The history of brewing
Beer has been produced in Little Eaton for centuries. Find out how.
Beer has been produced in Britain since pre-historic days and in Little Eaton for centuries. It was probably first recorded in Sumarian and Egyptian times and paintings and models from the time show that women were frequently in charge of the brewing operations. The traditional ingredients for beer production have always been readily available locally to Little Eaton. Initially production would have taken the form of beer brewed in individual houses, almost certainly by the wife of the householder, for consumption by the family. This may well have included all members of the family, as water sources were frequently contaminated and the beer would have been safer to drink. The beer would have been of quite a low alcoholic content (2.5 to 3.0 %!!) which meant that it would have also been given to the children – in small amounts!
Farmers, who have usually employed many men and boys on the farm, would have supplied them with bread and beer for their lunch – the beer almost certainly being brewed by the farmer’s wife. The next stage towards larger scale production would have been the ‘beer house’, once again frequently run by women who were termed ‘brewsters’. Their husbands would have worked elsewhere during the day in one of the local trades, whilst the women would have run the beer house. In the evening the husbands would have joined them in the bar – though maybe not always serving the beer, but drinking it! The beer would have been brewed by the wife during the day in a back room where she could keep an eye on both the bar and the beer. Beer brewed in this way would have had a short shelf life and was brewed in small quantities on a day-by-day basis.
“Commercial brewing was very widespread, especially in the countryside." Judith Bennett wrote in her book ”Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England”. "In Brigstock, Northants, before the plague more than 300 women - about one-third of the women who lived on the manor - brewed ale for sale. In Alrewas, Staffordshire, during the 1330s and 1340s, between 52 and 76 brewers, mostly women, sold ale each year in a village with about 120 households. In Wakefield, Yorkshire, between 1348 and 1350, 185 women - accounting for almost one-third of all women - brewed for sale.” From this you can see the large part that women played in the development of brewing.
The next step up from that would have been brewing beer on a more commercial scale, not just for the one beer house, but for sale onwards to other beer houses and inns. Once again it was typically the women who ran these smaller breweries, but once the scale became such that they employed other staff, it became more common to find men running the business. This shift in scale only really became possible in the 1880s when refrigeration on a commercial scale was introduced.
The main ingredients used in the brewing process are:
Barley - produced in and around the village (witness the name Barley Close), though in some cases barley would have been sourced from elsewhere in the East Midlands and East Anglia;
Fresh water - from the Bottle Brook or local artesian wells;
Yeast - a living organism which occurs naturally, though as brewing developed selected strains of yeast were isolated which produced better beers more reliably. Yeast from one batch of beer was harvested and used for another batch;
Hops - some varieties of which grow in this area, though the nearest large scale production area was in the West Midlands (principally Herefordshire and Worcestershire).
Barley, as harvested, is not suitable for brewing beer; it has to go through a process called malting. In the malting process barley is steeped in water and then spread onto a slatted floor. Here it allowed to start germinating and requires regular turning to stop the small shoots from becoming tangled. The germination process allows the development of enzymes, crucial later in the brewing process. The germination process is arrested by drying the barley in kilns and the resultant dried barley is called Malt. Malt can be easily crushed into a coarse powder, called grist, and then mixed (or mashed) with water (or liquor), to form a porridge-like mixture. It is here that the enzymes produced in the malting process promote the breakdown of complex sugars, like starch, to form simpler sugars such as maltose and lactose. This liquid mix of sugars is then run off into a copper and is now called Wort. The wort is boiled with hops in this copper vessel to sterilize it and add bitterness. It is then cooled before the Yeast is added as it is transferred to fermenting vessels.
The Yeast breaks down the sugars during the fermentation process to produce alcohol and a range of subtle flavour components, along with carbon dioxide, some of which remains dissolved in the newly formed beer giving it its ‘life’. In times gone by the beer would then have been packaged in one of two ways, Casks or Bottles. Beers destined for racking into casks would be allowed to settle overnight in a large vat, where excess yeast would be removed, and then filled directly into the casks whilst some dried hops would be added to give extra flavour. Bottled beers would be given a few more days of conditioning, possibly in slightly pressurized tanks, then filtered to leave a bright product which may, or may not, have been pasteurized before packaging. It is unlikely that The Little Eaton Brewery pasteurized its bottle beers, which would have been sold locally and consumed within their relatively short shelf life.
The brewing industry has been well known for recycling its waste materials for many years. Spent grains, the waste material from the production of the wort, consists of the husky remains of the malted barley and can be fed to cattle. It has been calculated that in the past within the UK for every 36-gallon barrel of beer brewed the brewers’ grains generated contributed to the production of 27 gallons of milk. The Hops have a high fibre content and are frequently used as a fertilizer by market gardeners. During the process of fermentation Yeast reproduces rapidly and will grow in volume by as much as six times. The excess yeast contains a large amount of proteins and vitamins and after treatment is used in the production of, amongst other things, Marmite – hence the reason that one of their largest factories was situated in Burton-on-Trent, brewing capital of the UK.
More modern techniques such as Kegged and Canned beers only came about in the 1940s and 1950s on a commercial scale. Recipes for different flavours have been devised by adding spices, herbs, fruit or chocolate.