Huge guffaws from me at the news that Punch Taverns is to bring back to life for a third time the name Taylor Walker, a former London porter brewer that had strong links with the earliest days of brewing in Philadelphia. Clearly, to be a marketing man you have to have every irony-containing cell filleted from your body. This really does smell of desperately reinventing the past to paint over a tawdry present.

Although Taylor Walker’s substantial brewery in the East End closed exactly half a century ago, the name will still be familiar to many drinkers in their late 20s and upwards. This is because in November 1979, what was then the giant brewing/pub owning corporation Allied Lyons decided to revive the name Taylor Walker for its London pub operations, as part of a plan, apparently, to pretend that it wasn’t a giant brewing/pub owning corporation. (This also involved reviving other vanished brewery names, such as Benskin’s of Hertfordshire and Friary Meux of Surrey.) Suddenly hundreds of London pubs had the Taylor Walker name painted on to their fascias (even though many had never belonged to Taylor Walker), while their innsigns sported a “cannon” trademark that had, in fact, belonged to one of the many concerns Taylor Walker had taken over, the Cannon Brewery of St John Street, Clerkenwell.

Twenty years later, in 1999, Allied (by now Allied Domecq) sold all its pubs to Punch, and the Taylor Walker name disappeared again. Now, 11 years on, Punch has decided that it wants to dig this twice-dead corpse up once more and slap the words “Taylor Walker” on the front of about a hundred or so of the more “iconic” (for which read “old-looking and marginally upmarket”) outlets run by its managed pub arm, Punch Pub Company.

If you think this is copying the rival pub company Mitchell & Butlers (itself operating under the name of a long-vanished brewery) and its up-market Nicholsons pub chain, tsk – you’re as cynical as me. Clive Briscoe, Punch Pub Co’s marketing director, insists: “This is not a rebranding exercise but an opportunity to badge together a whole range of iconic London pubs.” But among the basketful of ironies in this is that one of the pubs that will bear the revived Taylor Walker name is the Anchor at Bankside, Southwark, which was once the brewery tap of Taylor Walker’s great porter-brewing rival, Barclay Perkins. (Another irony is that Punch, even though it owns many former Taylor Walker pubs, has had to licence the Taylor Walker name off Carlsberg, which acquired Allied’s brewing business, and all its beer brands, in the 1990s.)

Naturally, Punch’s PR company has screwed up the history, claiming in the announcement of the revival that “the Taylor Walker name dates back to 1730″. No it doesn’t: the concern never became Taylor Walker until 1816. But the history of Taylor Walker as recorded pretty much everywhere is full of errors: you’ll see it stated, for example, that the brewery “moved to Fore Street, Limehouse” and then “moved to Church Row, Limehouse”, when in fact it stayed exactly where it was, expanding from a small 18th century brewhouse to eventually cover more than seven acres, which abutted Fore Street (now part of Narrow Street) on one side and Church Row (now Newell Street) on another.

Let’s take a history of Taylor Walker you might cobble together in 10 minutes from various internet sources and see how much is actually true:

Founded 1730 as Salmon and Hare at Stepney – I don’t know what the evidence for this is, but the title deeds for the brewery’s properties only, apparently, go back to 1732, and there’s no evidence I know that the concern began in Stepney itself. Certainly a man called Hare was the earliest known owner and he was in partnership, at least later, with various people called Salmon – and later became Hare and Hartford. HARFORD, not Hartford (I’m looking at you, Wikipedia – again). And I can’t find any evidence that Harford had a partnership with Hare. Hare and Harford operated the brewery until 1796, when John Taylor bought Richard Hare’s share in the business – no, Hare was gone by 1792, at least, and Harford and Taylor ran the brewery. I don’t know if it was Hare’s share Taylor acquired – and was joined by Isaac Walker in 1816 when the business became known as Taylor Walker. That’s true, at least. Moved to Fore Street, Limehouse by 1823. No, it had been just off Fore Street from at least 1745, and the concern’s address was given as Fore Street proper in the 1760s. In 1889 the business moved from Fore Street no it didn’t, and a new brewery was built at Church Row, Limehouse no, the new brewery was at least partly developed on an extension of the old site, and the “front door” was now in Church Row rather than Fore Street or Ropemakers’ Fields, named the Barley Mow Brewery. That’s true. So that’s 12 “facts” about the history of Taylor Walker, five unproven/with no evidence, five wrong and only two definitely correct.

There’s actually very much more to the history of Taylor Walker, at one time one of the three Quaker-owned London porter giants, alongside Barclay Perkins and Truman Hanbury & Buxton, than that brief selection of mis-statements indicates. There’s the Philadelphia connection, for example; and the dodgy dealings involving hidden brewery pipes, tax avoidance and unlawful ingredients; the marital row that broke up the brewery partnership; the family of almost legendary cricketers, rivals to WG Grace and his brothers; the exports to India and Australia; the takeovers of ten other breweries from Kent to Bristol; and the near-death by German bombing. Who wants to buy the TV rights?

Taylor Walker themselves claimed to have been founded in 1730. Breweries’ claimed foundation dates are astonishingly unreliable, sometimes too early, sometimes too late, and without evidence this has to be marked as “unproven”. It is also sometimes said that the concern was founded by two men called Salmon and Hare “in Stepney”, moving later to Limehouse. Again, I have seen no evidence for this. Limehouse was originally part of Stepney parish, and became a parish in its own right only in 1729. Any original documents placing the concern in “Stepney” in 1730 may have actually meant Limehouse.

The Ship brewhouse, shown in Beck's Rents, off Fore Street, Limehouse in a map drawn circa 1741-45. (Double-click all pictures to enlarge)

The brewery certainly seems to have been going by 1735, because Richard Hare, brewer of Limehouse, is recorded in April that year in the Hackney petty sessions books putting up £20 bail money for one John Williams to appear in court on an assault charge. Hare was born in 1700, and he is sometimes said to be a member of the Hare family of Stow Hall in east Norfolk, though Hare family historians have been unable to make any link. His premises, in 1735 or later, were the Ship Brewhouse in Becks Rents, between Fore Street, Limehouse and Ropemakers’ Field. The Ship brewhouse is shown on John Rocque’s map of London, drawn up circa 1741-45, and it grew into “one of the largest establishments for brewing porter in England”.

When exactly the Salmon family interest started in the brewery in Limehouse I haven’t discovered. In 1745, according to the deeds of the Crown at Bellwater Gate, Woolwich, across the Thames from Limehouse, Richard Hare was in partnership in Limehouse with John Hare of Woolwich, (presumably a relative – his elder brother, born 1693 (Richard Hare also lived in Woolwich by 1752) and James Salmon. In 1749/50, according to another lease in the London Metropolitan Archives, John Hare, Sarah Salmon and Richard Hare were “copartners in a brewhouse”. Another lease in the same set of records, from 1753, refers to “John Hare, Sarah Salmon and Richard Hare, brewers”. Three years later a lease for the Duke of Cumberland in Woolwich High Street lists the partners as John Hare, Richard Hare and John Salmon.

In 1757 Richard Hare evidently had two new partners, when he, Robert Salmon and John Kilner were leasing a pub called the Roman Eagle in Church Street, Deptford. The Universal Pocket Companion of 1767 lists “Hare, Salmon and Kilner, brewers, Fore Street, Limehouse”, while the St Anne’s church, Limehouse poor rate records for the same year show Robert Salmon and “Hare, Messers & Co” in Fore Street. In April 1772 the Town and Country magazine recorded that “Mr Robert Salmon, brewer, at Limehouse” had married Miss Thornton of Halton, in Lancashire. After that, the Salmons’ connection with the brewery seems to vanish.

Richard Hare, who married twice, the second time, in 1745, to Martha Harford, daughter of the Reverend Henry Harford, had five sons, including Richard junior, born 1747, James, born 1749, who joined the Church of England, Charles, who became a captain in the Royal Navy, and Robert, born 1752. In 1773, aged 21, Robert emigrated to America with a gift from his father of £1,500 and, it appears, a notebook of porter-brewing recipes, dates 1770-71 and now in the possession of the  Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Robert arrived in Philadelphia and within a short while set up, like his father, as a porter brewer, supposedly the first in America. The business was an almost instant success. George Washington became very partial to Robert Hare’s porter, and would send his carriage from Virginia to Hare’s brewery in Callowhill Street, Philadelphia to pick it up. In 1776 Robert was described in a letter written by John Adams, later the second president of the United States, as “the famous brewer of porter, who is carrying on that business here with great reputation and success and on a very large scale.”

(There is evidence that the Limehouse brewery may have been previously exporting its own beers to America: “Robert Salmon Esq, brewer, Limehouse” appears as a subscriber to a book published in 1764 called The American Negotiator or the Various Currencies of the British Colonies reduced into English money, along with at least 11 other brewer-subscribers, including Henry Thrale of the Anchor brewery, Southwark, later Barclay Perkins. This suggests that there were times when the Limehouse brewery was being paid in Pennsylvania pounds or Massachussetts pounds for its beer and wanted to know the exchange rate into sterling.)

Robert’s father actually died in 1776 – he was described in the Gentleman’s Magazine as “Richard Hare Esq an eminent brewer and justice for Middlesex, remarkable for his son’s having carried porter brewing to the highest perfection in Philadelphia” – and the father was followed at the Limehouse brewery by his eldest son, Richard junior.

In January 1785 Richard junior was contemplating buying a steam engine for the brewery and wrote to Boulton and Watt in Birmingham requesting an estimate for one “like that of Goodwyn and Co’s” at the Red Lion brewery, another substantial porter brewer a little further up the Thames, between Wapping and the Tower of London. However, Hare warned the Birmingham firm, he had heard that Boulton and Watt were very expensive, and he had also talked to “Mr Wood of Oxford” about buying one of Wood’s patent steam engines. A short while later Hare told the Birmingham firm that “another brewer Mr Clowes [of the Stoney Lane brewhouse in Bermondsey, one more 'top 15' London porter brewer] has made calculations that a 9 horse steam engine saves nothing for a brewery”, and he would make no purchase until he had talked to Clowes.

The following year Hare was hammered by the authorities for a long list of offences in connection with the brewery, and fined the considerable sum of £1,250 in total: £800 for failing to pay the £400 duty on 1,000 barrels of strong beer; £200 for illegally possessing 100 pounds of molasses and using it in the brewing of 1,000 barrels of beer; £50 for illegally mixing together 500 barrels of strong beer and 500 barrels of small beer; £200 for illegally having underground pipes to convey beer about the brewery (presumably to hide brews from the exciseman); and £20 for using 100 pounds of “essentia bina”, an illegal colouring made from burnt sugar, in brewing 1,000 barrels of beer (probably porter).

Eventually Richard Hare junior left the by now “extensive” brewery (he was later described as “a gentleman of Bath”, and died in Bath in 1822) and handed it over to two Quakers, John Vickris Taylor from Southgate, North London and Truman (or Trueman) Harford from Bristol. Whether Truman Harford was a relative of Richard Hare through Richard’s mother Martha, née Harford, I have been unable to discover. John Taylor may have been the nephew of the Esther Taylor who was married to Captain Charles Hare, son of Richard, though I doubt it: I can’t see someone from a Quaker family marrying someone who was in the Royal Navy.

Taylor and Harford were certainly in business together by December 1793, when “Trueman Harford and John Vicaries Taylor” (sics) are described as partners and porter brewers in a case at the Old Bailey involving copper worth eight shillings and ninepence allegedly stolen from their brewery. A likely date for Taylor joining Harford at the brewery (and possibly for Richard Hare leaving) is November 1792, judging by the evidence given in a pair of court cases in 1803 and 1805. It appears that Hare had taken out a patent in September 1791 on an apparatus designed to use the steam from the wort as it was being boiled to heat water for the next mash, at the same time capturing the hop oils evaporating off the boiling wort. On November 5 the following year, Hare signed an agreement that allowed Taylor and Harford the right to use his apparatus for 14 years, for an annual payment of £100.

