Noted Breweries of Great Britain and Ireland is a four volume, 2,183 page, work written by Alfred Barnard towards the end of the nineteenth century.It is a personal account by Barnard of his visits to a wide range of Victorian breweries giving detailed accounts of the premises, plant and product range at a time when the industry was booming.
Given its importance as a beer related historical reference, I am slightly ashamed to say that it has only hit my attention in recent weeks. Firstly at the (now legendary) Beer Bloggers Conference, when it was discussed at a time when a talk on the future of beer writing seemed to get a bit bogged down in the history of beer writing.
A week or two later, the Brewery History Society Journal hit the doormat and the first paper was entitled A personal consideration of Alfred Barnard's Noted Breweries of Great Britain and Ireland and aspects of its relationship to the late Victorian brewing industry written by Paul Bayley.
A little dry you may think but by the end of the 40 odd pages, I was hooked and keen to get my hands on a copy. That is until I learnt on the last page that copies were now changing hands for about £1,000 !
All is not lost though, there is a CD ROM copy available for about £30.
Excellent I thought and set about googling to find a copy.
Even better news, and the real reason for this blog post, is that I have found a free download of all four volumes.
It is included in the Ask About Ireland digital book collection at www.askaboutireland.ie
I can't really do it justice here; suffice to say that even though there is a body of evidence to suggest that the breweries paid fees to be visited by Barnard, this is a very readable collection of beer and brewery travels, has fabulous illustrations for its time and is well worth getting a copy of.
I downloaded it to my IPad and now have it in my electronic book collection, available in seconds with a swipe of the finger. I guess it would also work just as well as a normal PC PDF download.
Never let it be said that I don't bring you value. £1,000 worth of beer history, at your fingertips, thanks to the digital age.
Finally, I am never slow to say that the £18 annual subscription to the Brewery History Society remains excellent value and is recommended.
5 comments:
It’s fascinating, I downloaded a few months back, was even more interested to discover that Bernard visited the town where I live and also wrote about the brewery in nearby Tiverton.
Nice one, I enjoyed the article in the Brewery History Society Journal too.
It's a great book. I picked up the CD a couple of years ago. I actually prefer to have it in electronic form because I can OCR it easily.
Thanks to yourself (and Ron) for putting me onto this book. Being from Dublin it was great to see so many forgotten Irish breweries in the book. Looking at some of the old maps on osi.ie reveals a very large portion of Dublin city was taken up with breweries and distilleries. Pity most have vanished without a trace.
Thanks to yourself (and Ron) for putting me onto this book. Being from Dublin it was great to see so many forgotten Irish breweries in the book. Looking at some of the old maps on osi.ie reveals a very large portion of Dublin city was taken up with breweries and distilleries. Pity most have vanished without a trace.
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