"Jacob's ladder," is crushed between a series
of rollers like a dredging machine. And by
“crushing," Sir John took particular care to
inform me, he did not mean "smashing."
The corporeal integrity of the barleycorn is
preserved; not intact, but by being with its
germinatory offshoots "starred," turned inside
out as it were, but still collapsible to its
original dimensions. Crushed, this malt
passes into a long trough, and is pushed by
an Archimedian screw from hopper to hopper
(each lined with zinc, and looking like a floury
Erebus), amidst clouds of minute farinaceous
particles which got down my throat and into
my eyes, and set me sneezing and coughing
uproariously. These different hoppers come
down into, and are all feeders of the great
mash-tub in the room below. I descended a
staircase into this mashing hall; and, as soon
as my eyes (scarcely quit yet from the floury
simoom) had recovered from the blinding and
scalding effects of the clouds of steam, I gazed
around. Vessels resembling washing-tubs on
a Megatherian scale met my eyes on all sides.
These tubs are mash-tubs, each of which will
hold one hundred quarters of malt; each large
copper has a capacity for three hundred and
seventy barrels; and in them the malt
(supplied from the hoppers above) is mashed
into a gruel thick and slab—the hot water
being first let in—mashed by huge sails or
paddles working with a circular motion, with
huge velocity, yet capable of being stopped in
a moment—until the starchy matter in the
malt is by heat, and moisture, and motion,
converted into Wort—the wort we have
been all so familiar with in our young days
when home-brewing took place; and for
furtively consuming which (hot, sweet, and
weak) from half-pint mugs, our youthful ears
have been frequently boxed. There is one
monster tub here, Sir John told me, whose
feeder will be put in requisition to supply
three thousand barrels or ninety-six thousand
gallons of ale, the amount of one single order.
I remark here, on the authority of the
Barleycorn knight, that "light beers" do not
require a "stiff mash;" that every hundred
quarters of malt take upon an average seven
hours-and-a-half mashing; and that in the
brewery we are now surveying there can be
mashed in the Barleycorn interest as much
as fifteen hundred quarters a week. The
several minor details, relative to the exact
proportions of water, temperature, and other
niceties, would not, I opine, be in any way
interesting to the general reader; there are
besides slight points of trade skill and trade
experience, which are closely kept Burton
secrets.

After a passing glance at a giant coal-
scuttle in the mash-room we went into the
chamber of the hop coppers; where, in huge
vessels of that rubicund metal, the hops are
busily boiling with the wort. These boil
together for a stated time; and then the
boiling liquor comes down into a gigantic
strainer. The hops left at top are pressed
and sold for manure; the Excise interfering,
and prying, and thwarting the brewers
through the whole process. From this strainer
the liquor (now become a sort of inert beer,
possessing flavour but not body, bitterness
without pungency,) is drawn by a
prodigious arterial process of pipes into the next
important stage in its career, the cooling-
room. And I may mention that, while
bending over the hop coppers, and watching
the bare-armed perspiring men stirring them
with great flat spoons or ladles, or gauging
them with the mash rule, Sir John Barleycorn
requested me to taste the hops, which I
did, and found them to be very bitter indeed;
upon which Sir John chuckled, and asked if I
thought it worth while to employ strychnine,
as had been grievously libelled by a certain
French ignoramus.

I may compare the cooling-room to
Behring's Straits turned brown—a sea of pale
beer. On all sides—as far as the eye could
reach, at least—lay this waveless, tideless
sea of pale ale, traversed by an endless
wooden bridge. Leaning over the balustrade
of this bridge gazing at the monstrous
superficies of ale lying here a cooling in a liquid
valley, I saw myself in liquor. A good
brewer, Sir John was kind enough to inform
me, likes also to see himself in liquor: if
his person be well-reflected in the cooling
ale it is a sign that the mash has been
successful. So I gazed on the ocean, and at
the arterial process of pipes, at the pillars
supporting the low roof, and at the floodgates
of beer far away, until, to tell the truth,
the odour of the liquor made me somewhat
muddy and confused, and I was not sorry
when my host and guide moved forward to
another department.

The wort, come to the complexion I have
described, is now removed into the fermenting
squares, loose boxes of beer, of plain white
deal numbered and in tiers. Here, yeast is
mixed with it, and the process of fermentation
goes on—to what exact extent must
depend, of course, on the judgment, ability,
and experience of the brewer. Upon the
surface of the lighter fermenting rises a thick
froth, so pregnant with carbonic acid gas, that
it will put a candle out, and nearly knock
you down in a fainting fit if you put your
nose close to it; but being heavier than the
atmospheric air, soon sinks to the bottom.

From the fermenting squares the liquor,
now really pale ale, is conveyed by an intricate
machinery of pipes into the cleansing or
tunning room. Here the casks by hundreds
and thousands, after being whirled and
churned round, in order thoroughly to clean
them, receive the beer, and are finally bunged
and branded. They are almost immediately
carted away to the railway and to London.
The bottled pale ale, albeit brewed by the
same process as the draught, is bottled from
the wood in London, without any connexion