say one or two foot deep, this allowed the mash tun to sit lower, and therefore the copper to be lower too. The arrangement saved both space and money and was in common use; a depression for an underback can be seen today at Painswick. Many brewers disliked this arrangement intensely.51 If enclosed by a stone or brick floor, it was impossible to see any leaks, which were a constant worry with stave-built vessels; the conscientious brewer needed to fill his vessels periodically with water and leave them to stand for twenty-four hours in order to check for leaks. Sometimes underbacks were built permanently into the ground, as at Chillington where the underback or 'receiver' is a rectangular pit, ten inches deep, set into the floor and lined with white ceramic tiles. William Ellis was one brewer who disliked such arrangements. On visiting a pub brewhouse in 1737 and finding the ale badly tainted with a sour mustiness, he was invited to inspect the brewhouse. Amongst other faults, he found 'his underback or receiver deep in the ground, and part of it in the way of the dirt of shoes and other nastiness to fall into'.52 The purpose of the underback was to receive the wort from the mash tun hence its alternative and less domestic name of receiver. The wort was then ladled or bucketed out of the underback up to the copper. By the middle of the eighteenth century many brewhouses were fitted with hand-operated pumps which eased this task considerably. In private brewhouses these took the wort directly out of the underback. The provision of an intermediate and even lower vessel, called the jackback, seems to have been a feature restricted to trade establishments, where more than one mash tun was on the go at any one time; the jackback was designed to be fed by several underbacks. The builder of Wrest's new brewhouse in 1735 quoted for a jackback with false bottom, but this may well have been for a semi-commercial enterprise.

The Overback The process of hand-pumping the hot wort back up to the copper for boiling took a long time, tying up the copper when it was needed for heating liquor for later mashes. In many brewhouses, therefore, an intermediate holding vessel

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57

for wort or liquor was fitted immediately over the copper. Chillington and Stanway still have an 'overback' as it was often called. Made of stout timber planks fitted into a framework, usually about nineteen inches deep, its fitting tested the ingenuity of brewhouse builders. Chillington's substantial rectangular overback is supported at one end by the copper lip, whilst the other end is slung precariously from a long iron stay attached high up to the roof purlin. Stanway's overback is a neat L-shaped box, fitting snugly over the copper in the corner of the brewhouse. According to the inventory of 1735, it was lined with lead. In commercial breweries the overback was often replaced by the more specialised liquorback and copperback.

Coolers In early domestic brewhouses the coolers were ordinary shallow wooden tubs, or indeed any domestic vessel which could be found. According to Randle Holme's description, they were 'oval-like, broad bottom, with ebb sides' and a hole in the side at the bottom. An inventory taken in 1819 at Swynnerton, in Staffordshire, mentions '8 old round coolers'; the Fitzherberts' brewhouse does not appear to have had the more modern cooling backs which by then were common in most country house brewhouses.53 As described by George Watkins, these were ideally flat timber trays, ten foot long by five foot wide, lined with milled lead; two were needed, set side by side, one higher than the other, with an overlap to allow the wort to run from one to the other. They should be fitted seven foot high, with one end slightly higher than the other to enable a slow movement to the other end, slow enough to allow the sediment to drop; after use they should be covered in slime.54 Shugborough's coolers are fitted in this way, but many other brewhouses had their single, double or even triple coolers set side by side at the same level. One of the few things on which all brewers were agreed was the importance of cooling the boiled wort quickly and thinly. It needed to be run out across the cooler in a thin stream at first, so that a shallow covering of wort was cooled very quickly; then the wort could be let out more rapidly to stand, but never more than three inches deep at the very most. Above all, the coolers needed free air space above for rapid ventilation, and this was especially important if the household wanted to brew in summer. The coolers should therefore never be fixed directly above each other - which was the arrangement found by

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William Ellis in his inspection of the pub brewhouse mentioned above. According to the wall fittings, Pradoe also seems to have had two coolers set immediately above each other. A high roof space was useful, to allow the steam and hot air to rise, and there needed to be vents or louvred windows adjacent. It was always difficult to keep coolers watertight. For this reason great care was taken in their construction. The method of construction of the coolers at Pradoe is also found in Stanway and Calke and seems to be standard. The Pradoe coolers are small, no more than six foot long. They are made of two-inch-thick softwood, limewashed outside. The base is made of five planks joined by false tongues. Through the width of these planks run iron rods with adjustable nuts. The sides are made of single planks, held to the base planks again by adjustable nuts and bolts through their thickness. In this case there is no evidence of a lead lining. The nuts can be tightened in case of shrinkage or warping. Before iron rods and nuts became widely available, coolers were made using wooden pegs slotting into the ends of the planks and these too were adjustable to a degree; this construction can be seen at Lacock (Fig. 51). An even greater problem than leaking coolers was the ever-present one of hygiene. Keeping wooden coolers clean was a nightmare. Thomas Poole obviously had long and frustrating experience of this. He warned that even well-kept coolers could give a disagreeable tang to the drink, probably from wet in the wood. A common fault in cleaning coolers was to soak them too long - this would soon turn them 'putrid'. Sometimes, he claimed, this was due to 'permitting women to wash in a brewhouse, which ought to be entirely abolished . . . for nothing can be more hurtful than the slops of dirty soap suds'. A thorough 'scowering' with cold water two or three times was the recommended method of banishing 'the undiscovered filth that may be in the crevices'. Hot water was to be avoided at all costs as it would 'drive the infection further' and 'collect the foulness'. For these reasons, he strongly recommended that all coolers be lined with lead.55 The use of lead to line commercial brewing vessels was a common practice in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was a feature taken up to some extent by the private houses and not only aided cleanliness but helped avoid leakages. An up-to-date common brewer might think it worthwhile to line all the vessels except the mash tun, preferably with lead of the quality of four pound to the foot, but it is difficult to be sure how many private brewers did this. Lead-lined coolers are mentioned occasionally in inventories, as at Rufford Old Hall in 1724 and Temple Newsam in 1808, but a surprising number do not specify lead lining, which would have been an expensive item worthy of

