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Chapter  The Mature Industry: Levels of Consumption A certain sign of the success of the adoption of brewing with hops and perfection of the technique in northern Europe was the high level of beer consumption in towns. Consumption and production in most towns were closely tied, the exception being the few places that specialized in export. Consumption level data, that is data for per capita beer drinking, are just as sparse as are data for production and for the number of breweries. Figures are sometimes derived from known sales and not always reliable population data and sometimes from unique circumstances, such as practices in hospitals or monasteries . Since the sales figures are based on tax records, they run the risk of missing consumption by tax-exempt groups. At the very least, though, what survives does give an impression of the great importance of beer to the people of Renaissance northern Europe. The figures of the absolute quantities of beer people drank can be misleading . Not all beer was the same. Small beer was much weaker and less nutritious than full beer or double beer. Export beers, like those that came from Einbeck and were shipped to Frankfurt and Bavaria or from Gdansk and shipped to the Low Countries, were even heavier and of higher quality in every sense. The amount of beer drunk from one year to the next might be stable, but the amount of grain used and the nutritional value of the beer might vary widely. In the sixteenth century, grain prices rose and with them the costs of brewing beer. The population increase, which was the principal cause of rising prices, brought more consumers, but with their declining real incomes as the cost of bread went up, they were less able to buy beer. Wars, the disturbances to the economy and the higher taxes that came with them, could also cause marked short-run fluctuations in consumption levels and obscure long-term trends.1 Compared to Renaissance drinkers, modern consumers of beer fall far behind. In  Belgians, among the most avid beer drinkers in the world, consumed on average  liters per person per year,2 less than half the amount of urban populations in the late Middle Ages or the Renaissance. Levels of Consumption  Consumption Variations over Time and Place Data from a broad range of towns in Germany and the Low Countries from the second half of the fourteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth show significant differences from one place to another and over time (see Table ). The numbers do suggest that something around  liters consumed per person per year was near the norm with figures, if anything, rising in the fifteenth century and stable or even in a few instances declining in the sixteenth . The sparse data on consumption show drinkers in the Low Countries to have been consistent but less avid than German beer drinkers while English drinkers kept pace with their German counterparts when both ale and beer are taken together. A general estimate for medieval England of between four and five liters each day for each person is reasonable but perhaps too high. More sensible and likely is an estimate of some . liters each day for each person. Members of better-off farm families in England in the fourteenth century may have consumed on average as little as half a liter of ale each day. At about the same time, members of aristocratic households probably had between . and . liters per day, a figure perhaps not incidentally similar to the supposed average consumption in contemporary Poland.3 Under a revision of the Assize of Ale in  some four liters of ale would have cost an English craftsman about a third of his daily earnings and a laborer about two-thirds. It was unlikely that people could earn enough to afford to buy five liters of beer each day, but many people had other sources of ale and did not have to buy it from brewers. Social groups like religious and craft guilds would buy ale for members for festive occasions, and very often employers, both urban and rural, supplied ale as part of compensation to workers. A hospital for lepers in the north of England in the fourteenth century gave inmates four liters a day, or at least that was the ration under the regulations. A London hospital in the s, on the other hand, gave the more expected one liter per day with a supplementary half liter in the summer...

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