Brewery

How to spell brewery

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce brewery

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does brewery mean?

1. nounA building or company where beer is produced commercially.

Brewery in a sentence

• The old brewery on the river now offers guided tours and tastings.

• After years of home experiments, they finally opened their own brewery.

Where does brewery come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The heart of this word is the verb 'brew', which descends from the Old English 'breowan', meaning to make a drink by boiling and fermenting grain, a craft Germanic peoples practised for centuries. That verb has close cousins across the Germanic languages, including the Dutch 'brouwen' and German 'brauen', and it shares a deep root with words tied to heat and bubbling, fitting for a process that begins with hot water. The ending '-ery' arrived in English through Old French, ultimately from Latin, and it was used to name a place where a particular trade or activity is carried on, as in 'bakery' and 'tannery'. By the early 1600s English speakers had attached this productive suffix to 'brew' to name the building where beer is made commercially. The spelling trap lives in that ending: it is '-ery', echoing the 'brew' inside it, not the '-ary' that catches many writers out.

How the word is built

• brew (to make beer by boiling and fermenting)
• -ery (place where an activity is carried out)