Continuous Ferment: The History of Beer and Brewing in New Zealand

By Greg Ryan

Since the first brew by Captain James Cook and the crew of the Resolution at Dusky Sound in April 1773, the story of beer has been deeply intertwined with the history of Aotearoa from the early settlers' prodigious consumption of golden ale to the six o' clock swill, from prohibition to the Black Budget' , from the domination of Lion and DB to the rise of craft beer.In this remarkable story of New Zealanders and beer, Greg Ryan tackles the big questions: Why did people drink and did they do so excessively by contemporary international standards? What did people drink and in what circumstances? How did tastes change over time? What role did brewers and publicans play in the community, other than as dispensers of alcohol?Richly illustrated, astute and entertaining, Continuous Ferment is both a fascinating analysis of New Zealand' s social history and a book for anyone with an enthusiasm for malt and hops, barrels and bottles, pilsners and porters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Nov 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9781776711154

Book preview

Introduction

This book is informed by an appreciation for beer. It is not essential to enjoy one’s research topic. In many cases, this is impossible; in others, illegal or at least immoral. But, to understand the multiple roles of beer in both shaping and reflecting important themes in New Zealand history, it helps to have some appreciation of the diverse possibilities of the beverage, the settings in which it is consumed and the perspective of the drinker.

Beer is much more than a cold amber liquid for the relief of parched throats, or a putty in the hands of marketers seeking to create images without reference to taste. It is important to consider the culture of beer consumption in its own right. Why did people drink, and did they do so excessively by contemporary international standards? What did people drink and in what circumstances? How did tastes change over time? What role did brewers and publicans play in the community other than as dispensers of alcohol? To determine the impact of beer on New Zealand society is to distinguish between those who drank to excess, those who drank in calm moderation, those who abstained quietly and those who abstained noisily. Migrants to nineteenth-century New Zealand came from societies in which beer drinking was regarded as a physical and social necessity.

Yet in the writing of New Zealand history, the complexity of beer and its contribution to the social fabric have been swamped by the campaign to prohibit it. The dominance of a prohibitionist perspective is not entirely surprising. In the international historical literature on alcohol, there has been a strong focus on the emergence of temperance and prohibition in Britain and North America during the nineteenth century, and in particular the rise and fall of national prohibition in the United States. Much of this history places alcohol within the machinations of local and national politics and legislative processes. Its deleterious effects on colonised indigenous people have also been a recurring theme. Work emphasising sociability, the business of production, or sites of alcohol consumption is more the exception than the rule, although some of the more substantial examinations of these realms do tend to focus on beer more than other alcoholic beverages.

Likewise, where alcohol has appeared in the writing of New Zealand history, aside from its influence on some of the practitioners, the accounts almost entirely concentrate on its negative effects. As Caroline Daley notes: ‘New Zealand social historians have tended to focus on the wowsers of our past, the prescribers who preached a message of personal temperance if not prohibition.’¹ Indeed, the prohibition movement, at its peak from the mid-1880s to the late 1920s, tends to be portrayed as an inevitable and justifiable response to widespread drunkenness and related instability in colonial society. It would be foolish to deny that some people in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries drank more than was good for them or for those around them. Reliable evidence of drink-induced financial, physical and psychological damage is inescapable. However, an account of alcohol-induced catastrophe need not dominate to the exclusion of all other possibilities. Too much of the existing literature is uncritical, too inclined to take prohibitionist rhetoric at face value, and is largely devoid of meaningful international comparisons.²

In 1968, P. F. McKimmey traced the rise of the temperance and prohibition movement to 1893. In 1977, A. R. Grigg continued the story up to 1914, while Richard Newman provided a brief treatment of the crucial 1911 election in which support for prohibition peaked at 55.8 per cent.³ These works have become the standard sources for those few historians who have mentioned prohibition, let alone alcohol more generally, over the past half-century, including Jock Phillips’s discussion of ‘the boozer and the decent bloke’ in A Man’s Country? The Image of the Pakeha Male – A History and chapters by Stevan Eldred-Grigg in Pleasures of the Flesh: Sex and Drugs in Colonial New Zealand, 1840–1915.⁴ McKimmey and Grigg worked from the premise that there was a severe alcohol problem in pre-First World War New Zealand that needed to be addressed. Both found much of their confirmation in the opinions of prohibitionists, and neither gave much attention to the variety and complexity of those who opposed prohibition. In 2006, Paul Christoffel provided a detailed and valuable analysis of New Zealand alcohol law and policy since 1881, but his work is very much concerned with the motives and methods of those who sought to restrict rather than those who wished to enjoy alcohol.⁵

The following traces the history of beer and the brewing industry in New Zealand from the first strategic foray at Dusky Sound in 1773 to the establishment of permanent breweries alongside early Pākehā settlement amid a sense that beer was an important barometer of the quality and prosperity of a developing colonial society. Thereafter, the growth of the industry during and beyond the gold discoveries of the 1860s, and an accompanying bureaucracy for brewers, sellers and drinkers, necessarily addresses an enduring mythology about nineteenth-century consumption habits. In this context, especially as powerful players in the later brewing industry began to take shape, prohibition is seen less as a mounting crusade that failed by fewer than two thousand votes to rescue a drink-blighted country from itself in 1919, and more as a strange sort of cargo-cult movement in which progress was contested every step of the way by articulate antagonists who constantly questioned the validity of its claims.

