This book extends to a more general level the themes of Unger's A History of Brewing in Holland, 900-1900: Economy, Technology, and the State (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2001). He has used Belgian and Dutch archives and the Public Record Office, as well as printed documents, literary, iconographic, and anthropological material, and the substantial secondary literature.
Unger traces the technical character of the beverage and the social context of beer drinking, which was very different from modern perceptions. He applies to brewing the six-phase developmental scheme propounded by D. P. S. Peacock for the pottery industry. The earliest stage, household production, was done mainly by women. In the second stage there is some permanent equipment, but brewing was still a secondary source of income for most practitioners; women still dominate, but some skilled artisans brew. The third phase is characterized by individual workshops, often adjuncts to the residence, and the work is usually a by-occupation and done seasonally rather than continuously. A major change comes at stage four, corresponding to the High Middle Ages, when individual workshops are often linked into an industrial complex. Brewing was done on a large scale, with some cooperation among producers. The fifth stage was that of the manufactory, a single building or place where large-scale production by many artisans was done. This did not reach brewing until seventeenth century, and then only in isolated places. The true factory involving machinery powered by inanimate sources of energy is the sixth stage, which brewing was only beginning to reach by 1650. Unger deals cursorily with brewing from ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt through the late Roman Empire, then becomes more detailed with brewing on estates and smaller households in early medieval Europe, but the only large-scale brewing was in monasteries. Some writers saw beer as an acceptable substitute if wine was not available. Beer definitely was preferred to mead, production of which declined into insignificance. At this stage gruit, a conglomeration of dried herbs that usually included bog myrtle, was the normal fermenting agent, supplemented by other additives depending on what flavor the brewer wanted. License to use gruit was an imperial right, but it was being granted in the twelfth and particularly thirteenth century to some Low Country and west German towns, which used it as a beer tax. The fact that the gruit or gruitgeld was a public, not a seigneurial, right was important for the eventual regulation of brewing.
Unger associates the development of commercial brewing with the rise of urbanization in northern and northwestern Europe, for a high demand market was created in the cities for the local product. Beer brewing in the cities was fundamentally different from rural brewing, for it required larger facilities and specialization, since it was too complicated, required too much room, and had too many stages to be done effectively as part of the farm routine or in the residence. To gain access to water, brewers tended to live on the major streams in the town. Another element favoring concentration of brewing in the towns was the fact that gruitgeld was collected there, and town governments thus fostered brewing as a source of income. The size of the market in the towns also made capital concentration in brewing more feasible. The towns also took over the making of gruit before they taxed it, but they usually gave this job, and then selling it and including the tax in the sale price, to a gruiter. This changed rapidly in the fourteenth century, when the towns simply taxed beer by the barrel, leaving the brewers free to get their gruit wherever they wished and/or mix their own formulas. In addition to the gruitgeld, the Dutch cities levied excises on beer by the thirteenth century; the German towns were slower to do so, in some cases not until the fifteenth century. By then the share of the beer tax in total town income was rarely below 20 percent and was often much higher.
In the beginning all townspeople who could afford the gruitgeld could brew. Brewers' guilds did not form in most towns until the fourteenth century or even later. National and city governments initially preferred to supervise brewing directly. The brewers' guilds were primarily agencies of urban regulation and charitable and convivial associations, rather than being concerned with quality and wage regulation. Until the seventeenth century guild officers were mediators between the membership and the town government, rather than advocates of the concerns of their members. Once the guilds were established, they did try to restrict brewing to members and stop home-commercial brewing. Many towns had no apprenticeship requirement. The capital to set up a brewery was more important than technical skill. This was an important difference between brewers and most other medieval guilds. Unger thus concludes (222) that "the sharp separation between owner and workers that was a feature of the textile industry never existed in brewing."
The use of hops in beer goes back to the Carolingian period, but little is known of it until the thirteenth century. Hops were a preservative and thus facilitated transportation and long-distance trade. Preservation before hops had been done by raising the alcohol content; thus hopped beer was lighter. It took longer to produce, and the taste was different. This technical change made possible the development long-distance commerce in hopped beer after 1200 by the north German cities. Hamburg was the most important center, followed by Bremen, Wismar, and Rostock. German hopped beer was sometimes called "Hamburg beer" in the Low Countries. As much as half the work force of Hamburg in the mid-fourteenth century consisted of beer brewers. Unger argues, however, that demand of the cities themselves and their rural environs created the major market. Even Hamburg only exported one-third to one-quarter of its product. Accordingly, most towns issued protectionist regulations to aid the brewers. In addition to prohibiting or taxing imported beer, some towns in Germany, but even more in the Low Countries, tried to stop rural brewers from imitating the city product, but the results were mixed. This did not happen in England, where urban brewers flooded the countryside with their product and drove out rural competition by market forces.
