The Birth of the Scientific Brewer: International Networks and Knowledge Transfer in Central European Beer Brewing, 1794–1895

1 Introduction

The pavilion of the Dreher brewery at the 1873 Vienna World’s Fair must have been quite a sight to behold. A curious combination of the then-popular Oriental style and brewing paraphernalia, featuring both drapery-clad caryatids and an upturned mash tun for roof, the pavilion was a visual nod to the down-to-earth nature of the brewing business, while at the same time embodying its growing ambition.^[1] Its prominent presence at the exhibition was a message in itself: one that spoke about the new self-confidence of the brewing industry and about the Dreher brewery’s own astonishing ascension. Anton Dreher, a brewer’s son, and heir to a foundering brewery in Schwechat, a small town near Vienna, had entered the family business in 1836 and almost immediately converted the brewery to the production of Bavarian-style bottom-fermented beers.^[2] Within only a few decades, he and his son Anton Jr. transformed the brewery into the largest business of its kind in the Habsburg monarchy. The network of their possessions and commodity supplies stretched all over the empire: the Drehers had their own hop yards in Bohemia, bought their barley in Moravia, and owned breweries in Hungary, Bohemia, and in Trieste. Their flagship brewery in Schwechat was one of the first businesses in Austria to use steam power, had its own railroad connection, and in 1872, the brewing conglomerate was producing 613,897 hectoliters of beer a year – about the same amount as all breweries in the crown lands of Styria and Carinthia combined. It was also generating 2,101,889 Austrian gulden in revenue, surpassing the whole of Lower Austria’s mining industry more than three times.^[3] When it put up its extravagant pavilion at the Vienna exhibition, the brewery was cementing its status as the foremost business within an industry that was experiencing explosive growth and whose economic importance was second to none.

The 1870s were a time of sweeping changes in beer brewing, and the 1873 Vienna World’s Fair showcased these changes. Brewers from Austria-Hungary, Germany, and elsewhere proudly presented their products treated with the new conserving process called pasteurization; according to an official report about the exhibition to the German government, the pasteurized beers “proved their excellent durability and won general recognition.”^[4] Brewers flocked to a presentation given by Carl Linde, the inventor of the first artificial refrigeration system, and several of them went on to install his Kältemaschinein their breweries in the coming years.^[5] Beers presented at the exhibition included not only those from the traditional beer countries such as Germany, England, or Austria, but also products from Russia, Poland, Scandinavia, France, and Italy, along with more exotic samples from China, Australia, and Brazil.^[6] There was a delegation of brewers from the United States, which included Otto Lademan from St. Louis, friend of a certain Adolphus Busch, a fellow St. Louis brewer whom Lademan may or may not have reported about a beer from the Bohemian town of Budweis that he had tasted at the exhibition.^[7]

By the time of the Viennese World’s Fair, European and North American brewing was an increasingly industrialized, fast-growing field which used state-of-the-art technology, relied on latest scientific discoveries, and was beginning to ship its suddenly much more stable product all over the globe. Recently founded professional brewing journals disseminated scientific knowledge which an educated and internationally mobile class of brewers was willing to use in practical brewing.^[8] The spread of bottom-fermented lager beers, a mere novelty 40 years ago, was already in full swing and the clear, light-colored Pilsner-style beers were poised to become the global standard.^[9] Advances in science and technology combined with the forces of urbanization, industrialization, and mass migration transformed beer brewing into an increasingly convergent, globe-spanning industry with transnational knowledge transfer, itinerant experts, and global commodity flows and consumption. What only a few decades ago seemed a backward craft weighed down by rigid medieval regulations and governed by peculiar local customs and superstition, was now a booming and progressive industry. Like the once-humble but now immensely successful Dreher brewery, beer brewing seemed to be bursting out of obscurity into a brand new era: the industry’s reliance on science and its rapid internationalization were perceived by many as a watershed, a clear break with brewing’s artisan, local past. However, the reality was more complicated than that.

The 1870s were not the first time brewing came out of the narrow confines of state borders.^[10] Compared with the brewing boom of the last third of the nineteenth century, the decades preceding it are often treated as an afterthought, or a mere prelude to the grand developments of the latter portion of the century.^[11] This is to some extent understandable: up until the 1850s, beer brewing in most European countries was still characterized by small-scale breweries using local supplies and serving their immediate surrounding areas; the brewers operating them were mostly artisans guided by skill acquired on an empirical basis rather than a codified system of universal and replicable knowledge provided by science. Coexisting with this traditional brewing landscape, however, was a growing network of international contacts, an ever-larger body of professional literature advocating the use of science in brewing, and an increasing number of brewers who were willing to listen and let the advances of science and technology work to their advantage.

Decades before beer brewing transformed into a truly global industry, the region of Central Europe – primarily the German states and the Habsburg monarchy – became a sort of laboratory in which networks were forged, new inventions tested, new beer sorts copied, and in which people, knowledge, and materials traveled back and forth, resulting in an increasing convergence of the trade and standardization of the product. It was here that lager beer started its global spread, aided by forces of migration, knowledge transfer, and, later, empire building.^[12] It was here, facilitated by the formalized system of journeymen’s travels, that knowledge and innovation traversed the confines of the local and spread throughout the region.^[13] And it was here that the first institutions of formal brewers’ education sprang up, transferring the era’s candor for science and technology into the brewhouse.

