The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain during the 18th century and gradually spread throughout Europe, North America, and then the rest of the world. Britain was an almost inevitable starting point, because her homeland and Empire provided a vast source of raw materials and an ample market for manufactured goods. Most historians would agree that there were two phases of the phenomenon, the first commencing during the second half of the 18th century and the second starting around 100 years later.

Industrialization proper in Britain commenced around the second half of the 18th century when Richard Arkwright established his first cotton mill and took advantage of the many new inventions available at that time. The foundations, however, were laid a few years earlier, in 1733, when John Kay invented the flying shuttle, a device that allowed a loom to be operated at far greater speeds with half the labor. When James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny in 1764, the output of an individual worker increased eightfold. At the start of the 18th century, British textile manufacture was a wool-based cottage industry. Flax and cotton were difficult to manipulate with the equipment available in the home and formed only a fraction of raw materials. The influence of the “scientific revolution,” which started in the late 17th century, on these early events cannot be overstated. Just as spinning and weaving, previously domestic chores, were taken over by companies operating machinery, so too was brewing transforming from a cottage industry to machine-driven big business. Brewing was gradually divorced from its agrarian roots, and people moved from the fields into the cities to provide labor to the new, large brewing plants.

The harnessing of steam power was probably the singular most important aspect of the Industrial Revolution for brewers. The first (not oversuccessful) stationary industrial steam engine (1 hp) was built by Thomas Savery in 1698 and was designed to lift water, but the first safe and efficient model was credited to Thomas Newcomen. Several of his 5-hp engines were used to drain previously unworkable deep tin and coal mines. Fundamental improvements in the working principles of the steam engine were brought about by James Watt and his collaborator, Matthew Boulton, which resulted in a more constant temperature being maintained in the cylinder. Efficiency no longer depended on atmospheric conditions and was greatly increased, giving a 75% saving on coal usage.

The first brewery to install a steam engine was that of Messrs Cook & Co, at Stratford-le-Bow, just east of London, in 1777. The brewery paid £200 for a small 18-inch cylinder engine from Boulton & Watt. Henry Goodwyn’s Red Lion Brewery followed, in May 1784, with a 4-hp Boulton & Watt engine replacing the four actual horses that had worked their grist mill. Whitbread’s purchased an engine in June 1784, Calvert’s followed a year later, and Barclay Perkins 4 years later. See barclay, perkins & co. and whitbread brewery. Most of these engines were originally purchased for milling the vast quantities of grain necessary for large-scale beer production and for various pumping operations but, once installed, they soon found other uses. Indeed, one contemporary (1810) commentator on Whitbread’s Chiswell Street Brewery, said:

By 1801, 14 steam engines were operating in London breweries. The breweries that did embrace the new technology were able to expand dramatically. Whitbread, for instance, tripled their annual barrelage (to 202,000) by 1796.

Twenty-five years after converting to steam power, other factors that were to help breweries become larger and more efficient involved iron-making (blast furnace), the rediscovery of concrete, the invention of mechanical refrigeration, and improved transport links (canals, followed by railways) for raw materials and products. In northern continental Europe and the United States, improved refrigeration machines played an exceptionally vital role in the improvement of bottom-fermented beer manufacture and storage, but generally the innovations resulting from the Industrial Revolution in Britain were replicated in brewing industries elsewhere.

Cambridge social anthropologist Alan Macfarlane reckons that one of the largely understudied phenomena occurring immediately prior to the Industrial Revolution in Britain was a surge in population (which had remained static for the previous century). The infant mortality rate halved in the space of 20 years across all classes and in both urban and rural areas. Records show that there was a reduction in the incidence of waterborne disease at this time, and it was argued that a change in drinking habits back to beer (from gin) and the explosion in tea drinking (no other European nation drank more) were behind this. The antibacterial properties of the hop and the health-promoting properties of tea may well have given Great Britain the population capable of fueling the Industrial Revolution.