The consolidation of New Zealand Breweries and the unlikely emergence of Dominion Breweries during the inter-war decades, and the creative strategies they used to achieve prosperity, provide some balance to the competing moral, political and industrial forces that eventually culminated in the post-war six o’clock swilling of weak beer. That misguided attempt to circumscribe drinking has assumed rather mythical proportions that tend to distract from the more nuanced beer and brewing culture either side of it, and sometimes in parallel with it. If the introduction of later closing from 1967 was only a partial victory for more civilised drinking conditions, and indeed created problems of its own, it certainly heralded some degree of liberalisation. Tastes sometimes followed international trends, although at other times they reflected what was available rather than what was desired. The account concludes with the surge of ‘craft’ brewing during the early twenty-first century, but equally the contested terrain as to what that term means and whether it matters. Caution must prevail with the notion that craft beer rescued New Zealand beer from an abyss of blandness, as the limited market share for craft beer suggests that the majority of beer drinkers have not yet shown an inclination to be rescued.

The scope must always be much broader than beer. Patterns of settlement and infrastructure, population increases and shifts, were mirrored in the appearance, and later disappearance, of breweries. The need for raw materials always linked brewing to the progress of agriculture, horticulture and the science of production. The sale of beer bound it to the complexities of licensing legislation, customs and excise, taxation, and later the subtleties and oddities of branding and advertising.⁶

There was also no question that beer, as the most widely consumed alcoholic beverage by the late nineteenth century, has always been close to the centre of national politics, where its fortunes have shifted with the economic well-being of the country and the mood of politicians who periodically saw it as a convenient source of revenue. Events that had their genesis far beyond beer, such as the 1958 ‘Black Budget’, created actual and perceived impacts for beer. Beer also intersected with the politics of race and gender in ways that were frequently paternalistic and seldom liberating. This is also a history of business practices and workplace cultures – some successful, some unsuccessful, by turns lucky and unlucky. Some, despite their best efforts, were eventually outmanoeuvred by the powerful duopoly of the later twentieth century, which itself was swallowed by global brewing empires – a development that was certainly not unique to New Zealand but perhaps had greater impact in a small market.

Above all, this is a history of consumption and to some extent places of consumption. Without those wishing to drink beer in its various forms and settings, there would be no brewing industry.

‘View, possibly of Dusky Bay, New Zealand’, watercolour by William Hodges, probably made during Captain Cook’s Second Voyage (1772–1775). Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

ONE

‘Inspissated Juice of Wort’ and Other Early Alcoholic Forays Before 1850

New Zealand’s history with alcohol is interwoven with European ‘discovery’ and colonisation, Māori having left no record of producing indigenous intoxicating liquor. Beer, which would become the national drink, appeared early, preceding permanent European settlement in New Zealand by nearly twenty years. The first brew was by Captain James Cook and the crew of the Resolution at Dusky Sound in April 1773. In practical terms, it left no legacy for the later brewing industry – other than to inspire some modern derivations ranging along the taste spectrum from subtle ale to abrasive varnish. Over the next seventy years brewing in New Zealand was sporadic and on a very small scale.

However, in other ways the Dusky Sound concoction was an important symbol of the British society that was just beginning to explore New Zealand and would come to dominate it from 1840. In that society, beer was simultaneously a drink, a food, a medicine, a comfort and a social lubricant. Those who decried the ravages of alcohol on the emerging colonial frontier of the 1820s and 1830s never had beer in mind. Indeed, despite its tentative beginnings so far from ‘home’, beer’s rise to prominence in New Zealand was inevitable as an extension of a long global history and, in particular, followed an established British culture of producing and consuming ale. Something of this lengthy and complex history must unfold before returning to Cook and his successors in New Zealand.

Beer – in its simplest form a drink fermented from cereal grains – was probably the first alcoholic drink deliberately made by humans. It has been linked to the ‘Neolithic revolution’, which transformed nomadic hunter-gathering to stable settlement perhaps around 12,000 BCE amid refinements to various agricultural techniques for the production of grain. The first evidence of fermented beverages dates from China 7000–9000 years BCE, and almost simultaneously in Sumeria, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and encompassing Southern Mesopotamia.¹ Whether by accidentally fermenting wet bread or more deliberate experiments with grains, beer soon became an essential element of both diet and ritual in evolving civilisations.

Texts from 3200–3000 BCE indicate that beer was not merely an agricultural product, but part of the centralised economy of the Sumerian states.² The Babylonians who rose to power in Mesopotamia during the second millennium BCE brewed at least twenty distinct types of beer. The pioneering legal code of Hammurabi, ruler of Babylon c. 1792–50 BCE, stipulated a daily beer ration, with amounts dependent on the social standing of the individual, along with strict and unpleasant penalties for those failing to maintain a quality beverage. Beer was also an important dietary and religious item in Ancient Egypt. It was frequently placed in tombs to accompany the dead, and 30,000 gallons a year was offered as a gift by Pharaoh Ramses II (c. 1200 BCE) to keep the favour of the gods.³

Beer reached Europe by 3600 BCE. While somewhat marginal to the Greeks and Romans who preferred wine in warmer climates,⁴ beer took a firm hold among the Teutonic peoples of temperate Central Europe, and later in Britain, especially with the decline of the Roman Empire by the fifth century.⁵ Traditionally a home-based activity carried out largely by women, termed ‘brewsters’ or ‘ale-wives’ in England, brewing also became an essential element of large institutions such as military garrisons and especially monasteries. Not only was beer necessary to supply pilgrims and other travellers, it was a nutritious drink for monks subject to a variety of fasting periods. It was also a versatile drink, in that it could be brewed with a wide variety of readily available materials and to different strengths for common use or ritual occasions – such as ‘bride-ale’ (bridal) for weddings or ‘yule-tide’ (ale tide) brews at Christmas.