However, Taylor and Harford eventually discovered that something very similar to Hare’s steam-capture idea had been invented earlier by a brewer from Oxford called Thomas Sutton Wood, who looks as if he might be the same man Hare had talked to about steam engines in 1785, and who had been given a patent for his invention in that exact year. You might think that someone as dodgy as Hare, judging by the events of 1786, was well up to nicking someone else’s patent idea and passing it as his own. I couldn’t possibly comment. Taylor and Harford stopped paying Hare his £100 a year in 1797, and Hare sued for the rest of his money. In July 1803 a jury at the Guildhall court in London ruled that Wood’s prior invention invalidated Hare’s patent, and Hare was therefore not entitled to any more money. Taylor and Harford then sued Hare in their turn, to get back the £425 they had already paid him. Unfortunately for the partners, the Court of Common Pleas in London ruled in 1805 that Hare could keep the cash.

Harford and Co's brewery, Limehouse, from Motson's map of London made between 1792 and 1794

Harford was evidently the senior partner in the brewery: Kent’s directory for 1794 records the concern as “Harford & Co. Brewers, Fore street, Limehouse”. He was named for his grandfather, Truman Harford, a Quaker merchant born in Bristol around 1700, son of Charles Harford and Rachel Truman. The younger Truman was born in July 1758, and by 1776 he seems to have been a silk merchant in Bristol. In August 1789 he married Mary Biddle in Esher, Surrey.

John Vickris Taylor and Truman Harford knew each other through the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, in which each played a leading part, as well as through their membership of the Society of Friends. Taylor was another member of an old Quaker family, his name dating back to the marriage of James Taylor, a Cheapside linen draper who died in 1716 in London, to Elizabeth Vickris, who was born in 1673 in Somerset, and whose mother had been a member of an influential Quaker family in Bristol, the Bishops.

A map of London drawn up around 1795 shows “Harford & Co’s brewery” as three substantial buildings now filling in between Ropemakers’ Fields and Fore Street, with what looks like possibly more brewery buildings on the north side of Ropemakers’ Fields. The main yard looks to have opened out into Ropemakers’ Fields, and this is the street that seems to have been regarded locally as the brewery’s address, judging by a couple of court cases in which it is mentioned, until its rebuilding in 1889.

One innovation tried out at the Limehouse brewery under the new partners was to use mules rather than drayhorses to pull the drays. John Lawrence, author of A Philosophical and Practical Treatise on Horses, wrote in 1796:

It is urged that the chief use of large horses in town is as fillers to stand the shaking of slop carts and other very ponderous loads but I think a gross and bulky or a tall leggy horse can never be so able to endure this, as a square muscular boney one of fifteen three or sixteen hands high. Those over-grown cattle are apt to be too much shaken by their own weight. The practical arguments, however, of Messieurs Trueman [sic] Harford and Co of Limehouse are of more validity than a whole folio of my theoretical ones. The drays of those gentlemen have for some months past been drawn by three mules each, the highest of which did not appear to me above fourteen hands. They carry three butts of beer from Limehouse to London, the same weight precisely which the London drays carry with three large horses

Truman Harford died three days before his 45th birthday, in July 1803, the same month he and Taylor won their first court case against Richard Hare over the patent brewery heat-saver. John Vickris Taylor carried on the brewery under his own name, slowly pushing it up the league table of London porter brewers: for the year July 1807-July 1808 it was the 12th largest in the capital, at 32,800 barrels (with Henry Meux the largest at 190,160 barrels), by 1817-18 Taylor’s was 10th with 47,775 barrels, still a long way behind the leader, Barclay Perkins, on 340,560 barrels, and by 1827-28 it was ninth, on 65,238 barrels.

In 1816 Taylor had taken as a partner in the brewery another scion of a wealthy Quaker family, Isaac Walker, then just 22. Isaac’s grandfather, also called Isaac, a linen merchant had bought Arnos Grove, a seventeenth-century mansion in Southgate, north-east Middlesex in 1777, making him a neighbour of the Taylors: the families were already linked by both being related to Walker Gray, a Quaker brandy merchant who owned Southgate Grove (later called Grovelands). John Vickris Taylor had married a Miss Donnithorne in Fetcham in 1797. Their eldest daughter, Sarah Sophia, was born around 1801 at her parents’ home in Palmers Green, Southgate. Naturally the Walkers and the Taylors, neighbours, relatives and business partners, mixed socially, and it can have been little surprise to anyone when, in 1823, Isaac Walker married Sophia Taylor.

Greenwood's London m ap of 1830 shopwing the brewery buildings between Fore Street and Ropemakers' Fields, and to the north the Limehouse workhouse, eventally swallowed up as the brewery expanded.

Sophia’s brother John Donnithorne Taylor, born 1798, eventually joined the brewery partnership, and so, too, apparently, did Isaac Walker’s brother Edwin, born 1805. John D Taylor, who was to inherit Grovelands from his uncle Walker Gray, married Elizabeth Thompson in 1830. They had six children, before his wife left him in 1837, accusing him, he claimed, of adultery, a charge he denied. The next year she demanded that he take her back, which he refused to do. The courts found for Mrs Taylor and ordered her husband, who was said to have an income of £8,000 a year, to pay his wife £800 a year until he restored her conjugal rights by taking her back. He appealed, and in 1842 the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, the highest court in England, ruled against him. To avoid having to take his wife back, Taylor fled abroad, resigning from the brewery partnership in 1843. But while the Walkers carried on as sole partners, the concern continued to be called Taylor Walker. Isaac Walker was replaced after some years as a partner it appears, by his eldest son John, born 1826, and Edwin by his eldest boy, Charles Hoggart Walker, born 1831. (John D Taylor eventually returned to England and died in 1885, by which time he owned more than 600 acres in Southgate and Winchmore Hill.)

VE Walker, Victorian cricketing star, and brewer

Isaac Walker, who died in 1853, apparently in an epileptic fit, and Sophia had seven sons and five daughters: enough offspring to ensure continuity, you might have thought. In fact none of the sons married (though all of the daughters did); instead the Walker boys spent much of their time playing cricket, with remarkable success. They were mainly responsible for the founding of the Middlesex County Cricket Club in 1864, and one Walker brother after another captained the club for its first 20 years. The star of the family was Vyell Edward Walker, known as Teddy, who devoted the two decades after he left school to cricket, before finally joining the family firm. In July 1859, aged 22, he scored a century for England versus Surrey at the Oval, and took all ten Surrey wickets in the first innings for 74 runs. He was to take all ten wickets in an innings on two more occasions. Before WG Grace began his long dominance of the game, VE Walker was considered, in the early 1860s, the best all-rounder in the country, and he and his two younger brothers, Isaac Donnithorne Walker and Russell Donnithorne Walker, helped make Middlesex a powerful cricketing county.

By 1868 at the latest (and probably long before) Taylor Walker was brewing India Pale Ale and shipping it to Bombay, using shippers based in Fore Street, Duncan Dunbar and Sons. The brewery also exported its beers to Australia: in October 1858 L Solomon’s Stores of Currie Street, Adelaide told readers of the South Australian Advertiser that it had in stock Taylor Walker’s stout, as well as Bass No 3 Burton, and ale and porter from the London beer bottler RB Byass. Like most London breweries, Taylor Walker took its brewing water from wells: a book in 1875 said that a well bored between 80 and 90 Fore Street found water 160 feet down which was calculated to give a supply of more than 25,000 gallons an hour.

The brewery looks to have been rebuilt about 1820, but in 1889 a substantial new brewery, designed by the brewery architects Inskipp & Mackenzie, was added on, covering land once used for the Limehouse workhouse. The additional 150-quarter plant now gave the concern a new address, as well, with the brewery offices being in Church Row, part of a street originally running north from Ropemakers’ Fields. The concern was now called the Barley Mow brewery, rather than the Limehouse brewery, as it had been before. The name evidently came from the now-demolished Barley Mow pub opposite the Grapes in Fore Street/Narrow Street (not to be confused, though it has been, with the later Barley Mow further west along Narrow Street, now called The Narrows, which was the former Limehouse Basin dockmaster’s house. Among the sources making this mistake is Wikipedia – there’s a shock).

The Walker brothers were replaced at the brewery by sons of their sisters, notably John Bradshaw, who joined Taylor Walker in 1885 (and who spent 54 years at the brewery, rising to chairman), his brother Robert and their cousin Edward Stanhope Rashleigh. Taylor Walker became a limited company in 1907, the year after the death of Vyell Edward Walker, who left an estate worth £1.6 million.

Even before the First World War, Taylor Walker was acquiring other brewery firms to boost its tied house estate: John Furze & Co of the St George Brewery in the Commercial Road, not far from Limehouse, in 1901, and the Highbury Brewery, Holloway Road, North London in 1912.

In 1927 Taylor Walker became a public company. The takeovers of other concerns continued: Smith Garrett and Co of the nearby Bow Brewery (once owned by the Hodgsons, famed for their India Pale Ale), also in 1927; the Victoria Wine Company, a chain of off-licences, in 1929; Glenny’s brewery, Barking, Essex, with 15 pubs, in October the same year; the Cannon brewery in Clerkenwell, with nearly 600 pubs, in November 1930 (the Clerkenwell brewery stayed open another 25 years, closing only in September 1955); Wells & Perry’s Chelmsford brewery, Essex in June 1934. It also acquired along the way a gin distillery in the nearby Mile End Road, Curtis & Co.

In March 1941 German incendiary bombs set the brewery on fire, halting production for 18 months, and forcing Taylor Walker to rely on other breweries to supply its pubs. The blow did not stop the company from making more acquisitions: in 1943 it extended its reach to Truman Harford’s birthplace, buying EA Mitchell of Bristol. Three years after the war, in 1948, it bought Bushell Watkins & Smith’s Black Eagle brewery in Westerham, Kent.

As the British economy slowly recovered from the war, in 1949, Taylor Walker brought out a new strong beer, Reserve pale ale. The company’s best-known beer, however, was a strong(-ish) dark mild called Mainline, a name well enough associated with the brewery that when it produced an illustrated map showing all its pubs in the south-east of England some time in the mid-1950s it called the area “Taylor Walker Mainland”. It carried on acquiring other brewers: Chesham and Brackley Breweries in 1956; Ward and Sons of Foxearth, Sudbury, Suffolk in 1957, with 29 pubs. In 1959 Taylor Walker was still brewing at Limehouse, and in Westerham and Brackley, and controlling an estate of 1,360 pubs and off-licences, with 650 in London.

That June, however, after four years of rumours, the company announced that it was being taken over by Ind Coope, brewer of one of the biggest nationally advertised bottled beers, Double Diamond, and owner of breweries in Burton upon Trent and Romford, Essex. For shareholders, it was extremely welcome: Ind Coope was offering 56 shilling for every Taylor Walker share, 21 shillings more than the highest price they had reached at any time in the previous five years. Taylor Walker admitted that talks between the two concerns had begun back in 1953. Seven months after the takeover announcement, in January 1960, Ind Coope declared that Limehouse brewery site would be closed, with 1,350 of the 1,950 workers losing their jobs. Within a few years the Barley Mow brewery was demolished.

The revival of the brewery’s name in 1979 included the brewing (at Romford, initially) of a beer called Taylor Walker Bitter, and even, for a short while, the return of a beer called Mainline. Selling a dark mild in the 1980s, however, was tough, and it disappeared quickly. When Punch acquired the Allied pub estate, Taylor Walker bitter died too. Now the name, at least, is back again – the brewery they just can’t kill.

I hope you found bits of that interesting: what is interesting, I think, is that it contains more information, and more accurate information, on Taylor Walker’s history than you’ll find in any other single place, and I put it together from just a couple of days’ Googling. You could have done it as well. The increasing digitisation/internetting of old documents is starting to make it almost trivially easy for anyone to research practically anything without moving from their computer. The problem is that the internet also makes it easy to spread rubbish, so that far too many sites now repeat, for example, that the Taylor Walker name goes back 280 years, or that Gordon Ramsey’s The Narrow restaurant, when it was called the Barley Mow, was “attached” to the Barley Mow brewery – please, they were 400 yards apart and on different sides of the road and different sides of the entrance to Limehouse basin.

There’s plenty more to discover about the history of Taylor Walker that’s not available, or doesn’t seem to be available, on the net – I’d like to know, for example, when the dockmaster’s house took the name of the old Barley Mow pub further up the road, and when Fore Street as an address disappeared and it became an extension of Narrow Street. Over to you.

