Food & Drink - Page 3 of 5
Beer - The Vital Ingredient
S. Vine & M. Richards
Throughout the Tudor period beer was one of the most important sinews of war. It is almost impossible to understate its importance, without it ships could not sail and armies would not fight. The importance of beer lay as much in its preservative qualities as its alcohol content, it was the only way to supply liquid in bulk that would keep for the duration of a campaign.
The quantities consumed were prodigious, in 1565 navy victuallers were contracted to supply each man in the fleet with seven gallons a week. Only beer would do, English soldiers and sailors were not used to anything else. This is shown in a report from John Stile to Henry VIII concerning the Spanish Expedition.
"And it please your Grace, the greatest lack of victuals here is of beer, for your subjects had [lyver] for to drink beer than wine or cider, for the hot wines dothe burn them and the cider dothe cast them in disease and sickness".1
Supplying the armies and fleets with such huge quantities of beer was a task that stretched the victualling system to its limits, and often beyond. Crops had to be harvested, then delivered to the brewhouses, the beer had to be brewed, put in stave-built wooden containers, usually pipes; which themselves had to be constructed, ships had to be hired to carry the beer, and the whole operation paid for.
The estimate for victualling the navy for six weeks in 1522 (supplying 3000 men) was 140 pipes of beer a week, being one a day for every 120 men. The estimated capacity of a pipe varies between 105 gallons and 66 gallons, although on the figures above, and given a ration of a gallon a day, a pipe would hold 120 gallons. This ties nicely with the capacity of a pipe being 126 old wine-gallons.
Such vast amounts of beer could not be produced by small domestic brewers, the King had his own brewhouses to make beer on an industrial scale.
The brewhouses here (Portsmouth) are the goodliest he ever saw, and already brew 100 tun a day (a tun is c.252 gallons).
As there is no place to store it but the streets, where the hot weather would destroy it, he has commanded Wm. Pawne to have great trenches digged and covered with boards, turf and sedges. The quality of the beer was not always what was expected. The beer which came for Lord Lisle has been assayed by Howard, the Treasurer and the Clerk Comptroller and mostly sent back to London; for Heron's servants, who deliver it, say that the brewers are bound to take back "unable" stuff." I know not what the King pays, but "much of it is as small as penny beer and as sour as a crab. I doubt not that your Lordships will see the brewers punished".2
An inventory taken of the King's beerhouses in Portsmouth on the 18th of January 1525 gives a further idea of the scale of brewing in Portsmouth.
The brewhouse called the Rose:- A great copper kettle, a meshing tonne, an underback, a stuk, 8 rothers, 24 stuk maunds, 2 hop maunds, 2 styck forcks, a workfate, 2 colefats, 4 gutters, 1 kevetonne, 1 flote, 1 aperne of ledde, 8 small kettles, 1 fylling kettle, 24 yeast tubs, 2 pair of slings, 1 iron coal rake, iron pitchfork and hook, a pudgale, a bucket, 4 fylling kilderkins, 2 trattors. The mill:- 4 millstones, 1 hopper, 1 iron crow, 2 spindles, 2 ryndes, 2 lyftys, 2 trendylls, 2 tonnys, 2 callers, 2 mylpyks, 1 millwheel, 4 horsehoods, 4 pairs of traces, 4 horse collars. The contents of the other brewhouses, the Lyon, the Dragon, the Whiteharte, and the Ankre, with their mills , consist of similar articles.3
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