Tower brewery

A tower brewery is a distinct form of brewery, identified by its external buildings being arranged in the form of a vertical tower.

The purpose of a tower brewery is to allow this multi-stage flow process to continue by gravity, rather than lifting or pumping the brew liquor between stages. Once the bulk raw materials, water and barley malt, are first raised to the top of the tower, they can then mostly flow downwards without requiring further pumping.

Tower breweries developed in the late Victorian period, the first examples from around 1870, the majority in the 1880s. At this time steam power was available, but not electricity. Powering a single large pumping step was practical, but multiple small pumps around a building would be much less so.

The buildings of a tower brewery are arranged as a tower with around six floors. There may be a single tower, but many breweries were less regular, with portions reaching varying heights. Only relatively small areas were needed for the highest floors. The highest point would be a small water tower, the next highest a prominent ventilated attic giving good airflow for coolers.

The brewing process comprises many stages, each taking place in their own specialised vessels. Multiple brews may be in progress simultaneously, a new brew being mashed and boiled most days, then allowed to ferment for a week in one of several sets of fermenting tuns.

Brewing begins at the top of the tower. Water is pumped up to the 'cold liquor' storage tank (5th floor), liquor being the term for the water that will become beer. The quality of this water is extremely important in brewing, often controlling the location of the brewery. In many cases it is taken from a borehole and so will already have been pumped from below ground, before being raised up the tower.

The second main ingredient in beer is barley malt. This has already been malted in a malthouse outside the brewery tower and may have been stored for some time since. The malted grains are lifted up the tower mechanically, by either a sack hoist or a continuous elevator. From here they are fed into a grist mill (4th floor) which crushes the grains to open their seed coat and allow good extraction of their contents.

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Wikipedia