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FIGURE 33. Illustration of a small brewing plant, showing: a) two coppers; b) mash tun; c) mashing oar; d) underback; e) wort pump; f) cooler with guttapercha tube. From John Walsh, A Manual of Domestic Economy (1857), figs 86 and 87.

mention.56 Lacock's coolers are lined with lead and Calke's coolers retain strips of lead lining, but many others - including Chillington, Shugborough and Pradoe - show no signs of nail holes (Fig. 52). By the 18308 unlined wooden coolers were regarded with great disparagement by professional brewers. W.L. Tizard, no fan of traditional brewing equipment, did not believe in wasting time on them: 'the best cure for a wooden cooler is to burn it'.57 Despite the attribution to cider-making of a celebrated outbreak of lead poisoning in Devon in the 17905, lead was used widely in brewing equipment throughout the nineteenth century, though using it in fermenting vessels had become less common by the i88os. Even when water engineers eventually

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started to worry about the combination of lead piping or lining and liquid contents, it was only if the content was soft water, which could have deleterious effects upon the lead. A report on the sanitary arrangements at Shugborough completed in 1892 recommended that the waste from the brewery tank be checked: 'As the water is very soft, it might also be worth while to have it analyzed, to be sure that it has no action upon the lead.' 58 In commercial breweries, zinc was often the successor to lead-lining, though it does not seem to have been used much in private brewhouses (even though butlers' work tops which were often zinc-covered). Eventually flat coolers were replaced by coolers working on the radiator principal and a few private brewers did eventually dispense with the flat cooling trays; the inventory of the brewhouse at Petworth, dated 1869, mentions three copper refrigerators which may have worked on the radiator principle (see p. 68).59 The same inventory also mentions gutta percha tubing: by the mid nineteenth century this was used as a coil to carry running cold water through the flat type of cooler, thus hastening the cooling process; it seems the Petworth brewer was experimenting with new methods of cooling (Fig. 33).60 Within living memory, an elderly salesman of Alfa Laval dairy equipment, working in Staffordshire and Shropshire after the First World War, remembers making frequent sales of milk coolers to farm or estate brewhouses; this type of cooler was certainly used at Hickleton; though, according to Clarence Hellewell's earliest memories, in the 19205 there was still a flat metal cooling tray.61

The Fermenting Vessel The fermenting tun was usually similar in shape to the mash tun, though it might be slightly smaller (Fig. 49). It needed to be large enough to take the whole of one brew and should have a boarded cover. Later professional brewers preferred a closed working vessel and some preferred a square tun, lined with lead. Private brewers carried on with the conventional coopered vessel. Because the fermenting vessel sat under the coolers, it was fairly common to have an oval rather than a round, so that it would fit neatly between the framework supporting the coolers, as at Calke. An important consideration was the positioning of the outlet holes. The outlet for the beer needed to be a couple of inches above the base, allowing sediment to collect in the bottom, with a second outlet provided in the actual base boards for ease of cleaning.

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6l

In early inventories, the fermenting tun was often called a 'gildfat' or 'guile' vat, a regional word for 'fermentation' which has been retained by the brewing industry. Another early regional word was 'yielding' - hence the term 'yelling comb' (meaning a fermentation vat) - is sometimes found both in inventories and, for example, in Randle Holme's dictionary published in i688.62 Fermenting tuns were also called 'collecting' or 'gathering' tuns, as they were sometimes used to collect together the first and second worts before fermentation. The fermenting vessels of very large country houses were often situated not in the brewhouse but in the cellars. These were connected directly to the cooling trays by pipeline, an arrangement which lessened the time taken to cool the worts as the passage through the pipe itself cooled the beer rapidly. Clarence Hellewell, the Hickleton brewer from the 19208 onwards, remembered the days of his apprenticeship under the brothers Harry and Ted Heptenstall: I always thought the cellar was an impossible place for the ferment to take place as where the vessel stood was overhung with black cobwebs which inevitably would occasionally plummet down into the fermenting wort. I remember enquiring about the questionable cleanliness of this, only to be told they would all come out when the yeast was skimmed off.63

The fermenting tun was fed from the coolers by a lead pipe, about one inch in diameter, and fitted with a tap: Obviously the length of pipe, about 60 yards, would soon cool that length of beer quicker than it would cool in the tank in the brewhouse. 'Owd 'any' used to keep going down to the cellar, turn the tap on, thus running the beer through his fingers, then when it became hot again, he would turn off the tap and leave it for say 20 minutes, then repeat the process throughout the rest of the time until it was all down to the correct cooled temperature. How he could be sure it was all the same temperature heaven knows, but somehow he arrived at the same conclusion or near enough to produce good results.64

