Ouput of UK breweries by size in 1889

I've been playing around a bit with the numbers from yesterday. And come up with some fascinating new ones of my own.

I've converted the quantities of malt and sugar into quarters, 336 lbs in the case of the former, 224 lbs for the latter. Why? Because that makes it easy to calculate how many barrels of beer were brewed from them. Or at least, the number of standard barrels.

A standard barrel was defined as 36 Imperial gallons of beer with an OG of 1055º. A quarter of malt or sugar produces about 80 brewers pounds of extract. 1055º is about 20 lbs per barrel, so you get about 4 standard barrels from a quarter. Simple. The total for 1889 I came up with is 30,791,391. I don't have the real number for total beer production for that year, but I do for 1890 and 1891. For both it was around 30.8 miliion barrels. So I think I'm somewher close.

The most striking details are revealed by looking at the percentage of total output produced by each class. The two largest breweries produced more beer than the smallest 10,745. That's quite mind boggling when you think about it. Around a third of all beer was brewed by the 34 breweries producing more than 100,000 barrels a year. While a quarter was made by those producing fewer than 10,000 barrels a year.

Come to think of it, the situation in the UK today is similar in some ways. A few large breweries and a modest number of middle-sized ones producing most of the beer, while a massive number of tiny ones contribute only a tiny percentage of the total.

Barrels brewed by UK breweries of different sizes in 1889
standard barrels brewed	no. of licences issued	qtrs malt & corn	qtrs sugar	est. barrels brewed	% of total brewed
Under 1,000	10,745	517,100	18,613	2,142,851	6.96%
1,000 and under 10,000	1,479	1,243,508	175,246	5,675,015	18.43%
10,000 ,, 20,000	173	872,002	127,125	3,996,507	12.98%
20,000 ,, 30,000	108	585,740	98,970	2,738,838	8.89%
30,000 ,, 50,000	69	585,643	96,617	2,729,040	8.86%
50,000 ,, 100,000	48	699,994	129,906	3,319,598	10.78%
100,000 ,, 150,000	13	341,106	52,625	1,574,923	5.11%
150,000 ,, 200,000	5	191,351	23,942	861,172	2.80%
100,000 ,, 250,000	3	150,602	18,592	676,777	2.20%
250,000 ,, 300,000	3	160,536	47,416	831,811	2.70%
300,000 ,, 350,000	1	67,249	15,404	330,613	1.07%
350,000 ,, 400,000	3	268,002	31,443	1,197,779	3.89%
400,000 ,, 450,000	1	91,888	26,486	473,496	1.54%
450,000 ,, 500,000	1	119,915	5,971	503,542	1.64%
500,000 ,, 550,000	1	109,897	26,234	544,520	1.77%
550,000 ,, 600,000	1	150,486	4,345	619,323	2.01%
600,000 ,, 1,000,000	—	0	0	0
1,000,000 and over	2	637,459	6,324	2,575,131	8.36%
Total	12,756	6,792,491	905,357	30,791,391
Source:
"The Brewers' Guardian 1890", 1890, page 322.