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And here’s a pot of good double beer, neighbour: drink, and fear not your man. Third Neighbor Henry VI Part 2 (III.2) The Brewer, designed and engraved in the Sixteenth Century, by Jost Amman. | Public Domain | Source Beer Making Ingredients Beer was made commercially in Shakespeare’s lifetime, but could also have been made in individual homes by home brewers. The principal grain in England was barley, in fact english brewers preferred barley over all other grains, unlike the continent where there’s more variety. Beer can be made from any vegetable matter, so they would use wheat sometimes (though in small proportions in England) as well as oats, but oats is ore difficult to deal with so barley was common. In the east, they used brewer’s yeast, and hops, and they were beginning to grow these and were imported in England for a long time, by Shakespeare’s time they were growing hops in fields, especially in Kent, so that was pretty much it. Some other sweetener sometimes, but it was in essence, barley, yeast, water and hops. Alcohol was consumed copiously during Shakespeare’s lifetime, with drinks like ale or beer being known even as breakfast beverages to start the day in early modern England. When it came to providing this beer in these amounts, there was a transition taking place during Shakespeare’s lifetime where the primary person responsible for making the ale or beer switched from individual houses to being done on a more commerical scale. In the middle ages, a lot of beer was made domestically, people in villages, housewives would provide beer for their own family. If they had any left, they would sell that, and some would even become professional beer makers selling it from their houses, but when towns begin to get larger, commercial brewing became the norm. In London, in Shakespeare’s lifetime, there was a sizable brewing industry with major brewers, producing large quantities of beer by 1585, London brewers sold both 106 million liters of beer. 200 million pints, that’s 300 million cans, except there were no cans, but that gives you an idea of the volume. 26 big brewers, 3.2Million per brewer. Large scale operations, turning out over 100k pints of beer a week, using something like 50 tons of grain to produce that beer. They’d supply individuals, but even more than that, they’d supply pubs, inns, drinking houses, etc. There were a couple hundred thousand people in London in a concentrated area, and one reason they didn’t make beer at home in London is that you needed space and a place to store grain, so in the city, it was more common to buy beer. Which was also exported, too, shipped 100s of thousands to Belgium and the Netherlands mostly, but other markets as well. Because beer drinking was popular, there was one pub for every 200 people and even more in London. Related Episode You Might Enjoy the dust is earth; of earth we make loam; and why of that loam...
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