Watering beer

Food and Sanitation. It's becoming one of my favourite magazines.There's always so much about beer in it. Admittedly, not very reassuring stuff if you're living in the 1890's. At the distance of more than a century, the tales it tells aren't quite as scary.

I'll admit that the title of this item is a bit of a puzzle. There's no mention of a brewer anywhere in the article.

"THE BREWER CAN PRACTISE THIS GAME WITHOUT BEING FINED.

At Lambeth on June 18th, John Thomas Smith was summoned hy the Excise for diluting beer. Mr. Squires, from the Solicitor's Department, Somerset House, appeared in support of the summons, and said the case was a bad one, the dilution being equal to 6.5 gallons to a barrel of 36 gallons. The defendant carried on business at a fully-licensed house in Marmont-road, Camberwell, and on March 27th a supervisor of Inland Revenue took a sample of beer from a cask in the defendant's cellar. Upon examination at Somerset House, it was found that the beer had been diluted at least to the extent mentioned.—The defendant said his instructions to the cellarman were that he was in no way to dilute the beer, and the cellarman assured him that he used only a gallon of finings. The defendant had no chance of defending himself, as the Excise did not divide the sample, and he heard nothing of the matter for two months,—Mr. Squire pointed out that the defendant was present when the officers called, and could have had a sample if he had chosen to ask for it.—Mr. Biron (to defendant) : You were there when they took the sample, and any man of ordinary intelligence would have taken a sample himself.—The defendant said samples had been taken from his place on previous occasions without any complaint being made. There must be some mistake in this case.—Mr. Biron ordered the defendant to pay a fine of £30, and £2 10s. costs."
"Food & sanitation, Volume 4", 1894, page 199.

To put the fine of £30 into context, a 36-gallon barrel of standard-strength beer cost £1 16s. The landlord could have bought a couple of week's supply of beer - 16 barrels - for the same amount as the fine.

The end of adulteration (but not watering)

Someone asked the other day about how long watering and adulteration continued to be practised. I think I've found the answer.

Increased control by local authorities had finally put an end to poisonous adulteration.

"Beer adulteration had also practically ceased to exist by 1880, except for innocuous dilution. Fables continued to circulate, particularly at temperance meetings, about the poisonous ingredients allegedly used by brewers - a speaker in 1883 made the unsupported statement that 245,000 cwt of 'chemicals' were annually used in British breweries, and a few years later a book purporting to be a serious study of drinks and drinking habits stated that bitternesss in beer was produced by strychnine, absinthe, and nux vomica, and intoxication by belladonna, opium, henbane, and picric acid. In fact, cocculus indicus was last reported in 1864 and grains of paradise in 1878, and only rarely after this were old adulterations such as 'heading', capsicum, and liquorice discovered by public analysts as isolated curiosities. Narcotics disappeared from beer with the vigilance of local habits: by the closing decades of the century people no longer wanted to be stupefied and had turned away from porter and 'hard beer' towards lighter, less alcoholic varieties. Dilution remained the outstanding problem, and a seemingly intractable one: as late as 1900 one in five samples was watered, and a great many of these salted in order to restore lost flavour and, no doubt, increase thirst."
"Plenty and want: a social history of food in England from 1815 to the present day" by John Burnett, 3rd edition, 1989, pages 234 - 235.

Though stopping the watering of beer was more problematic:

"In many areas the newly appointed Public Analysts began to examine random samples and prosecute offfenders: in 1873 the PA for North Staffordshire found twenty-six out of eighty-nine random samples of beer adulterated, six with poisonous cocculus indicus. When the Inland Revenue Act 1880 restored the duty on beer, the Excise Department became more active in testing for adulteration by publicans, and in effect a concordat developed by which the Excise concentrated on dilution and the Public Analysts on other additions. . . the proportion of samples reported by Public Analysts as adulterated was comparatively small - 9.3 per cent in 1877 but falling quickly to between 2 per cent and 5 per cent up to 1914, though with occasional high variations (1892 16.8 per cent, 1900 8.8 per cent). The results of the Excise test for added water were very different, however - 78 per cent in 1880, 29 per cent in 1890 and still 15 per cent at the end of the century: the persistent rumours in late Victorian England that the workers' beer was watered had real foundation."
"Liquid pleasures: a social history of drinks in modern Britain", by John Burnett, published by
Routledge, 1999, ISBN 0415131812, page 123.

There you have it. Adulteration with poisons was a thing of the past by 1880. Watering survived much longer. At the risk of offending any publicans reading this, does watering still go on? Or is British beer already watery enough?