Meux’s Horse Shoe brewery, Tottenham Court Road in 1830

I can stake a tenuous family link to the Great London Beer Flood disaster of 1814, which took place exactly 196 years ago today. My great-great-great-great grandfather on my mother’s side, Maurice Donno, was living in Soho, a minute or three’s walk from the Horse Shoe Brewery off Tottenham Court Road, when a huge vat of maturing porter at the brewery collapsed violently and flooded the surrounding tenements, killing eight people. Most, if not all, of those who died were poor Irish immigrants to London, part of a mass of people living in the slums around St Giles’s Church, the infamous St Giles “rookeries” (later to be cleaned away by the building of New Oxford Street in 1847). Maurice Donno was very probably Irish, his surname most likely a variation of Donough or something similar (which would make his first name a common Anglicisation of the Irish Muirgheas). Perhaps he knew some of those who died, or were injured, in the Great Beer Flood, or knew people who knew them. It seems very likely he would have gone across the road at some point after the tragedy, to join the hundreds who came to see the destruction wreaked by that dreadful black tsunami of beer.

What has prompted me to write about the Great Meux Brewery Beer Flood, is not the anniversary, however, It’s because I have finally been called out over some dodgy maths in the book Beer: The Story of the Pint, which I wrote in 2003.

I said in BTSOTP, correctly, that the vat of porter which burst suddenly on Monday October 17, 1814 at Henry Meux’s Horse Shoe Brewery contained 3,550 barrels of beer. I said, correctly, that this amounted to more than a million pints. Then for some mad brain-burp reason I said the beer in the vat weighed “around 38 tons” – almost precisely 15 times less than the correct answer, which was actually more than 571 tons.

Thank you, Eugene Tolstov, for pointing to my mistake, and for not laughing too much at my inability to multiply 3,555 by 36 by 10 and divide by 2,240. But at least my narrative on probably the worst industrial accident involving a British brewery was more accurate than many. The late Alan Eames, for example, in The Secret Life of Beer, claimed that the vat burst “with a boom heard five miles away” – not mentioned in any of the many sources from the time that I’ve read – while “eyewitnesses told of besotted mobs flinging themselves into gutters full of beer, hampering rescue efforts” – no, newspaper reports of the rescue don’t support this at all – and “many were killed suffocated in the crush of hundreds trying to get a free beer” – again, the contemporary reports don’t say this – while “the death toll eventually reached 20, including some deaths from alcohol coma” – no, the newspaper reports from the time make it clear that only eight people died, all women and children, and all killed by the initial huge wave of beer and the destruction it caused to the buildings in the tenements behind the brewery.

A street inside the St Giles ‘Rookery’ about 1800

Similarly there’s a myth arisen that when those injured after the vat burst were taken to the nearby Middlesex Hospital, “patients already there for illnesses unrelated to the beer disaster smelled the ale and began a riot, accusing doctors and nurses of holding out on the beer they thought was being served elsewhere in the hospital”, while another myth claims that when bodies of those killed were taken “to a nearby house for identification”, so many people turned up to see them that “the floor collapsed under the sheer weight of onlookers” and “many inside the building perished in the collapse.” None of this is in any reports of the accident from newspapers in 1814, and if any of it had happened, you can bet one of them would have written about it.

The vat that burst, in spite of all the death and destruction it caused, was not actually the largest at the brewery: indeed, this report from a visit to the Horse Shoe Brewery in 1812, two years before the disaster, written by a 34-year-old Orkney-born novelist called Mrs Mary Brunton, suggests it was one of the smallest:

In Meux’s Brewery every thing is as filthy as steam and smoke, and dust and rust can make it; except the steam engine, which is as polished and as clean as the bars of a drawing-room grate. The first operation of this engine is to stir the malt in vats of twenty-eight feet diameter, filled with boiling water; the second is, in due time, to raise the wort to the coolers, in the floor above; then this wort is conveyed by leaden pipes into the tub where it is to ferment, and afterwards into the casks where the porter is first deposited. One of these casks, which I saw, measures seventy feet in diameter, and is said to have cost £10,000; the iron hoops on it weigh eighty tons; and we were told that it actually contained, when we saw it, 18,000 barrels, or £40,000 worth of porter. Another contained 16,000 barrels, and from thence to 4,000; there are above seventy casks in the store.

From the top of the immense building, which holds this vast apparatus, we had a complete view of London and the adjacent country. I must own, however, that I was rejoiced to find myself once more safe in the street … I never feel myself in a very elevated situation, without being seized with an universal tremor. I shook in every limb for an hour after coming down.

Henry Meux

At the time of the disaster the Horse Shoe brewery had been in the hands of Henry Meux for just five years. The brewery’s origins are obscure: in the 20th century, at least, Meux & Co claimed a foundation date of 1764. Printed sources for its history are hit-and-miss. Richmond and Turton’s The Brewing Industry: a Guide to Historical Records, which is not always a reliable witness, asserts that it was “founded prior to 1764, after which date it was run by Blackburn and Bywell”. The Victorian History of the County of Middlesex wrote that it was “founded by a Mr Blackburn”, while Old and New London by Edward Walford, published in 1891, says that the brewery “was founded early in the reign of George III by Messrs Blackburn and Bywell whose name it bore until Mr Henry Meux, at that time a partner in the brewery of Messrs Meux in Liquorpond Street, joined the firm”. As we shall see, this misses out two early owners of the brewery and gets the name wrong of a third.

The “brewery tap” on Tottenham Court Road, called the Horseshoe, is supposed to have been in existence as a tavern since 1623, and to have been called the Horseshoe from the shape of its first dining room. Its age, if true, suggests the brewery was named after the tavern. The first reference to any owner of the brewery I can find is from an Old Bailey court case in April 1785 involving a break-in at the Yorkshire Grey pub, Red Lion Square, near the brewery, when “Thomas Fasset” (sic) the brewer is mentioned: Thomas Fassett was certainly the owner of the Horse Shoe brewery soon after, and probably then as well. In the list of London brewers’ output from 1786-7, Fassett’s was the 11th largest porter brewery in the capital, producing 40,279 barrels of beer a year, a long way behind the leader, Samuel Whitbread, on more than 150,000 barrels a year.

By 1792 the brewery was in the hands of John Stephenson. He was the “natural” son of another John Stephenson, a wealthy London merchant, originally from Cumberland. John Stephenson senior, whose uncle was at one time Lord Mayor of London, was an MP for more than 30 years from 1761 until his death at his home in Bedford Square in April 1794, aged 84. Stephenson senior was unmarried, and left almost all his estate, which included land in Cumbria, to his son. John junior, his wife Susan and their six or seven children moved after John senior’s death from nearby Charlotte Street into the rather finer house in Bedford Square, which was itself only a short walk north from the brewery. (Many of the streets and squares, and indeed pubs, in the area, incidentally, took their names from the local landowners, the Russell family, Dukes of Bedford and Marquesses of Tavistock, whose arms bore a red lion.)

Tragically, John junior had little time to enjoy his extra wealth. Like other breweries at the time, the Horse Shoe brewery cooled the hopped wort after it was boiled by pumping it into large, shallow vessels at the top of the building, before it was run into the fermenting vessels and pitched with yeast. Around 10am on the morning of Thursday, November 13, 1794, one of the brewery workers spotted a hat swimming on top of the beer in one of the coolers. It was Stephenson’s. Just a short time before he had been in the brewery “accompting house”. Unnoticed, he had gone up to where the coolers were, fallen in and drowned.

Poor John was followed as owner of the brewery by Edward Biley, whom he must have known well, since Biley was one of the executors of John junior’s will. It seems to have taken several years to transfer the ownership, since the regular listings of London brewers’ annual outputs continue to call the concern “Stephenson’s” until 1798, when Biley is finally included in the tally. Biley ran the brewery until at least January 1809, when he, John Blackburn (the other executor of John Stephenson junior’s will) and Edward Gale Bolero, a banker, are named as partners in the concern in another Old Bailey court case, this one involving the alleged theft of yeast from the brewery. (John Blackburn and Edward Biley are clearly the “Blackburn and Bywell” Old and New London claimed ran the brewery.)

Soon after, some time towards the end of 1809, the Horse Shoe brewery was bought by Henry Meux, who had been a partner in one of the largest of London’s porter brewers, Meux Reid. His father, Richard Meux (pronounced mewks), who came from an old landed family on the Isle of Wight, had been born in or just before 1734 (he was christened at the other St Giles, in Cripplegate, on the edge of the City). In 1757 Richard had gone into business, aged only 23 or so, as a partner in a brewery in Long Acre, Covent Garden. That brewery was badly damaged by fire in 1763, and Meux and his partner built a new one in Liquorpond Street, Clerkenwell, which they called the Griffin brewery, after the crest of Gray’s Inn nearby. The Griffin brewery was one of the first to go in for building absolutely enormous vats for maturing porter (ageing at least some of the porter sent to publicans was regarded, from at least the 1730s, as essential to achieve the flavour customers sought). In 1790 one vat was unveiled in Liquorpond Street that stood 20 feet high and 60 feet across: more than 200 people sat down to a dinner inside. Five years later Richard Meux was constructing another vat at the Griffin brewery, the “XYZ”, with a capacity of 20,000 barrels, at a cost of £10,000, equivalent to more than £750,000 today.

The Griffin brewery’s success – it was the fifth largest in London in 1796, with production of just under 104,000 barrels – attracted rich new partners. These included a distiller and wine and spirit merchant called Andrew Reid, in 1793 (whereupon the brewery became known as Meux Reid), and, in 1798, Sir Robert Wigram, East India merchant, ship builder and owner of Blackwall docks on the Thames. Their capital helped the brewery acquire more pubs (it controlled more than 100 licensed houses in 1795) and extend more loans to publicans to increase their share in the furiously competitive London porter market.

In 1800 Richard Meux retired from the business. leaving the management of the Griffin brewery to his sons Richard junior, Henry and Thomas. Richard junior, was declared insane in 1806 (something that was also to happen to Henry Meux’s son decades later). Henry, the second eldest, and Thomas, the third, carried on, Thomas in charge of brewing, Henry looking after sales and tied houses. Unfortunately Henry became heavily involved with an extremely dodgy character called James Deady, one of the brewery’s two “abroad coopers”, or outside reps. Dodgy Deady’s tricks included seducing the wife of a free trade publican, and then having the publican jailed for failing to pay his bills to the brewery. Worse, as far as the company was concerned, Deady and Henry Meux were secretly running a distillery, a rival operation to the one owned by Andrew Reid. Eventually Reid found out, and in 1808 he launched a Court of Chancery case against Henry Meux, claiming that Meux had misappropriated £163,000 of the brewery’s capital.

The Court of Chancery judgment gave an option for the Meuxes to be bought out of the partnership, and in 1809 the Griffin brewery was put up for sale and purchased by members of the Reid and Wigram families, with the Meuxes getting a fifth of the proceeds. Thomas Meux remained one of 20 members of the new partnership (he eventually left in 1816, when the brewery became known simply as Reid & Co). It has been claimed that on the break-up of the original Meux-Reid-Wigram partnership, “Henry Meux summoned two hackney carriages and went off with the deeds of the public houses, leaving the Reids with the brewery and the free trade.” Sadly, there is no proof of that. But Henry Meux does seem to have taken with him a number of the Griffin brewery’s employees, including James Deady, when he and several partners acquired the Horse Shoe Brewery.

Under Henry Meux the Horse Shoe Brewery’s production absolutely rocketed, from 40,663 barrels in 1809 to 93,660 in 1810 and 103,502 barrels in 1811 (though this was still less than half that of Meux Reid’s 220,094 barrels, and far behind Barclay Perkins’s 264,105 barrels in 1811, the huge rise pushed the Horseshoe Brewery up from 10th to sixth place in the London porter brewery league table.) In 1813 or 1814 the Horse Shoe brewery acquired or merged with a smaller concern, Clowes & Co of the Stoney Lane brewhouse in Bermondsey. Then came the disaster.

