Transporting beer is a topic as old as beer itself. Since beer is a living beverage and does not like traveling, vibrations, or light, its transport requires expertise and art, which breweries know best. When agitated during transport, it likes to escape and shoot out like champagne or foam profusely. In the past, to prevent this, beer was transported within breweries or from the brewery to a nearby point of sale on a special wooden carrier, a pole from which a beer barrel hung on a chain; this was extremely cumbersome and inconvenient. Later, this was replaced by horse-drawn transport, which proved to be the most practical and longest-used method. My generation of 50-year-olds still remembers horse-drawn beer wagons delivering to shops and restaurants. A pair or sometimes two pairs of draft horses harnessed to a large wagon delivered the beer. Since beer is a healthy beverage in every respect, as the chronicles state, even the horses received a bucket of beer to drink after a hard day’s work! (they had their own allowance). Breweries had stables, carriage houses, and a workshop that served as a forge and carpentry shop, and there was also a veterinarian. Beer was transported on a flatbed wagon on which beer barrels (of various capacities) were laid horizontally, or on a low-sided wagon on which wooden crates of bottled beer were stacked. The crates had the brewery’s logo or name branded on them, and the bottles were initially closed with so-called porcelain stoppers or corked. The driver wore a long leather apron (for protection during loading and unloading), and often one could also find emblems and advertising slogans of a given brewery on the wagons; sometimes the driver’s uniform and cap were also branded.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 2/2003.