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19-06-2011, 08:06
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Hooray! Today's the last part of my rambling series about the geographical distribution of brewing in 1849.

It's hard to imagine now the dominance of London brewers in the early part of the 19th century. As you can see in the table below, more than a fifth of the UK's beer came from London. More than three times as much beer was brewed in Britain's capital than in Ireland and Scotland combined.

Of course, this is just a snapshot. The situation changes significantly as the century progresses. With other brewing centres such as Burton and Dublin rivalling London in size. When Bass in Burton and Guinness in Dublin went past the 1 million barrel mark, the days of London's supremacy were over. Its went into a long, slow decline that only ended a couple of years ago.

You may have noticed that I've separated out Wales from England. While its beer output lagged a quite bit behind England's relative to population,it was way ahead of Scotland and Ireland. See, I can understand why Ireland would do poorly in such a comparison. It was the least developed part of the UK. But Scotland and Wales had industrialised. Why were their beer industries doing so relatively badly?

The relative contribution of Ireland and Scotland increased during the second half of the 19th century. I'm started to assemble some figures to demonstrate this change. I'll publish them as soon as I've finished, but it may take a while.



UK beer output and population, year ending October 1849



output (barrels)
% of output
population in 1851
% population
barrels per head of population


London
3,144,954
21.50%
2,362,200
8.63%
1.33


England
13,223,059
90.40%
16,769,400
61.26%
0.79


Wales
365,299
2.50%
1,163,000
4.25%
0.31


Scotland
435,792.5
2.98%
2,889,000
10.55%
0.15


Ireland
602,437.5
4.12%
6,554,000
23.94%
0.09


total
14,626,587
100.00%
27,375,400
100.00%
0.53


actual beer output
14,691,734






Sources:







"Statistics of British commerce" by Braithwaite Poole, 1852, pages 5 and 6.


http://www.populstat.info/






https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/5445569787371915337-1355420158892284626?l=barclayperkins.blogspot.com


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