The Assize of Bread and Ale enacted by Henry III in 1267 confirmed the centrality of ale to English culture and diet by establishing legal regulation of a maximum price per gallon according to a sliding scale of corn prices, thus guaranteeing both a profit for brewers and a fair price for consumers.⁶ As Richard W. Unger depicts medieval drinking patterns in Europe: ‘The prevailing presentism makes it difficult for many to comprehend a world where beer was a necessity, a part of everyday life, a drink for everyone of any age or status, and a beverage for all times of the day from breakfast to dinner and into the evening.’⁷

Until at least the late fifteenth century, the terms ‘beer’ (Anglo-Saxon) and ‘ale’ (Danish) were used interchangeably in Britain to describe the unhopped, sweet, dark drink of these times that could not be stored for long or easily transported. It was only as hops began to appear from the late fifteenth century, with their superior preservative qualities that enabled the beverage to be stored for longer, that hopped beer was distinguished from unhopped ale. By the late seventeenth century, however, with the rapid decline of the unhopped drink, ‘ale’ became the common term for beer – a historical quirk that defies logical explanation.⁸

From around the mid-fourteenth century, more of it was likely to be commercially brewed by men and the traditional role of women declined sharply. As Judith M. Bennett explains, the Black Death, which wiped out as much as half of the population of Britain and Europe during the late 1340s, left an environment with fewer customers drinking more per capita, and purchasing more from alehouses for on-premises consumption than from the homes of brewsters. As brewing became more specialised and falling grain prices made it more profitable, patriarchal control gradually squeezed women out of brewing and into lower-status roles as ale-sellers and servants to the industry.⁹

In 1689, the first year for which reliable production and consumption figures are available, per-capita English beer consumption peaked at about 832 pints per person or 2.3 pints per day, which represented 400–500 kilocalories or a fifth of daily energy requirements. Thereafter it dropped sharply throughout the eighteenth century, due to increasing competition from other beverages such as coffee, tea, chocolate drinks and spirits, not least gin. Yet per-capita annual consumption was still 154 litres (271 pints) per person for England and Wales during 1800–1804, and would remain in that vicinity throughout the nineteenth century.¹⁰ Beer was essential to weddings, christenings, funerals and seasonal thanksgivings. It was a standard feature of many working environments, and especially important for labourers during harvest, haymaking and other strenuous manual tasks.

From the seventeenth century, the preservative qualities of hops further encouraged commercial brewing as beer could more easily be stored and transported, and the final transition from a female to an almost exclusively male occupation was completed. Perhaps one-third of English beer was commercially produced by 1700, and half by 1800 as the expanding industrial revolution shifted population from country to town, eroding traditions of home brewing, while rural enclosure reduced access to brewing fuel for those who remained. The twelve largest London brewers produced 42 per cent of output for the capital in 1748, and 77 per cent in 1800.¹¹

The influence of these establishments went hand-in-hand with a significant change to the preference of London beer drinkers, which would also figure prominently in early New Zealand tastes. By the 1720s there were at least thirty beer styles available in London, ranging across a wide spectrum of taste and strength. Many of them were blended prior to consumption. But gradually, as it was discovered that the traditional working-class staple of strong, dark-brown, bitter beer became much better if left to mature for at least twelve months, a style known as ‘porter’ came to dominate – named for the thousands of porters in London who carried goods from place to place and needed a refreshing and nutritious beer to sustain them. Heavily hopped to balance the sweetness of the malt, porter was perhaps 6 per cent alcohol by volume (abv) but not fully attenuated – meaning that not all of the malt sugars were turned to alcohol during the brewing process, and some therefore remained in the beer to provide energy to drinkers. However, the time required to mature porter determined that its manufacture was largely the preserve of those with sufficient casks and cashflow to store it until ready for sale.¹²

Meanwhile, despite a reputation for the production and consumption of spirits, both Ireland and Scotland witnessed strong growth in brewing by the mid-eighteenth century, especially of porter. While the brewing traditions of lowland Scotland would later become especially significant to New Zealand, the establishment of a brewery at St James’s Gate, Dublin, by Arthur Guinness in 1759 is the most enduring symbol of the Irish brewing industry. By the 1880s Guinness was the largest brewery in the world, responsible for 60 per cent of Irish output and with a strong presence in English and international markets.¹³