Floors The floor of the brewhouse was important. The staging around the copper and the mash tun could be made of timber, but timber floors were most unsuitable. They tended to become slimey when wet; slippery and uneven floors were a great danger to men carrying heavy vessels of scalding liquid. Good-quality stone

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slabs were considered best, though some preferred Dutch brick. Floors were usually laid as in washhouses, sloping down to a single point and fitted with a drain. William Ellis railed against uneven floors, for wherever there were lodgments in holes or hollow places, there must in course be produced corrupt and foul puddles, whose ill scents and nasty daubings are always ready to affect and damage the utensils and the worts. For this reason, all boarded or planked floors are to be rejected, as they are obliged to be laid hollow on joists and sleepers, that will surely rot them in a little time, and create unwholesome stinks and vapours; besides the great danger that attends such a wooden floor in its slipperiness when wetted, that exposes a person to falls as he is carrying scalding worts or water.65

Rakes, Rudders and Oars One of the problems with the traditional English method of mashing was the presence of hot spots in the mash. To avoid this it was essential to keep the mash moving for the first few minutes. The mash was first raked through and then stirred vigorously, a process which was sometimes called 'rowing'; the implements used were known as 'oars', although the movement was more akin to an energetic paddling (Fig. 34).66 According to an FIGURE 34. Brewing utensils from Shibden article in the Universal Magazine for Hall, near Huddersfield. (Peter Brears) January 1748, an alternative name for the oar was a 'rudder'.67 The older type of oar was plain in shape, slightly narrower than a bread oven peel and easily confused with it. The characteristic eighteenthand nineteenth-century design was more complex, with cross-pieces joined by converging side-pieces (Fig. 35). The implement was highly characteristic of the

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63

brewer, so much so that, in the seventeenth century and earlier, a bargain and sale of a brewhouse was made by delivering a rudder to the buyer by the vendor.68 The rudder was also used as an agitator for the copper when heating the liquor during the initial boil. An alternative tool for this job consisted of a square board with holes bored through, attached to a wooden shaft in the centre; by simply plunging this up and down carefully a few times the hot water at the bottom of the copper was brought to the surface.

Sieves A sieve (sometimes called a 'temse') was used at the end of both mashing and hop-boiling. The false bottom used in bottom-mashing replaced the primitive and often troublesome sieve used in top-mashing. In the eighteenth century this sieve was known as a 'huck muck' or 'muck bucket' or 'strum'.69 It was a wooden bucket or a wicker basket, sometimes even a laundry basket, filled FIGURE 35. Head of a brewer's mashing oar. with straw, fern or furze, to a depth of (The rural History Centre, Iniversity of six or eight inches in the bottom, and Reading) set over the drain hole, with the penstaff through the centre of the basket.70 It needed to be steadied with an iron hook let into the side of the tun, and connected to a jointed swivel, so it could sit round the basket like a dog collar. In earlier references it was called the 'brewer's thorn', and could be literally part of a thorn bush, as described by Randle Holme: This is a thing set over the hole in the bottom of the brewing comb, with the staff in the hole to keep that no liquor runs out . . . the Thorn keeping that none of the grain runs out with the Wort.71

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COUNTRY HOUSE BREWING

As late as 1705, Nicholas Blundell recorded in his summary of the annual household accounts for Little Crosby Hall 'a thorne for bruing . . . 4^.'72 The hop sieve was used later in the process and situated so that the wort running out of the copper ran through it before going into the coolers. Early hop sieves took the form of a willow or wicker basket, perhaps filled with fern or ferze, or simply a wooden bucket with holes in the bottom and filled with straw. They were known as 'tapwads'. Later they were made of bentwood fitted with a base of horsehair, as at Charlecote. Thomas Poole's description of a hop sieve was 'a square boarded frame, closely wired at the bottom, and covered with a hair sheet'.73 In later commercial breweries the hop sieve developed into a larger, square, perforated copper container called the hopback, and it may be something of this sort which was referred to in the accounts at Dodington: in the spring of 1790, a new hop strainer and huckmuck cost the brewhouse there over ;£8.74 An inventory of the brewhouse at Petworth, taken in 1869, refers to a copper hopback, along with several other fairly up-to-date features such as copper refrigerators.75 No copper hopback seems to have survived from the private house context.

Thermometer and Saccharometer The thermometer was available on the continent in the first half of the eighteenth century. Yet its general adoption in England was by no means immediate, although its use was explained and recommended as early as 1758 by Michael Combrune.76 The use of the saccharometer spread even more slowly amongst private brewers. Many commercial breweries adopted it during the last decades of the eighteenth century, along with the system of recording gravity known as brewer's pounds per barrel.77 None of the private brewhouse inventories examined from around the period refer to either instruments, even though a number do specify small items. An inventory of the Sutherland brewhouse in 1826 does not include a thermometer, even though one was bought a few years earlier - for the poultry keeper, not for the brewer.78 Both Thomas Threale and Samuel Child, writing at the turn of the eighteenth century, assumed that a private brewer would not have access to such equipment, and Sir Thomas Broughton's butler, Shore, was obviously unusual in obtaining both as early as i8o4.79 According to a manual published as late as 1840, a thermometer was highly useful but not indispensable.80 Even trade brewers sometimes had problems with the

