This article was published simultaneously on the personal blog 
Thorne in Westminster The brewery was rebuilt in the mid-1830s: it would not have been so big when William Helliwell saw it
in Charing Cross Station Next door Calvert's on the Thames , he first visited the Porter Brewery. The attractions he visited included a mash barrel 30 feet in diameter and 8 feet deep, containing 120 A quart of malt weighs approximately 19 tons of grain. The largest of the two coppers holds 1,200 barrels and includes a mechanical bubbler powered by steam to prevent the hops from sinking to the bottom. The brewing water was stored in a cast-iron reservoir on top of the brewery, which was as large as a quarter of an acre of land, that is, about 120 feet long and 90 feet wide. There are four coolers , each 126 feet by 20 feet, and fermenters which are like little houses, built in a square shape with the door on the side. The beer is processed , that is, fermented, and packed in round barrels, each barrel containing four cigarette butts, each 532 gallons.
The brewery has 11 vats, eight 36 feet tall and 15 in diameter, each held together with 24 hoops, and two 40 feet tall and 20 in diameter, capable of holding a week's worth of beer, according to William. He also saw 12 malt bins, 30 feet wide and 15 square, and yeast storage tanks made of stone, sunk into the ground, measuring 10 feet square and 6 deep, holding about 3,500 gallons of beer. yeast
What William Halliwell saw at Calvert's brewery in Thames Street around 1830
William next walked through the stables where he sawabout 20 elephant-like animals Same horse as (spelling is not one of his strong points) and was told that the brewery owned about 70 horses in total. He was afterwards taken on a tour of Calvert's new brewery, which had been built to the best plan and on a very extensive basis. It was less than two years since the passage of the UK's Alehouse Act, which led to the opening of more than 30,000 new alehouses, and most of the large London porter brewers (Calvert was one) were already brewing porter to supply these New outlets. Beer brewing looks to be more hygienic:
Is this what William saw at the Calvert Brewery?
He also documented the strange pipe barrels used to brew ale. According to William's slightly confused description, these kegs were always full This was apparently one of the precursors to the Burton Union system that emerged in the 1820s and early 1830s and was designed to automate the filling process of beer kegs. This was probably the device that won the Society of Arts Grand Silver Medal for Robert Dickinson of the Albany Brewery in Camberwell, south London, in 1824, in which a barrel was placed on top of each fermenting wort barrel, connected by a tin To the barrel pipe, drain excess yeast out the top and then wort down through a hole in the side.
The next day, a Friday, William visited Elliott's Stag Brewery in Pimlico, near Buckingham Palace , another major Porter brewery in London. There he saw a vat room with 27 vats ranging in size from 400 to 1,200 barrels, or 3,600 barrels. The port is fermented in turns and then run into a large stone resevoy (reservoir) to settle before being pumped into vats where it is stored. William wrote that the vats were cooled by refrigerators . The brewery employs 260 workers and has two steam engines and 160 horses.
Finally, William ends his London brewery tour on Saturday with a trip to the largest brewery, Barclay Perkins, on Park Street, Southwark.The streets outside and the brewery yard were so crowded with (sic) Barclay's carriages that it took almost a Hercules to get through, William wrote. A month ago the brewery suffered a devastating fire, causing damage estimated at £100,000, which today could be £9 million. Cleanup continues, with William estimating that between 200 and 300 people are involved in repairing damage and dismantling broken machinery, including pulling giant copper plates 20 feet in diameter into pieces. The fermentation and vat rooms appear to have been largely unscathed by the fire. He was most impressed by Barclay's method of steam cleaning wine barrels, although he also noted in awe the number of people the brewery used - three to four hundred people, as well as a large number of partners in the industry,* *Has a capital of nearly a million pounds
There seems to be no record of whether Don's brewery was making porter before William left for England, but it was certainly in 1836: 1837 2 In December, William recorded that he had erected a small still, and in December of the same year he spent the whole day making port wine at home.
The Helliwells' Don Brewery, Toronto: on a different scale than Barclay Perkins et al...
Ten years later, in January 1847, Helliwell Brothers' brewery and distillery burned down after a fire in the cooling room. With total damage estimated at £5,000 to £6,000 and insurance costing only £1,000, Helliwells decided not to rebuild the brewery after 25 years but to focus on milling and other activities