Between the end of the eighteenth century and the 1860s, brewing gradually started to rely on technological innovation and scientific knowledge disseminated first in treatises and later in specialized journals. More and more brewers were becoming internationally mobile, educated people who formed a loose community with contacts to one another; they shared their experiences and applied theoretical knowledge practically. These networks differed in scale, but not in quality from those in the second half of the century. They helped set the stage for the boom of the industry from the 1870s on. A closer look at these developments reveals that already since the beginning of the nineteenth century, beer brewing was increasingly becoming a field defined by international movement of knowledge, experts, and materials which the advent of new technology and transport possibilities only accelerated.

This article follows these developments through retracing the careers, networks, and times of four pioneering Central European brewers. František Ondřej Poupě/Franz Andreas Paupie (1753–1805) in Bohemia, Gabriel Sedlmayr senior (1772–1839) and his son Gabriel Sedlmayr junior (1811–1891) in Bavaria, and Anton Schwarz (1839–1895), whose career spanned the Habsburg monarchy and the United States, represent subsequent generations of brewers, each of them working in a different era that offered – and expected – different ways of knowledge production and exchange. Their careers stand for and exemplify the ways in which nineteenth-century beer brewing increasingly relied on scientific and technological innovation and on international knowledge transfer. At the same time, they embody the continuity of brewing development, the gradual way in which scientific knowledge entered the brewery and brewers’ networks widened in scope. Following individual brewers’ careers in the context of their contacts, influences, and respective eras from the late eighteenth century until the end of the nineteenth century brings out the way in which beer brewing’s transition from a craft to an industry was a continuous process rather than a clear break. Finally, it demonstrates how the dense network of contacts, the advent of scientific brewing, and the knowledge transfer within the Central European region helped set the stage for the boom of the industry from the 1870s on.

2 The Art of Brewing: František Ondřej Poupě

During the eighteenth century, the center of innovation in brewing was undoubtedly England. While the once-flourishing continental brewing languished, decimated by the Thirty Years’ War and by competition from new, fashionable drinks such as tea or coffee, and tied down by strict regulations about who was allowed to brew beer and where they were allowed to sell it, England’s unique economic development made way for early industrialization and for the first large-scale breweries. By the late eighteenth century, large London breweries such as Thrale, Barclays, and Whitbread were able to produce a more or less standardized beer in quantities of more than 100,000 hectoliters a year to serve the huge and ever-growing market at their doorstep.^[14]

Beer brewing moved from the realm of the household to the sphere of mass production and it transformed from an occupation supplementing other trades, such as bakery or agriculture, into an industry run by professionals. This transformation was reflected in the sort of writings being published about beer: whereas in the first half of the eighteenth century, English beer literature was dominated by treatises penned by gentleman brewers who – or, more precisely, whose servants – brewed for their own households, around 1750 treatises started emerging whose authors were professional brewers. One of the first was An Essay on Brewing, published in 1758 by Michael Combrune, a commercial brewer in London. Combrune’s work was the first English brewing publication not only to be structured like a chemical treatise, but also to insist that “some knowledge in Chemistry is absolutely necessary to complete the Brewer” and to compensate for the whims of seasons, temperatures, and brewing materials.^[15] Combrune was also the first author to discuss the use of the thermometer in the brewery. Apart from describing the use of the device in brewing practice, his treatise recommended the “admirable instrument” through curious visual means: the Essay’s title-page illustration showed an eagle, flying straight at the reader over a field of barley stacks, carrying a thermometer in its beak.^[16] Combrune’s treatise did not immediately inspire a following: as historian James Sumner notes, most publications written by commercial brewers only emerged in England after 1800.^[17] Combrune’s work, however, did popularize thermometry and was circulated widely, becoming the standard work of reference for brewing amateurs and professionals alike. Gentleman farmers and innovators like Samuel Bentham or Thomas Jefferson ordered a copy of the treatise.^[18] It was translated into German in 1796; a French translation followed in 1802.^[19] By this time, brewing treatises were becoming more common on the continent as well, and with them a new phenomenon: brewers who engaged in debates in print about their own profession.

One of these progressive brewers was František Ondřej Poupě, or Franz Andreas Paupie – the German version of his name he would use in bilingual Bohemia. Since the mid-nineteenth century, he has become something of a hero for Czech brewers and brewing scientists who came after him. He would be hailed as a pioneer of the field, a man ahead of his time who advocated exact scientific methods in brewing at a time when most of his contemporaries relied on empiricism, mysterious (and sometimes toxic) additives, and the grace of God. Masarykův slovník naučný, a 1930s general-knowledge encyclopedia, informed readers that Poupě was the “first brewer-theoretician” who introduced beer scales and the thermometer into brewing practice and “thus laid the foundations of a modern and healthy brewing industry.”^[20] Gabriela Basařová, arguably the most prominent (and female!) Czech brewing scientist of the latter part of the twentieth century, has referred to Poupě as a “legendary” progressive brewer.^[21] A plaque on the building of the former town brewery in Brno where Poupě acted as brewer from 1798 until his death in 1805 praises him as a “brewing reformer;” and the annual award of the Czech Association of Breweries and Maltings is named in his honor.^[22] Poupě was undoubtedly a progressive brewer fond of innovation and such exact brewing methods as could be applied in the brewing practice, but he was far from being a lone voice in the desert. A closer look at his principal work, Die Kunst des Bierbrauens (The Art of Brewing), shows how firmly embedded his position was in the international exchanges of his time.

