The practice is a bad one. The genuine, old, or entire beer, of the honest brewer, is quite a different compound; it has a rich, generous, full-bodied taste, without being acid, and a vinous odour: but it may, perhaps, not be generally known that this kind of beer always affords a less proportion of alcohol than is produced from mild beer. The practice of bringing beer forward, it is to be understood, is resorted to only by fraudulent brewers.[69]
If, on the contrary, the brewer has too large a stock of old beer on his hands, recourse is had to an opposite practice of converting stale, half-spoiled, or sour beer, into mild beer, by the simple admixture of an alkali, or an alkaline earth. Oyster-shell powder and subcarbonate of potash, or soda, are usually employed for that purpose. These substances neutralise the excess of acid, and render sour beer somewhat palatable. By this process the beer becomes very liable to spoil.
It is the worst expedient that the brewer can practise: the beer thus rendered mild, soon loses its vinous taste; it becomes vapid; and speedily assumes a muddy grey colour, and an exceedingly disagreeable taste.
These sophistications may be considered, at first, as minor crimes practised by fraudulent brewers, when compared with the methods employed by them for rendering beer noxious to health by substances absolutely injurious.
To increase the intoxicating quality of beer, the deleterious vegetable substance, called cocculus indicus, and the extract of this poisonous berry, technically called black extract, or, by some, hard multum, are employed. Opium, tobacco, nux vomica, and extract of poppies, have also been used.
This fraud constitutes by far the most censurable offence committed by unprincipled brewers; and it is a lamentable reflection to behold so great a number of brewers prosecuted and convicted of this crime; nor is it less deplorable to find the names of druggists, eminent in trade, implicated in the fraud, by selling the unlawful ingredients to brewers for fraudulent purposes.
List of Brewers prosecuted and convicted from 1813 to 1819, for receiving and using illegal Ingredients in their Brewings.[70]
Richard Gardner, brewer, for using adulterating ingredients, 100l., judgment by default.