“You cannot put stinking fish into beer”: the controversies of brewing science around 1800

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The National Archives

Beer brewing

Speaker: Dr James Sumner, Senior Lecturer in the History of Technology at the University of Manchester

In 1809 a London brewery was prosecuted for the unusual offence of trying to remove cloudiness from its beer by dosing it with an extract of fish-skins. “Keep your stinking fish to yourselves,” thundered the Solicitor-General – and yet the brewers won the case.

Drawing on trial records and Excise correspondence at The National Archives, this talk discusses the challenges brewers faced in promoting new innovations to an often justifiably suspicious public, and how they enlisted scientific reputations in support of their cause.