The area around the brewery circa 1794, when it was still ‘Stevenson’s’ (sic)

The first hint of what was going to happen occurred at around half past four in the afternoon of Monday October 17 1814, when a seven-hundredweight iron hoop, the smallest of 22 securing a 22-feet-high vat in the storehouse at the back of the brewery, and about three feet from the bottom of the vat, fell off. The vat was filled within four inches of the top with 3,555 barrels of “entire”, porter already 10 months old and destined to be sent out when judged properly mature to be mixed with freshly brewed porter to customers’ tastes, in Meux’s pubs. George Crick, the storehouse clerk, who was on duty at the time, told the inquest held into the deaths of the victims of the disaster that he was “not alarmed” at the hoop falling off as it happened “frequently”, two or three times a year, and was “not attended by any serious consequence”. Nevertheless, Crick said, he wrote a note to Florance Young, one of the brewery partners, who ran a back-making (that is, brewery vessel making) business, to let him know what had happened, so that someone would come to mend the hoop.

At 5.30pm Crick was standing just a short distance from the vat in question, with the note for Young in his hand, when he heard the vat burst. He ran to the storehouse where the vat was, and was shocked to see that the end wall, at least 25 feet high, 60 feet long and 22 inches thick at its broadest part, together with a large part of the roof, lay in ruins. The force of the escaping beer, and flying debris, including the huge staves of the collapsing vat, smashed several hogsheads of porter in the storehouse and knocked the cock out of another large vat in the cellar below which contained 2,100 barrels of beer, all of which except 800 or 900 barrels joined the flood.

Crick and his colleagues, now up to their waists in porter, were too busy rescuing their fellow workers injured as the vat collapsed, and trying to save as much beer as possible, to pay attention to what had happened outside. The vast flood of escaping porter, weighing hundreds of tons, had crashed down New Street behind the brewery and smashed into the buildings there and fronting Great Russell Street to the north. By good fortune the tenements in and around New Street, all in multiple occupation, were comparatively empty, because of the time of day. Had the accident happened an hour or more later, the men would have been home from work and the death toll greater. Instead all those killed were women and children. As the huge wave of beer, at least 15 feet high, roared down the street it flooded cellars, knocked in the backs of houses and washed people from first-floor rooms. One little girl, Hannah Banfield, aged four, was taking tea with her mother Mary, a coalheaver’s wife, in an upstairs room of one of the New Street houses when the vat collapsed. When the torrent of porter rushed in, Hannah was swept from the room through a partition and killed, while her mother was washed out of the window and badly injured and another child in the room “nearly suffocated”.

Houses in Great Russell Street, including the Tavistock Arms pub at number 22, that backed on to New Street had their cellars and ground floors filled with beer and their backs badly damaged. Those living in the cellars had to climb up on top of their highest pieces of furniture to save themselves from drowning in porter. At the Tavistock Arms, where beer had washed right through the taproom and into the street outside, pouring into the “areas” (basement entrances) of the houses opposite, part of the back wall collapsed on top of one of the pub servants, Eleanor Cooper, aged 14, who was at the pump in the yard, scouring pots. She was dug out of the ruins nearly three hours later, still standing upright, but dead.

Most tragically, in one of the cellars in New Street a group of people, all or nearly all Irish immigrants, had gathered to “wake” John Saville, the two-year-old son of Ann Saville, who had died the previous day. As the flood of beer crashed in, five of the mourners were killed, including the grieving mother herself; Elizabeth Smith, 27, the wife of a bricklayer; Mary Mulvey, 30, and her son by a previous marriage, Thomas Murry, aged three; and Catharine Butler, a widow aged 65.

The only eyewitness account of the disaster from a member of the public that appears to have survived, strangely, is from an American who happened by unlucky chance to be passing down New Street “on a dismal night” on his way to Great Russell Street, thinking about the war then two years old between the United States and Great Britain, when the porter vat collapsed. More than 20 years later the anonymous American wrote in the New York magazine The Knickerbocker:

All at once, I found myself borne onward with great velocity by a torrent which burst upon me so suddenly as almost to deprive me of breath. A roar as of falling buildings at a distance, and suffocating fumes, were in my ears and nostrils. I was rescued with great difficulty by the people who immediately collected around me, and from whom I learned the nature of the disaster which had befallen me. An immense vat belonging to a brew house situated in Banbury street [sic - more properly Bainbridge Street], Saint Giles, and containing four or five thousand barrels of strong beer, had suddenly burst and swept every thing before it. Whole dwellings were literally riddled by the flood; numbers were killed; and from among the crowds which filled the narrow passages in every direction came the groans of sufferers. Though but just rescued, as it were, from the jaws of Death, my clothes heavy with the hot malt liquor which had saturated them, I can truly say that fifteen minutes had not elapsed before I had entirely forgotten the late disastrous occurrence, in the emotions excited by perusing in the Admiralty Bulletin an exaggerated account of a most brilliant victory gained over the American army before Baltimore, in which it was stated that twelve thousand Americans had been completely put to route by about four thousand British troops, including a brigade of seamen.*

Rescuers arrived quickly in great numbers to dig out those buried in the ruins, who included at least one small child, injured but alive. The Morning Chronicle wrote that “The cries and groans which issued from the wreckage were dreadful.” Another newspaper, the Morning Post, which said the scene behind the brewery resembled the aftermath of an earthquake, commended the “several Gentlemen” drawn to the spot who were anxious “to prevent any noise from among the crowd, that the persons who were employed in clearing away the rubbish might … direct their ears to the ground, in order to discover whether any of the victims were calling for assistance.” It added that “The caution and humanity with which the labourers proceeded in their distressing task … deserve warm approbation,” commenting that “To those that even approached the scene of ruin, the fumes of the beer were very offensive and overpowering.”

As far as I can discover, only the Bury and Norfolk Post, in its report of the tragedy nine days after the event, describes anyone drinking the escaped porter, claiming that “When the beer began to flow, the neighbourhood, consisting of the lower classes of the Irish, were busily employed in putting in their claim to a share, and every vessel, from a kettle to a cask, were put into requisition, and many of them were seen enjoying themselves at the expense of the proprietors.” None of the London papers, who would certainly not have been friends of the poor Irish, especially the Times, report anything like this. One wonders if the Post was describing what it expected to have happened.

First reports estimated that between 20 and 30 people had died in the disaster. But at the coroner’s inquest, held in St Giles’s Workhouse on the Wednesday, two days later, the only victims, most of whom were not found until the next day, were revealed to be three small children, the teenaged Eleanor Cooper, three women aged 27 to 35, and the elderly Catharine Butler. George Crick was the first witness called, and he told the coroner his surmise was that the rivets on the hoops around the vat that burst had slipped, since none of the hoops had broken, nor had the foundations underneath the vat collapsed. Instead the whole vat “had given way as completely as if a quart pot had been turned up on the table.” His own brother, John, was one of two brewery workers still in the Middlesex Hospital “in a dangerous way” after being injured in the accident, Crick said. He also revealed that the body of Ann Saville had been found “floating among the butts” an hour after the vat collapsed, where she had evidently been washed. Parts of a private still was also found floating in the beer: it appeared that someone in New Street had been engaged in a little illegal gin-making. The coroner’s jury, after hearing the evidence and viewing the bodies, returned a verdict “without hesitation” of “died by casualty, accidentally and by misfortune”.

On Friday the Morning Post was able to report that “by strict enquiry of the different beadles, and at the public houses to a late hour”, it could state that no other lives had been lost in the accident besides the eight on whom the inquest had been held. Five more victims, “some of whom are dreadfully bruised”, were still in the Middlesex Hospital: George Crick’s brother John; Patrick Murphy, a labourer at the brewery; Mary Banfield; and two children “who were picked up in a state of suffocation and much bruised”. Spectators were still arriving to see the devastation: “The numbers who were led to view the spot during the whole of yesterday, was beyond calculation,” the Post said, momentarily forgetting subject-verb number agreement. The five who died at the New Street cellar wake were waked themselves, in the parlour at the Ship pub in Bainbridge Street, on the south side of the brewery, while the coffins of the other three victims were laid out in a nearby yard. If the accident had happened just an hour later, the Morning Post commented, “many more lives would have been lost, as the men would have been home from work, and the cellar in which the wake was held would have been full, as is customary among the Irish.” All those who came to see the bodies were asked to make a small donation – sixpence or a shilling – towards the families of the survivors, with the collection at the Ship totalling £33 5s 7d.

It was not much, against estimates that the poor victims of the flood had lost £3,000 in ruined belongings. A fund was set up for their relief by the churchwardens of the two parishes that covered the area hit by the disaster, St Giles’s, and St George, Bloomsbury, and within a month more than £800 had been raised, including £30 from Florance Young (whose family later owned Young’s brewery in Wandsworth) and £10 from John Vickris Taylor of the Limehouse brewery.

Initial estimates for the amount of lost beer was 8,000 to 9,000 barrels, getting on for 10 per cent of total yearly production, though the final calculation came to only 7,664 barrels of porter. Meux and Co claimed their estimate total loss to be £23,000 “at the lowest calculation”, equivalent, on a share-of-GDP calculation, to more than £66 million today. The firm petitioned Parliament for a refund of the duty it had paid on the lost beer, and the malt and hops that went into it. An Act was passed the following year allowing the partners to brew duty free an amount equivalent in duties to the duty on the beer lost, which saved them around £7,250.

The Horse Shoe brewery maintained its position as one of London’s leading porter producers for the rest of the 19th century: indeed, it was the last one to remain solely a porter brewer, with production of ale not being introduced until 1872.

In 1921 the Horse Shoe Brewery, which was increasingly an anachronism as a large brewery in the heart of London, finally closed, with production transferred to Thorne Brothers’ Nine Elms brewery in Wandsworth, which Meux had bought in 1914. (The brewery was demolished in 1922, and in 1927-28 the Dominion Theatre was erected on the site.) In 1956 Meux merged with Friary Holroyd and Healey of Guildford to form Friary Meux. Eight years later, in 1964, Friary Meux was snapped up by the fast-expanding Allied Breweries. Like Taylor Walker, the name was revived by Allied in 1979 as a disguise for one of its pub-owning subsidiaries, but vanished again when Allied sold its pubs to Punch 20 years later.

Drink a toast, then, tonight, to the memory of Ann Saville, Eleanor Cooper, Elizabeth Smith, Sarah Bates, Catharine Butler, Mary Mulvey, Thomas Murry and Hannah Banfield, innocent victims of man’s desire for well-aged porter. I’m hoping that for the 200th anniversary of the tragedy we can get a plaque put up on the site of the brewery recording their names. Meanwhile if you were one of the several thousand people who bought Beer: the Story of the Pint, many thanks, and would you mind turning to page 130 (in the hardback edition), run down to line four, strike out the figure “38″ and insert “571″ instead.

* The anonymous American was right to call the report “exaggerated”: the Americans had, in fact, successfully beaten off the British assault on Baltimore, a defence that inspired Francis Scott Key to write the song that became known as “The Star-Spangled Banner”

Nick Sharpe of the St John's Tavern, pub enthusiast

It’s an ill wind that doesn’t have a silver lining – or something like that. Anyway, I’m delighted to be able to give you a chance to see and hear Nick Sharpe of the St John’s Tavern, Archway, North London, give one of the most passionate expositions on the British pub, its present and its future, that I’ve heard. What I particularly enjoy about Nick’s views on pubs is that they are clearly rooted in a love of pubs’ past, without being fetishistic about it: he’s running a 21st century business at the St John’s Tavern, he delights in being able, thanks to help from English Heritage and his local council, to reflect some of the pub’s 19th century origins in the renovations that have been carried out, but he’s not about to turn it back into the multi-bar warren it would have been when it opened, because we no longer live in a society where Public Bar Man never mixes with Saloon Bar Man.

Click on the video you’ll find here, ignore (sorry) the first two minutes 45 second of the video – Jack Adams is a nice guy, but he’s a better interviewer and video maker than presenter, go and make a cup of tea, take the top off a bottle of beer or something until he’s finished – and then come back and listen to Nick talk with feeling and depth about pubs, about why he did what he did with the St John’s Tavern, and what he would like to do with it if his pubco would just let him.