Poupě was born in 1753 in the town of Český Šternberk (Sternberg) in Bohemia, then part of the Habsburg monarchy. After having trained as brewer with his older brother, he followed the custom of his trade and embarked on a journeyman’s tour which in his case led not only through different regions of the empire, but also to the German states and to Poland. After six years of extensive travel, he returned to Bohemia and managed to secure employment as a brewer at various nobility-owned breweries across the region. In 1794, Poupě published Die Kunst des Bierbrauens, a 540-page, two-volume practical guide to brewing.^[23] In it, he carefully laid out the whole process, from the brewing materials over malting, mashing and cooling, down to the rudiments of brewing chemistry. Poupě advocated several technical innovations which in his opinion made controlling the brewing procedure easier and the result more predictable: one was the thermometer, another the beer scale, a floating device for measuring beer and wort strength similar to the saccharometer introduced by the English brewing theorist John Richardson in his 1788 publication Philosophical Principles of the Science of Brewing.^[24] What set Poupě’s work apart, however, was the fact that he was one of the first professional brewers of his time to join the theoretical debate.

As in England, beer brewing became a popular subject of late eighteenthcentury German professional literature. In the absence of specialized journals, the preferred form of exchanging information, ideas, and opinions on the subject was the treatise. The Enlightened state’s pull toward modernization and rationalization of production prompted a flood of publications about the efficient management of businesses of all kind, including breweries. Few of the authors of these treatises were brewers themselves: some were scholars interested in the chemical processes associated with brewing; others were state officials and estate managers striving to maximize the profit and lower the cost of beer production.^[25] In the late eighteenth century, this brewing literature was experiencing a growth spurt: Johann Georg Krünitz, a Berlin physician and author of the mammoth Oeconomische Encyclopädie (Economic Encyclopaedia), listed in his entry about beer brewing no fewer than 86 sources, a substantial portion of them English and French.^[26] Just like the professional journals several decades later, these writings drew on, reacted to, and disagreed with each other, sometimes to the point of vilification. Even so, together they created a lively debate on the subject of brewing which new voices could join, and a body of literature others could build upon.

Poupě was one of the first professional brewers to contribute to this exchange. Throughout his treatise, he seeks to boost his credibility in a manner typical of his time: while showcasing his familiarity with theoretical literature on the subject of brewing, he never fails to stress his first-hand knowledge of the subject.^[27] He insists that he, in contrast to other authors of treatises on brewing, is not a theoretician, but a practitioner who is familiar with every aspect of the process and has verified his theoretical postulations in his practice. He emphasizes that in his book, he “has written not a word of theory which was not confirmed through practical experience.”^[28] At the same time, he draws heavily on contemporary writings about beer brewing, so much so that his treatise reads at times like a Who Is Who of late-eighteenth century brewing literature. Apart from Krünitz, whom he considers an authority but nevertheless occasionally criticizes as an impractical theoretician who, although right on the theory, has apparently never in his life set foot in a brewery, he engages with trade publications, scholarly treatises, and scientific essays. He sharply criticizes authors such as Johann Ludwig Timotheus Zitzmann, a priest from Eicha in Thuringia, whose Praktische Anweisung gutes Bier zu brauen, according to Poupě, clearly shows the author’s lack of actual expertise in brewing.^[29] He repeatedly quotes publications written not by experts but by universal scholars, for instance Johann Christian Simon’s Die Kunst des Bierbrauens, or Karl Benjamin Acoluth’s Anmerkungen über das Bierbrauen.^[30] Although not interested in analyzing the chemical processes, but rather in the practical application of knowledge, he draws on the work of the best experts of his day: the chemists Sigismund Friedrich Hermbstädt and Johann Christian Wiegleb, or the author of one of the first systematic agronomical textbooks, Johann Gottlieb von Eckart.^[31]

Poupě’s work frequently refers to sources beyond the Habsburg monarchy. In a chapter about the use of oats for malting, he references English treatises on the subject; the section on kilning builds on brewing literature published in Saxony.^[32] Although critical of some of the practices of brewers in other parts of Europe (he famously recognizes three ways of brewing: the Bohemian way, practiced in Bohemia, Moravia, and Poland; the Swabian way, done in Austria, Hungary, and Southern Germany; and the botcher’s way, allegedly to be found in Northern Germany and Scandinavia), he nevertheless draws on sources from the German states.^[33] His examples include breweries not only in the Habsburg empire, but also in Bavaria; and he writes in German, the lingua franca of the region and the widely recognized language of science, even though his native tongue is Czech.^[34]

Contrary to later popular accounts that made him into a proto-scientist among backward traditionalists and nearly a patron saint of modern Czech beer brewing, Poupě was not entirely a man ahead of his time. Rather, he represented a new type of brewer that emerged at the turn of the nineteenth century: a professional man molded by the advent of scientific inquiry into everyday occupations, increased transboundary exchange of ideas, and a rising demand for rational management of business and manufacture. He was an educated man well-versed in the expert debates within his field; he possessed international experience; and he was eager to apply theory where it promised more consistent results in his practice. Nonetheless, when Poupě died in 1805, the introduction of science into the brewing process was still in its infancy and the advent of industrial production and internationalization of the trade was still several decades away. Even though knowledge would be readily crossing borders and, as evidenced by Poupě’s treatise, the debate about the most efficient ways to run a brewery was becoming Central European in scope, most beers at the time would still be made using custom and individual experience, and they would be sourced and consumed locally. However, barely two decades later, the situation began to change dramatically.

