Seldom, it may be imagined, even in the sphere of domestic brewing, has so small a “browst” been brewed as that described by Hone in his _Table Book_ as having been made by Widow Wood, of Beckenham Alms House. She brewed with her ordinary cooking utensils, and the fireplace of her little room; a tin kettle served her for boiler, she mashed in a common butter-firkin, ran off the liquor in a “crock,” and tunned it in a small beer barrel. She thought that poor folk might do a great deal for themselves if they only knew how; “but,” said she, “where there’s a will there’s a way.”
Among modern writers Christopher North has left perhaps the best description of what a modern private brewhouse should be. “We dare say,” he says, “that many personages who never in the whole course of their polished existences dreamed or thought of dreaming of brewing anything (except mischief), will shrug their shoulders at the idea of being introduced like his Majesty George the Third, at Whitbread’s, into an odorous brewhouse, redolent of wash, wort, grains, hops, yeast, and carbonic acid gas; peeping into pumps—tumbling into vats. Silence, good exquisite! and let us inform you—(but first take that cigar out of your mouth, or you will infallibly burn the carpet)—let us inform you that a _gentleman’s brewhouse_, like his greenhouse, his hothouse, his dairy, or even his cellar, _is no such unpleasant place_. No place, indeed, can be so that has anything of the rural about it. There is our own brewhouse at Buchanan Lodge; it might pass for a summer-house. We shall describe it to you. It stands, good reader (mark us well), at the back of the house, just at the edge of the little ravine or dell, and half hid by the laburnums. It is also separated from the other offices by a lowish beech hedge. Around, below, and opposite are growing the wild cherry, the tall chestnut, the sycamore, the fir, the thorn, and the bramble, which clothe the sides of the deep glen. From its chimneys, as soon as the soft March gales begin to blow, curls the white smoke before the hour of dawn. The fire within burns brightly. Everything is clean and ‘sweet as the newly-tedded hay.’ Precisely as six o’clock strikes we march forth—ay, even we, Christopher North—with our old fishing jacket and our apron on; our old velvet study-cap close about our ears, and our thermometer in our hand. The primroses are basking in the morning rays; the dewdrops are sparkling the last upon the leaves; the unseen violets are breathing forth sweets; the blackbird trills his mellow notes in the thicket; the wren twitters in the hedge; and the redbreast hops round the door. We enter. All is right. We try our heat. ‘Donald, a leetle more cold. That will do. { 62} In with the malt. Every grain, you hound.’ ‘Ech! Donald’s no the man to pench the maut.’ ‘Now stir, for life;’ and the active stirrer turns over and over the fragrant grain in the smoking liquid. All is covered up close, and the important mash (twelve bushels to the hogshead) is completed.