THE B R E W H O U S E

65

introduction of new techniques. In 1848 William Roberts related the tale of one commercial brewer who told him he was forced to keep his use of the thermometer a secret from his father, who objected to experimental innovations.81 Evidence that some private brewhouses could be astonishingly dilatory in adopting new equipment comes from the memoirs of the Hickleton brewer, who remembered the 'modernisation' of his brewhouse in the 19205; this included the replacement of the wooden mash tun with a copper one and the adoption of an electric pump, a saccharometer and a milk refrigerating unit for cooling the worts.82

Slings, Jets, Gauns, Cocks, Pumps and Pipes The hardest labour of all involved the small utensils which were used to move the wort around from one vessel to another. The whole building was designed to use gravity as much as possible, but even so there was a good deal of back-breaking work. In small brewhouses, before the use of pumps, the underback might be small enough to be carried. The cooper made the vessel with two long staves or 'ears', which were pierced to allow a strong pole to be pushed through; even if full and heavy the vessel could be slung between the shoulders of two men. This idea was elaborated into a proper sling, used more for lifting heavy casks than the brewing vessels themselves. According to Randle Holme a sling was a strong, thick yet short pole, not above a yard and a halfe long, to the middle is fixed a strong plate with a hole in which is put a Hook with a head, which will turn any way after the manner of a Twerl: on this hook is fastened two other short chains with broad-pointed hooks, with them clasping the end of the barrels above the heads, the Barrel is lifted up and borne by two men to any place.83

The same author described a simple but useful piece of kit called a bearing staff. This was a flattish length of wood with notches on the top edge at both ends by which empty barrels are carried by servants from place to place, by fixing the ends of the staff into the barrel at the bungholes, and so putting the middle of the staff on his shoulder.

In circumstances where the underback was too large to sling between two

66

COUNTRY HOUSE BREWING

FIGURE 36. Brewer's jet, for ladling worts. (The Rural History 'Centre, University of Reading)

men, the wort was moved from the underback up to the copper by hand-ladling into smaller vessels. The ladling was done with ordinary wooden bowls, with 'gauns' (gallon buckets) or with the more specialised brewing ladles known as 'jetts' (wooden ladles with either long or short handles) (Fig. 36). The work was tedious, exhausting and not a little dangerous, since the wort to be carried up the steps was scalding hot. For cleanliness, all such tubs, pails or jetts were rubbed very smooth inside. Long-handled jetts were used in conjunction with open wooden chutes to move the wort between vessels (Fig. 60). These chutes were sometimes called gutters and could be of considerable length, as with the inlet pipe from the well-pump to the copper in the brewhouse at Charlecote. They could be lined with lead or copper. Cylindrical wooden pipes were also used - appropriately called 'trunks' since they were simply pieces of tree branch or small trunks bored down the middle with a hand auger, charred inside and pitched outside. By the eighteenth century, the professional brewer preferred all wooden pipes to be lined with lead and to give at least five inches clear diameter. Many wooden pipes had been replaced altogether, either with lead or leather pipes. These last were more flexible than either wood or lead and could be fitted to size and shape. They were made by specialist leather workers who also made leather bottles and buckets; they had the advantage that they could be fairly easily mended by the house saddler. A legacy from the time of boiled leather armour, the leather was made rigid by boiling and treating with hot wax; it could then be sewn or riveted with copper rivets. In the larger country house brewhouse the ultimate luxury came to be a leather or lead pipe running directly from either the cooling trays or the fermenting tun to the casks in the cellars. This saved considerable labour in manhandling the casks between cellars and brewhouse, but it required careful planning of levels and usually an extra pump in the brewhouse, as can be seen from the plans of Stackpole Court (Fig. 20). Pipes are also recorded on plans or inventories at Langley Park, Wimpole, Hickleton, Temple Newsam and Chatsworth, as well as at Annesley Hall in Nottinghamshire, where brewing continued until the First World War.

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67

Occasionally, wooden chutes and leather pipes have survived, but no example remains of the pipe or 'crane' which was described by Randle Holme, and which worked rather like a giant laboratory pipette: it was an L-shaped pipe, with one leg twice as long as the other: Let the short end be put into any liquor, and the longer end being lower out from it, and but suck the liquor through the long end, and upon your withdrawing your mouth, all the rest of the liquor will follow it ... By this means the Brewers by a Leaden Crane draw their Wort from one cooler to another.84

Writing in 1688, Holme also included a description of a hand-operated brewer's pump. Pumps were first used for raising water supplies for domestic use in London in the 15508, but they do not seem to have been used widely in the brewing trade until the second half of the seventeenth century. They were probably then adopted fairly quickly, simply because they saved so much labour. No doubt private brewhouses took a little longer to modernise. Dodington's brewhouse pump was installed in 1762, at a cost of 195. 6d.S5 Eighteenth-century pumps were usually made of lead, as at Chillington, or elm, as at Wrest. They could be expensive; the estimate for the copper pump to be fitted at Alton Abbey in 1819 by the Earl of Shrewsbury was £6 os. od.S6 Brewhouses which had invested in pumps invariably had taps or cocks - large, chunky, brass taps often with a long straight spout. These were fitted both into the copper and the mash tun, where this had a false bottom, and possibly also into the underback and fermenting vessel (Fig. 37). The more primitive ancestor of the tap was the spiggot and faucet, which needed a twig to adjust the stream. These were still in use when William Ellis was writing in the 17305 but were not popular, as they could easily slip and scald the operator. In the hectic moments of running the liquor or worts out of the copper it was important to be able to reach over the FIGURE 37. The brewhouse at Charlecote, showing the copper outlet tap with a chute atmash tun to adjust the stream of wort tached by a leather strap. The chute could be very quickly, SO even the later forms of taps might be fitted with rough wooden

easity adjusted to charge either mash tun or cooker.(photograph by Vera Collingwood)