3 The Ideal Brewers: Gabriel Sedlmayr Sr. and Gabriel Sedlmayr Jr.

In the early nineteenth-century Munich, the Spaten brewery enjoyed the reputation of a model plant. The business in the Neuhauser Gasse in the very heart of town was well-known far beyond the borders of Bavaria for its masterful Munich lagers and for its affinity to technological innovation: in 1818, the brewery introduced a so-called English kiln, a new device for drying malts which for the first time prevented the direct contact of the malt with smoke, and in 1821, it experimented with the first steam engine in Munich. Although this particular machine did not prove effective and was dismounted some years later, the urge to experiment and modernize remained.^[35]

The driving force behind these developments was the owner of the Spaten brewery, Gabriel Sedlmayr. The son of a baker and brewer from the Upper Bavarian town of Maisach, 35-year-old Sedlmayr bought the brewery, then the smallest one in Munich, in 1807 and immediately set about modernizing and expanding the business. His efforts brought the brewery economic success: in 1820 Spaten was already the third largest brewery in Munich, and by the time of Sedlmayr’s death in 1839, it was a rapidly industrializing business poised to become the city’s largest beer producer, with ice cellars extending hundreds of meters under the Isar river terraces.^[36] Gabriel Sedlmayr, however, was not only a shrewd entrepreneur and a skilled brewer, but also a technology enthusiast and amateur scientist. Convinced about the usefulness of science and formal education in the brewing business, he represented a new kind of professional brewer that, though rare in Sedlmayr’s time, began to take over the field from the 1830s on: a scientifically interested professional who placed value on formal training, paid attention to new developments in his trade, and who regarded extensive travel and international experience as useful assets or even necessary prerequisites for the successful management of a brewery.

In the 1830s, not only the brewers, but also the beer was undergoing profound changes. Bottom-fermented lager beers originating in Munich and Bavaria, where they benefited from relatively cold winters, deep, cold cellars and also, paradoxically, from a royal ban on brewing beer during the summer, fitted excellently the onset of the industrializing era.^[37] Better technology, especially more efficient cooling systems, and better roads, soon to be complemented by the first railroads, made it possible for breweries to serve larger than strictly local markets.^[38] Bottom-fermented beer was their ideal product as it spoiled less easily than its top-fermented cousin and had since the 1820s come to be regarded, at first in the German states and later in the whole of Central Europe, as a fashionable drink of the emerging middle class.^[39] As a genuine lager beer could allegedly be brewed only with Bohemian hops, and as professional brewers were travelling widely throughout the region as part of their training, international movements of materials, knowledge, and people, and the spread of the new beer style reinforced each other.^[40]

The brewers of the larger breweries emerging in the 1830s were no longer just artisans, trained only in the empirical ways of their forefathers: an increasing number of them had received formal education not only in practical brewing, but also in the rudiments of sciences such as chemistry and physics. They followed scientific discoveries and often conducted experiments themselves, or supported scientists’ work – as was the case with both the older and the younger Sedlmayr. While the father provided the Munich engineer Joseph Baader with the opportunity to test his new steam engine in his brewery, the son financially supported the physicist and – eventually – inventor of artificial cooling Carl Linde.^[41] What in Poupě’s times was a new development was now slowly becoming the norm: while Poupě, as a practical brewer, was largely reflecting the work of scientists and scholars, in the new beer brewing, the divide between brewers and scientists had become permeable.

At the time Poupě wrote his treatise, brewing and science were still to a large extent parallel universes: scientists writing about brewing rarely failed to accuse brewers of backwardness and superstition, while the few commercial brewers who authored publications about brewing dismissed scientific treatises as vain theorizing with little practical merit.^[42] Now the situation was beginning to change: among brewers who more than ever felt the need for a stable product that could be widely distributed and reliably recreated, there was a growing acceptance that scientific methods could make an actual economic difference. Formal science, for its part, was increasingly interested in the chemical processes associated with brewing. Biologists were busy trying to isolate yeast and understand its nature, with ultimate success in 1837; chemists were endeavoring to crack the mystery of fermentation. These efforts were to a large degree fueled by the state’s interest in having a reliable tool for measuring beer strength in order to tax it accordingly.^[43]