If you want to see what the pub looked like at its Edwardian peak, go here and click on “Renovation”: you’ll see the magnificent lamps Nick talks about. From a beer historian’s viewpoint, the boards on the outside of the pub advertising “Bass & Co’s Pale & Burton Ales” (regular readers of this blog will know that pale ale and Burton Ale are two very different beers), and Watney’s Imperial Stout and “Pimlico Ales” (those would be mild ales, almost certainly, brewed at the former Watney’s brewery, which was halfway between Buckingham Palace and Victoria Station) suggest what was popular in North London at the time: I remember my grandfather Alf Donno, who was born in 1890 and grew up in Crouch End, about a mile and a half from the St John’s Tavern, telling me that he and his pals would search out pubs selling Bass, in the (probably correct) belief that it was of much higher quality than the local brews.

The video of Nick is available because the Pub History Society had to cancel its conference, for which it was made, when several speakers dropped out: their ill wind is our silver lining. There’s another important conference on next month for those interested in Britain’s beery past, called “The Last Drop: England’s Surviving Brewery Heritage”. It’s been organised by the Brewery History Society, which is promoting the report on preserving England’s brewing heritage put together by Dr Lynn Pearson (author of the excellent British Breweries: An Architectural History) and the Brewery History Society as part of English Heritage’s Strategy for the Historic Industrial Environment. It will be discussing what can be done to save and enhance what’s left of the evidence of our brewing past,and attempt to identify priorities for future action, it’s at the National Brewery Centre (the Bass Museum/Coors Visitor Centre as was), Horninglow Street, Burton-upon-Trent on Saturday 12 March, it starts at 10.30am, it costs £24, and you can download a programme and booking form here. For anybody reading this with roots in the Newark area (hello, Ron), among the talks is one titled “Two Newark Breweries: Applying Conservation Philosophies to Adaptive Re-use”, by Rebecca Lamb.

Excellent news, I think, that Wells & Young’s has acquired the Scottish brands McEwan’s and Younger’s from their current owner, Heineken.

The announcement last week that W&Y was bringing back Courage Imperial Russian Stout genuinely excited me, and not just because it’s a fantastic beer. It showed that the Bedford company has a shrewd understanding of the sort of niche a medium-sized brewer can exploit with the right brands, and it has cottoned on to the growing desire of drinkers in the UK, the US and elsewhere to drink authentic, heritage beers again. McEwan’s and Younger’s have plenty of heritage – Younger’s No 3, for example.

But I’d like to make it clear, now, that if I notice ANY references by the brand’s new owners to Younger’s being “established in 1749″, I shall be driving up to Bedford and administering a few slaps. Because it wasn’t. This claim of a 1749 foundation date has been around since at least 1861, making it 150 years old, or more, and it still regularly pops up. Only yesterday the Scotsman newspaper printed this rubbish

“William Younger founded Edinburgh’s historic brewing industry when he set up his firm in Leith in 1749.”

There are two big errors in that one sentence: Edinburgh’s brewing industry is, of course, far older than 1749: the city was stuffed with breweries long before, so much that its nickname, “Auld Reekie” (“Old Smoky”), is sometimes said to have come from all the smoke that came out of the brewery chimneys. In addition, William Younger never started a brewery in Leith, in 1749 or any other year. In fact he was almost certainly never a brewer at all.

William Younger was only 16 in 1749, which was actually the year he moved to Leith from the family home in West Linton, Peeblesshire. It has been claimed that his first job was working for a brewery in Leith, sometimes said to be the one run by Robert Anderson, one of the town’s bigger brewers, with an output of 1,500 barrels a year. Unfortunately, there is no known documentary evidence to back this up: if there had been, the book printed to celebrate Younger’s “double centenary” in 1949 would have trumpeted it. Instead the author quietly danced around the issue of whether William had been a brewer or not.

By 1753, aged 20, William was working as an excise officer, and married to a young woman from his home village, Grizel Sim. Their eldest son, Archibald Campbell Younger, was born in 1757, to be followed by at least two more boys, Robert, and William Younger II, born 1767. Less than three years after William II was born, however, his father died aged only 37. Two years later Grizel Younger married Alexander Anderson, who had been brewing in Leith since at least 1758. When Anderson died in 1781, Grizel ran Anderson’s brewery herself before retiring in 1794, aged 65. It was Grizel, therefore, who was the first of the brewing Youngers.

Archibald Campbell Younger had been apprenticed to his stepfather’s brewery when he was 15. When he reached 21, in 1778, Archibald left Leith to start his own brewery in the precincts of the Abbey of Holyrood House in Edinburgh. If any date can be given for the start of the Younger’s brewing concern, therefore, 1778 is the year. The site Archibald chose had excellent well-water, and, because it was within the abbey precincts, it was outside the jurisdiction of Edinburgh Town Council: thus Archibald and the three other brewers in the abbey precincts did not have to pay the council’s 2d-a-pint beer tax.

The Abbey brewery, Edinburgh in 1861

After eight years, in 1786, Archibald was able to buy a larger brewery nearby in Croft-an-Righ (“Farm of the King” in Gaelic), a lane behind Holyrood palace. He had become famous for brewing Younger’s Edinburgh Ale, according to the writer Robert Chambers in 1869, “a potent fluid which almost glued the lips of the drinker together, and of which few, therefore, could dispatch more than a bottle.” It sold in the bothies of Edinburgh for three pennies a bottle, 20 per cent more expensive than ordinary ale. Five years later, in 1791, Archibald moved again, to a new brewery in North Back Canongate with a capacity of some 15,000 barrels a year, where he was in business with his brother-in-law, John Sommervail.

Archibald’s brother Richard was running a brewery just off Canongate in Edinburgh from at least 1788, though by 1796 he had moved to London. That was the same year that William Younger II opened his own brewhouse within the Holyrood Abbey precincts. By 1802 Mr William Younger’s “much admired” ale was being advertised for sale at the Edinburgh Ale Vaults in London, in cask and bottle. The following year he acquired James Blair’s Abbey Brewhouse, Horsewynd, Holyrood. William and Archibald were briefly partners in a venture to brew porter, from 1806 to 1808, but this seems not to have been successful, and William acquired new partners, while in 1809 Archibald retired from brewing.

William Younger, ‘Established 1749′ – not

In 1818 the Abbey concern became William Younger & Co, with William II in partnership with Alexander Smith, the brewer and superintendent of the Abbey brewery. In 1836, when William II was 69, he made his son William Younger III, aged 35, a partner in the business, along with Andrew Smith, son of Alexander Smith. William Younger III had no particular desire to be involved in the business, but Andrew Smith had worked there since he was 16, and it was under his command that the company began bottling for sale overseas in 1846, and exports started to grow. The reputation of Younger’s India Pale Ale and Edinburgh ale helped it rise to be easily the biggest brewer in Edinburgh by 1850, mashing 10,292 quarters of malt. This was nearly a third as much again as its nearest rival, Alexander Berwick, who had bought Richard Younger’s old premises off South Back Canongate (now Holyrood Road), 300 yards away.

Eight years later Younger’s bought Berwick’s premises from his nephews for £1,600. Eventually production of India Pale Ale (brewed, like the Burton article, in unions) was concentrated at the Holyrood brewery, while the Abbey brewery made the Edinburgh ale. By the early 1860s the the firm was exporting its ales as far as Honolulu and New Zealand, using a red “triple pyramid” trademark, greatly annoying Bass, which felt it resembled its own red triangle trademark too much.

A description of the Abbey brewery in the Official Illustrated Guide to the Great Northern Railway in 1861 included mention of two 50-quarter “mash tubs” equipped with Steele’s mashers; two wort coppers, one holding 116 barrels; and the tun and fermenting rooms, “each having 30 fermenting tuns, and beneath them 12 settling synores [sic].” It’s clear from the context what a “synore” is, but I have never seen the word before, and it appears to exist nowhere else in Googledom but here. If anyone has any more information I’d be delighted to hear it. “Synore” there is evidently a typo for “square”.

The GNR guide is also the first reference I have found to the “established in 1749″ canard, though I am sure there are earlier ones out there. By now William McEwan had started his own brewing operation at Fountainbridge in Edinburgh, but although he would become a ferocious rival, Younger’s continued to thrive: it was the first brewer in Scotland to register as a limited company, in 1887, and by 1905 it was reckoned that Younger’s produced a quarter of all Scotland’s beer.

In 1930 it was announced that Younger’s and McEwan were linking up as Scottish Brewers, though their three breweries continued until 1955, when the Abbey brewery was shut and converted into offices. (In 1999 it became part of the site for the new Scottish parliament building.) The consolidation of the brewing industry in the UK saw Scottish Brewers join up with Newcastle Breweries in 1960 to form Scottish & Newcastle, which would eventually, by the start of the 1970s, be the smallest of the “Big Six” UK brewing conglomerates. That was how it stayed, until the 1990s, when another storm hit the UK brewing industry, and by 1995 S&N had acquired what had once been the Courage and Watney brewing empires to become the biggest brewing concern in Britain. It was clear, however, that consolidation was not just a regional, UK, phenomenon, but global. S&N tried to expand enough to compete on the world stage, buying the French brewer Kronenbourg to become the second biggest brewing concern in Europe.

It also started a joint venture with Carlsberg, Baltic Beverage Holdings, to run the Baltika brewing operation in Russia. Carlsberg, however, seems to have eventually decided it wanted all of Baltika’s profits for itself: knowing it would never be allowed to take over S&N on its own (too many markets where it would own too great a share), in 2007 the Danish firm invited Heineken to join it in carving up S&N, with Heineken getting the UK brewing operations.

Slowly Heineken appears to be realising that comparatively “niche” products are best run by a specialist, hence the sale of McEwan’s and Younger’s to Wells & Young’s, which at a bound becomes the third largest premium ale producer in the UK, after Marston’s and Greene King. I wish them well: just don’t mention 1749 in the promotion literature.

The London Brewers Alliance beer festival at Vinopolis, by Borough Market, a couple of Saturdays ago was a terrific event, thoroughly enjoyable. In one room were gathered a dozen or more (I forgot to count) stalls representing breweries from in and around London, with the brewers themselves serving their beers and happy to talk to the punters about them.

It was the kind of “meet the brewer” show common in the US but almost unheard of in the UK that we really should be seeing repeated across this country. And it’s good to see London’s brewers working together in the 21st century to support each other in exactly the same way their ancestors did almost eight centuries ago, when the Brewers’ Guild was founded at All Hallows’ Church, London Wall.

It was also good, for me, to see that the Brewery History Society had a stall there: the LBA clearly has an interest in London’s history as a world-class brewing city, and everybody needs to be reminded of this almost forgotten heritage. I’d argue that, historically, London has an excellent claim to be regarded as the greatest brewing city in the world. Yes, I AM a Londoner, so of course I’m biased, but I dare you to deny that over the centuries London has given the world more new beer styles than any other brewing centre on the planet:

Porter
Developed around 1718 by London’s brown beer brewers and taking its name from London’s street and river porters, the strong, hoppy, aged porter eventually became the world’s first widely drunk beer style, and was imitated by brewers from America to Russia.

Stout
The stronger forms of porter were known as brown stout, eventually shortened to just “stout”. London remained a centre of stout brewing until after the Second World War.

Russian Imperial Stout
Several London brewers developed particularly strong versions of stout for export to Russia in the late 18th and 19th centuries, in a style that eventually became known as Russian Imperial Stout.

India Pale Ale
The Bow brewer George Hodgson was the first brewer to make a name for exporting well-hopped pale ale to India, from at least the 1790s, and Hodgson’s was the first beer to be called an India Pale Ale.

Brown Ale
In 1902 Thomas Wells Thorpe, the newly appointed managing director of Mann, Crossman and Paulin in Whitechapel, introduced the first modern bottled brown ale, Mann’s Brown. After the First World War brown ale became an increasingly popular style, with almost every brewer in the country eventually producing one.

London was also home to the UK’s first lager-only brewery, in 1882 and, until the 1870s, home to a succession of the biggest breweries in the world, including Barclay Perkins, Whitbread and Truman.

The crowd at the London Brewers Alliance beer festival 2011. There are at least two well-known beer writers half-hidden: can you spot them?

