Brewers and brewery engineers

Brewers and brewery-engineers.

Three evolutions testify, among other less significants developments, about the rapid evolution of the brewer profession from the 1870s onwards.

1.  The scientific lab is entering the brewery.
2.  The engineer-brewer gradually replaces the traditional brewer.
3.  The industrial brewery is organized around some Institutes for beer and brewing or the like, professional high schools, periodicals, and annual conventions devoted to to what has becoming a pivotal economical branch.

The control laboratory, a scaled-down version of the research laboratory, enters the breweries. A corpus of new scientific and technical knowledge has emerged in the field of malting and brewing. This accumulation is partly the result of scholarly contributions from brewers themselves. These new knowledge packages inaugurate the era of the scientific brewery. They involve biology, chemistry, mechanics and machinery, conversion of energy (thermal, electrical, mechanical, artificial cooling), process optimisation, labor managment, capital risks, etc.

As a direct consequence, the engineer replaces the traditional brewer formed by the chain of learning. The engineer learns in these specialized schools or institutes, and introduces new brewing methods, processes and equipments. Every major industrial countries created their schools for brewers and research institutes for beer brewing. These national initiatives are not without ulterior commercial and political motives.

The specialized journals bloom, official publications of professional organizations including maltsters, brewers, beer distributors, and manufacturers of industrial equipment. Each country organises its industrial sector centered on its national breweries, their suppliers, their beer shippers and vendors. Meanwhile, periodicals dedicated to research in brewing emerge.

The laboratory of the Carlsberg Foundation is created in Copenhagen in 1876 by the Danish brewer Jacob Christian Jacobsen in 1875. He was trained in bottom fermentation brewing by the brewmaster Sedlmayr of the Spaten brewery in Munich.

After introducing the concept and technology to achieve a culture of pure yeast at Carlsberg Brewery in 1883, the biologist Emil Christian Hansen and his ideas are quickly used by other brewers in Europe and USA. In ten years, Hansen's devices to propagate pure yeasts are settled in 173 breweries from 23 countries[1]. Meanwhile, Alfred Jorgensen had provided some 65 breweries in Europe with strains of pure yeasts from his laboratory in Copenhagen.

The Brewery Lessons start at Weihenstephan (Bavaria) in 1865 with eight students and one teacher, Carl Lintner[2]. The most impressive is the Institute for Research and Education for the Brewery (VLB) in Berlin, founded in 1883 by Max Delbrück. At the Congress of the German brewery a year later, Delbrück makes this announcement : " With the sword of the science and the armor of practice, German beer will encircle the world ". Germany is now already the world's leading beer producer, after overtaking the UK.

In 1873, the «Spolek pro průmysl pivovarský v království Českém (SBIKB) » (Association for the Czech Kingdom Brewing industry) is founded in Prague. It coordinates and promotes the interests of the profession and creates a technical Research Institute for Brewery in Prague.

Similar institutions appear at the same time in Austria (Vienna), where strong commercial and technical relations with the Czech brewers were operating for centuries. At that time, breweries in Austria and Bohemia and their brewers were working within the same Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Similar foundations to promote the brewery are founded in Switzerland.

In France, Pasteur's wishes for a science-industry alliance are heard by governments. France does not create a large research laboratory for the brewery, but a School of Brewing and Malting in 1892 in Nancy to train its staff. The links between pure science (University of Nancy founded in 1854) and the brewing industry are strengthened.

In the United States, John Ewald Siebel, a German immigrant, founded a laboratory in Chicago in 1868, which became the Zymotechnic Institute in 1872. Siebel opened a School for Brewers in 1882. What would later become The Master Brewers Association of the Americas was founded in 1887.

In Britain, education was based on a less inventive ground. The brewers apprentices being taken as students, they received a training on the job with tuition. This system has survived after World War II. There was no school of brewing in England before 1900. With the financial support of a local brewer William Waters Butler, classes started at the University of Birmingham who had just opened. Some trainings for brewery started in 1904 at the Heriot-Watt College in Edinburgh.

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From 1860, specialized journals proliferate and spread the message of a mature and thriving industrial brewery throughout the world. Some are professional journals, other scientific journals of high level.

Germany leads the way. Brauer-und Allgemeine Zeitung Hopfen (known today as the Brauwelt) was created in 1861 in Roth near Nuremberg. The journal of Carl Lintner, Bayerische Bierbrauer, is published for the first time in 1866.

In Great Britain, the Brewers 'Journal is published in 1865 and the Brewers' Guardian in 1871. The Transactions of the Laboratory Club, which became later The Journal of the Institute of Brewing, are first published in 1886.

In Prague, the same year SBIKB is founded (1873), Antonín Stanislav Schmelzer (1844-1902), professor at the First Public School for Malting, sponsors a technical periodical for brewery named Kvas (Ferment), which became the official periodical of the SBIKB (see above)[3].

The Australian Brewers Journal is launched in 1882. The Petit Journal du Brasseur was founded in Belgium in 1892. The first issue of De Bierbrouwer is published in Netherlands in 1895.

Each national beer industry in Europe owns at least one periodical.

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[1] Anderson Ray 1993, Highlights in the History of International Brewing Science. Ferment. 6:191-198. Quoted by Anderson R. himself 2005 in The Transformation of Brewing: An Overview of Three Centuries of Science and Practice, Journal of the Brewery History Society 121, pp 5-24.
http://www.breweryhistory.com/journal/archive/121/bh-121-005.htm