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holidays_shropshire Local Breweries holidays_shropshire holidays Shropshire, Ludlow town, local breweries, inns and ale houses, Ludlow, countryside, brewing, locally grown, real ale breweries, market, holiday cottages, holidays shropshire, You may find the text below interesting to read if you are planning to stay in our holiday cottages.  Real ale brewing, like baking was an essential part of housekeeping and ale was brewed in farmhouse, inn and alehouse. The Brewsters were usually women, who were called ale-wives, and not held in very high esteem. If they were accused of any heinous crime, real or imagined, whilst carrying out their trade there was the punishment of the ducking stool or worse, and the pay was low. Hmmm. In the year 1400 a consignment of hops came from Holland and so were reintroduced into the countryside, having not been grown in this country for a few hundred years, indeed since the Roman occupation. The first hop fields were planted in Kent. With the addition of hops the beer gained extra flavour, and because of the preservative properties of the hops it also kept for longer before going off. As soon as there was more money to be made the men took over the brewing. Not a ducking stool in sight. By the late Middle Ages ale was the only safe liquid to drink, so people did, all day and every day, in various strengths. There would be no alternative until tea arrived in the 18th century. Ale was usually made of malted barley, or occasionally wheat, these were then steeped in water and fermented with yeast. The locally grown barley grains were passed through the malting process to become maltose sugars, and malting as a trade increased in Ludlow from18 in 1770 to 30 in 1828 with many of these in Corve Street. Hops were another ingredient readily available, as there was a hop market in Mill Street selling locally grown and Worcester varieties. Until the middle of the 19th century most landlords of the inns and alehouses made their own brews in small breweries behind their inns or in their cellars, but later the inns that were housed in smaller properties were more reliant on bought in ales from other inns, or a growing number of breweries. There were many small local breweries around but the main brewery in Ludlow town was the Ludlow and Craven Arms Brewery Co Ltd. Then there came a new type of beer which was a Pasteurised sterile keg beer and a lager both of which were produced by the much larger breweries and became very cost effective and popular. The real ale breweries found they could not compete and so were forced to close down at an alarming rate around the country, from 6,390 in 1900 to less than 200 in 1970. There then followed a series of mergers and takeovers of those much larger breweries until they have become global giants, and as they have grown bigger so they have left small holes in the market behind them. These vacancies are slowly being filled by small real ale breweries so the story ends where it starts. |
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Please contact us for bookings and enquires
Tel: 01584 873418
Email: margaret@ludlow-cottage-lets.co.uk
Website created by Jane Ashbridge www.freelance-consultant.co.uk
