258 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



give the compulsory abstinence party, as well as 

 those who are not prepared to go so far in limit- 

 ing our liberty, the credit at least of good inten- 

 tions. Their object has been good, though the 

 means advocated for securing it have been bad. 

 It is not by such drastic treatment that the av- 

 erage Englishman is to be cured of his abuse of 

 alcoholic drinks, but by offering him a better and 

 a pleasanter place of social meeting than a pub- 

 lic-house bar ; by allowing him the right and 

 privilege which the rich man enjoys at his club — 

 the right to drink alcoholic or other beverages 

 or not, as it suits him, and the privilege of social 

 intercourse without being compelled to drink to 

 excess solely for the benefit of the house ; and 

 by securing to him good beer. 



I propose, in the first place, to describe briefly 

 the manufacture of beer, and to point out some 

 of the shortcomings of the English process and 

 the injurious influence of our obstructive fiscal 

 system in retarding improvement, especially in 

 the direction of a cheaper and less intoxicating 

 beer ; and having seen how good beer, whether of 

 the English alcoholic character or of the German 

 less alcoholic and more dextrinous character, is 

 produced, I will venture to suggest a means 

 whereby the working-man may be led, without 

 interfering with his liberty of action, to the tem- 

 perate use of them. 



Before describing the process of manufact- 

 ure, it will not be without interest to quote some 

 statistics on the development of the trade, given 

 in a recent publication on brewing and distilling. 1 

 In 1873, excluding malt exported or used in dis- 

 tilleries, no less than 59,174,089 bushels of malt 

 were manufactured into beer, producing a reve- 

 nue of £8,027,408 in the form of malt-tax. In 

 the year ending March, 1873, there were 144,- 

 425 dealers and retailers of beer in the United 

 Kingdom. Thus much regarding the magnitude 

 of the beer-trade. As regards spirits, we find 

 that 30,644,750 gallons of spirits were made dur- 

 ing the year ending March 31, 1875, and the 

 revenue derived from this source amounted to 

 £14,895,769. Allowing for a small portion used 

 in the arts, there were retained for consumption 

 as a beverage 29,821,574 gallons ; or about one 

 gallon for each man, woman, and child, in the 

 United Kingdom. The number of licenses grant- 

 ed in the same year to persons dealing in and 

 retailing spirits was 138,845. In round numbers 

 we see that beer yields some £8,000,000, and 

 spirits some £15,000,000 to the revenue; the 

 two together, if we include the revenue derived 

 1 "British Manufacturing Industries," Stanford, 1876. 



from the licenses to brewers, distillers, and deal- 

 ers, may be put down as being about £24,000,- 

 000. This of course does not include the rev- 

 enue derived from the wine and spirits imported ; 

 these, however, concern rich men rather than 

 poor, who rarely drink wine or brandy of foreign 

 manufacture. 



Let us now briefly examine the process of 

 manufacture, the first stage of which consists in 

 converting barley into malt. 



Ground barley, wheat, or any other cereal, 

 when infused with warm water, slowly undergoes 

 a change by which the insoluble starch in the 

 grain is gradually converted into soluble sugars 

 or allied substances. The activity of the albumi- 

 noid ferments in ground grain is, however, too 

 slow for the brewers' purpose, and hence re- 

 course is had to the process of malting. — i. e., 

 germination of the grain — which converts some 

 of the inert albuminoid bodies into active agents 

 of change, grouped under the general term dias- 

 tase. 



With this view the maltster steeps the grain 

 in water for a period of about fifty hours, vary- 

 ing, however, according to the time of year and 

 the kind of barley employed. So soon as the 

 grain has absorbed a sufficiency of water to carry 

 on the subsequent germination, it is removed 

 from the cistern, and is spread on the floor of the 

 malt-house. Oxygen is absorbed, the tempera- 

 ture rises, and germination commences, and is 

 allowed to proceed until a sufficient development 

 of the young plumule has been obtained, the 

 growth of the plumule being coincident with the 

 swelling noticed at the back and under the testa. 

 This secured, the grain is then dried on the floor 

 of a kiln heated by a fire beneath. This process 

 stops all further development, and produces em- 

 pyreumatic products, so important to the flavor 

 and keeping qualities of the beer. When dry, 

 the malt is then fit for the brewer's or distiller's 

 use. The malt thus made is then crushed be- 

 tween rollers and mixed in the mash-tun — the 

 vessel wherein the infusion process is conducted 

 — with about twice its weight of water, the pro- 

 portion varying with the method of infusion 

 adopted and the strength of the beer to be pro- 

 duced, the temperature of the water being such 

 that after the intermixture the contents of the 

 mash-tun range from 63° C. to 67° C. In the 

 mashing or infusion process which now com- 

 mences, the diastase is the agent by which water 

 is absorbed, and dextrine and various sugars — 

 the hydration products of the reaction — are ob- 

 tained. The infusion product of the English 