68

COUNTRY HOUSE BREWING

Inventory of the brewhouse at Petworth, West Sussex, 1869 (Petworth House Archives, 10068) Barrel stand Copper pump

Copper mug

2 long wood shoots & chimney 2 Pieces gutta percha tubing with rose 5 stirrers

Pr. barrel dogs

Tray top folding board Iron fold bar

3 Brewing tubs

Wood huckster

3 small tubs 2 Pr. Stillions & frames 4 Brewing tubs

2 choppers Hand bowl Copper stoker & fire pan

4 2 rise steps 4 stirrers

Tun dish

Copper force pump Fender and fire irons

5 short shoots

Tin funnell 4 lengths of copper piping + i old piece

4 Brewing sticks

Pr. 3 and pr. 5 rise steps

4 gall, cask Water cask

Yeast tub

Steelyards and weights Small Carpenter's bench

Copper funnel

Copper hop back Small mash tub & underback

Gridiron

2 Tin skimmers doz nozzle (bars?) 2 lanterns

Iron saucepan

2 Tin shoots

9 short shoots Low form

6 Pails

Large tub

Table Chair

Long copper funnell

3 copper refrigerators

Wood shovel

Beer charger

Oil lamp

handles pushed through the top, giving a better purchase. These are still in place at Stanway — in themselves insignificant details but speaking volumes down the years as each generation of brewers customised their workplace. Drain holes were lined with copper or more usually lead; they could easily be stopped with corks cut to size, wrapped round with linen and weighted down. One other essential item was a bushel measure, a bentwood straight-sided vessel for measuring the amount of malt required. These were strike measures - that is they were filled to overflowing and then struck across the top with a stick or 'strickle' to get a level top. They measured volume, not weight, so no scales were needed, though periodically the measure needed to be checked. 'Trying whether my halfe-bushel was true' cost Nicholas Blundell 4^. in lyio.87 This was not as straightforward as it might seem, for in 1710 bushels were not standard throughout the country. The standard imperial bushel (the equivalent to eight imperial gallons) was not introduced until i824.88

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69

The brewer also needed general pieces of equipment such as buckets, ladders, stools, lanthorns, and a poker and shovel for the fire; a number of other small utensils appear in inventories or very rarely in collections, including a mallet for tapping barrels, a barrel tilter and a long-handled malt scoop for ladling the malt into the mash or removing it after mashing. The inventory of the brewhouse at Petworth in 1869 is excellent for details of small items.89 Another essential piece of equipment in any well-run brewhouse was a comfortable chair or bench, for the brewer, if not for his assistant: the whole brewing process lasted at least a couple of days; different stages could be left only for a few hours and it was often not worth going to bed. Sometimes wage accounts record the fact that the brewer worked through the night - usually without receiving any extra payment for it. Finally, one item invariably present in both brewhouse and cellar inventories from at least the seventeenth century onwards was a lock and key. Brewhouse doors were themselves usually stoutly made, for security has always been to the fore where alcoholic liquor is concerned (Fig. 38). This fact, combined with ample clear space and only intermittent use, has meant that brewhouses have seen long service for the FIGURE 38. The massive outside door to storage of totally irrelevant items. Such the room serving the brewhouse at Lacock was the case in Newark in 1592 when Abbey. (Photograph by Vera Collingwood; the new (and no doubt very expensive) National Trust) iron railings for the tombs of the 3rd and 4th Earls of Rutland were stored in the family brewhouse whilst they were in transit from Gainsborough to Bottesford in Leicestershire.90 Not surprisingly, some inventories bewilder rather than illuminate.

Casks An important part of the brewing equipment was a set of casks. For domestic purposes large casks were a disadvantage, as it might be impossible to fill them

7O

COUNTRY HOUSE BREWING

with one brew. The most commonly used size in private brewhouses was undoubtedly the hogshead; this was also the almost universal measure used in country house brewing records. Even so it is wrong to expect complete standardisation, for the hogshead, although always holding fifty-four gallons today, varied in capacity in the past. In the early eighteenth century, for example, Croker's dictionary included a table of capacities which gave a hogshead holding sixty-three gallons, a relic of the days when hogsheads as well as butts and pipes varied in capacity according to the quality of ale or beer concerned. A century later the cellar-book at Shugborough specified hogsheads as holding sixty-nine gallons.91 A further complexity was added by the practice of having different capacities for vessels used for beer and ale - a legacy from the days when ale and beer brewers belonged to different guilds. A barrel of beer held thirty-six gallons; a barrel of ale held thirty-two gallons; in 1688 a compromise barrel for both ale and beer was introduced, holding thirty-four gallons, and in 1803 both were increased to thirty-six gallons; after 1824 both were standardised at thirty-six imperial gallons.92 Sometimes country house cellars contained huge casks; the Shugborough cellars in the 18308 had one ale cask of 900 gallon capacity inscribed with the name 'Lord Anson' and another of 400 gallon capacity called 'Lady Anson'.93 Given that the Shugborough brewhouse had a 400 gallon and a 200 gallon copper, it is possible that a full brew with several mashes could fill the larger cask at one time. Even so, the practice of topping up casks with different brews was definitely common in private houses, though greatly frowned upon by commercial brewers. Many writers, including John Loudon, recommended the sort of casks which taper downwards rather than the 'bellied' barrel-shape. Such casks helped to keep a crust over the whole of the surface of the beer and also had the advantage of having the bung hole at the top, large enough to allow the hand inside to clean them. Unfortunately, they were much more difficult to move about than the bellied shape; and if the floor or stillion which they were standing on was not completely flat, they could hide unnoticed air pockets. In practice, many brewhouses probably had both. Wrest in 1779 had both shapes.94 Earlier casks were hooped with stout bent wooden hoops, later replaced by iron hoops. An inventory of the brewhouse at Calke taken in 1737 perhaps gives a guide to the timescale of this change, for it itemised twenty hogsheads with iron hoops and twenty-six hogsheads with wooden hoops.95 Casks and vessels were often painted or colour-washed to distinguish them

