The London beer flood

What was going on around it

An event on its own is a date. These are the periods it belongs to, where the argument about what changed is actually made.

• Industrial brewing

  Beer became the first mass-produced consumer product, and the technologies that made that possible — measurement, power, pale malt, rail — also decided which beers survived.

Why it matters

The clearest surviving illustration of the scale eighteenth and nineteenth-century porter brewing had reached, and of the engineering it outran.

How well this is established

Styles this shaped

• English porter4–5.4% ABV

  The original dark British beer: chocolate and light coffee over a nutty malt base, restrained rather than aggressive.

Traditions

• London porter brewing — The first industrial-scale brewing tradition, built in eighteenth-century London around dark beer, long maturation and enormous vats.