One of the preeminent scientists who focused their attention on the chemistry of brewing was Karl Balling, chemistry professor at the Prague polytechnic. The school had been offering courses in brewing and malting since 1818, one of the first to do so at a time when learned societies drew a sharp line between theory and practice and paid little attention to the latter. Balling, since he had been first employed at the polytechnic in 1824, and especially after he became professor in 1835, applied himself with great vigor to the research and teaching of brewing chemistry.^[44] After an initial focus on metallurgy, he devoted the lion’s share of his career to scientific exploration of organic chemistry and processes essential for food production. He published widely on sugar, wine, and vinegar production, but his main focus was on brewing and fermentation.^[45] In 1845 he published his monumental three-volume, 1,250-page work on fermentation chemistry, Die Gährungschemie, which experienced numerous re-editions and became the standard work on the subject in the decades to come. “In no other industry,” he wrote in the preface, explaining the need for such a study, “is there still so much empiricism, secretiveness, superstition and prejudice as in the trades based on fermentation chemistry. Precisely because they are so omnipresent, they are regarded as too common, too lowly […] and people are afraid that if they stoop to them to learn about them, they might soil themselves.”^[46] Unlike his predecessors and very much like his contemporaries, he regarded professional brewers as peers rather than as passive audience, and drew on their experience, even working closely together with some of them. Among the references in Die Gährungschemie are therefore not only works by professional scientists such as Justus Liebig or Ernst Ludwig Schubarth, but also Poupě’s treatise and an article about measuring the quality of hops written by Gabriel Sedlmayr senior.^[47] Like Balling, other scientists of the era cooperated with and reflected the scientific output of practical brewers as well: the Munich physicist and chemist Johann Baptist Herrmann drew on the older Sedlmayr’s lectures and articles, as did Lorenz Zierl, professor for agricultural science at the Munich university.^[48]

By the mid-nineteenth century, the simultaneous practical and theoretical engagement with the subject of brewing was becoming less of an exception. Gabriel Sedlmayr was quite a prolific author on various subjects connected to brewing, and he experimented with thermometers and barometers – it was his hobby to make these instruments himself – as well as with new methods of kilning. He was regarded as an authority on hop quality, making him an expert witness during an 1832 Munich scandal involving adulterated hops.^[49] He was also the first brewer to become a member of the Polytechnical Society in Munich and owned a library of German, English, and Bohemian treatises on brewing.^[50]

Elsewhere, the distance between formal science and practical brewing was growing smaller as well. In the early 1830s, a former assistant to Edward Turner, professor of chemistry at the University of London, became resident chemist at the London brewery of Truman, Hanbury and Buxton.^[51] In 1845, the star chemist Justus Liebig helped found the Royal College of Chemistry in London, a school whose mission was to bring technical education to practical professions. And around the same time, people who had trained with Liebig at the university in Gießen, such as Heinrich Böttinger or Peter Griess, were being appointed to managing positions in large British breweries in London or Burton-upon-Trent.^[52]

The first half of the nineteenth century was also a time when a technical and scientific education for brewers was increasingly seen as a must and was becoming formalized. While František Ondřej Poupě established an informal brewer’s school during his time in Brno which may have numbered as many as 31 alumni, the school did not survive the principal’s death in 1805.^[53] Other schemes, linked to existing institutions, were more successful: beer brewing was to be part of the curriculum at the Bavarian agricultural school in Weihenstephan, founded in 1803, and became firmly established there as a subject from the 1820s on. The Prague polytechnic had offered courses in brewing and malting since 1818.^[54] The emergence of such courses was driven both by the state’s need for experts capable of managing industries in an effective way, and by the brewers’ own desire to give their businesses a competitive edge.

Like an increasing number of professional brewers of his time, Gabriel Sedlmayr was a proponent of formal technical education for brewers. He had both his sons, Josef and Gabriel junior, take private courses with the scientist Johann Baptist Herrmann. Gabriel, who would eventually succeed his father as the head of the Spaten brewery, then went on to study at the Munich polytechnic with the chemistry professor Georg Kajetan Kaiser. Kaiser had close ties to the older Sedlmayr and evolved over the years into something of an academic mentor of Bavarian brewers.^[55] Studying with Kaiser, however, was not the only education Sedlmayr the Elder deemed necessary for the completion of his sons’ competencies as brewers. They needed to familiarize themselves with knowledge that transcended the borders of Bavaria. Accordingly, Gabriel junior studied at polytechnical institutes in Munich, Berlin, and Vienna, where he met a fellow brewer and a lifelong friend, Anton Dreher. Dreher, a native of Vienna, later visited the Spaten brewery in Munich in turn.^[56] The at this point still rather basic formal education, however, also needed to be complemented by transregional and, increasingly, international experience.

Increased mobility was one of the defining features of early nineteenth-century beer brewing. It became customary for brewers’ sons to go on an extensive journeyman’s tour which more and more often included the whole of Central and Western Europe. Journeyman’s tours, to be sure, were nothing new in the brewing trade, and already at the turn of the nineteenth century, extensive travel throughout the German states and the Habsburg monarchy was not uncommon for Central European brewers.^[57] The young Sedlmayrs’ – especially Gabriel’s – journeys, however, were more reminiscent in their scope of a gentleman’s grand tour than of the completion of an artisan’s training. Josef, the older son, after spending some time in Bavarian breweries, went on to familiarize himself with brewing methods in the north of Germany, and roamed as far as Moravia and Hungary in the east, and Belgium and Holland in the west. Gabriel, after a time in Bavaria and Vienna, embarked in 1833 on a journey which has become legendary in the history of beer brewing.^[58]