Hamburg dominated the export trade in hopped beer to the Netherlands in the fourteenth century, but there was significant competition from local brewers by the fifteenth. The beer market in Scandinavia mainly benefited the east Baltic towns with a heavy German population, particularly Wismar. German influence declined in the fifteenth century, then revived in the sixteenth, despite development of native brewing in Scandinavia and competition from Danes. The Germans in brewing, as in other areas of trade, had more trouble getting and keeping their way in Low Countries than in Scandinavia: the Netherlanders were quick to take up the German techniques, and they also produced more that the Germans needed than did the Scandinavians, at least until the sixteenth century.
During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as beer became both better and relatively cheaper, and as wars disrupted French wine production and distribution, the border between wine and beer areas moved south and west as far as Paris. The northern Low Countries were the earliest major export market to develop for hopped north German beer. Faced with a loss of income from the gruitgeld, the counts of Holland initially forbade the production of and trade in hopped beer, but in the early fourteenth century several Dutch towns got charters permitting their brewers to make hopped beer. The charter of Dordrecht (1321) distinguished between hoppenbier and ael (unhopped beer). This distinction persisted in the English words and practice. The word "beer" was imported into England from continental usage. The older technique with gruit did not end immediately, for brewers had to learn the right proportions of hops and other ingredients by trial and error, just as North German brewers had made hopped beer for some time before they started exporting it, and the Dutch brewers were the same. The major increase in Dutch production came between c. 1380 and 1450. Hops were initially imported from Germany, but they were being grown in the northern Netherlands by the fourteenth century and soon exported. Production changed from the household to the workshop, and the trade became more professionalized. Beer, second only to export quality textiles, became crucial to the transformation of Holland to a primarily commercial and industrial economy.
The diffusion of hopped beer brewing from northern Germany to the northern Netherlands, principally Holland, was followed by its spread to the southern Low Countries, England, and Scandinavia. The patterns of change discernible in north Germany and Holland fit less well here, particularly for England. Legalized brewing with hops came to Flanders, Brabant, Utrecht, and the prince-bishopric of Liege in the second half of the fourteenth century. Spread was slow along the Rhine, but it reached the vicinity of Nuremberg around 1500. By the late fifteenth century beer production had spread to Bavaria, but here and in Austria the great growth in beer, which became part of the local dietary tradition, came in the sixteenth century, the same period that saw the final victory of hopped beer in England, the southern Low Countries, and Scandinavia.
The situation in England was somewhat different. Commercial brewing was rising in the first half of the fourteenth century, earlier than in the southern Low Countries. The Dutch exported beer to England, perhaps by the late thirteenth century, and English ale in turn was exported to Holland and Flanders. The large alien population of southeastern England may have elevated demand for hopped beer, and alien brewers, mainly from the Low Countries, dominated production. Imports started to decline in the early fifteenth century, perhaps as a result of the rise of domestic production. Only in England was hopped beer a technological innovation brought by immigrants. Elsewhere natives tried to imitate foreign techniques by trial and error. Hopped beer only dominated over ale in England from the mid- sixteenth century. While ale brewing had been practiced in the small towns and villages, beer brewing was centered in London. Separate regulations applied to ale and beer brewers, and the latter became a separate guild in London in 1493.
Unger deals briefly and inconclusively with hopped beer brewing in Slavic Europe. In Scandinavia the trade was only practiced by natives from the sixteenth century, in many cases with government encouragement. The poor communications meant little export within a region, and towns were small, so that the heavy urban domestic demand that fueled the German and Dutch industries could not be a catalyst in the far north.
