Brewer’s Vat.details

The wonderful magnitude of the great London breweries is a familiar source of wonderment. The stacks of casks that might reach, placed side by side, from London to Eton – the vats in which parties could dine and have dined-the colossal machinery which performs the functions discharged by men and women in the puny brewages of domestic and antique beer-making – the floods of brown stout accumulated in the huge receptacles, large enough to be the reservoirs of the water companies of moderate towns – the coopers, smiths, sign-board painters, and other artisans, who lend to the interiors of the great breweries the appearance of small towns-all these matters are familiar to the flying visitors of London and their home-keeping cousins, who listen with wonderment to their tales of the metropolis.

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Sometimes, walking on the earthen floor, we pass immediately under the ranges of vats (for none of them rest on the ground), and might then be said to have a stratum of beer twenty or thirty feet in thickness over our heads; at another, we walk on a platform level with the bottom of the vats; or, by ascending steep ladders, we mount to the top, and obtain a kind of bird’s-eye view of these mighty monsters.” (p. 12)