The first London Brewers Alliance festival, last year, featured a “co-operative” porter brewed using the combined resources of alliance members, and this one included a “joint effort” production of London’s other great innovation, IPA. Now, here’s where I DO have some criticism: the IPA was served on a stall by itself with, effectively no publicity, nothing to explain what this beer was, nothing to explain the significance of the links between IPA and London, and nothing about this particular brew, the hops, the grain bill, the fact that it was being served (IIRC from my chat with Kieran, a nice young man from the Windsor and Eton Brewery) at least eight weeks old, nicely matured. That was all a bit of a fail. My impression is that there’s a growing appreciation of heritage, of authenticity, of local roots among beer drinkers under 35 (indeed, among young consumers of anything at all), and they love learning that sort of stuff.

I’d also suggest that the “half pint minimum” serve is an improvable idea as well: third-of-a-pint glasses would enable drinkers to have 50 per cent more samples in their four-pint “free” (for the £20 admission) allowance. (And to be honest, half a pint was much more of a couple of the beers available than I wanted to drink. The standard of beers was generally very high, but there was at least one that really shouldn’t have been on sale: an English bitter should NOT taste like someone dropped a shot of Scotch into it.)

That apart, it was a great evening, and my egotistical little heart overflowed when I spotted that the Tottenham-based Redemption Brewery, one of 2010′s start-ups, had on its stall a beer called Fellowship Porter. “You know your brewing history,” I said to the guy on the stall, who was evidently Andy Moffat, the Redemption head brewer. “Yes,” he said, “I got the name from a book by Martyn Cornell.”

Considering that only five years ago, London was down to just 10 breweries, the smallest number since the all-time low of nine in 1976-1978, and a long way from either the post-Second World War peak of 34 in 1998 and the 25 that existed 60 years ago, there has been a tremendous resurgence in brewery numbers in the past couple of years. Currently more than 20 breweries are actually running, or will be running shortly, within the Greater London area. What is a tad depressing is that only two of those breweries date from before 2000. But hey – even Fuller’s was a start-up once.

The BHS guys asked me to produce a couple of London-specific items, so I put together a rough map showing the major London breweries of 1850 – actually a low point in the 19th century for brewery numbers, but interesting because it was still a time where you could differentiate between the big porter brewers, such as Barclay Perkins, Reid, Meux, Whitbread and Truman, and the by-now fast-growing ale brewers, such as Mann, Goding, Charrington and Courage. Here’s that map – double-click on it to see it full-size. Anyone who wants to, please feel free to reproduce it. Below the map is the London brewing time line, I did for the event: again, London brewers, feel free to use this yourselves. And finally, here’s a little verse:

London’s brewing, London’s brewing
Rise up early! Grind the malt!
Pour on water, good hot water
Stir the mash tun, stir the mash

London’s brewing, London’s brewing
Sparge the mash tun! Drain the grains!
Fill the copper, tip the hops in,
Boil the wort and cool it off.

London’s brewing, London’s brewing
Fill the vat high, pitch the yeast!
Watch the foam rise, see it settle
Rack in hogsheads, drink it up!

London brewing: a brief timeline

1118 Thomas Becket, patron saint of the Brewers’ Company, born in London around this year.
1286 The brewery at St Paul’s Cathedral made 67,814 gallons of ale in a year.
1342 The Brewers’ Guild founded by John Enfield at All Hallows’ Church, London Wall.
1372 Henry Vandale bought four barrels of “beere” in London, the first known mention of the hopped drink in the city’s history (it was probably made in the Low Countries).
1419 Richard “Dick” Whittington, Lord Mayor of London, angry that the brewers ate “fat swans” at their St Martin’s Day feast, ordered them to sell their ale for a penny a gallon the next day. Around this time London had around 290 commercial brewers.
1424/5 London’s ale brewers complained about “aliens” (from Continental Europe) “nigh to the city dwelling” (probably in Southwark) brewing beer.
1483 London’s ale brewers, trying to maintain the difference between (unhopped) ale and (hopped) beer, persuaded the city authorities to rule that ale must be made only from “licour, malt and yeste”.
1542 Henry VIII’s royal brewers – he had at least two, one for ale, one for beer – were supplying more than 13,000 pints a day to Hampton Court palace.
1574 There were 58 ale breweries in London and 32 beer breweries. The biggest Elizabethan London beer brewer consumed 90 quarters of malt a week, enough to make around 14,000 barrels of beer a year, very roughly.
1578 The Brewers’ Company wrote to Queen Elizabeth apologising for the annoyance caused by the smoke from the seacoal used in their breweries, and offered to burn only wood, rather than coal, in the brewhouses closest to the Queen’s home, the Palace of Westminster.
1580 The Hour Glass Brewery in Thames Street looks to have begun some time before this year: later, as Calvert’s and then the City of London Brewery Company it ran through until brewing stopped on the site in 1922.
1616 The Anchor Brewery, Southwark, later Barclay Perkins, founded around this year.
1635 Thomas Cole began brewing in or before this year in Twickenham: the Coles only stopped brewing in 1892.
1666 Brewers’ Hall, the home of the Brewers’ Company, was destroyed in the Great Fire of London, along with 16 brewhouses, all in and around Thames Street, close to the fire’s heart. The same year, or thereabouts, the brewery that became Truman Hanbury and Buxton opened in Brick Lane.
1700 London had 190 breweries, producing a total of 1.7 million barrels of ale and beer.
1718 Around this year London’s brown beer brewers started to hop their beer more, and store it longer, eventually developing a drink that took the name of its keenest customers, the city’s many street and river porters.
1748 The biggest London brewers were now the specialist porter manufacturers, with the largest making more than 50,000 barrels a year. Their profits enabled them to buy themselves country estates.
1780 Around this time Southwark replaced Stourbridge fair, just south of Cambridge, as the biggest hop market in England.
1784 Henry Goodwyn of the Red Lion porter brewhouse at St Katharine’s, Wapping (later Hoare’s) installed the first steam engine in London.
1786 The top 12 London porter brewers made up half the capital’s beer production, leaving another 150 brewers to supply the rest.
1793 The first record of George Hodgson of the Bow brewery exporting pale ale to India. This would eventually develop into the beer that became known as India Pale Ale.
1814 The Great London Beer Flood: on October 17 a 22-feet-high vat at Meux’s porter brewery off Tottenham Court Road burst, releasing 3,550 barrels of beer, weighing 570 tons, into the slums behind the brewery. Amazingly, only eight people were killed, all women and children.
1815 The 12 “principle” porter brewers now made 75 per cent or more of the city’s beer. The combined output of all the seven biggest ale brewers in London totalled just 85,000 barrels, the same as one porter brewer, Barclay Perkins, could produce on its own in just four months.
1823 Porter output in London hit 1.8 million barrels, the highest it would ever be.
1832 The London excise district contained 115 brewers, though most of the beer was produced by the 20 or so largest.
1833 Increased sales of mild ale started to force the London porter brewers to brew ale as well, while London’s ale brewers, such as Mann, Charrington and Courage, began to grow in size.
1835 First known use of the expression India Pale Ale, in an advertisement by Hodgson’s of Bow.
1850 More than 40 London breweries had closed in the previous 20 years.
1872 Meux & Co, of the Horseshoe brewery, off Tottenham Court Road, long one of the biggest brewers of porter, started brewing ales as well.
1877 Reid & Co of the Griffin brewery, Clerkenwell, the last porter-only London brewery, began production of pale and bitter ales alongside the black beer.

Derek Prentice of Fullers studies a page from a 1930s brewing book at the BHS stall

1880 New openings had pushed the number of London breweries up to the levels of 1830 again.
1882 Britain’s first lager-only brewery , the Austro-Bavarian Lager Beer and Crystal Ice Company, began brewing in Tottenham High Road.
1887 Porter now made up only a third of the London trade.
1893 London’s brewers owned an estimated 3,000 horses.
1898 Three of the former big 12 London porter brewers, Watney, Combe and Reid, merged to form one firm, with breweries in Pimlico and Mortlake.
1902 Thomas Wells Thorpe, the long-serving head brewer at Mann, Crossman and Paulin in Whitechapel, introduced the first of a new kind of beer, Mann’s Brown Ale.
1904 London still had 90 breweries, out of a total of 1,503 in England and Wales. It also had just one pub still brewing its own beer, although in the rest of the country there were another 3,108 home-brew pubs.
1921 Meux’s brewery in Tottenham Court Road closed, with production moving to Thorne Brothers’ brewery, Vauxhall.
1922 The last brewery in the City, the former Calvert’s brewery in Upper Thames Street, known since 1860 as the City of London Brewery Co Ltd, closed and transferred production to Stansfeld & Co’s Swan brewery in Fulham.
1933 Hoare & Co, the Red Lion brewery, by St Katharine’s Docks, another former porter giant, was taken over by Charrington’s and closed the following year.
1936 Guinness opened a brewery in Park Royal to supply much of England with its stout.
1940 Brewers’ Hall was destroyed for a second time, in a German air raid.
1941 Whitbread brewed porter for the last time at its brewery in Chiswell Street.
1952 London still had 25 operating breweries, run by some 19 or so companies, out of around 560 breweries in the whole of the UK.
1955 Barclay Perkins merged with Courage.
1958 Watney merged with Mann Crossman and Paulin and closed the Pimlico brewery the following year.
1959 Ind Coope of Romford acquired Taylor Walker in Limehouse, closing it early in 1960.
1967 Charrington of Mile End merged with Bass to form the biggest brewing concern in the country.
1974 Watney Mann merged with Truman Hanbury & Buxton.
1975 Brewing stopped at Charrington’s.
1976 Brewing stopped at Whitbread’s brewery in Chiswell Street. London hit an all-time low of just nine breweries.
1977 Godson’s brewery, the first of London’s new generation micro-breweries, opened, originally in Clapton, before moving to Bow in 1979. The venture ultimately closed in 1987.
1979 Brewing stopped at Mann’s in Whitechapel. The same year David Bruce opened the Goose & Firkin in Southwark, London’s first home-brew pub for many decades.
1981 A flurry of pub-brewery openings saw the number of London breweries rise from 11 to 20.
1982 The Courage brewery by Tower Bridge closed.
1989 Truman’s brewery in Brick Lane closed.
1992 Ind Coope in Romford closesd.
1998 The growth of the Firkin chain helped push London’s brewery numbers up to a post-war high of 34.
2000 The closure of the Firkin chain the previous year saw brewery numbers drop back down to just 20. The Meantime brewery opened in Greenwich.
2005 Guinness Park Royal closed.
2006 Young’s brewery moved its operations from Wandsworth to Bedford.
2007 London’s brewery numbers hit their second post-war low, of just 10.
2009 Plan to close the Stag brewery at Mortlake announced (though this has apparently been postponed until 2014).
2010 Brewery numbers starting to climb again, up to 14, with new brewers such as Kernel.
2011 A surge in new openings pushes brewery numbers in London back up to 21, the highest this millennium: of those 21 breweries, all but three have opened since 2000.

If there is one blessing the Oxford Companion to Beer has brought us, it’s the beginnings of a much better, and myth-free understanding of the origins of the world’s most popular beer style, pale pils lager, and the brewery that first made it, Pilsner Urquell, which is in what is now the Czech Republic. We didn’t get this new understanding from the OCB itself, obviously, but from Evan Rail, who lives in Prague, who writes with insight and erudition about Czech beer, Czech beerstyles and Czech brewing history, and who knows the number one rule about writing history: go back to the original sources – an apt commandment here, since “Urquell” – “Prazdroj” in Czech – means “original source”.

If you haven’t already, I urge you to read his latest blog post adding, clarifying and correcting the OCB’s Czech-related entries.

Evan has done something few, if any, writers in English about the origins of Pilsner Urquell, the “world’s first pale lager”, have bothered doing. He has uncovered, and read, the document in 1839 which effectively founded the brewery in Pilsen, the “Request of the Burghers with Brewing Rights for the Construction of Their Own Malt- and Brewhouse”, made by 12 prominent Pilsen burghers. He has also read the brewery’s own history, written for its 50th anniversary, Měšťanský pivovar v Plzni 1842-1892.

