March 2016 Commercial brewing

Turning into an industry

The question is when, how and why did people start having brewing as a full time profession. It's not all that easy to pinpoint exactly when that happened and it slowly progressed over time. In the beginning farmers brewed for their own need and sold the surplus. However they didnt have the money to invest in the equipment needed to brew enough to make a living out of it.

Landlords in northen Europe and in England saw the potential and began to invest in larger breweries as a way of making an income from it. They had the financial resourcers to make it happen, although they could not get their money solely from that but it was something that partly contributed to their wealth in the long run.

The market

Later on when people started to move into cities and they became bigger and bigger, which also meant that more and more turned from producers to only consumers, the market for brewers increased and familly owned breweries started to show up. In the 12th century specialized workers start appearing all over Europe which pointed to the fact that by this time full time brewers existed and by the 13th century it was a viable occupation.

Who owned it

A brewery was a familly bussiness, unless it was a wealthy landlord but even then the familly owned and ran the brewery to some extent. It might come as a surprise to some that most of the time it was the wife that was the head of the familly company, perhaps not on paper as women wasnt allowed to own a bussiness everywhere, but in practicality it was she who made sure it worked. This is not so strange if you think about it, baking bread was the chore of the wife to begin with and brewing beer was considered the same so she women knew how to do it, it just needed to be scaled up a bit.

Did it change how to brew?

Brewing was surrounded by supersticion and religion. It was, for example, considered a bad time to brew beer two weeks before christmas as it was a very big religious time. Although there was a need to beer which made it tricky, either the beer had to be made in good time or you had to take extra care when making it. Banging in doors, stomping or making loud noises was considered terrible for brewing beer. Crosses started to appear on barrels to ward of evil spirits. Especially in Scandinavia there are notes on how to keep the little folk away from your brews. Sometimes you had to bribe them or your brew would turn sour. This tradition and way of thinking was still in practice even when the brewing went commercial, a brew that went bad could be devastating so people took every precaution to avoid that.This points to the fact that even if breweries became industrialized much of the ideas were kept, improvements were made but supersticions lingered on and in some parts replaced by religion.

Impact on society

Breweries moved closer and closer to the cities so the companies didnt have to transport their goods so far with every delivery. The problem here is about the same as we have today, pollution. The brewers need good water, without that you couldnt make a proper beer, but the breweries produced a lot of waste which they most often just dumped in the rivers and streams so they would float away. This polluted the water for the rest which was rather unpopular. Also the amount of smoke and ashes that was part of heating up the water was considerable when the production increased. In England regulations appeared in the 12th and 13th century with a fine if the brewers didnt abide by the rules set for how to handle the waste. In a sense the same problems we have today with large industries.

Source: Beer in the middge ages and rennissance