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02-04-2017, 08:15
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A little about Truman’s Brick Lane brewery in the 1870’s. The article I’m using as a source was printed in the Brewer’s Guardian so should be fairly reliable on any technical stuff.


“The largest and best engineered brewery, is that of Messrs. Truman, Hanbury, Buxton, & Co., Brick Lane, Spitalfields. The brewery. yards, &c., cover an area of eight acres, 240,000 gallons of water are used daily, or 72,000,000 gallons in a year. The well from which it is obtained is 530 feet deep, viz., 330 feet to bottom of shaft, and a bore-hole continued to the further depth of 200 feet. The supply from this well is only equal to half of what is required. A large quantity is taken from the East London Water Company. The produce is about 530,000 barrels of beer annually. There are 113 vats, the largest of which contains 2,050 barrels, or 74,000 gallons, and 100,000 casks, of sizes ranging from 18 to 108 gallons. The steam-engines, of which there are twelve, besides two gas-engines, represent a total power of 200 horses. There are eight brewing coppers, three of which are capable of containing 800 barrels each, and one liquor boiler of a capacity of 1,200 barrels. 700 quarters of malt can be mashed at one time in six mash-tubs. The malt is measured by two patent self-registering machines. There are two of Siebe's cooling machines, for reducing the temperature of the refrigerating liquor. 8,000 tons of coal are used annually. The average number of horses is 165. each horse consuming per day, about 40 lbs. weight of food, a total annual consumption of 2,409,000 lbs, or 1,075 tons. The number of persons employed is 450. The establishment is now the largest of its kind in London.”
"Brewers' Guardian, vol. 1, 1869", July 1871, page 205.
Truman was indeed the largest brewery in London, brewing around half a million barrels a year. In the 1850’s they’d been neck and neck with Barclay Perkins, but after 1860 began to pull away as Barclay Perkins output stagnated while theirs continued to grow. Though in the 1880’s Barclay Perkins snatched back top spot.

For over 100 years the largest brewery not only in the UK, but also the whole world, had been located in London. But all that was starting to change around this time. Bass in Burton and Guinness in Dublin were rising fast. By the end of the 1870’s, Guinness was brewing over 800,000 barrels a year and in the 1880’s passed the million barrel mark . That was far more than any of the big London brewers, who got stuck on about half a million barrels a year .

I was slightly surprised that the largest vat only contained 2,050 barrels. But by the 1870’s, Keeping Porter was all but dead and brewers no longer had a need for enormous vats. The beers which were still vatted – stronger Stouts and Stock Ales – were brewed in far smaller quantities and hence only required modestly-sized vats.

Siebe's cooling machines were what we would call a refrigerator today, that is a genuine artificial cooling device cooling by evaporating ether. This was at the cutting edge of technology. Ultimately, it made possible the spread of Lager brewing to areas without large amounts of natural ice. Truman were using it to cool the water in their refrigerator (a washboard of copper pipes over which the wort ran.

700 quarters of malt is enough to brew 2,800 barrels of standard-strength beer. Truman brewed on a massive scale, making single brews of 1,500 barrels by using multiple mash tuns.

Here are the output figures for London’s largest breweries around this period:



Largest London brewers 1851 - 1872


Year
Barclay Perkins
Whitbread
Truman
Meux
Mann


1851
419,430
173,311
401,863
215,255
101,899


1852
420,475
176,097
379,119
219,519
110,390


1853
441,199
206,040
455,477
223,308
115,576


1854
421,319
207,689
425,498
215,442
111,250


1855
357,836
225,578
363,554
179,217
106,363


1856
409,574
177,860
408,468
207,204
112,241


1857
437,948
172,907
429,871
230,964
123,823


1858
442,146
197,355
472,044
236,855
125,365


1859
425,494
223,758
451,693
245,240
130,292


1860
421,286
242,848
457,796
288,597
128,179


1861
373,043
169,419
449,274
234,104
135,243


1862
383,436
193,233
479,922
259,142
152,929


1863
418,461
220,665
479,742
268,542
176,490


1864
415,721
204,154
520,945
273,069
187,587


1865
415,142
236,418
537,189
277,757
203,117


1866
428,000
231,496
596,769
293,475
206,276


1867
423,444
235,665
554,955
274,299
201,014


1868
405,622
238,975
595,639
288,611
217,078


1869
409,327
231,904
534,949
272,253
227,027


1870
410,710
225,600
509,447
264,753
217,575


1871

241,149
533,477
273,386
222,120


1872
407,874
250,360
559,137
262,266
240,111


Source:


"The British Brewing Industry, 1830-1980" T. R. Gourvish & R.G. Wilson, pages 610-611.




Four of the five had been big Porter brewers in the 18th century. The outsider was Mann, an Ale brewer, which was quickly catching up, with its output about doubling in the 1860’s.

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