ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the marketing of beer in Victorian Britain. At first sight the task, at least measured by success, seems an easy enough operation. Output in the United Kingdom doubled between 1831 and 1873; some breweries grew greatly in size; no industry generated larger fortunes for its business leaders. Bass, Allsopp and Guinness had become by the 1870s perhaps the greatest - certainly the best-known - names in British industry. On closer inspection, however, a study of beer reveals that marketing arrangements were complex and unusual: complex in that beer was a varied and fragile product relying at point of sale upon tens of thousands of publicans only indirectly controlled by the brewers themselves; unusual among Britain’s major industries in that the export market was, except for a handful of firms, unimport ant (never more than around 3 per cent of output found its way over seas). The retailing of beer therefore embraces a large number of primarily domestic outlets. What were successful strategies in this big industry under constant government and temperance surveillance in the nineteenth century? Again on the surface, no industry appeared to retain its traditions better. The ‘Beer and Britannia’ image of Sydney Smith was preserved, its close links with British agriculture continued, its conservative business leaders appeared to eschew the march of science, so that the production of beer seemed much the same in 1900 as it had done seventy years earlier. Yet it did not remain detached from the progress of industrialization and urbanization transforming Victorian Britain. Therefore at the outset it is necessary to outline the major changes encompassing the beer market in these years.