Accompanied by his friends and fellow brewers’ sons Anton Dreher from Vienna, Georg Lederer from Nuremberg, and Georg Meindl from Braunau, Gabriel arrived in London in the summer of 1833 and the four young brewers spent the next half a year doing what today would most accurately be described as industrial espionage. After initial difficulties, they gained access into some of Britain’s largest breweries, including Bass in Burton, by then far larger than any continental brewery, and by means of openly observing brewing processes and secretly collecting beer samples gained insights into British brewing methods. Luckily for them, they were never found out and thus, despite their rather unorthodox methods – as Gabriel confided in his father, the young Germans even had a special hollow walking stick made in order to steal beer samples unobserved – when they returned to the continent, they brought with them not only knowledge about new brewing techniques and technologies, but also contacts to British brewers. The knowledge transfer worked both ways: British brewers proved equally interested in the German way of brewing as were the continentals in British technological innovations. Just as Sedlmayr and Dreher both introduced English saccharometers in their breweries and even experimented with English ales after their return to Munich and Vienna, John Muir, a brewer the two had befriended in Edinburgh, tried his hand at bottom-fermented beers and had Munich yeast sent to him especially for this purpose. David Booth, a retired London brewer, the author of the treatise The Art of Brewing and their first contact in London, inquired in 1837 about samples of bottom-fermenting yeast and about Munich-brewed ales.^[59]

The result of the journey was a far-reaching international network of brewers with the Spaten brewery in the center: Gabriel Sedlmayr not only stayed in touch with his British peers, including Michael Thomas Bass, the owner of the formidable Bass brewery; he also maintained contact to Jacob Christian Jacobsen, the Carlsberg brewer in Denmark, to the Strasbourg brewer Hatt, and remained lifelong friends with his erstwhile travelling companion Anton Dreher.^[60] Thus, during the 1830s and 1840s, there emerged a network of brewers in Central Europe who had regular contact to one another and exchanged ideas and experiences. The Spaten brewery itself became something of a pilgrimage site in the years following the younger Sedlmayr’s tour: numerous young brewers came to Munich to be instructed in the Munich way of brewing with bottom-fermenting yeast, and the brewery became an internationally recognized flagship of lager-beer brewing and of technological innovation.^[61]

Even though the Spaten brewery arguably had more foreign contacts, and its network was denser than with most breweries, seeking inspiration and innovation abroad was slowly becoming the norm in brewing from the 1830s on. In 1839, the architect Martin Stelzer, tasked with building a new brewery in the town of Pilsen, Bohemia, sought inspiration in neighboring Bavaria and its lager breweries. Three years later, in 1842, Pilsen’s newly established burghers’ brewery looked beyond the borders of the Habsburg monarchy for modernization and for a brewer who could introduce the up-and-coming Bavarian-style lager beer in Pilsen. In one of the most famous moves in beer-brewing history, the Bavarian brewer Josef Groll came to Pilsen that same year and started brewing the soon-to-be-famous Pilsner-style beer.^[62] When the burghers of the South Bohemian town of Budweis decided in 1851 that they, too, needed to invest in a new, modern, lager-beer brewery, they sent the builder Josef Sandner, accompanied by the master brewer and one of the owners of the brewery, to Vienna to inspect the improved lager breweries of the imperial city.^[63]

While the brewers were becoming an increasingly mobile and widely travelled class, brewing materials started to travel even more widely than those using them. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, beers were mostly locally sourced: other than local sources were hard to get, owing to bad infrastructure; because of longer ways and tariff rates, they were often also prohibitively expensive. With the advent of railroad connections that began to span Central Europe from the 1830s on, and with the larger, industrializing breweries increasingly dependent on a reliable flow of resources, brewers began to seek them in places further and further away from home. The foundations of a Europe-wide trade with Moravian barley from Hanna, a region with particularly rich soils that was able to guarantee a stable supply of high-quality grain, were laid in the 1830s and 1840s, but much more prominent was the trade with hops.^[64] Required in smaller quantities than malt and therefore comparatively less bulky, hops were traded widely in Central Europe of the early nineteenth century. Franz Olbricht, the author of a contemporary publication about the properties and cultivation of Bohemian hops, remarked in 1835, not without a portion of condescension: “The Southern brewer, above all the Bavarian, confronted with the inadequate produce from Spalt, Lauf, Hersbruck and Altdorf, believes the Bohemian hops from Saaz, Auscha and Falkenau indispensable for his strong lager beers.”^[65] The supposedly indispensable Bohemian hops, however, had strong competition in Central and Western Europe: north German brewers bought their hops from England, Silesian breweries looked for supplies in Poland, and after a bad harvest in 1832, Bohemian hops were confronted with cheaper competition from both England and Poland.^[66] The Spaten brewery’s hop supply was a manifestation of this trend: in 1830, the brewery bought its hops in Bohemia, but also in Alsace, Brabant, and England.^[67] Thus, not only the brewers themselves and brewing knowledge, but also brewing materials were crossing the international borders of Central and Western Europe.

When Gabriel Sedlmayr senior died in 1839, the brewing landscape differed from the one he entered when he bought the Spaten brewery in 1807. International travel, increasing levels of formal education, dissemination of scientific and technological innovation, and mobility of materials and brewers were beginning to change the face of the trade and usher it into a new era. Still, Sedlmayr and his contemporaries, for all their international contacts and their enthusiasm for scientific discovery and technological innovation, usually remained firmly based in one region and in the fields of science and technology, they mostly played the role of enablers and interested outsiders. It was the next generation of brewers that consummated the convergence of science and beer brewing and took the industry to a truly global level.

