Resistance by the Pint: How London Brewers Shaped the Excise and Created London’s Favorite Beer

Abstract

Abstract This study focuses on the methods that brewers in London employed to mitigate the increasing burden of taxation from the state in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and how those methods came to shape the collection of the excise. Brewers employed a multitude of strategies to mitigate their tax burden, from hiding raw materials and products, to bribing excise officials, to the most successful strategy used by brewers, brewing an extremely strong beer concentrate that would be watered-down by consumers. It argues that the resistance of brewers and consumers in London to the state’s ability to interfere in the industry through excise taxation was vital to the creation of a professionalized excise establishment in the early eighteenth century and helped to shape the preference for eighteenth-century London’s preferred beverage, porter.