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Brewing Science: Technology and Print, 1700-1880. By James Sumner. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013. Pp. xviii+295. $99.
By the closing years of the nineteenth century, in the wake of Louis Pasteur's and then Emil Hansen's work on yeast, science was securely established in the making of beer. James Sumner, in this revised and expanded doctoral dissertation, writes the prehistory of that success. His sources are the various British books on how to make beer, largely by unheralded authors, along with newspaper reports and advertisements as well as articles written in trade and scientific journals, where relevant pieces began to appear around 1850. His close reading makes it possible to trace a longterm shift from reliance on experience to experiment. Eighteenth-century authors typically were either veterans of breweries or writers of a philosophical bent with an inclination to universalize the exception. Each group tended to snipe at the other, with brewers said to lack learning and promoters of chemistry said not to know how breweries worked. The former were suspect since they were unlikely to reveal trade secrets and lose a competitive edge. Logically they would reveal part of what they knew, with more available...