4 The Brewer as Scientist: Anton Schwarz

Karl Balling kept teaching his brewing course at the Prague polytechnic until his sudden death in 1868.^[68] One of the students he instructed in analytical, agricultural, and fermenting chemistry was a young man named Anton Schwarz, who a few decades later would go on to become the prototypical modern brewer: a man whose experience spanned both practical brewing and scientific experiments, and whose career stretched geographically across two continents. In the careers of Anton Schwarz and other brewers of his generation, the tendencies toward making Central European beer brewing science-based and international culminated.

Anton Schwarz was born in 1839 in the small town of Polná in Eastern Bohemia into a German-speaking Jewish family. After a brief period of law studies at the University of Vienna, he took up studying chemistry with Karl Balling at the polytechnical school in Prague, with special attention paid to brewing. After graduating in 1861, he went on to become the manager of several large breweries in Budapest. After seven years spent in the Hungarian capital, he relocated once more, this time even more radically: in 1868 he crossed the Atlantic Ocean and settled down in New York.^[69] On the one hand, this move can be regarded as part of one of the most distinct phenomena of the era, mass immigration of Europeans into the United States. On the other hand, however, Anton Schwarz’ move can be read as professional mobility taken one step further, from a regional to a global level.

Schwarz’ arrival in the United States coincided with a period of explosive growth in American beer brewing. Fueled by the German immigration wave, which brought to the United States both expert producers and avid consumers of bottom-fermented lager beers, the rapidly improving railroad network which provided means of transportation and expansion of the breweries’ markets, and a population which doubled every twenty years throughout the nineteenth century, brewing was on the verge of becoming the nation’s “leading manufacturing industry.”^[70] The national shippers such as Pabst and Schlitz in Milwaukee or Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis, who specialized in lager beer and for whom nationwide shipping and expansion was a way of life, were on the lookout for means to improve the quality and stability of their product in order to be able to ship it to markets hundreds and thousands of miles away from their breweries. They embraced scientific and technological innovation as a means to attain this goal.^[71]

Until the arrival of European-born, especially German, experts in the last third of the nineteenth century, the United States lacked institutions devoted to the science of beer brewing. In his new environment, Anton Schwarz was able to put to use both his scientific training and his familiarity with Central European lager-beer brewing. Shortly after his arrival, Schwarz found employment in a brewing trade journal The American Brewer, or rather Der Amerikanische Bierbrauer, as the journal was published in German almost until the end of the nineteenth century, indicating its primary audience. Within a year, he became the journal’s editor-in-chief, and later also its owner.^[72] In Der Amerikanische Bierbrauer and its supplement, Der Praktische Bierbrauer, Schwarz published articles on topics ranging from advocating chemical analysis in the brewery, over reviews of various mashing and cooling devices, up to detailed descriptions of various innovations in brewing operations, writing a substantial portion of the contributions himself.^[73] One of his special interests was brewing with adjuncts, a topic that resonated with German-American brewers. Given the high prices of barley and the difficulties of brewing European-style lagers with American protein-rich six-row barley, brewing companies were experimenting with various substitutes, including maize and rice. Brewing with adjuncts had long been an interest of European scientists: Schwarz’ mentor Karl Balling, too, had published on the subject of adjunct brewing, in his case with potatoes and starch powder.^[74] Anton Schwarz concentrated in his research on brewing with rice and published several articles about brewing with raw cereals.^[75] Historian Maureen Ogle argues that this research was instrumental in the creation of Anheuser-Busch’s Budweiser lager which the brewery started producing in 1876 and which, apart from barley, contained a small amount of rice.^[76]

Schwarz was also an advocate of formal scientific education for brewers, modelled after European examples. Soon after his arrival in the United States, he worked towards establishing a brewers’ school in New York, an idea that only bore fruit in 1882 in the form of the proudly-named United States Brewers’ Academy. Furthermore, in 1880 Schwarz founded the First Scientific Station for Brewing, a chemical laboratory meant to raise the scientific standard of American beer brewing, in which he conducted his own experiments.^[77] He was not the only one who attempted to transport his European experience into his American existence in this way: shortly after Schwarz’s academy opened its doors, another Central European immigrant, John Ewald Siebel, who came to the United States from the Düsseldorf area of Germany in 1866, established a similar institution in Chicago.^[78]

