Beer Aerating Machine

While on my quest for information on Formby brewers, I came across this lovely advert for fizzing up your beer.

"THE "SPECIAL”
BEER AERATING MACHINE
(FOSTER’S PATENT),
Also for Aerating Still Wines and making them into Sparkling Champagnes.
NOTE !! We shall be happy to Aerate any Beer sent us, free of charge, except for expenses out of pocket. Bottles, Corks, &c.

This Machine is specially designed for Brewers and Beer Bottlers, to enable them to introduce, in a more perfect form than hitherto, Bottled Beers, making them equal or superior to the best brands, as light beer aerated and bottled by this process becomes a high-class Bottled Beer.

Bass's, Allsopp's, Ind, Coope's, Guinness's, or in fact any of the best brands of beers, can be aerated by this machine, and rendered fit for immediate use. The beer being run into either cylinder, the pump in the first place exhausts the atmospheric air out of it, and afterwards, by an arrangement of cocks, the same pump forces carbonic acid gas into the beer, it being agitated by rotating fans at the same time. When pressure has arrived at 30 lbs, bottling may be commenced. The filling machines used being either for the screw-necked bottles or cork.

See Testimonial in reference to this Machine.

THE “SPECIAL" BEER AERATING MACHINE, complete as above, with two 40-gallon
cylinders (Silvering extra, £40)    ...    ...    ...    ...    ...    ...    ... £135 0 0
GASOMETER AND GENERATOR, Figs. 21 and 22 in our Catalogue ...    ...    ...    20 0 0
                                                                                                                                 £155 0 0
FOB FURTHER PARTICULARS APPLY TO
BARNETT & FOSTER,
“NIAGARA” WORKS, Eagle Wharf Road, LONDON, N".
Kelly's Directory of the Wine and Spirit Trades, 1884.

 By "rendered fit for immediate use" he means you wouldn't have to let it condition after bottling. Not sure what Bass and Guinness would have thought about that. Both were still bottle-conditioning well past WW II.

It wasn't exactly a cheap device, at 155 quid. Possibly worth the money is you turn cheap white wine into champagne.

The 1880s is when you first see artificially-carbonated bottled beers. Brewers started adopting American bottling techniques. Which produced a sediment-free, sparkling beer. Though, as is often stated in technical publications, brewers themselves considered bottle-conditioned beers as far superior in terms of flavour.

Forty years later, the majority of UK beers were artificially-carbonated.