THE BREWING INDUSTRY IN IRELAND. 451 



THE BREWING INDUSTRY IN IRELAND. 



The early history of brewing is somewhat obscure, owing in part to its 

 very antiquity, and the history of the rise of the brewing industry in 

 the United Kingdom, and especially in Ireland, has been much neglected. 

 Indeed, until 1889, when Mr. Alfred Barnard commenced his work on "The 

 Noted Breweries of Great Britain and Ireland," but little of importance had 

 been written upon the subject, and even the work referred to does not deal 

 with the rise or progress of brewmg in general, but only with the develop- 

 ment of particular breweries. It is, however, clear that the art of 

 preparing an alcoholic beverage from grain or 

 Antiquity of other saccharine substances by means of a process of 

 Brewing. fermentation was one of man's first inventions, and 



in countries where the vine did not flourish, and often,' 

 even where it did, drink made from corn, generally barley, seems to have 

 been common from the earliest times. The process of making such a bever- 

 age was well known among the Egyptians and from them the Greeks 

 derived, like so much of their other knowledge, skill in the art of brewing. 

 In the time of Tacitus beer seems to have been the usual drink of the 

 Germans, and from the historian's description there can be no doubt that 

 they understood the method of converting barley into malt. 



The art of malting and the use of beer are supposed to have been intro- 

 duced into Great Britain by the Romans, and a writer 

 The rise of Brewing in the third century noted that Britain produced 

 in England. " such an abundance of corn that it was sufficient to 



supply not only bread, but also a liquor comparable to 

 wine." After the Saxon Conquest brewing was widely practised in England 

 and ale soon became the national beverage. It is frequently mentioned in 

 mediaeval records and a statute passed in 1272 enacted that a brewer should 

 be allowed to sell two gallons of ale for a penny in the cities, and three or 

 four gallons for the same price in the country. From a lease which is still 

 extant, made, in 1295, in favour of the Abbot of Burton-on-Trent, it is 

 evident that Burton was already at that date a brewing centre, and that the 

 monks made their own malt. Mary Stuart, even in the midst of her 

 troubles, was not insensible to the attractions of English beer, for when she 

 was imprisoned in Tutbury Castle, her secretary enquired where beer might 

 be procured for her Majesty's use, to which Sir Ralph Sadlier the Governor 

 made answer, " Beer may be had at Burton, three miles off." A Brewers' 

 Company was formed in London in the fifteenth century, and we read that 

 they tried to curry favour with the then Lord Mayor by making him a 

 present of an ox which cost 21s. 2d., and a boar priced at 30i'. id., "so 

 that he did no harm to the brewers and advised them to make good ale in 

 order that he might not have any complaint against them." 



The use of hops in the manufacture of ale seems to have been a German 



invention of the fourteenth century, which was not 



-,, f H s introduced into England for two hundred years. The 



e use op . ygg q£ j^^pg ^j. |^j.g|. ^^^ viewed with disfavour, and in 



1530 Henry VIII. prohibited it by statute, but hop 

 plantations soon became common in England. Hops made such a change 