Given its cultural significance, provision had to be made for beer as Britain extended its commercial and political influence further afield. It became a standard English sea ration from the fourteenth century, both as a luxury to counter the hardships of life at sea, and more importantly as vital food and medicine and a widely regarded preventative, if not a cure, for scurvy – the scourge of long sea voyages that is said to have caused more losses than enemy action for the British Navy during the eighteenth century. Yet even in its hopped form, the relatively limited keeping quality and bulk of beer posed significant challenges on the long voyages of commerce and exploration that were becoming a regular feature of eighteenth-century maritime expansion. Spirits, especially brandy and later rum, were deliberately used as a substitute for beer. While these met the need of sailors for alcohol, they did not offer the perceived nutritional and medicinal benefits of beer.¹⁴

With the cause of scurvy remaining uncertain until the isolation of ascorbic acid (vitamin C) in 1932, the eighteenth-century medical profession was awash with theories and procedures for its cure. The British Admiralty sponsored numerous experiments to test them – but always with the proviso that any potential anti-scorbutic for a long sea voyage should be stable for at least a year, preferably two, and not be bulky.¹⁵

With the almost universal faith in the medicinal qualities of beer, it quickly entered the lexicon of scurvy cures. Among the most influential were the views of Dr David Macbride, who characterised scurvy as a disease of putrefaction that could be inhibited by the production of ‘fixed air’ (carbon dioxide) as occurred in fermentation. Any food that fermented quickly in the digestive tract would help to counter putrefactive disease. However, as beer derived all of its fixed air from the malt of which it was made, Macbride concluded that malt rather than beer would be more effective on long voyages as it took up less room and was likely to last longer.¹⁶ Others, drawing on North German and North American brewing traditions, advocated types of spruce beer, which had added vegetable matter such as the fresh leaves of spruce fir trees or the essence of these.¹⁷

Dried malt was taken on James Cook’s 1768–71 Endeavour voyage, with a certain amount being ground each day, mixed with boiling water, allowed to stand for several hours and then issued to the crew at the rate of at least 1 quart per person per day. A prominent surgeon, Nathaniel Hulme, also apparently provided Joseph Banks with directions for brewing spruce beer, but there is no evidence that this was done.¹⁸

In January 1772, Henry Pelham, secretary to the commissioners of victualling, wrote to the Admiralty recommending ‘inspissated juice of wort’, which was made by boiling most of the water away from wort (unfermented beer), or ‘inspissated juice of beer’ (already fermented). This technique had emerged earlier in the century among brewers attempting to reduce excise duties by paying them on smaller quantities of beer before adding water. As beer was mostly water, a concentrate would take up less space and a strong concentrate would keep better. The Admiralty promptly ordered supplies of both inspissated juice of wort and beer for Cook’s second voyage aboard Resolution and Adventure, and also trialled it on ships bound for the Falklands.¹⁹ Cook brewed at sea in August and November 1772, but found that in hot climates and due to the movement of the ship the inspissated juice fermented uncontrollably and a considerable quantity was lost as it forced its way out of its casks. But he noted on 20 September that ‘The beer made from this juce is of a very deep Colour, something of a burnt taste and without bitter and must be drinked soon after it has done fermenting otherways it turns hard and will sour.’²⁰

More consistent results were enjoyed when New Zealand’s first brewing began in the cooler climate of Dusky Sound, Fiordland, on 1 April 1773. Cook recorded in his journal: ‘The Juce deluted in warm Water in the proportion of Twelve parts Water to one part Juce made a very good well tasted small Beer’.²¹ In his official account of the voyage published in 1777, he presented the recipe in more detail.

We at first made our beer of a decoction of the spruce [rimu, Dacrydium cupressinum] leaves; but, finding that this alone made it too astringent, we afterwards mixed with it an equal quantity of the tea plant [mānuka, Leptospermum scoparium] (a name it obtained in my former voyage, from our using it as a tea then, as we also did now), which partly destroyed the astringency of the other, and made the beer exceedingly palatable, and esteemed by every one on board. We brewed it in the same manner as spruce beer, and the process is as follows. First make a strong decoction of the small branches of the spruce and tea-plants, by boiling them three or four hours, or until the bark will strip with ease from the branches; then take them out of the copper, and put in the proper quantity of molasses, ten gallons of which is sufficient to make a ton, or two hundred and forty gallons of beer. Let this mixture just boil; then put it into casks, and to it add an equal quantity of cold water, more or less according to the strength of the decoction, or your taste. When the whole is milk-warm, put in a little grounds of beer, or yeast if you have it, or anything else that will cause fermentation, and in a few days the beer will be fit to drink. After the casks have been brewed in two or three times the beer will generally ferment itself, especially if the weather is warm…. Any one who is in the least acquainted with spruce pines will find the tree which I have distinguished by that name. There are three sorts of it: that which has the smallest leaves and deepest colour is the sort we brewed with, but doubtless all three might safely serve that purpose.²²

On 5 April, second lieutenant Charles Clerke wrote ‘got Beer on board for the People and stopt their Spirits – this Beer I think is a very palatable pleasant drink; the Major part of the People are I believe of the same opinion, for they seem to drink pretty plentifully of it’. The Swedish naturalist (and evident cocktail aficionado) Anders Sparrman added: ‘After a small amount of rum or arrack has been added, with some brown sugar, and stirred into this really pleasant, refreshing, and healthy drink, it bubbled and tasted rather like champagne.’²³

