I'm going to another do at Brewers' Hall next month so I've started reading up on The Worshipful Company of Brewers. As the company goes back a long way so does Mia Ball's history of it. One of the fascinating facts it contains was the number of breweries in London in 1380. Records collected for a poll tax that year show there were over 1,000 brew houses, one for every twelve inhabitants. If that's extrapolated to the current population across Britain there would be over five million breweries. That would keep the beer tickers busy!
As the current booming number of breweries has caused some concern we might be reaching saturation point, it's interesting to see quite how few we have now compared to 1380.
In the future everyone will have there own personal brewery and the entire economy will be just people bartering beer with each other. Everything else will be handled by robots and computers.
ReplyDeleteI frankly don't understand why people are concerned about the numbers of breweries. I don't see any problem, frankly. But then again, I haven't got any stakes in the industry and, no matter how many breweries are there, I would give my business to those that I believe do things well.
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