Beer from Coal

A tweet this morning from someone I follow put me in the direction of this gem of a film. It was made in 1959 and is part of the British Film Institute archive.



The film features some great footage of Charringtons now demolished (1976) brewery in East London and the one big change from 50 years ago is the huge scale of the brewing that went on at the time. The mash tun and coppers are something you would see at Regional breweries only today and the manuel handling of the hop pockets would need a risk assessment today! . Open fermenters are still being used in the film,these are rarely used today. The cask washing of the wooden barrels is an eye opener for those of us who have only known metal casks and the bottling line is not shown not braking down every few minutes as one owned by a modern brewery I know does.
A great bit of history in this short film.

More from the BFI archive here on You Tube