Although this beer used inspissated juice of wort (rather than beer), molasses and spruce, it seems that Cook soon concluded that he could have brewed with molasses and spruce alone, as there was no distinct advantage in inspissated juice as a fermentable, and it was the fixed air rather than the fermentable that was believed to prevent scurvy. Indeed, while Cook brewed again in New Zealand on his third voyage, at Queen Charlotte Sound, in February 1777, there is no firm evidence that the juice was used again.²⁴

After the second voyage Cook reported to the Admiralty that ‘wort made with malt is without doubt one of the best antiscorbutic sea medicines yet found out’, and that it would be a ‘Valuable and useful Article’ if it could be prevented from fermenting in hot weather. However, he qualified this with the observation that ‘If given in time it would, with proper attention to other things, prevent the scurvy from making any progress, but would seldom be found to cure it.’²⁵

Although it may have had some limited effectiveness because germinated barley contains substantial amounts of ascorbic acid, some of which may have remained in Cook’s malt, the very low rates of scurvy on his voyages were more likely due to various other substances used, such as sauerkraut, mustard and marmalade of carrots, and a strict regime of cleanliness. But so many were used simultaneously that it was impossible to determine which actually worked. Certainly, by the mid-1780s, following severe outbreaks of scurvy on a number of voyages on which malt was issued, there were growing doubts about its effectiveness as an anti-scorbutic. Moreover, while some crews were happy to accept essence of wort as a medicine, they were less enthusiastic about its use as a substitute for beer.²⁶

Nevertheless, Captain George Vancouver, who had sailed with Cook on his second and third voyages, remained faithful to the remedy and brewed spruce beer when his ships Discovery and Chatham reached Dusky Sound in November 1791. As a journal of the voyage recorded:

Thus we quitted Dusky bay, greatly indebted to its most excellent refreshments, and the salubrity of its air. The good effects of a plentiful supply of fish, and spruce beer, were evident in the appearance of every individual in our little society. The health of our convalescents was perfectly re-established, and excepting one with a chronic complaint, and two wounded by cuts in their legs, we had not a man on the surgeon’s list; though, on the most trifling occasion of indisposition, no person was ever permitted to attend his duty.²⁷

But in 1795, against mounting evidence, the Admiralty officially adopted lemon juice for use against scurvy, and in 1798 all issue of malt for this purpose was stopped.²⁸ New Zealand’s first foray into beer and brewing was at an end, but it would not be absent for long.

As the nineteenth century opened, New Zealand became home to a motley collection of sealers, traders, whalers and escaped convicts from Australia, who generally worked hard and drank harder. From 1814 they were joined by missionaries who condemned their alcoholic excesses and despaired at the likely impact of drink on Māori. New Zealand therefore followed a pattern familiar to any number of rugged and mostly male frontiers in which drink, and spirits in particular, were ubiquitous as European exploration and commerce encircled the globe. Yet the emphasis on the demands and perils of frontier life as a cause for drinking clearly ignores the parallel influence of drinking cultures from which all of these European visitors and settlers came. There were certainly differences in New Zealand, but also much that was familiar, including a clear distinction between beer and other alcoholic beverages, not least by the most remote offshoot of the British and Foreign Temperance Society.

The drinking habits and attitudes characteristic in New Zealand were very much a reflection of both the entrenched traditions and growing resistance to particular forms of drinking within British society at the time. These would underlie developments on the new frontier. In Britain, alcohol was still a main beverage of choice through much of the nineteenth century, as there were few safe alternatives. Although technological change improved the quantity and quality of water available, and notwithstanding added urgency from the discovery of a link between cholera and waterborne sewage by John Snow in 1854, progress could hardly keep pace with the rapid growth of cities. Mains water supplies were limited even in upper-class households until the 1850s, and water storage only improved when iron piping replaced wood. Even by the 1870s there was still much unsafe water in London, and many believed that it should not be drunk unless purified with spirits.

Likewise, uncertainty about the processing and storage quality of milk remained until at least the 1870s, when the development of refrigeration and the expansion of railways enabled more efficient delivery from country to city. But per-capita consumption was still very low during the 1880s, and milk was not widely accepted as a drink until the 1930s. Other thirst-quenchers, such as soda water and cordial, were only beginning to enter common usage during the early nineteenth century, but not always with the affordability or accessibility of alcohol. Coffee consumption increased until the 1840s, when it was superseded by tea, which dropped in price with decreased taxation following the Napoleonic Wars. Ginger beer became popular around the same time, but it was also noted during the 1890s that many of those purchasing it in pubs wanted it mixed with spirits.²⁹ In New Zealand, the water may initially have been safer, but this did not last. Other beverage choices were shaped by the vagaries of import networks and the preferences that arrived with the settlers.

