It was a sour and muddy stream that flowed from their vats; a beverage disagreeable to the palate, and very cold and uncomfortable to the stomach. Who drank it I could never learn. It was to be found at no respectable inn. … Nevertheless the brewery of Messrs. Bungall and Tappitt was kept going, and the large ugly square brick house in which the Tappitt family lived was warm and comfortable. There is something in the very name of beer that makes money.
Mr. Tappitt's determination to brew bad beer is reinforced by the appearance of Luke Rowan, who aspires to participate in the management of the brewery and brew good beer. But Mr. Tappitt knows that would require capital investment. The brewery has been managing to make money under his direction, and he wants neither to concede any of his power nor to risk the profitability of the business with newfangled ideas. This divergence of views comes to a climax when Rowan offers to join the firm as an active partner, to allow Tappit to retire with an annual pension, or to sell his share of the business to Tappitt and then build his own competing brewery. Mr. Tappitt's response is to brandish a poker, and at the conclusion of this dramatic encounter Rowan departs, declaring that the matter will be turned over to his lawyer.
Having been accepted by Rachel, he now leaves town, and Rachel is left to the pernicious influence of community opinion, which is against the young man in his apparent effort to unseat a longstanding citizen of the community, even though he does brew bad beer. Rachel is influenced by her mother, who is in turn influenced by her spiritual advisor, the vicar Mr. Comfort, who in turn is influenced by community opinion conveyed by a disaffected colleague. And so Rachel's letter in response to her fiancé's first letter is so much less than passionate that she fears she has terminated their engagement.
So how will the matter be resolved? Here we see a second issue: a political contest. Politics fascinated Trollope, and he even entered an election himself. In this instance Tappitt supports a Jew from out of town, Mr. Hart, against young Butler Cornbury, eldest son of the neighboring squire. The author revels in the details of the campaign: slurs against the Jew by his opponents who probably know better, the raising of money, and the buying of votes. Luke Rowan reappears in town after having purchased property from Rachel's mother for the apparent purpose of building his own brewery. And Luke enters the political contest, even though he is not an elector in Baslehurst, supporting Butler Cornbury with fiery speeches. Luke is found to be a radical—that is, "he desires, expects, works for, and believes in, the gradual progress of the people," and he "will own no inferiority to the manhood of another."
The outcome of the election is determined by one vote. Cornbury is the winner, but Tappitt dreams of revenge. He is invited to a dinner of Hart supporters and chairs their meeting. He meets the unscrupulous lawyer Mr. Sharpit there and asks him to take his case against Mr. Rowan because his own lawyer Mr. Honyman has recommended capitulation and retirement.
But Mr. Tappitt has been ill, and his wife, who wants him to retire so she and her daughters can enjoy the delights of Torquay, has threatened to have him committed "under fitting restraint" if he goes to the meeting. This is the red pepper program: "There may be those who think that a wife goes too far in threatening a husband with a commission of lunacy, and frightening him with a prospect of various fatal diseases; but the dose must be adapted to the constitution, and the palate that is accustomed to large quantities of red pepper must have quantities larger than usual whenever some special culinary effect is to be achieved."
Tappitt comes home from the dinner drunk, and his wife finds him vulnerable the next morning. She refuses to let him out of bed until he agrees to invite Honeyman the lawyer back to the brewery, thus achieving a compromise that allows Mr. Tappitt to sell out and retire.
So everything works out. The author has also used our story to indulge his fondness for church affairs. Rachel's widowed sister has been attracted to the less formal side of the Church of England, and in particular to a rather unsavory clerical representative of this school of thought, one Mr. Prong, whose pride in his sermons exceeds the results. But in the end Rachel's sister Dorothea shrugs off Mr. Prong, who denies any interest in Dorothea's money but is unwilling to forgo the husband's legal right to her money.
It's all a good story. We share the author's fun with the radicals, the politics, the churchmen, the fairy godmother, and particularly with Mr. Tappitt. Rachel's romance works itself out, but perhaps more to the point, the men of Baslehurst will get better beer.