Still, that 2% is enormous compared to the amount of Lager consumed in 1899.
Persons not conversant with brewing statistics inform the public through the daily press that in this country lager beer is becoming a popular drink, but this statement is not borne out by facts, and we can only surmise that the writers have mixed up their continental experience and what they have seen at some of the German cafes in London and of the populous towns with ordinary beer consumption, making this experience to become in their minds the national habit. To show the pertinence of our conclusion we give statistics from the forty-first report of the Commissioners of Inland Revenue for the financial year ended the 31st March last. The gross barrels of beer brewed amounted to 35,632,131, and the quantity upon which duty was actually paid within the year was 35,590,095. The quantity of British beer exported from the United Kingdom within the same period was 462,953 barrels, but the quantity of foreign beer imported was only 45,194 barrels. These figures of home production and import are startling enough when given in barrels but probably the expression of them in terms of percentage consumption will make the comparison more striking still and it will be found that of the beer consumed in this country 99.88 per cent, was home brewed, and 0.12 per cent only of foreign origin. We do not overlook the fact that attempts have been made during the last ten years of establishing lager beer breweries in the United Kingdom. The number started has been very small, and in the majority of cases the attempt has met with failure. At the present time there are only about four such breweries in the United Kingdom. The plant in each case is of limited capacity, and the output not such as to make any appreciable difference in the percentages before given, especially when in the calculation it has been assumed that all the beer imported was lager beer, which, strictly speaking, is not the case.
The Brewers' Journal vol. 35 1899, January 15th 1899, pages 5 - 6.
German brewers did have pubs in London. The most prominent being Spaten's on Piccadilly Circus, opened in the 1890s. But they also had one Market Street in Manchester. So Lager-drinking wasn't purely a metropolitan phenomenon. Lager had been available in Manchester since 1869:
"THE STOCK EXCHANGE LUNCHEON-ROOMS.
ENTRANCES:
NEWMARKET-ST. and BACK POOL FOLD, CROSS-STREET,
with the WINES Bodega Company, Bass's PALE ALE, Reid's Imperial STOUT, and Dreher's VIENNA BEER."
Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser - Monday 02 August 1869, page 1.
There were, indeed several failed attempts at establishing a Lager brewery. Here are a few:
The Bayerische Lager Beer Brewery in Eltham, Kent, which opened in 1881 and closed in 1888.
The Austro-Bavarian Lager Beer and Crystal Ice Company in Tottenham, London, brewed from 1882 to 1895.
The Kaiser Lager Beer Co. which lasted from 1884 to 1890.
The English Lager Beer Brewery which started brewing at Batheaston in 1890 and went bankrupt in 1893.
There were also established brewers who tinkered with Lager and they abadonned it. For example, William Younger in Edinburgh and the St. Anne’s Well Brewery in Exeter
I'm trying to work out who the four Lager brewers were. Wrexham and Tenent. Who were the other two? Jeffrey of Edinburgh, maybe?
Lots more of this to come.
Manchester in the nineteenth century of course had a large community of German merchants connected to the cotton trade, the most notable being Friedrich Engels, who also drank at their own social club in the then posh suburb of Chorlton-on-Medlock. They must have accounted for a large percentage of the lager consumed in the city, at prices which would have probably put it beyond the working class drinker. How times change!
ReplyDeleteIs lager still more expensive than ale and stout over there, as it is here in Ireland.
DeleteOscar
Would Allsopp be one of the four? In 1897 they imported a lager plant from Sweden that didn't do all that well in the long run, with the whole company going into receivership in 1911, but the lager plant would certainly have been chugging along in 1899.
ReplyDeleteYou can see a photo of part of the lager plant in the now online 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Brewing/Plates showing their cooling pipes as the wort trickled over them.
Allsopp's lager plant then got moved to Alloa and Skol was born, (originally called Graham's Golden Lager) and became a major brand as part of the Allied Brewers stable.