Regardless of the availability of alternatives, alcohol continued to be sought for its medicinal properties and was frequently prescribed by doctors. It assisted dentists and surgeons, quietened crying babies, and was believed to impart physical stamina to workers, act as a barrier against cold, cleanse the system, cure indigestion, and act as a painkiller, especially for the poor, who regarded pain as a disease in itself rather than a symptom of disease. While medical science began to question these ideas by the 1860s, and not least the view that fatter beer drinkers embodied superior physical strength, the use of alcohol for medicinal purposes endured along with the idealisation of a rotund John Bull, tankard in hand.³⁰

Brian Harrison also observes that drinking places ‘mirrored the interests and needs of their localities; broadly speaking, their two main roles were as recreation centre and as meeting place’. The inn, tavern or alehouse was often preferable to a cold, crowded and noisy home. Indeed, ‘Light, heat, cooking facilities, furniture, newspapers and sociability were then obtained by the poor only at the drinking place.’³¹ Paul Jennings adds that the pub was also strongly linked to conceptions of English identity and the notion that as a community institution it was unique to England.³² In an age with a relative prevalence of solitary occupations, these establishments provided important human contact as well as serving as local news centres and venues for all manner of formal and informal meetings of trades, travellers, societies and reform campaigners. Even as organised sport and leisure began to capture the popular imagination during the nineteenth century, the public house remained a significant provider of recreation and entertainment.³³ Its role among the rudimentary settings of colonial New Zealand was to be even more pronounced.

At a psychological level, especially during a time of unsettling social change as the industrial revolution took hold, alcohol and drinking places undoubtedly eased fear in those for whom catastrophe and economic disaster were not far away. As Harrison explains: ‘Such places brought temporary harmony into the disordered lives of many bored, exhausted or exploited individuals.’ Yet he also stresses the positive dimension of alcohol as a social lubricant in many rituals of community interaction and celebration, not only moderating gloom but enhancing festivity.³⁴ To this Paul Jennings borrows from William James in positing alcohol as perhaps a variety of religious experience – ‘the great exciter of the yes function in man’, bringing the drinker ‘from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core’.³⁵

Improvements in housing, the impact of the railway on patterns of travel and meeting, changing leisure patterns and the emergence of other public buildings, such as town halls and libraries, all gradually altered the role of the public house from the mid-nineteenth century. But there were still complaints by the 1870s that England had largely failed to grasp the continental model of cafés or other alternative eating and drinking establishments. Indeed, these were to take hold only slowly in Britain amid an enduring devotion to, and nostalgia for, the communal role of the pub in both town and countryside.³⁶

Nevertheless, there was always a kernel of opposition to drink, and more specifically to excessive drinking. Notwithstanding the monastic tradition, elements of organised religion had attacked drunkenness from at least Anglo-Saxon times, partly due to its association with pagan rituals and partly from a humanitarian sense of the productive and balanced life of moderation. From the early sixteenth century, England witnessed a succession of licensing legislation to preserve public order and conserve grain. While a few had always demanded total abstinence, a gradual increase in spirit drinking from the late seventeenth century, especially the ‘Gin Craze’ of the first half of the eighteenth, drew stronger reactions.³⁷ Meanwhile, the beginning of the industrial revolution, with its greater emphasis on regular work time and discipline, discouraged anything such as drunkenness that would undermine the productivity of the workforce.

The Licensing Act 1753 was the first to require alehouse licensees to provide evidence of good character. Licences also had to be renewed annually rather than being granted in perpetuity. In 1787, under the influence of politician, philanthropist and abolitionist William Wilberforce, George III issued a Royal Proclamation for the Encouragement of Piety and Virtue, and for the Preventing and Punishing of Vice, Profaneness and Immorality. This, in turn, empowered magistrates to enact further restrictions against the licensed trade.³⁸

From the early nineteenth century, reports of growing anti-spirits and later temperance sentiment began to trickle into Britain from the United States, at the same time as a variety of other evangelical, moral reform and self-improvement movements, such as the Lord’s Day Observance Society and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, began to gather momentum. In 1829–30, an anti-spirits movement emerged simultaneously in Ireland and Scotland. In England it was no coincidence that the movement achieved its early successes in the industrial heartlands of Lancashire and Yorkshire. The British and Foreign Temperance Society was formed in 1830, with a number of brewers among its supporters.³⁹

But contradictions quickly appeared in the movement. Condemnation of spirits in predominantly spirit-drinking areas singled out the poor while leaving the wealthy free to indulge in wine. On other occasions beer drinkers got more drunk than spirit drinkers. As Harrison notes: ‘So pronounced were regional variations in drinking habits that only a teetotal pledge could achieve in beer-drinking rural England and Wales what an anti-spirits pledge could achieve in spirit-drinking Ireland and Scotland.’⁴⁰

Within this gradually evolving drink and anti-drink environment, the Beer Act of 1830 brought dramatic if perhaps short-term change. With the rise of commercial brewing through the eighteenth century came strong objections to brewer monopolies, especially to their ‘tying’ of licensed establishments to supplying only their beer. Some also argued that the restriction of licences by magistrates greatly increased the value of those remaining.⁴¹ Reports of the adulteration of beer also added to perceptions of brewer corruption. In 1814, 14,000 Londoners signed a petition against adulteration and high beer prices. Many felt that the problem was a lack of competition and the failure of previous legislation to curb the power of the brewers.⁴²

