Government & Hospitality - Dark Matter
Series: Regulatory HistoryLeading up to 1802 England was at war with France, again, and the country was being run by Pitt the Younger. He was really good with taxes, taxing the rich more than the poor, wax candles which gave a clean light were taxed more than the smelly and smoky tallow ones for instance, but the war had left the country in debt and needing more money.
Illustrations by Christine Jopling
Things you will learn
- Pitt's Customs and Excise System
- Malt vs Beer
- Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt
-
Pitt's Customs and Excise System
Beer had been taxed for a long time, but Pitt also wanted to introduce a more modern Customs and Excise system to make sure that people were getting what they paid for, whilst also raising taxes. He reasoned that if you were going to have to pay more for it, you should at least know you were getting your money’s worth. Previously under Pitt’s leadership tea smuggling had stopped, he had personally borrowed money to offset the huge drop in the tax on tea to make it financially unviable to smugglers.
It was just as cheap for retailers to buy it legitimately as it was to get it from the smugglers, but the retailers still wanted to make extra money and were frequently cutting tea with hedgerow twigs, leaves and flowers, as well as with some more unsavoury ingredients, all mixed in with a bit of colouring to look like the much more expensive tea that people thought they were buying. It was a major problem of the time.
-
So the Duties on Beer etc Act was brought in, a forerunner not only to the current Alcohol Duty system, but also to our modern Trading Standards and Consumer Rights. When you ordered your pound of tea leaves, it made sure you got a pound of tea leaves, not half a pound of tea leaves, a quarter pound of privet and some random bits and pieces from the forest floor.
When you ordered your pint of beer, it made sure that you got a full pint of beer chosen from a very limited range because ingredients used for centuries were overnight considered to be adjuncts and banned. No more meadowsweet, heather, tansy, nettle or bog myrtle ales, no more saisons, just your modern (by their standards) beers made only with malt and hops, because that’s what their mates made beer with and told them was all that should be in beer so that was all that mattered. It was pure coincidence I’m sure that hops and malt were both taxed, and the other ingredients weren’t.
-
Malt vs Beer
This really highlighted a problem that still exists today, that those making the laws weren’t usually the ones who would be needing to abide by them, or at least affected by them, or even knew anything about how they would affect others. Pitt was better than most though, being young and not one of the Peers, but he was a fiend for Port rather than beer, having been prescribed it for tonsillitis when he was 14 - it worked and he recovered.
As with any time that a ban comes in, industry will find a way around it and the following month a City of London druggist called Matthew Wood patented a process for “preparing a colour from malt”. The patent described how the malt would be mashed (as it would in a brewery), and then boiled until most of the liquid was removed before roasting it until it was almost a black powdery substance. What the patent didn’t mention at all was beer. But it was only made from malt, and therefore theoretically a legitimate ingredient that could be used in making beer.
-
This may seem like a storm in a teacup, but there were some hefty financial implications of making beer with this colouring compared to not. A typical recipe of the time for a Brown Stout would include up to around 40% of brown malt alongside the pale malt base. The pale base malt is where the sugars come from to make the alcohol. Additional malts like brown produce some sugars, but not as many.
So a beer made with such a large amount of brown malt would be a lot weaker than a beer made with just pale malt. With this new malt colouring however, brewers were able to get the same colour and flavours as before but by using a lot less of it, meaning that the majority of the malt in their mash was pale, and therefore they could either produce a higher strength beer, or in practice use less pale malt to get the same strength as before; making the beer cheaper to produce.
-
Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt
Unfortunately the Excise men didn’t agree with its use and set about confiscating any of this dark malt they found and fining any brewery who was using it. They saw the spirit of the law whilst the industry saw the letter of it. Local Excise offices decreed that “malt” meant products direct from maltsters, the industry saw that malt meant malt - after all it was their livelihood so they knew it better.
One particular brewer who argued on the letter of the law rather than the spirit was a gentleman farmer named Henry Hunt. Henry Hunt was considered wealthy at the time, and was made an alderman of the City of London in 1807, the same year that he funded the construction of a brewery in Bristol. It was there in 1808 that the Excise men confiscated Hunt’s dark malt extract and led to Hunt getting involved in politics.
When the cask of colouring was removed from his brewery, Hunt contacted his supplier who contacted the Board of Excise in London. The central board then informed the local ones in Bristol to return the cask. A case of not training staff properly perhaps, or of local staff taking more upon themselves in interpretation of the law.
-
Whatever the reasoning, the local Excise men informed Hunt that he could come and collect it whenever he was ready. This didn’t sit well with Hunt who informed them that since they removed it - illegally - they could return it or face trial for theft.
This seems like a small anecdote in the history of brewing, but it led Henry Hunt to become more involved in politics. Eight years earlier he was in court as part of a dispute with a neighbour about ownership of pheasants that were killed. Hunt lost that, but during the trial he met Henry Clifford, a radical lawyer, and in 1807 Hunt was recorded as disrupting a hustings that he saw as a stitch-up between the two incumbent - and wealthy - politicians. Arguably spurred on by his win on the use of dark malt extract, Hunt became more and more involved in regional and then national politics, and by 1816 was giving speeches on political reform to crowds of up to 80,000 people.
-
In 1818 Hunt was elected as the radical candidate for Westminster, winning by a very narrow margin because a lot of those eligible to vote at the time were set to lose a lot of money and privilege by the changes he was pushing for. In 1819 Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt gave a talk to 80,000 people in Manchester; this event later became known as the Peterloo Massacre due to the killing of 11 people and the injuring of several hundred by the local yeomanry - ordered by the Manchester Magistrates to break up the meeting and arrest Hunt for sedition.
It’s arguable that all that could have been avoided if Pitt had talked to the wider industry, before implementing a law that would affect the smaller breweries badly, whilst making the larger breweries richer and further radicalising people like Henry Hunt.
"It was pure coincidence I’m sure that hops and malt were both taxed, and the other ingredients weren’t."
"It was there in 1808 that the Excise men confiscated Hunt’s dark malt extract and led to Hunt getting involved in politics."
"In 1819 Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt gave a talk to 80,000 people in Manchester; this event later became known as the Peterloo Massacre".