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71

Inventories of the cellars at Wrest Park, 1779 (BRO, Lucas Mss, Lji/igo) Lower ale cellar

Servants' hall cellar

Good oak drink stalls all round the cellar

Oak drink stalls all round the cellar 4 x 2-hogshead tun-shaped casks

Bell casks of between 2 and three hogsheads 2 hogshead tun-shaped casks

Best small beer cellar 3 oak drink stalls

1 pair steps

4 tap tubbs

2 wood filters

i pair dogs 6 x 2-hogshead tun-shaped casks

Blue ale cellar Good oak drink stalls on both sides of the cellar

Cellar opposite the last 1 oak drink stall

i pair steps

2 x 164 gallon tun-shaped casks 5 ditto, two hogshead casks

i hanging yeast trough i large wood tunnell i yo-gallon bell cask large tun-shaped casks painted blue marked and numbered i, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

Common small beer cellar Good oak drink stalls all round the cellars 3 x two-handed gallon tun-shaped casks 8 ditto, two hogshead casks i large vessels for carrying beer with a long leather pipe belonging to it.

from others. This perhaps indicates that the practice of filling up casks with several brews of similar strengths was commonplace. Wrest Park had a bluewashed cellar and casks and at Shibden Hall there is a brewing vessel (probably made of oak) painted on the outside with scrumble and combed to look like oak. Household accounts sometimes record the buying of paint for cellar casks.96 Cask bungs were wooden, preferably poplar, never cork, though there are some early references to closing casks with bags of clay or sand. Bungs were about three inches long and turned to fit each cask.

Cellars A well-built cellar is a triumph of the bricklayer's art. Throughout the seasons, the cellars at Shugborough varied only a degree or so, from 55° to 57° F, optimum conditions for beer storage. Some cellars were not so obliging, one

72

COUNTRY HOUSE BREWING

FIGURE 39. The beer cellar at Chatsworth, Derbyshire, showing on the left a stillion and on the right the intricately carved heads of the casks which were known as 'the Twelve Apostles'. (Devonshire Collections, Chatsworth)

of the main problems being extremely low temperatures in winter. Hence the instructions to the butler given by the author of The Servants' Guide and Family Manual: 'In frosty weather, shut up all the lights or windows of the cellar, and cover them close with straw or dung, so as to keep the wine, beer etc. in a proper and temperate state.' This was especially important if ale was bottled.97 The main beer cellar underneath Park Farm at Shugborough is a fair-sized room with stillions fitted around three sides. Stillions are long, low, brick or timber frameworks with a gutter running down their length, in the middle (Figs 39 and 71). When the casks had been filled, but were still 'in ferment', they were placed on these on their sides, bung hole at the top. When the yeast worked out of the bunghole, it ran down the sides of the barrel and was collected in the stillion gutter. This was the best yeast or 'barm' to keep for future brews or for use in the bakery or stillroom. In practice the stillions could be built either in the brewhouse or the cellars, depending on where the racking was carried out; often they were built of a brick base with two timber beams running along the top. Once fermentation had stopped, the barrels were stood on end

THE B R E W H O U S E

73

on individual oak barrel stands. Both stands and stillions had a variety of regional names - thralls, thramms, stills or stands. There is much more to the average cellar than meets the eye. That at Park Farm, Shugborough, frequently floods to a depth of a few inches; the whole brick floor is slightly domed, draining to gutters running in front of the stillions, which in turn drain to a sump in one corner. The cellars in the main house at Shugborough are similarly drained, but far more complicated in layout. Like most houses designed for a substantial living-in servant population, it had a cellar for the small beer, which was freely accessible; and a separate cellar each for the ale and the strong ale, both of which were kept locked. The wine cellars were completely separate and provided with brick bins. Wrest Park in the 17705 had even more elaborate cellars - six in all, excluding the wine cellars. Two were for ale, one of which was limewashed blue; even the casks were washed a blue colour, presumably so there would be no confusion with casks from other cellars. There was a separate cellar for the servants' hall, another indeterminate cellar and two cellars for the small beer - one for common and one for best small beer.98 In 1773 Trentham had eight cellars in use for beer and cider, containing a total of 124 full vessels, thirty-four of which were in the 'great cellar'; fifteen hogsheads were in the vaults under the church, which at Trentham was more or less part of the house (Fig. 40)." The Hickleton cellar after brewing was a sight which imprinted itself in the memory of the brewer: 'The cellar under the Hall looked a splendid sight after a brewing session with around 10 or 12 of these huge casks standing in a row.'100 The cellars at Chatsworth were even more impressive, since the heads of the casks were beautifully carved with the family arms (Fig. 39). Calke is unusual in having cellars connected to the brewhouse by an underground passageway, served by a steep flight of stone steps with treads worn away by feet and barrels. Some builders of cellars went to considerable lengths to maintain a cool environment. Peter Kalm's account of his visit to England in 1748 included a description of a cellar belonging to an inn at Eaton Bray. The cellar was situated close to a little running beck . . . On either side of the cellar was a row of beer-barrels, and the water ran under each row, for which purpose it was also at the entrance of the cellar divided into two branches. He assured us that the beer never turns sour in this cellar in summer, but is kept quite fresh . . ,101

