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Chapter  Epilogue: The Decline of Brewing The consolidated, relatively capital-intensive beer brewing industry of the seventeenth century was firmly established as an integral feature of the economy and of the social life of northern Europe. Drinking ale, beer, or mead had a long history which stretched back far beyond the Middle Ages. But it was in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that urbanization led to specialization and first allowed commercial brewers to thrive. Men and mostly women still made ale at home, but for the first time in Europe there was the possibility of making a living producing the drink. The presence of a number of people with relatively higher incomes living close together meant that there was a market for beer. After the first period of development, preparation of a market , came the second, perfecting of the use of hops in making beer. How and when that happened remains obscure, but the exports from Bremen, then Hamburg and other north German Hanse ports after  are a sure sign of the production of large quantities of durable hopped beer. The spread of hopped beer was followed by the spread of the technology of making hopped beer. That third phase took much longer. The process depended on the presence of a market for the new good, one often prepared by imports from northern Germany. It also depended on minimum levels of income and urbanization as well as on government action. It was in the era of adoption of hopped-beer brewing that the importance of government regulation to the industry became obvious. That role would increase over time as brewing passed through a fourth period, that of adjusting existing techniques to the production of the new type of drink and adjusting the drink to the tastes of consumers. That acclimatization to local conditions was followed by a fifth period where brewers throughout northern Europe could produce hopped beer of consistent quality and in quantities to satisfy the existing demand. The process began with the success in thirteenth-century Bremen and Hamburg and was carried on in Holland, Brabant, Flanders, England, Prussia, Scandinavia , and then Bavaria through the fifteenth and into the sixteenth century. The outcomes were an ability throughout northern Europe to make hopped beer and a mature brewing industry. With that maturity came innovation, not in the product, but in ways of making it. Brewers found that they could reduce  Chapter  costs most effectively by increasing investment and the scale of production. The sixth phase of process innovation created the industry of the seventeenth century with, relatively, a small and declining number of breweries each with about the same number of employees. In the course of that change, small brewers, those who made beer infrequently or just for their own consumption and that of a few neighbors, disappeared. The bigger brewers with access to capital for investment in equipment and for extending credit and with access to wider markets were able to smother their little competitors. Again, governments found themselves a part of the process. With few exceptions, the authorities, whether urban, royal or at any level between those two extremes, opted to allow, if not actively support, the growth of relatively big breweries. The greater political power of the more prosperous brewers, reflected in their ever increasing presence in civic governments in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, often made the choice a simple one. The pace of change in brewing, which had been by standards of the Middle Ages intense in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, slowed in the Renaissance. The dramatic demographic and social changes of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries contributed to the rapid transformation of brewing, to the adoption and spread of the technology of making beer with hops. The sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries saw an elaboration and consolidation of the earlier development. The trends toward commercialization of the production and distribution of beer, toward specialization with a few producers supplying the entire market, and toward professionalization with brewers becoming full-time producers of beer and abandoning other employment continued and intensified. The production and consumption of beer also continued to spread. Adding hops won new customers for beer first in Germany and then in the Low Countries. In England, the eastern Baltic, and Scandinavia beer only had to win over mead and ale drinkers; in the southern Low Countries and in central and southern Germany, it had to battle wine. The movement of the beer border southward started in Brabant and Flanders...

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