ABSTRACT
Few industries are more complex than brewing. Partly its intricacies arise from the way governments have for social reasons controlled the sale of beer and, for economic ones, used it for revenue-raising purposes. But the manufacture of the product and its retail is labyrinthine in comparison with other industries. The growth and production of its main raw material, malt, link it closely with the fortunes of agriculture; the process of manufacture is highly scientific although based on simple, historic, empirical principles; and its retail, often an uneasy balance between brewer and publican, is intricately enmeshed within the wider parameters of shifting social attitudes and evolving leisure pursuits. Moreover, the product itself is, in spite of the broad categorisation of beer and lager, far from uniform. Nowhere is this latter observation better exemplified than in a study of beers and their changing nature in Victorian Britain. What types of beers did the Victorians drink? Did these change over the 1830-1914 period? What do these changes tell us about shifting social attitudes to beer drinking? Why did the vogue for bottomfermented beers which swept the world s beer-drinking nations by and large bypass Britain?