In some houses a separate bottle room was provided, usually fitted with a table and bottle racks. The practice of bottling beer in country houses was older

74

COUNTRY HOUSE BREWING

FIGURE 40. Account of the ale vessels at Trentham Hall, Staffordshire. Extract from the cellar-book for 1770. SRO, Sutherland Mss, D5Q3/R/6/I. (Photograph by Peter Rogers)

than usually imagined, going back to at least the seventeenth century. The contents of the bottle room, at Wheatley Hall, Doncaster, as recorded for the Cooke family in 1683, gives an idea of the uses to which some rooms were put: in addition to the usual bottles and racks, it contained a 'feather tubb and cover' - a reminder of the days when feathers had to be dressed for making beds and annually washed and 'cooked' to sterilise them; a large smoothing-board also suggests that the room doubled as the ironing room.102

Vessel Care Despite the manufactured brewhouse which Loudon claimed could be converted into a washhouse, most brewers were adamant that vessels should be used only for brewing. The fact that so many writers made this point perhaps indicates that the practice of using the same vessels for both brewing and washing was common in earlier years.

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75

FIGURE 41. A nineteenth-century primitive painting by an unknown artist of a cooper's workshop. (Photograph by James Austin; Peter Mathias)

The copper boiler and any other copper parts had to be cleaned to brightness; polishing needed to be repeated after every second brew. Practical experience at Shugborough has shown that, as long as this regime is rigorously maintained, scrubbing hard with hot water will keep the copper bright and will even get rid of verdigris. Stave-built vessels present particular problems of care, as any collector or curator knows. They have many advantages in use: by shaping the joints the cooper can make curved vessels; this reduces the number of corners and makes cleaning easier. The major disadvantage is that vessels produced by the wet cooper were made to work; when not working - that is, when not holding liquid - the staves shrink and the vessel falls to pieces. A brewhouse, therefore, needed to be kept in regular use. If it was not, the vessels still needed to be filled with water, left for two or three days, then drained; this needed to be done at least once a month, more often in summer. Cleaning stave-built vessels and casks was a tiresome job, requiring patient scrubbing and heavy manhandling. The usual method was to scrub them the day

j6

COUNTRY HOUSE BREWING

after use, first with cold water, leaving them to soak if wanted; then scrubbing with scalding water, making sure that they were thoroughly dried before their next use. This last could take some time with some of the big mash tuns, so timing was crucial. It was in the nature of household brewing that vessels were left unused for several weeks or even months, and this could present problems. Professional brewers recommended that open vessels should be scoured with birch brooms after use, then put to stand with a little liquor and a piece of unslaked lime left inside; this was especially important with false bottoms. One brewer gave a timely warning never to use oil or white lead to fill up loosened carpenters' joints.103 The closed casks presented a more difficult problem than the open tuns. Shropshire seems to have been famous for its closed barrels made with a bung-hole large enough to admit a hand and a brush. Keeping the more usual closed casks sweet was a continual worry; they would stay sweet if they were never emptied, but left with a gallon or two of beer and sediment in the bottom and kept closed. If kept properly, all that was needed the next time was emptying, scalding and the hoops checking. Allowing them to stand open to the air was a sure way to make them foul. An easy test for foulness was to blow into the vent, place a finger over it for a minute, and then smell the air coming out. If a cask did go foul, the first and easiest remedy was to scald it with a mixture of bruised pepper and boiling water. Alternatively, a piece of chain or some large pebbles could be slipped in and the barrel vigorously rolled. A surer method of restoring sweetness was to take out the head of the cask, scrub the insides with a hard brush, lye and sand, replace the head, scald the inside, throw in a piece of unslaked lime and stop up the bung hole. Croker's advice was more particular: In ordering vessels for the preservation of beer, they must not at one time be scalded and at another washed with cold water: some rub the vessels with hop leaves, that come out of the wort, and so rinse them again; then being dried in air, and headed, they take a long piece of canvas, and dipping it in brimstone make matches thereof, and with a few coriander seeds set fire thereto; others opening the bung let the match burn in the vessel, keeping in as much as they can of the sulphureous fume, by laying the bung tightly on, and when the match is burnt, they stop it close for a little time; then being opened, and coming to the air, the cask is found to be as sweet as a violet.104

A persistently smelly cask was called a stinkard - a name, incidentally, originally applied to an persistently smelly human. The standard recommended cure for

