Beer Production 1882 - 1892

The way to get even more fun from numbers is to play with them to get new sets. Which is what I've done this time.

One of the wonderful features of the standard barrel, is that you know exactly how much tax was paid on it. In the 1880s and 1890s, that was 6s 3d. Making it a piece of piss to work out how many standard barrels were brewed in each constituent kingdom of the UK.

I have partil figures from other sources for the number of standard barrels brewed in the UK. It almost matches the ones I've calculated. There's a difference of few hundred thousand barrels. Nothing massive. Not sure why that would be.

One caveat: the figure for Ireland is very different to the amount of bulk barrels brewed. While in the rest of the UK the standard barrel gravity (initially 1057º, after 1889 1055º) was close to average gravity, in Ireland that wasn't the case. Because such a large percentage of the beer brewed was Stout, average OG was much higher. In the years just before WW I, it was around 1065º. It was probably higher than that in the period the table covers.

Beer Production 1882 - 1892 (standard barrels)
	England.	Scotland.	Ireland.	United Kingdom.
1882	24,355,850	963,894	1,978,877	27,298,621
1883	23,761,606	997,981	2,121,590	26,890,778
1884	24,035,405	1,063,715	2,063,021	27,162,141
1885	24,075,603	1,078,698	2,188,896	27,343,197
1886	23,647,338	1,089,955	2,154,166	26,891,459
1887	23,872,102	1,139,530	2,174,461	27,186,093
1888	24,406,083	1,206,822	2,264,000	27,876,906
1889	24,488,326	1,266,259	2,310,358	28,064,944
1890	26,262,947	1,412,934	2,437,482	30,113,363
1891	27,266,893	1,509,891	2,523,690	31,300,470
1892	27,472,669	1,484,413	2,568,749	31,525,830
Source:
"The Brewers' Guardian 1892", 1892, page 295.

Here's the same information in table in percentages:

Beer Production 1882 - 1892 (%)
	England.	Scotland.	Ireland.
1882	89.22%	3.53%	7.25%
1883	88.36%	3.71%	7.89%
1884	88.49%	3.92%	7.60%
1885	88.05%	3.95%	8.01%
1886	87.94%	4.05%	8.01%
1887	87.81%	4.19%	8.00%
1888	87.55%	4.33%	8.12%
1889	87.26%	4.51%	8.23%
1890	87.21%	4.69%	8.09%
1891	87.11%	4.82%	8.06%
1892	87.14%	4.71%	8.15%
Source:
"The Brewers' Guardian 1892", 1892, page 295.

Remeber, in terms of bulk barrels, the share of Ireland would 10-12% lower.