Beer at school
I’ve been enjoying the hell out of Pete Brown’s new book, “Hops & Glory: One Man’s Search for the Beer That Built the British Empire.” I’ll be devoting a column to it soon, but in the meantime here’s something that jumped off the page at me:
In the 1870s… “brewing was the second-biggest industry in Britain, behind cotton.”
Now, while that statement is impressive, it’s Pete’s footnote observation that really struck me:
“The fact that you almost certainly didn’t know this (I didn’t until just now) is perhaps the most significant victory of the temperance lobby. I clearly remember studying Victorian industry at school. We learned all about cotton, coal, steel, steam and railways. Brewing - which at this stage was contributing over a third of the Exchequer’s total revenue and employing 1.5 million people - wasn’t mentioned once.
And, I’m thinking, yeah - I don’t remember a single lesson about the American beer industry in any of the history classes I ever took, either. We all learned about Louis Pasteur, for example, but it wasn’t until 20 years after I graduated that I realized that one of his most important works was “Etudes sur la Biere.”
I don’t know if the temperance movement is to blame, but I can’t believe every one of my teachers was a teetotaler. God knows I gave them enough reason to drink.
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