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77

a stinkard was to unhead it, scrub it, rehead it, put in pounded charcoal, oil of vitriol and cold water, bung it and roll it in all directions, then wash out well. Alternatively, it could be unheaded, shaved and burned inside by the cooper before being scalded. Yet another remedy for a sour barrel was to stand it over the heated copper for one night, allowing the steam to search it; this needed care, however, for a new cask treated like this would fall apart. New oak vessels needed seasoning. One way of doing this was to boil together a concoction of brewer's grains, green walnut leaves and new hay or wheat straw; this was put scalding into the cask, which was then stopped up close for some time. A commonly-mentioned method of seasoning a cask was to bury it in the ground before use - dig a hole, lay the cask half in its depth, with the bung holes upwards, and leave for one week. For the first year of use, new barrels were used for small beer only. Both brewhouse and fittings needed regular maintenance. It was important that internal pointing and plastering were kept in good order and regularly cleaned. At Hickleton, in Clarence Hellewell's time, the day before each brewing saw all the tools scalded and the walls brushed down to remove dirt and cobwebs. In the longer term, coppers burnt paper-thin and needed turning, patching or replacement; above all, the brewer needed the regular services of a good cooper (Figs 41 and 42). At Woburn in the eighteenth century, the cooper's work was of two different types - intermittent repair work and regular cleaning of casks. The FIGURE 42. A cooper at work with a headrepair work most often needed was the ing knife. (BLRA) refitting of hoops to a variety of vessels. Often these were specifically iron hoops. Casks - pipes and hogsheads - needed replacement staves or bottoms; occasionally old vessels were cut down and converted into open vats.105 The need to clean vessels thoroughly provided the cooper with regular work; throughout the autumn of 1756, George Bradford was needed almost every day

78

COUNTRY HOUSE BREWING

The Duke of Bedford's bill in the brewhouse and cellar at Woburn: George Bradford, cooper, 1756 (Bedford Estate

Office)

£s.d.

1756 Oct 2

Oct 4 Oct 5 Oct 6

Oct 8 Oct 9 Oct ii Oct 12

Oct Oct Oct Oct

13 14 15 16

Oct 1 8 Oct 19 Oct 20

Oct 22

Total

For heading a pipe & flagging For new chines For vent pegs For taking the head out of a Hhd & cleaning For heading ditto & flagging for heading 2 pipes & flagging For 2 new heads in a pipe For new chines For an iron hoop to a pipe For taking the heads out of 3 hhds & cleaning For heading up 5 ditto and mending the head of a hhd. For putting 3 staves in a hhd. For mending a hhd & new chines For heading 2 hhds.& flagging For half a head in a hhd. For mending a hhd. For putting new chines into 3 hhds. For taking the heads out of 3 hhds. & cleaning For heading 4 ditto & flagging For putting staves into 3 hhds. For setting of hoops For taking the heads out of 3 hhds & cleaning For heading 4 ditto & flagging For setting of hoops For new chines For taking the heads out of 2 hhds. & cleaning

o-i-o o-i-o o-o—6

o-i-o 0-0-6 0-2-0

0-1-6 o-i-o 0-1-6 0-3-0 0-3-0 O-2-O

0-1-6 O-I-O

O-I—0

o-o—6 0-1-6 0-3-0 0-2-O

o—6-0

o-i-6 0-3-0 0-2-0

0-1-6 0-1-6 O-2-O

2-6-0

in the Woburn brewhouse and cellars, heading hogsheads and pipes - that is, taking out the heads, scrubbing, scalding or shaving the inside of the casks and replacing the heads. Sometimes in doing this he needed to reflag the heads that is, slip new strips of reed between the staves of the head to make a good seal; and sometimes he needed to make new chines — the central stave in the head. The frequency with which heading and flagging occur in the Woburn bills seems to show that some casks were headed after every brew. Bradford's

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79

bill for the winter of 1756 totalled £4 165. 6d., of which only 45. 6d. came from the kitchens and washhouse, the rest from the brewhouse. As the country house system relied on credit, the bill was not paid until March 1757. Bradford's laboured signature shows that the cooper was barely literate. Some of the big private brewhouses must have provided a considerable amount of work for the local cooper. In 1789 the steward at the Duke of Kingston's house at Thoresby in Nottinghamshire paid an annual bill of £20 175. 2d. to John Stone, cooper, and -fj] 105. 2d. for '12 bunches of barrel hoops' to William Carson.106 Such bills must have made up a fair proportion of the annual turnover of a small craft business.

Building a Brewhouse Brewhouses were substantial buildings with complex fittings requiring services — chimneys, water supplies and drains. How expensive were they to build and therefore how exclusive? A series of records, giving some indication of cost, relates to a proposal by the Duke of Kent to build a new brewhouse.107 There is no indication as to why the Duke wanted both to refit an existing brewhouse and to build a new much more ambitious one on his estate at Wrest in the 17305. The smaller one may have been for the home farm and the larger for the main household; most likely, however, the larger one may have been the result of an aristocratic fancy to go into the trade; certainly it was concieved on a commercial scale, incorporating features not normally associated with domestic brewhouses, such as a liquor back and hop back. In any event his agent asked the architect Batty Langley to quote. Langley became well-known as a Gothic revivalist and author of several books promoting the Gothic style, as well as dealing with more practical subjects such as pricing levels in the London building trade.108 On 10 November 1735, he duly submitted his first estimate to the Duke, which worked out at ^150 55. 5