This chapter traces the changing character of published literature on brewing between the 1820s and 1850s. The backdrop to this change was the slowly emerging acceptance, in a variety of manufacturing industries, that chemically trained managers could make a decisive commercial difference. The largest breweries first began to appoint chemists of their own from the 1830s, although it was not for another three decades that a group of ‘brewing chemists’ emerged large enough to function as a community, a development I will discuss in chapter 8. Across the period covered by the present chapter, only a handful of texts was published by men brewing on their own account.

In the eighteenth century, it had been possible for a brewer such as Michael Combrune to theorize about the trade, before a public audience, with no other goal than establishing himself as a credible philosopher.