Among the fascinating facts that Evan has revealed so far, the following seem particularly worthy of note:

• The town of Pilsen was already being “flooded” by bottom-fermented “Bavarian-style” beer in 1839, the 12 would-be founders of the new brewery declared, and it seems one big reason why they wanted to build their own new brewery was to fight back against imports of lager beers from elsewhere, by making their own bottom-fermented brews in Pilsen.
• The builder of the new brewery, František Filaus “made a trip around the biggest breweries in Bohemia which were then already equipped for brewing bottom-fermented beer,” while in December 1839, the brewery’s architect, Martin Stelzer, “travelled to Bavaria, so that he could tour bigger breweries in Munich and elsewhere and use the experience thus gained for the construction and furnishing of the Burghers’ Brewery.”
• The yeast for the new brewery was certainly not “smuggled out of Bavaria by a monk”, as far too many sources try to claim (did anybody with their critical faculties engaged ever believe that?), nor even, apparently, brought with him by Josef Groll, the 29-year-old brewer from the town of Vilshofen in Lower Bavaria who was hired to run the new brewery. Instead, “seed yeast for the first batch and fermented wort were purchased from Bavaria,” according to the 1892 book. (The Groll family brewery, incidentally, no longer exists, but another concern in Vilshofen, the Wolferstetter brewery, still produces a Josef Groll Pils in his memory.)
• The maltings at the new brewery were “dle anglického spůsobu zařízený hvozd”, that is, loosely, “equipped with English-style malt kilns”, according to an account from 1883. That meant indirect heat: the same 1883 account says the kilns were “vytápěný odcházejícím teplem z místnosti ku vaření“, which looks to mean “heated by heat from the boiler-room”. Indirect heat makes it easier to control the heating, and easier to produce pale malt, which is just what the Plzeňský Prazdroj brewery did to make its pale lager.

That still leaves THE big mystery: if the burgher brewers of Pilsen wanted to compete against Bavarian-style bottom-fermented lagers, which would still have been quite dark (think “Dunkel”), why did they make a pale beer? Were they attempting to imitate English pale beers? Since pale bitter beers were only just taking off even in Britain in 1842 (although pale mild ales had been around for a couple of centuries), I don’t personally find that particularly likely.

However, Evan has promised “more on the origins of Pilsner Urquell coming up”, and I am hugely looking forward to reading additional revelations. I was delighted to read that Stelzer had toured the big breweries of Munich before the Plzeňský Prazdroj brewery was built, because I suggested in an article for Beer Connoisseur magazine in the US two and a half years ago that he must have done. In Munich he surely met Gabriel Sedlmayr II, of the Spaten brewery, who had been round Britain looking at the latest brewing and malting techniques being practised in places such as London, Burton upon Trent and Edinburgh, and Sedlmayr would have been able to tell him about English malting techniques. Munich, at that time, was becoming a magnet for brewers in Continental Europe because of the advances in brewing methods being made by Sedlmayr, as he perfected the techniques of lager brewing.

Sedlmayr wasn’t, at that time, making pale malts: however, the man who accompanied him to Britain on one of his trips, Anton Dreher of the Klein-Schwechat brewery near Vienna, DID come back and start producing paler English-style malts, allied with Bavarian-style lagering, which resulted in a copper-brown beer, the first “Vienna-style” lager. Vienna was then, of course, the capital of the Austrian empire, of which Bohemia (and Pilsen) were still a part: it would not be surprising if Stelzer, a citizen of the Austrian empire, also visited Vienna and met Dreher (whose name, it always amuses me to note, translates as “Tony Turner”), and talked about malting techniques, but there seems to be no evidence as yet that he did so.

I’d also love to know why Josef Groll was hired (apparently by Stelzer) to run the new brewery: Vilshofen, while nearer Pilsen than Munich is, is a comparative backwater, and if Stelzer had been to Munich, why did he not bring a Munich brewer back with him to Bohemia? This site claims (on what authority I know not) that Groll studied under both Sedlmayr and Dreher, but both allegedly complained about his rudeness, obstinacy, stubbornness and lack of self-control. If that’s true (I have no idea), it doesn’t look as it Stelzer bothered checking up on Groll’s references before he hired the young brewer …

‘If the man who invented the censorship bar had drunk Skol, it wouldn’t look like this – it would look like this. Skol goes down round’

It is one of the stranger results of global beer marketing that the biggest-selling beer in Brazil, which is also one of the biggest beers in Africa, from Algeria via Guinea to Rwanda, and is sold across large parts of Asia, from India via Malaysia to Hong Kong, began life more than 50 years ago in a small Scottish town on the north side of the Forth estuary.

I doubt too many drinkers of Skol in Rio de Janeiro know that the drink that “goes down round”, according to its advertising, came originally from 6,000 miles away. Today a beer that was one of the pioneers of mass-market lager in Britain is seen in Brazil as so Brazilian that drinking it turns Argentinians into supporters of the Canarinhos.

Skol is also huge across the South Atlantic in the Congo, where it inspires what I suggest may be one of the best music videos in support of a beer ever, by the too-little-known Bill Clinton Kalonji. (Give yourself eight minutes 33 to watch, and if you’re not grinning broadly by two minutes in at the latest, you can have your money back. The Portman group would turn into steam.) In Malaysia (where the beer is brewed by a Carlsberg subsidiary) and the Far East, meanwhile, it has been launched as a “value for money” brew.

In Britain, Skol was the biggest-selling beer in the market 25 years ago. But it had fallen out of the top 10 by 2004 and is now a commodity lager, sold in cans at just 2.8 per cent abv to take advantage of the UK’s new low-alcohol tax band. Skol is currently the fifth best selling beer in the world, thanks to its popularity in places such as Brazil and the Congo. But in the country where it began, Skol is a sad, tired brand.

The other curiosity is that brewery mergers and takeovers mean that Skol-the-brand is owned by Carlsberg in Britain and Asia, A-B InBev in South America, and UniBra, a Belgian company, in Africa. How all did this happen to a beer from Alloa? It’s a long story, and it properly starts in Burton upon Trent more than 110 years ago, where a substantial but struggling pale ale brewer, Samuel Allsopp & Sons, decided in 1898 to get into the lager-brewing business.

Allsopp’s Lager ad, Daily Mirror, 1906. Love that typeface …

Allsopp’s, the second-biggest of the Burton brewers (behind Bass), had been far too slow in reacting to the wave of pub-buying by other breweries that took place in the late 1880s and early 1890s, which gobbled up a big slice of its former free trade outlets. As a result it had seen a sharp loss of sales – by 1895 it was brewing only half the volumes it had been selling in the late 1870s – and was suffering from serious over-capacity. A new chairman was appointed that year, the Hon Arthur Percy Allsopp, aged 34, Old Etonian seventh son of the first Lord Hindlip, Henry Allsopp. Percy set about buying pubs, paying more than £1.7 million in five years for 323 outlets. This was very much more than the going rate per pub, and a strategy later described by The Economist as “insane”.

He also decided that Allsopp’s should start brewing lager, to use that spare capacity, and after trips to look round breweries in Germany and the United States, plumped for the very latest in kit from the Pfaudler Vacuum Fermentation Company of Rochester, New York. The new lager brewery, erected on the “Old Brewery” part of the Allsopp site in Burton at a cost of £80,000 (equal to £80 million today), could turn out 50,000 to 60,000 barrels a year, “sufficient lager beer to supply almost the whole of the country”, using “a rapid system of maturing which is greatly favoured in the United States” that would send the beer out with just 14 days’ lagering, against the two to four months seen in Germany.

The new lager brewery was finished by August 1899, and officially opened that October. It seems to have made both Pilsner and Bavarian-style beers: in December 1899 Allsopp’s “presented 600 dozen pint bottles of their pale and dark lager” to 500 Volunteers off to South Africa to join the British forces fighting the Boers in the Second Boer War.

However, the new lager brewery failed to revive Allsopp’s fortunes, and in 1900 Percy Allsopp resigned. Total barrelage continued to fall, although the amount of lager produced increased: even so, the Allsopp’s historian Ray Anderson estimates that despite “considerable” advertising, sales never topped 40,000 barrels a year. In 1913 Allsopp’s briefly went into receivership. But John Calder from the Scottish brewer James Calder and Co of Alloa, was brought in by the receiver, Sir William Barclay Peat, to be the new chairman, and under his leadership the company began to turn around.

In 1920 Calder also became the chairman of the Alloa brewer Archibald Arrol. A year later, Allsopp’s lager brewing kit was transferred to Arrol’s site in Alloa, together with Allsopp’s Swedish head lager brewer, Joseph Lundgren. There it continued to brew Allsopp’s lager, though in 1927, a new brand was introduced, Graham’s Golden Lager. This took its name either from Colonel Graham, Allsopp’s agent in London, or Willie Graham town clerk of Alloa, depending on which legend you wish to believe.

Allsopp’s actually acquired Arrol’s in 1930. Then in 1934 it merged with Ind Coope, which had been brewing next door in Burton since 1856, to form what, at the time, was the biggest brewery company in the UK, with 3,400 tied houses. Lager continued to be only a minute fraction of the British beer market, even after the Second World War, but Graham’s remained one of the leading brands. All the same, Ind Coope, perhaps prompted by the drive by the Canadian entrepreneur Eddie Taylor to promote his Carling’s Black Label (sic) lager in Britain, spent £1 million over four years from 1955 rebuilding its two lager plants, Arrol’s in Alloa (which received a new Swedish-made brewery) and Wrexham in North Wales (acquired in 1949), and in 1959 it launched a new brand: Graham’s Skol Lager.

The “Skol” part was supposed to be derived from the Danish/Norwegian/Swedish toast word “skål“, equivalent to “cheers”: it reflected a trend throughout the 1960s and 1970s by British brewers to give their lagers a Continental-sounding air. (Oddly, the very first bottle labels carried the old Ind Coope Burton brewery “castle” trademark.) The “Graham’s” bit was soon sidelined, with “Skol pilsner lager” being promoted in what Ind Coope called “the biggest advertising campaign Britain has ever seen for any lager”, which was deliberately pitched at young people in a way that would not be allowed today.

In 1961 Ind Coope merged with Tetley’s of Leeds and Ansell’s of Birmingham to form what would be named Allied Breweries. That gave Skol thousands of new outlets in the UK. But Ind Coope had been developing even bigger plans for its lager. In 1960 the UK had applied to join the European Economic Community, or Common Market, the customs union encompassing France, Germany, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands that was the forerunner of the European Union, only to be vetoed by Charles de Gaulle, president of France. Ind Coope had apparently hoped that if Britain joined the EEC, that would allow it to sell its lager in Europe. Ind Coope’s commercial director, Robert Eades, frustrated by De Gaulle, looked instead at markets outside the EEC and, as he told The Times in 1967: “Suddenly it went click. Why not an international beer?” From that was born the idea of one beer, brewed in different countries but with the same character and standards, under the common name of Skol.

Labatt’s Skol label

Previously, big-selling international lager brands such as Carlsberg, Becks and Heineken had been brewed in one country and exported. But Eddie Taylor had shown, by brewing Black Label in the United States and Britain as well as Canada, that drinkers did not necessarily care where their lager was made. Ind Coope had signed a “technical alliance” with Eddie Taylor’s Canadian rival Labatt’s in 1958. In 1961 what was to become Pripp-Bryggerierna, the largest brewery in Scandinavia, joined the alliance, to be followed by Unibra of Belgium, owner of the largest brewery in what had once been (until 1960) the Belgian Congo. In 1964 the four groups met in Bermuda and signed an agreement to set up a company called Skol International. The same summer, Skol began to be brewed at a new brewery near Barcelona in Spain under a deal between Allied Breweries and the Spanish brewer Cervezas de Santander. In the autumn of 1964 the Skol consortium was joined by Portugal’s Sociedade Central de Cervejas, which had links with South American brewers as well as the then Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique.

By 1967 Skol was being brewed by 20 breweries in 14 countries, including Austria (by Brauerei Schwechat, Anton Dreher’s old concern), Algeria, Australia (by Perth’s Swan Brewery), the Netherlands and Greece, and drunk in 36, with new breweries to make the beer being built in Italy (at Ceccano, 40 miles south of Rome) and “Persia”, as Iran was still known. Talks were going on with brewers in France, Germany (with Dortmund Union), Yugoslavia, Sardinia and Columbia, while three requests from Indian firms to join the Skol consortium were sitting on his desk, Eades told The Times. Skol International attempted to maintain strict quality control over each brewer, with the Schwarz Laboratories in New York, owned jointly by Labatts, Allied and Pripp, testing samples of Skol from new members of the consortium “exhaustively” until satisfied. One firm in 1967 was supposed to have been waiting 18 months for the green light, with 28 trial brews tested and rejected. Eades admitted to only one serious failed launch: in New Zealand in 1964, where “a lack of market research” meant that the local Skol “did not coincide with local taste”.

