Brewhouse

A brewhouse is a building made for brewing beer and ale. This could be a part of a specialized brewery operation, but historically a brewhouse is a private building only meant for domestic production.

Larger households, such as noble estates, often had dedicated brewhouses that could be quite elaborate using equipment not too different from that of commercial breweries. English country houses have detailed records of brewhouses.^[1]

In ordinary farming households brewing was in some regions done outside, particularly in summer. The Baltic countries have a concept of a "summer kitchen", which is basically an outdoor area used for cooking and brewing in summer, but brewing could also be done outside in parts of Norway and Sweden as well as Russia.

An ordinary farm household could rarely afford to dedicate an entire building, or even an entire room, to brewing, and so brewing was usually done in what is best understood as a "rough kitchen", a kitchen suitable for coarser jobs with heavy use of fire, such as sausage-making, butchering, large-scale baking, clothes washing, and brewing. This could either be a dedicated building or just a single room.