In 1830, the Duke of Wellington’s Tory Government, ever devoted to the gospel of free trade, introduced the Beerhouse Act ‘expedient for the better supplying the public with Beer in England, to give greater facilities for the sale thereof, than was then afforded by licences to keepers of Inns, Alehouses, and Victualling Houses’.⁴³ The Act allowed any householder assessed on the poor rate, and on payment of 2 guineas to the local excise office, to open their house between 4 a.m. and 10 p.m. to sell beer and cider only. They were free from the requirement of alehouses, inns and taverns to obtain a licence from a magistrate, but subject to a £20 penalty if they sold wine or spirits. The excise duty on beer was also abolished, leaving only that on malt and hops. The intention was to erode the brewer monopoly, encourage the drinking of beer rather than spirits, especially gin, and to bring lower prices and improved quality to the consumer through competition with existing establishments. Within six months from October 1830, more than 26,000 new beer shops opened in England, and nearly 46,000 by 1838, of which perhaps 40 per cent brewed their own beer.⁴⁴

Yet the imagined paradise for drinkers never arrived. A temporary rise in beer consumption during the early 1830s levelled off by 1840. Many of those who did not brew their own quickly became tied to brewers for their supplies. Among those who did brew, and among the established breweries, there was increasing evidence that cost-cutting competition produced poor-quality, often adulterated, beer.⁴⁵ Real and imagined problems with social order in so many largely unregulated drinking places also drew opprobrium to the Act. As Lord Palmerston observed in 1853: ‘The words licensed to be drunk on the premises are by the people interpreted as applicable to the customers as well as the liquor.’⁴⁶ The Act was not, however, substantially amended until 1869.

If the Beerhouse Act did not have a long-term impact on those who drank, it did galvanise the forces opposed to drink. While some moderationists remained keen to promote the consumption of beer, the ‘temperance drink’, at the expense of spirits, an increasingly vocal cohort of teetotallers argued for total abstinence. From the 1850s, as later chapters will explain, they also moved away from moral suasion to advocacy of prohibition by legislation to achieve their goal.⁴⁷

However, the impact of the teetotallers on Britain should not be exaggerated. Between the 1820s and 1860s per-capita beer and wine consumption and the number of drink-selling outlets increased. The only partial victory was a slight decline in the per-capita consumption of spirits from 5 litres in 1840 to 4.4 in 1860, although it peaked again at nearly 6 litres in 1875. Certainly there was an influential and literate group of temperance ‘opinion-makers’ by mid-century, but the committed movement numbered well under 100,000 during the 1860s. Throughout the nineteenth century, publicans and brewers continued to enjoy wealth and respectability within communities, and the latter group secured a significant stake in local and national politics.⁴⁸ It will be seen in later chapters, however, that the cause of temperance and ultimately prohibition took a firmer hold on New Zealand and other new-world societies in which notions of a fresh start, respectability and progress through diligence and self-improvement in a new setting held greater sway.

As European contact with New Zealand expanded from the late eighteenth century, it brought with it a strong, if sometimes contested, tradition of alcohol consumption and of the drinking place as central to the community. Moreover, the new land was something of a blank slate, in that, with the possible exception of fermented tutu juice, no intoxicating drink was known to Māori until the arrival of Europeans. Accounts from a number of early explorers note Māori aversion to alcohol and descriptions of it as ‘wai piro’ (stinking water) or ‘wai kaha’ (strong water).⁴⁹ The prevailing European drinking culture during the early years of settlement was unlikely to affect this view.

The sealers, traders, whalers and convicts, who flirted with the coast of New Zealand from the early 1790s and began to congregate in larger numbers in the north after 1800, were hardy adventurers and perhaps more likely to have a predilection for alcohol than most of their counterparts in Britain and Europe. A transient, almost exclusively male, population generally lacks a sense of social obligation, and is subject to few restrictions around its drinking behaviour. This was accentuated by the use of alcohol as a currency in an environment where real money was meaningless. Whalers were frequently paid in food and rum, and it was traditional to indulge after the capture of a whale. The supply of alcohol in New Zealand during the early nineteenth century may also have been enhanced by the fact that no customs duty was payable in New South Wales on alcohol brought from New Zealand. There is evidence that some merchants shifted alcohol through New Zealand, and that some was landed at the Bay of Islands directly from the United States before most of it was sent on to Sydney.⁵⁰

Nor was Sydney short of alcohol for the New Zealand market. Although the convict colony in New South Wales was almost certainly not as constantly soaked in alcohol as most accounts have suggested,⁵¹ very quickly after their arrival in the early 1790s officers of the New South Wales Corps exploited their position and wealth to monopolise imported rum and other spirits, and exchange these for goods and labour at very favourable rates. Despite the efforts of successive governors to control the trade, ‘The Rum Corps’, as it became known, ensured that alcohol remained the dominant currency of New South Wales until after 1810, when the regiment was recalled and Governor Lachlan Macquarie was finally able to establish coinage.⁵²

Nevertheless, Sydney remained a vital supply base. Customs records for January to August 1830 show that New South Wales alcohol exports to New Zealand amounted to 3300 litres of beer, 11,000 litres of rum and whisky, and 7300 litres of brandy and gin – for a European population probably well under a thousand. And this takes no account of supplies secured from Hobart or other sources.⁵³ Notably absent from the exports to New Zealand was a significant proportion of beer; not surprisingly, as it was a relatively bulky and sometimes unstable export commodity compared to spirits. Although brewing had begun in Sydney during the early 1790s and there were fifteen breweries in New South Wales by 1833, along with another twenty-one in the more temperate climate of Tasmania, there is no record of whether any of the local production was sent across the Tasman.⁵⁴