The transnational scope of Schwarz’s activities, however, was not limited to drawing on his European training in his American professional life. His activities continued to span both continents, bringing Central European brewing knowledge (and even materials) to America, while at the same time continuing to be actively involved in Central European brewers’ networks. Schwarz apparently kept on closely following European brewing literature: in Der Amerikanische Bierbrauer he not only published original content (more often than not written by himself), but also re-printed studies by European brewers and scientists (a comparatively easy task in an era predating copyright laws). So did Der Amerikanische Bierbrauer bring to its audience of American brewers pieces written by the Bavarian biologist Carl von Nägeli and the Berlin professor of chemistry Alexander Herzfeld, but also by the Bohemian brewer working in Konstanz and in Switzerland Adolf Gustav Jeřička, and the brewing theoretician and director of the Prague brewers’ school František Chodounský, who both published in the Bohemian trade journal Der böhmische Bierbrauer.^[79] Schwarz himself regularly reported in his journal about international brewing news, including items not only from the United States, but also from Germany, Austria, France, or Denmark.^[80] Furthermore, in 1882 Schwarz served as the expert editor for the English translation of Julius Thausing’s 1877 work on brewing, Die Theorie und Praxis der Malzbereitung und Bierfabrikation. The Bohemian-born Thausing had been a professor at the brewing school in Mödling near Vienna since 1870; by making his work available to the American audience, Schwarz was acting as an ambassador of his former culture area in his current one.^[81] The title page of the English translation of Thausing’s study was also an eloquent illustration of just how important both Schwarz’s European training and his scientific credentials had become in the brewing industry: he was proudly identified as “graduate of the Polytechnic School of Prague, director of the First Scientific Station for Brewing in the United States, [and] publisher of ‘The American Brewer’.”^[82]

Despite having left the continent in 1868, Anton Schwarz continued to be active in Central European brewing networks. In 1880, he attended the German brewers’ conference in Munich, reporting about it in detail in Der Amerikanische Bierbrauer after his return.^[83] In 1892, he became a member of the Österreichische Versuchsstation für Brauerei und Mälzerei (Austrian Scientific Station for Brewing and Malting) in Vienna, and when a fellow member and Vienna chemistry professor Franz Schwackhöfer visited the United States in 1893 to learn about the American brewing industry, Schwarz acted as his host and facilitated contacts within the industry.^[84] He was even responsible for some of the movement of brewing materials from Central Europe to America: in 1888, Schwarz ordered 2.5 tons of Saaz hops from Bohemia, presumably for use in his brewers’ academy and laboratory.^[85]

For a man whose career assumed a truly transatlantic scope, it comes as no surprise that when Anton Schwarz died in 1895, his obituary appeared not only in The American Brewer, but also in Der böhmische Bierbrauer and the Austrian trade journal Gambrinus.^[86] In the person of Anton Schwarz and his peers, such as John Ewald Siebel, the convergence of practical brewing and scientific study became a new standard; mobility changed from regional to global; and Central European brewing science and brewers’ networks emerged on the global stage.

5 Conclusion

At the 1873 Vienna exhibition, the notion of beer brewing as a modern industry reliant on science and technology seemed a new development, and one that needed to be contrasted with the craft’s artisan past. Beiträge zur Geschichte der Gewerbe und Erfindungen Österreichs, a 600-page promotional publication that accompanied the exhibition and praised the advancements of Austrian industry, offered a celebratory account of the history of the brewing industry’s flagship, the Dreher brewery, that set off its current success against its humble origins. Before Anton Dreher took over, the narrative went, the Schwechat brewery had been producing “an honest-to-goodness bad top-fermented beer” that was made using obsolete methods, with the final product having been “bitter and unpleasanttasting, brown and murky in color, in short so bad that it could almost be declared injurious to health.” After such exposition, the present could only compare favorably to the past. Thus, it was only when Anton Dreher became the head of the brewery that the business turned into the model plant of Austrian beer making. Dreher Sr. was presented here as the ideal modern brewer: a well-traveled man with contacts in England, Belgium, and Bavaria, and with a good knowledge of the latest brewing science who would pioneer the use of the saccharometer, the indirectly heated kiln, and other technological innovations in his brewery.^[87] It was the international experience, the reliance on science and technology, and above all the clear break with the backward practices of the past that allowed the Schwechat brewery to emerge into modernity as the most successful business of its kind.

At the same time, the publication did not portray Dreher as a lone pioneer: as the text mentioned, Dreher always carried his copy of Poupě’s treatise on brewing in his pocket; later, “Kaiser in Munich and Balling in Prague became his guides and scientific mainstays.”^[88] Another, even more conspicuous fact blurred the distinction between the backward past and the enlightened present: the narrative’s protagonist, Anton Dreher, had himself been dead for ten years by the time of the Vienna World’s Fair. All the advances the catalog so vehemently praised lay years, sometimes decades in the past. Thus, while drawing a definitive line between the then and the now, the exhibition publication also suggested a degree of continuity in brewing modernization.

The 1870s boom of the brewing industry did not emerge out of nowhere. Just like the Dreher brewery’s success rested on its late principal’s international experience and contacts, and his interest in science, so did contemporary brewing business rely on pre-existing networks and profited from the results of a knowledge transfer that had been going on for decades. Made possible by the growing economic importance of beer brewing and a shared language, Central Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries nurtured brewing innovation and convergence between brewing industry and science. Although at first involving only a handful of brewers and breweries, networks were forged, new technologies and beer types tested and copied, and knowledge shared across regional and state borders. Decades before Anton Schwarz sailed to New York, František Ondřej Poupě traveled the Habsburg monarchy and the German states, and Gabriel Sedlmayr junior and his brewer friends undertook their legendary tour of Great Britain. Before The American Brewer printed articles written by scientists half a world away, Central European brewing debate traversed state borders with surprising ease. And long before Anton Schwarz studied chemistry with Karl Balling, Poupě and Sedlmayr senior stressed the importance of a scientific education for brewers. The 1870s did not invent the international brewing industry: the new era merely took existing networks to a global level.