THE BREWING INDUSTRY IN IRELAND. 489 



The Industrialisation of Brewing. 



In both England and Ireland, the present century has witnessed a great 

 change in the brewing trade, which has been affected like other manufac- 

 tures by the industrial revolution, and what was primarily, especially in 

 England, almost a household industry, is now conducted on the factory 

 system. Formerly brewing was carried on in nearly every large house- 

 hold in England, in the same way as baking ; and the vast majority of the 

 brewers brewed only for home consumption and not for sale, but owing to 

 the changed character of modern brewing, this system of brewing for house- 

 hold consumption is dying out, though even at the present day there are, 

 roughly speaking, over 12,000 brewers in England who do not brew for 

 sale, as compared with about 6,000 who do. This system of private 

 brewing never prevailed to any appreciable extent in Ireland, but none the 

 less, as a result of the change in the nature of the industry, the increase in 

 the size of most brewing establishments has been accompanied by a decrease 

 in the number of brewers actually working. The decline in the number of 

 brewers at work in Ulster and round about Tullamore and Limerick has 

 been already noted, and in quite modern times, to take the case of Dublin 

 only, the breweries owned by Messrs. P. and J. Sweetman* and Co., Man- 

 ders and Co., J. R. Read and Co.. Caffrey and Co., the Greenmount Brewing 

 Co., and the City of Dublin Brewery Co., have been closed or absorbed by 

 other firms, and the same fate has befallen numerous breweries throughout 

 the country. This decline in the number of breweries, whilst no doubt in 

 part due to the decrease in the population in rural districts and to the 

 increase in taxation, and the exactness with which the duties are collected, 

 is undoubtedly primarily due to the industrialisation of brewing, for the 

 quantity now produced is four times as great as at the beginning of the 

 nineteenth century though the number of brewers at work in Ireland is less 

 than quarter of what the number was a century ago. 



Concurrently with the revolution caused in brewing, as in so many other 

 trades, by the Introduction of machinery, a great 

 The Scientific change has taken place in the nature of the industry 

 Brewer. owing to the practical application of science to the 



various manufacturing processes. The broad lines 

 upon which the operations of malting and brewing are based had been 

 fixed by practical experience long before anything was known of the 

 scientific principles underlying the methods employed, and a number of rules 

 gradually came to be formulated through the observance of which the brewer 

 was enabled, although he might possess no scientific knowledge, to carry on 

 his operations with a greater or less degree of success. But the brewer who 

 worked under such conditions was little better than an animated machine ; 

 he simply followed a certain routine, and knew nothing of the why and 

 wherefore of the various processes going on around him. When an irregu- 

 larity occurred, he was no more able to detect the cause of his trouble with 

 a view to its remedy, than an ordinary individual is to locate the fault in his 

 watch when it has stopped from some hidden cause. All this has been 



* The advertisement of Sweetman's Brewery, which is reproduced on accompanying plate. 

 shows that in price, at any rate, there has been little change during the last hundred years. 



