British brewing industry structure in the 1860's

Sorry about the title. I really couldn't think of anything better.

This comes from possibly the most frustrating digitised book ever, "Statistics relating to the Brewing Trade". Why frustrating? Because it contains really useful tables which you can't see. Most tables are too big for the pages and are on pullout sheets. WHoever scanned the book didn't bother pulling out these sheets and alll you can see are their blank banks. Fortunately a couple of the tables are readable.

In particular, there's a table of the number of brewing licences issued in 1864, grouped by size of output. Using it, you can get a good impression of the structure of the industry at the time. The first thing that strikes is the sheer number of brewers: 34,679. That's probably more than there are in the whole world today.

Obviously, most of those breweries were very small. The majority were pub breweries, which were still extremely common in many parts of England. In 1857, there were 25,026* "brewing victuallers", as they were quaintly known. Only 20 breweries were brewing more than 100,000 barrels a year. At least five, and probably more, of those were in London. Guinness, Bass and Allsopp are three others in this category. Maybe Beamish, too. Only 40 breweries were making more than 50,000 barrels and 316,000 more than 10,000 barrels. It's clear that there were few breweries operating on truly industrial scale, just a few hundred in the whole country.

London brewers in 1864 (barrels)
Barclay Perkins	415,721
Whitbread	204,154
Truman	520,945
Reid	273,069
Mann	187,587
Source:
The British Brewing Industry, 1830-1980 T. R. Gourvish & R.G. Wilson, pages 610-611

As late as 1857, publican brewers were producing almost a quarter of Britain's beer:

Malt usage in 1857
	bushels malt	est. barrels	%
Brewers	25,965,217	12,982,609	77.74%
Publicans	7,434,561	3,717,281	22.26%
total	33,399,778	16,699,889
Source:
"Annals of British Legislation, vol. V" 1859, pages 333 and 334

Here's the table as presented by Amsinck:

Common Brewers in the United Kingdom Paying for Licenses in October 1864.
	Exceeding	Not Exceeding	number	amount charged on each class	The supplementary charge on the Licenses expiring 10th October 1864	The supplementary diminution on the Licenses expiring 10th October 1864
No.	barrels	barrels		£ s. d.	£ s. d.	£ s. d.
1	0	1,000	31,017	91,848 15 0	17,503 12 0	7,125 0 6
2	1,000	10,000	1,647	78,449 18 0	12,630 4 0	2,502  5 8
3	10,000	20,000	178	34,368 18 0	3,496 12 0	1,024 16 0
4	20,000	30,000	64	22,125 0 0	3,045 3 0	287 13 0
5	30,000	50,000	34	17,525 15 0	2,142 18 6	411 2 6
6	50,000	100,000	20	18,428 2 6	2,573 15 6	241 17 6
7	100,000	150,000	7	10,907 7 6	1,020 0 0	0
8	150,000	200,000	1	2,172 15 0	108 15 0	0
9	200,000	450,000	4	11,543 10 0	274 7 6|	770 0 0
10	250,000	300,000	3	11,186 7 6	219 7 6	28 2 6
11	300,000	350,000	0	0	0
12	350,000	400,000	1	4,645 5 0	560 0 0
13	400,000	450,000	1	5,262 15 0	22 10 0
14	450,000	500,000	1	5,997 2 6	332 17 6
15	500,000		2	14,593 0 0	1,208 15 0
Beginners at 12s 6d			1,699	1,061 17 6
			34,679	330,266 9 6	45,138 17 6	12,391 3 8
					12,391 3 8
Net supplementary Charge				32,747 13 10	32,747 13 10
Total Amount paiti by all Classes				363,014 3 4
Source:
Statistics relating to the Brewing Trade, compiled by G. S. Amsinck, 1865, page 3.

To get a better idea of at what scale most beer was being produced, I decided to play with Amsinck's numbers a bit. By estimating how much each brewery in the different bands brewed, I'm able to calculate the total output from each band. For the higher bands it's pretty simple, I've just used the middle point. That doesn't work for the bottom two bands. I know that many pub breweries produced tiny amounts, fewer than 100 barrels a year. And in the second band, many brewers would have been at the bottom end of the range.

Here's the result:

Estimated output per size of brewer
from barrels	to barrels	no. brewers	average barrels per brewer	total barrels	% of total
0	1,000	31,017	200	6,203,400	27.44%
1,000	10,000	1,647	2,200	3,623,400	16.03%
10,000	20,000	178	15,000	2,670,000	11.81%
20,000	30,000	64	25,000	1,600,000	7.08%
30,000	50,000	34	40,000	1,360,000	6.02%
50,000	100,000	20	75,000	1,500,000	6.64%
100,000	150,000	7	125,000	875,000	3.87%
150,000	200,000	1	175,000	175,000	0.77%
200,000	450,000	4	325,000	1,300,000	5.75%
250,000	300,000	3	275,000	825,000	3.65%
300,000	350,000	0	325,000	0	0.00%
350,000	400,000	1	375,000	375,000	1.66%
400,000	450,000	1	425,000	425,000	1.88%
450,000	500,000	1	475,000	475,000	2.10%
500,000		2	600,000	1,200,000	5.31%
Total				22,606,800

My estimates are a bit out, because in 1865 20,276,623** were estimated to have been brewed in the UK (there is no exact figure), a bit less than the 22.6 million barrels from my guesstimates. But I'm not too far off. You can see that probably a quarter of all beer was brewed by those in the smalklest band. 43% was made by brewers with an output of fewer than 10,000 barrels. 68% came from breweries under 50,000 barrels.

What am I trying to say? That despite having been heavily industrialised and concentrated in some places - london, for example - for a century, most British beer was still being produced on a pretty small scale in the 1860's.

Of course the next 100 years would see the numbers of breweries in Britain forever shrinking and their scale forever growing. Until CAMRA came along.






* "Annals of British Legislation, vol. V" 1859, pages 333 and 334.
** Brewers' Almanack 1865.