Having dealt in Chapters 3-6 with the origin of commercial brewing of hopped beer in northern Germany and its geographical spread, Unger considers in Chapters 7-10 four aspects of the mature industry, as techniques and business practices were refined: levels of production and consumption, technology, and capital investment and innovation. The change from geographical and chronological to topical analysis involves some repetition of information. As prices of beer in relation to wine declined sharply in the fifteenth century, in the parts of Europe with a strong beer production wine became a mainly liturgical and festive drink. Tax records are our best although not invariably reliable indication of level of production. Unger rejects deducing production from the number of breweries, since new breweries tended to be small, and there were changes of scale: the number of breweries was stable or falling in many places, while production was rising, breweries became larger. Even in relative decline in the sixteenth century, Germany was the leader in beer production; Wismar and Lübeck produced on a scale in the sixteenth century comparable to the Dutch export cities. Problems of definition and commensurability weaken the analysis here: the great brewing towns of Haarlem, Delft, and Gouda produced together about 100 million liters in the early sixteenth century, but only 7 percent was consumed locally, and the rest was exported, the converse of the pattern in Germany, where most production was consumed locally. This suggests that the Dutch were taking the export markets in the sixteenth century. Yet "Germany" was a vague geographical term, and Unger includes under "export" beer that was sent to other cities within the region of origin. Much Dutch beer was exported to the southern Low Countries, thus involving minimal transport costs. This competition forced native brewers in Ghent and Antwerp to give up cheaper beer in favor of more expensive grades. English, i.e. London beer production expanded to over 100 million liters yearly, roughly the total of the Dutch beer towns, and was exported to northern Germany, the Low Countries, and France.
Figures from which consumption can be extrapolated are even more problematical than those for production. Unger calculates per capita consumption in "beer regions" of about. 300 liters. Taking both ale and beer together, English and German drinkers were roughly at a level, those of Low Countries lower. In this chapter he deals with the problems of brewers in competing with others for the raw materials of the trade: the bakers had first claim on grain in time of scarcity, and the need of high heat for brewing put demands on the fuel supply that sometimes was regulated to the disadvantage of the brewers.
Unger reaches the final stage in his analytical scheme in Chapter 9, where he discusses brewing technology. The first English treatise on brewing technology appeared in 1503, the first German book in 1505. Curiously, no Dutch instruction manuals appeared until later. Preservation and transportation issues still meant that there were significant seasonal variations in beer production. City governments restricted hours when beer could be made, and even more the seasons of the year, since summer brewing could lead to spoilage. Many brewers thus turned to other occupations for the warm half of the year, notably trades such as carpentry and bricklaying, where demand for labor was highest in the warm months, the reverse for brewing. Regulation of brewing by city governments became increasingly tight in the fifteenth and especially sixteenth century, particularly in the Low Countries and Germany, less so in England, where local regulation had always been strong. Some towns fixed statutory recipes (the pegel) for types of beer. Costs of ingredients more than wage levels determined brewers' profits, but the rise in grain prices in the sixteenth century hurt them. The brewers were victimized by the same price considerations that hurt bakers: the authorities considered them bound to deliver a product that was needed by consumers, and if this meant brewing at a loss, this was preferable to upsetting consumers by raising prices. Thus brewers compensated by diminishing the amount of grain in the cheaper grades, while developing higher grades for consumers who could afford them. Another way of reducing costs was by moving to larger and more cost-effective breweries. Brewing, like leatherworking, had a "sizeable investment in fixed capital" and "was different from most contemporary economic activities on land in that they had a relatively high ratio of capital to labor" (Unger, 166). Many of the smaller brewers were forced out of business or became subcontractors of the big operators, who in turn developed a higher social status. They now often sat on town councils, which thus became more likely to permit consolidation measures, such as brewing more frequently and using bigger kettles.
The considerable role of women in brewing has been the subject of a substantial literature. Unger accepts the conclusions of Judith Bennett for England but finds more involvement of women in hopped beer production elsewhere. Women were always employed in continental breweries, although the tasks that were documented for them were rather menial. There was no dramatic change for the worse for women in the Low Countries, in contrast to Scandinavia and England. Widows could normally continue their husbands' breweries. Although on balance fewer women than before were operating their own breweries in the Renaissance, many continued to run their own taverns. Unger concludes (228) that "more important factors in making those trades a place for men were the growing scale of brewing establishments, the growing capital requirements in all aspects of the trade, and the more extensive and careful government regulation."
Although his topic imposes a north European focus, Unger makes regional comparisons. This is an important book, going beyond what is usually found in a synthesis. His analysis has important implications for the nature and comparative development of technology diffusion and social and industrial organization, as well as more obviously local and interregional trade. This work can accordingly be read with profit by persons who dislike beer, although enjoyment of it is enhanced by an appreciation of Unger's meticulous expositions about ingredients and taste.