The period during which British brewing shifted from the diverse domestic and commercial venues of the early modern era to industrialized Victorian brewhouses sheds light on far more than just one industry. It also helps to illuminate the changing nature of an important nexus of interests – intellectual inquiry and experimentation, public benefit, artisanal knowledge, commerce, and related institutions, including the government and learned bodies. In this volume, adapted from his dissertation, James Sumner explores the nexus through the medium of brewing publications which crossed the divide between theory and practice. As the author repeatedly reminds us, these works ‘do not transparently represent either the worlds they describe, or their authors' intentions’ (p. 7). Many synthesized earlier works and were published at least in part as commercial advertising, and all involved strategic packaging of both author and ideas. However, they offer an opportunity to analyse the ways in which writers sought to establish authority and to position themselves with respect to industry and science.
Certain key themes emerge, which also resonate far beyond just brewing – such as the long-standing tension between openness and secrecy. Knowledge sharing and formation, the public interest, and institutional recognition demanded a degree of openness. However, success in craft and commerce required strategic secrecy. Authors who did reveal everything engendered doubt about their practical experience and about the value of their revelations, and also endangered priority claims and profits. Similarly, it was a common rhetorical device both within and without brewing to pit elevated philosophers and experienced practitioners against each other, but the reality was far more complicated.
Brewing always had strong natural ties to ‘philosophical’ as well as ‘practical’ inquiry and experimentation. Its major steps ‘all involved the subtle internal rearrangement of material substances: finding a common framework to explain such transformations had been a popular preoccupation for philosophers from the seventeenth century onwards’ (p. 3). Over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the balance and boundaries between brewing theory and practice shifted frequently. Sumner explores this against the backdrop of the general shift from seventeenth-century natural philosophy to the late Victorian scientific disciplines. The book is prefaced by brief biographical notes on thirty-nine ‘Principal dramatis personae’, and further complemented by a glossary and ten black-and-white images.
Its first chapter, ‘The curious brewer’, outlines seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century publications. Most assumed a certain amount of practical knowledge, since smaller-scale and domestic brewing still existed alongside large-scale brewhouses. One early innovation was landowner Jeffrey Boys's pamphlet Directions on Brewing in 1700, which, while not ‘philosophical’ in the sense of seeking causes, explained raw materials and promoted experimentation in practice. Sumner sets the developments of these decades against a shift in rhetoric amongst the fellows of the Royal Society – from the seventeenth-century contrast between artisan and gentleman scholar to a new systematizing and comparative agenda under Hans Sloane which encompassed specialists without professional or landed backgrounds.
Chapter 2, ‘The theorist and the thermometer’, focuses on Michael Combrune and his Essay on Brewing of 1758. This is the earliest brewery text known to have been modelled after a natural-philosophical treatise, to discuss thermometry and to have been written by an active commercial brewer. It provided a model for future publications, and popularized both the use of the thermometer and tie-ins between publications and private commercial instruction. However, it largely disappointed readers on both sides of the divide between theory and practice.
Chapter 3, ‘Brewery instructors in public and private’, explores the theory-minded instructors who sprang up in Combrune's wake and the obstacles faced by non-brewing authors. In the 1770s, chemist Humphrey Jackson found success by employing partial disclosure in his publications, and by appealing to universal chemical laws as a source of authority for non-brewers. His career reflects important intersections of the cultures of polite knowledge making and trade included within the Society of Arts, the Royal Society and the nexus of public and projector interests which saw him address ship-worm and scurvy as well as brewing.
Chapter 4, ‘The value of beer’, explores how John Richardson (one of Jackson's disgruntled former customers) successfully couched quantitative gravimetric interpretations of beer strength within economic issues valued by brewers. He balanced the need for openness and secrecy by combining published generalities with privately proffered advice. Richardson also successfully promoted a philosophical instrument, the saccharometer, although he was not able to establish a monopoly over the technology and soon alienated the reviewing press. He and ensuing authors increasingly made a case for brewers being able to combine practice and theory in a way which non-brewers could not.
Chapter 5, ‘Chemists, druggists and beer doctors’, explores how, in the nineteenth century, these dynamics collided with public fears about the adulteration of food and drink. Just as industrialization distanced consumers from production, chemical-minded brewers appeared distanced from concerns about ‘purity’. Chapter 6, ‘Professors in the brewhouse’, shows how the introduction of professors into the brewery was an attempt to bridge this gap. It proved largely unsuccessful but influenced later authors, including chemist Thomas Thomson, who redefined brewing as an industrial process underpinned and innovated by chemical literature. He was one of a new breed of turn-of-the-century professionalizers who helped bring about greater scientific disciplinarity. Chapters 7, ‘Treatises for the trade’, and 8, ‘Analysis and synthesis’, discuss the appearance of brewing in later nineteenth-century treatises and periodicals, and how discussion of current research moved to commercially oriented trade publications.
In crafting this book, Sumner faced many challenges – including the limitations of focusing on one type of source, and the difficult balance to be found between recognizing and overstating well-known dichotomies and narratives. However, he explicitly addresses these issues, and repeatedly seeks to redress them through context and analysis. Rather than attempting a comprehensive brewing history, he aims to explore the theme of credibility through important but lesser-known chemists and publications which preceded the ‘microbiological turn’ in late nineteenth-century brewing.
