Tuesday 26 May 2009

Mobile brewery

I'd heard of the brewing ships constructed during WW II, but this takes mobile brewing one step further. Given the conditions under which it was brewed, I doubt it tasted that great. The soldiers must have been glad to get any beer at all, out in the jungle.

Running Beer
The sight of mobile canteens for the Forces are not uncommon, but one learns that Lord Louis Mountbatten has gone further and has instituted mobile breweries as part of the equipment of his forward combat units on the Burma border. The apparatus is said to fit on a 15 cwt. truck - surely a feat of ingenuity when one recalls the size and complexity of even the small experimental brewing plants staged at the Brewers' Exhibition just before the war - and includes a boiler for the liquor, mash tun, copper, cooler and fermenting vessels. Three days are taken in the process, and the beer keeps for only 12 hours, but the results are said to be good notwithstanding a temperature of 95º in the shade. The only missing feature seems to be the Excise officer.
'Brewing Trade Review 1944" page 10.

2 comments:

Matt said...

Surely it would have been easier and cheaper to take crates of bottled beer.

Mike said...

Are there any photographs of these mobile breweries? It must have been quite a trip brewing beer and having to drink it within 12 hours! Sounds like an April fools gag.