There would be five or six pails of wort in the underdeck after
this process.

The next morning the yeast was strained off and the
beer put into casks. These were left uncorked, and by the
next day, a little yeast would have worked out of the
bunghole. The remainder of the yeast was carefully
skimmed off and the same process repeated for three or
four days. The casks were then bunged down.

 In the meantime, the copper had been filled with four pails of
water. When this water boiled it was poured onto the mash left
in the tub to make the second wort. The second wort stood for

four hours as did the first.
 The first wort was then taken from the underdeck, poured into

The beer was left at least a week before being drunk;
although people who liked young beer often tapped the
casks before the lapse of this period. As a variation on the
above process, some brewers reserved three or four pails of
the first wort and placed two handfuls of clean wheat into
the cask with the beer. This would keep for a year, as all
the time the beer would be feeding off the wheat.

the copper and three quarters of a pound of hops were added
to  it. This was  boiled up with  the hops until the second wort

was ready to be  drained  off. The  first wort was  then drained
through  the  hair-sieve  into  the  underdeck.  The  second  wort

was drained off  from the mash and  then boiled in the copper
for four hours,  exactly  as the  first wort. The hops were used
for  a  second  time  with  quarter  of  a  pound  of  unused  hops

The process sounds magical, romantic, and to modern
eyes, accustomed by the exquisite but discriminating
watercolours of Helen Allingham or Birket Foster, and by
the romantic recreations of period films, the Victorian
village looks an idyllic place. No cars, no fertilisers,
homemade food and drink, none of the stresses and strains
of modern life: all is picturesque and appealing.

added to it.  Before the hops had  been  added to the wort  this
was known here as ‘sweet watt’ and was much sought after by
the children who would be just allowed to taste it.

 After the wilch had been taken out of the brewing tub, also the
remaining drains  of malt,  the  second wort was then  strained
off  into it to  cool. The second wort  gave small or mild  beer;

the  first  wort  -  if  kept  separate  -  strong  beer.  But  in  many
places the two worts were mixed  together  to  give nine or  ten
pails - about twenty gallons - of beer.

In fact both the Victorian urban and suburban middle
classes were so enamoured with Helen Allingham’s ‘lovely
little transcripts’ of everyday life and pleasantly prettified

One  pint  of  yeast  was  added  to  the  beer  when  it  was  milk-
warm.  A  couple  of  clean  corks,  or  a  slice  of  toasted  bread,
were placed on top of the beer; the yeast was poured in and as
it  began  to  work  it  collected  around  the  corks.  When  this

village sketches of Mary Russell Mitford that they were
never out of print, with the Victorians warming to Mitford’s
‘busy, merry, stirring little world’  which  offered  no
reassurance to those living in desperate poverty.

process began and the pleasant sight of the mushroom of yeast
starting  to form  around  the  corks,  the  brewer knew that  the
beer could be left to itself.6

One of the more hard-headed of the social explorers,
G.F. Millan, a journalist and special correspondent for the
Liberal
pictures of that idyll-that-never-was. In his description of a
village in Suffolk bordering on Essex he paints a delicious
but flawed scene:

Here is a vicarage garden with a party at lawn tennis; yonder
through  that  woody  vista  is  a  small  company  of  harvesters;
now you have a rosy looking woman shaking down the plums

preserving yeast by dipping handfuls of birch twigs in liquid
yeast, hanging them up to dry and keeping them for the next

brewing session, when one of these small brooms was thrown into
the wort. It was then extracted and used for the next brew.