In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter  The Mature Industry: Levels of Production The years from around  to the early seventeenth century were a golden age for brewing. Though levels of output as well as the number and size of breweries varied—from Flanders to the Celtic Sea to northern Scandinavia to Estonia and Poland to Austria to the upper reaches of the Rhine River—brewing expanded in those years. It grew as population increased. In some places in northern Europe, it grew faster than the population. It enjoyed unprecedented economic success. Beer invaded new parts of Europe, claiming or reclaiming territory where wine was the preferred drink. The higher quality of hopped beer compared to its predecessors, the greater efficiency of producers over time, and improved distribution all combined to make beer an increasingly popular drink. With acclimatization of the process of making hopped beer came signs of brewers gaining full mastery of the new technology. Figures for production and for export suggest that such mastery was achieved around  in north Germany, around  in Holland, around  in the southern Netherlands, and after  in England. The level of hopped beer exports is often the best indicator of maturity in dealing with the novel dominant technology. The level of regulation, the degree of institutionalization, and the refinement of ways of dealing with the new technique also serve as indicators of maturity, although such developments did lag behind growth in production and in exports. For Germany, the evidence comes almost exclusively from the level of exports. For Holland, signs of a mature industry appear in the first half of the fifteenth century and the principal indicator is exports, in that case exports to Flanders and England. In England the shift in both production and consumption from ale to hopped beer by the mid-sixteenth century suggests that brewers had command of the new technique. By that time there are also a number of references to export of beer from England. A  act of Parliament prohibited the export of beer in anything larger than a barrel, and every beer exporter had to import an amount of wood equal to what he exported as a beer barrel. The goal was to protect wood supplies in the kingdom. No one expected those beer barrels would ever to return to England. The legislation indicates England exported a sizeable amount of beer by then. Enough beer went out of the  Chapter  country that some seventy-four years later English beer was famous in the Netherlands and lower Germany where towns prohibited the sale of English beer to protect their own brewers. In Delft one English traveler claimed brewers tried to imitate English beer but could not create anything comparable to the English because the sea voyage from his homeland gave the beer a better taste.1 Higher levels of production meant brewers could reduce costs with a larger scale of production. The investment in the brewery but also in the maltery could be spread across a greater volume of output. The doubling of the number of brews annually could be achieved with virtually no increase in fixed costs, at least in the short term. The rise in export volume implied scale economies in shipping services as well. Vessels could travel with holds nearer to capacity and at no increase in cost. When sales rose and returns to investment increased, brewers also discovered a potential for greater capital investment in the industry. With rising levels of output it became easier to capture all the advantages of specialization which had existed back in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when brewing first came to towns. The Victory of Beer The beer border, that imaginary line between areas where drinkers more commonly chose beer over wine, moved south. The process, which started even before the invasion of German hopped beer in Holland in the early fourteenth century, was repeated again and again in the southern Low Countries, the Rhineland, and then in Bavaria and Bohemia. The milder weather in southwestern Germany had favored the production of wine, but changes in the relative prices of wine and beer combined with efforts by both governments and private individuals to raise beer consumption in grape-producing regions led to positive results over time for beer.2 Wine became more of a luxury or festive drink while beer became the daily beverage, often for no other reason than price. Beer prices in Germany fell in the fifteenth century by about  percent over the one hundred years. In the following century, prices...

Share