Of the spirits sent to New Zealand, there was no guarantee of quality at point of departure or in the hands of those responsible for distributing them. When asked his method for prolonging the rum supply, Geordie Toms, head of a whaling station in Queen Charlotte Sound during the 1830s, reportedly explained: ‘When I takes out a glass of rum, I puts in a glass of water; when it gets too strong of water, I puts in turps; and when it gets too strong of the turps, I puts in bluestone.’⁵⁵

Not surprisingly, accounts of alcoholic excess were numerous, although one always has to remember that most of them were written by those, such as missionaries, with a vested interest in emphasising depravity in the hope that it would prompt more formal British intervention in New Zealand. Samuel Marsden, New South Wales chaplain and instigator of the Church of England’s missionary activity in New Zealand, observed of the Bay of Islands in the early 1830s: ‘Here drunkenness, adultery, murder, etc are committed…. Satan maintains his dominion without molestation.’⁵⁶ Edward Markham, a visitor in 1834, labelled it ‘a wicked world and full of drink’.⁵⁷

The following year, Charles Darwin, arriving at the Bay of Islands during the historic voyage of HMS Beagle, lamented: ‘Besides a considerable native population there are many English residents. These latter are of the most worthless character; & amongst them are many run away convicts from New South Wales. There are many spirit shops, & the whole population is addicted to drunkenness & all kinds of vice.’⁵⁸ Writing in 1837, Marsden’s daughter Martha was equally disparaging: ‘The publicans are under no restrictions. They can receive into their houses whomsoever they think proper, having no one to control them – hence they are totally neglectful of all order and any appearance of morality.’⁵⁹

But a more palatable alternative to spirits was on offer to at least some in the Bay of Islands. Murdoch Riley suggests that ‘beer’ was made by missionaries and Māori from sow thistle juice, supplejack roots, mataī sap, kohekohe bark and bush honey, among other things.⁶⁰ But the details are unclear. With more certainty, home brewing can be inferred from the planting of hops. On 1 August 1821, Rev. John Butler noted in his journal that he had dressed a bed of hops: ‘I have fourteen hills which look exceedingly fine, as the plants are very strong. I brought a single root from Port Jackson, and planted the whole fourteen hills from it last spring; and I gathered a small sprinkling of fine hops from them in the season. I hope this year they will produce a good full crop.’ However, no mention is made of any production using the hops.⁶¹

Sometime during 1835 Joel Samuel Polack, a trader and land speculator originally from London, established the first permanent brewery in New Zealand at Kororāreka (Russell).⁶² The brewery plant and a supply of hops were imported from Sydney and a brewer from Hobart. In 1840 Polack claimed that the brewery was inspired

as a preventative to the then rapid spread of deleterious spirits that were consumed, less probably from taste, than the want of an invigorating substitute…. The natives after some little practice in quaffing soon became to relish it and baskets of potatoes, packages of fish, etc, soon found conveyance to Parramatta [Polack’s property], in exchange for pierian drafts of New Zealand beer.⁶³

No other account of this brewery has survived, and whether Polack’s professed concern for the well-being of his fellow residents was greater than a desire for profit will never be known. But the brewery was evidently a success until his departure for England in 1837. He returned in 1842, but there is no evidence that he brewed again.⁶⁴

Shortly after Polack began production, the cause of beer received another fillip from respectable elements of the Bay of Islands community. The missionaries were certainly not averse to alcohol, but they were at the forefront of growing concern about drunkenness and the consumption of ‘ardent spirits’ during the early 1830s, especially as they feared that Māori might be enticed away from previously abstemious habits and would then be more difficult to convert to Christianity. By 1834 most missionaries were in favour of a total prohibition against the importation and sale of alcohol.

In September 1835 a resolution against spirits was passed at Paihia, and a public meeting at Hokianga declared in favour of the ‘total and immediate abolition of the importation and sale of ardent spirits’.⁶⁵ This resolution was communicated to Governor Bourke in New South Wales, who urged a public proclamation of such a law to all visiting vessels. Naturally there was resistance from some traders, but also from James Busby, the British Resident at Waitangi, who resolved not to acknowledge the measure until it was passed by a meeting of all chiefs in the north. Given the lack of formal British jurisdiction over New Zealand before 1840, there was little choice in the matter. By early 1836 the failure of a prohibition at Hokianga was evident. In April Henry Williams, the most prominent Anglican missionary, observed that a similar failure was likely at the Bay of Islands without a properly constituted authority to enforce it, especially in the context of other tensions between Christian and non-Christian Māori. Supporters of prohibition therefore turned to temperance, with persuasion rather than compulsion as their only viable option.⁶⁶

In March 1836 a temperance meeting was held at Hokianga at which eighty Māori and five Pākehā signed a temperance declaration. Eliza White, wife of Wesleyan missionary William White, observed: ‘We hope the object will be gained to prevent the drinking of this liquid fire by these poor simple natives who are so sadly led by the white people.’⁶⁷ On Wednesday, 11 May, a public meeting attended by fifty people was held at Kororāreka at which the New Zealand Temperance Society was established. Its preamble was unequivocal:

Whereas the evils of Intemperance from the use of ardent spirits have arisen to an alarming height