In May 1967 it was announced that Skol would “soon” be brewed in Brazil for the first time, by Brazil’s Caracú group, at its breweries in Rio de Janeiro and Londrina. Caracú’s biggest-selling beers at the time were darker lagers, but Brazilians took to Skol quickly enough that in 1970 it was announced the Skol International consortium would be building a new £500,000 brewery in Manaus, Brazil, to brew 600,000 barrels of Skol a year, boosting total production of Skol in South America to 6 million barrels a year. In 1980 Caracú was acquired by its Brazilian rival Brahma, which linked up with its main competitor Antarctica in 2000 to form Ambev. Then in 2004 Ambev merged with Interbrew of Belgium to form InBev – now, after the takeover of Anheuser-Busch, A-B InBev.

In Britain, meanwhile, Skol was one of the brands heading what amounted to a lager revolution, as a new generation of drinkers rejected the beers their fathers drank. There was even “Skol Liqueur Lager”, aimed at female drinkers, as well as a stronger Skol De Luxe. But while Skol had 21 per cent of the UK lager market in 1967, and continued to be a leading contender for another 20 years, in the 1980s Skol was replaced by Allied as its main lager brand by the Australian Castlemaine XXXX, launched in the UK in 1984. In 2004, when Skol had more than 30 per cent of the Brazilian beer market, having been the biggest brand in the country since the 1990s, it was described in Britain as “an old-fashioned cheap supermarket brand”, barely hanging on under the ownership of Carlsberg, which had acquired the former Allied brewing empire. Last year Carlsberg announced it was cutting Skol’s abv in Britain from 3 per cent to 2.8 per cent, to fit in with the new reduced duty rate on beers of 2.8 per cent abv or below.

So, Skol, born in Alloa, son of Graham’s Golden Lager, grandson of Allsopp’s lager of Burton upon Trent, once hugely popular in Britain but now spurned and despised at home, is the darling of Brazil, a favourite of much of Africa, and selling 9 billion bottles a year. I wonder if Kirstie Allsopp has ever drunk any of the beer her several-times great-uncle had a hand in originating.

‘Guinness Marmite’ from the 1930s

Is there a brewery business with more books written about it – is there any business with more books written about it – than Guinness? Effectively a one-product operation, Guinness has inspired tens of millions of words. Without trying hard, I’ve managed to acquire 18 different books about Guinness, the brewery, the people, the product and/or the advertising (four of them written by people called Guinness), and that’s not counting the five editions I have of the lovely little handbook that Guinness used to give to visitors to the brewery at St James’s Gate, dated from 1928 to 1955. There are plenty more books on Guinness I don’t have.

Despite all those volumes of Guinnessiana, however, you can still find a remarkable quantity of Guinness inaccuracy and mythology, constantly added to and recycled, particularly about the brewery’s earliest days. The myths and errors range from Arthur Guinness’s date of birth (the claim that he was born on September 24, 1725 is demonstrably wrong) to the alleged uniqueness of Guinness’s yeast: the idea that the brewery’s success was down to the yeast Arthur Guinness brought with him to Dublin is strangely persistent, though the brewery’s own records show that as early as 1810-12 (and almost certainly earlier) St James’s Gate was borrowing yeast from seven different breweries.

Most accounts of the history of Guinness also miss out on some cracking stories too little known: the homosexual affair that almost brought the end of the brewery partnership in the late 1830s, for example; the still-unexplained attack of insanity that saw Guinness’s managing director, great-great nephew of Arthur Guinness I, carried out of the brewery in a straitjacket in 1895; and the link between the writings of Arthur Guinness I’s grandson Henry Grattan Guinness and the foundation of the state of Israel (which takes in the assassination of Arthur Guinness I’s great-great grandson in Egypt).

An advertisement for one-year-old West India porter from 1819

Let’s deal with a few more myths first, before we get into the juicy stuff. All the below are to be found in a book published in 2009 called Guinness: An Official Celebration, with a foreword by Rory Guinness, five-greats grandson of Arthur I:

1) “Arthur Guinness was born in 1725 in Celbridge, County Kildare.” The Dictionary of Irish Biography claims he was born on March 12 1725. However, that does not match the statement on Arthur Guinness’s grave in Oughterard, Kildare that he died on January 23 1803 “aged 78 years”, from which it can be inferred that his birthday must have been between January 24 1724 and January 23 1725. The most accurate statement, therefore is that his date of birth is unknown, but he was born 1724/5

2) “His father, Richard Guinness, was land steward to the Reverend Arthur Price, later Archbishop of Cashel, and his duties included brewing for the workers on the Archbishop’s estate.” There is NO evidence that Richard Guinness brewed for Archbishop Price, and it’s not usually, I suggest, the sort of task the land steward would have done anyway. Many narratives go on to claim that Arthur learnt to brew from helping his father. While it isn’t impossible that Arthur Guinness might have done some brewing or assisted with some brewing at Price’s estate, Bishopscourt – large domestic and farming establishments were somewhere between quite and highly likely to have their own brewing operation to supply ale for the farmworkers, the household servants and even the family – the brewing seems more likely, on the little evidence we have from elsewhere, to have been done by one of the lowlier servants, rather than the sort of educated young man Arthur Guinness obviously was.

(There are also regularly recurring claims that Arthur Guinness, or his father, was already brewing a black porter-like beer for Archbishop Price, which since we know his breweries at Leixlip and St James’ Gate originally only made ale, is another example of people Making It Up.)

3) “In 1752 the Archbishop died and bequeathed Arthur Guinness the sum of £100. Arthur used the money to open a small brewery in Leixlip.” While Price did leave Arthur (and his father Richard) £100 each in his will, this £100 was NOT the money that enabled Arthur to buy the brewery in Leixlip in 1755. As Patrick Guinness’s excellent book on the early years of the brewery, Arthur’s Round, makes clear, the money Arthur used to start in business as a brewer three years after the Archbishop’s death must largely have come from his father’s savings over 30 years of employment with Archbishop Price, plus, perhaps, money Richard had made from three years of running the White Hart inn in Celbridge after Price’s death.

An ad for extra-superior porter and ‘mild-stout Porter’, the latter strong but unaged

4) “Guinness was brewed using roasted barley, which gave it a distinct dark colour and taste.” Using unmalted barley, roasted or otherwise, was illegal when Arthur began brewing porter and stout, and roasted barley only started being used by Guinness around 1929/1930.

5) “Arthur Guinness must have been very confident that his beer would be a success as he signed a 9,000-year lease on the brewery.” This was almost certainly a legal fix to avoid, for whatever reason, a full transfer of the freehold, rather than any sign of confidence.

Arthur Lee Guinness

And now, a scandal or two. In 1839 Arthur Guinness II, the son of the founder, who had run the brewery since before his father’s death in 1803, was now in his 70s, and withdrawing from the business to leave it in the hands of the third generation. Arthur II had married Anne Lee in 1793. His eldest son, William, had entered the Church, and the two younger sons, Arthur Lee Guinness and Benjamin Lee Guinness, had been brought up to run the brewery. Benjamin had become a partner when he was 22, Arthur when he was 23. However, Arthur Lee became snared in a scandal that came close to seeing the business wound up.

Arthur Lee Guinness was living unmarried at the age of 42 in an apartment at the St James’s Gate brewery. He wrote nature poetry, collected pictures and sealed his letters with a stamp showing a young Greek god. His apartment was described by an American relative in 1840 as “crowded with knick-knacks, statuary, paintings, stuffed birds etc. His drawing room is furnished in Chinese style and most richly. In the yard there are plenty of gods and goddesses etc. There is a fountain which plays into a willow tree …” It was hardly the conventional lifestyle of a middle-aged brewer.

In the spring of 1839 the brewery hired as a clerk an 18-year-old would-be actor, Dionysius Boursiquot, the son of a Guinness relative-by marriage, Anna Maria Darley. Dionysius’s father was almost certainly a Trinity College lecturer and engineer, Dionysius Lardner (who is now making his second appearance in this blog), rather than Anna Darley’s husband, the Dublin wine merchant Samuel Boursiquot: Lardner had been their lodger. Dionysius Boursiquot, who later changed his name to Dion Boucicault and became a famous playwright and actor-manager, was slim and lively, with the dark hair and blue eyes typical of a certain type of Irish native – and Arthur Lee evidently became smitten.

Exactly what form the scandal took is unknown: the Guinness family seems to have removed all the records linked to it from St James’s Gate in the 1950s. But money was involved. Arthur Lee had apparently been issuing notes on the brewery partnership without the knowledge of the other partners, his father and brother. The obvious inference is that he was giving money to Boucicault, either as gifts or because he was being blackmailed.

A surviving letter in the Guinness archives from June 1839 from Arthur Lee Guinness to Arthur II shows clearly the pain he felt at his behaviour:

My dear Father, I well know it is impossible to justify to you my conduct if you will forgive me it is much to ask, but I already feel you have & I will ever be sincerely grateful … I know not what I should say, but do my dear Father believe me I feel deeply … the extreem [sic] & undeserved kindness you have ever, and now, More than ever shown me.

Believe me above all that ‘for worlds’ I would not hurt your mind, if I could avoid it – of all the living. Your feelings are most sacred to me, this situation, in which I have placed myself, has long caused me the acutest pain & your wishes on the subject must be religiously obeyed by me. I only implore you to allow me to hope and forbear a little longer, I feel it but just to do so …

Your dutiful, grateful but distressed son
A.L.G.

It appears that Boucicault was paid to go away: he turned up in London in May 1840 with enough money to buy a horse and carriage and entertain his friends “lavishly”. Meanwhile Arthur II and Benjamin agreed with Arthur Lee’s suggestion that, as part of the resolution of the crisis, he leave the brewery partnership, taking enough cash out of the business, £12,000, to buy his own home, Stillorgan Park, south of Dublin, and live “moderately”. Surviving letters in the Guinness archive indicate that at one point during the crisis it was suggested the whole brewing concern should be “given up” on the dissolution of the partnership between Arthur II and his sons. This would have meant the end of Guinness. However, a new partnership was formed without Arthur Lee, but with his father as titular head and his brother Benjamin at the helm, assisted by another partner, the son of the former brewery head clerk, John Purser junior.

The train that took visitors around St James’s Gate in the 1920s

Arthur Lee Guinness’s life after he left the brewery was not that moderate: another American visitor, Amelia Ransome Neville, described Stillorgan Park in the 1850s as “the most enchanting home I have ever known,” filled with embroidered silks, ivories, carved teak, and bronze gods. Arthur Lee organised weekend parties where guests included the Duke of Leinster and the Earl of Clarendon. Every afternoon at Stillorgan Park, Amelia wrote, “a blind harper, with white beard and flowing white hair, sat over at one side of the court and sang old melodies while he played an Irish harp.”

An English visitor in 1853 called Stillorgan Park “a veritable showplace. One saw there a superb house, elegantly furnished, with costly conservatories and gardens about, filled with the rarest flowers, and well-kept lawns and parks with paths through overshading trees, while statuary peeped out from clumps of thickest shrubbery a beautiful demesne indeed with outspread signs on every side of its owner’s wealth.” One of Arthur Lee’s cousin’s, Eliza O’Grady, lived with him at Stillorgan Park, doubtless playing the part of hostess.

Arthur Lee left Stillorgan Park in 1860, dying three years later, aged 65, at his final home, Roundwood House, Wicklow. While the sale of the contents of Stillorgan Park was taking place in 1860, Arthur Lee had a harper in the grounds play funeral dirges. The first Guinness bottle labels bearing the now famous harp trademark were issued in August 1862. We must wonder if Arthur Lee’s obvious fondness for harpers influenced the company’s choice of logo.

The St James’s Gate brewery from the air in 1939

By the early 1880s the brewery was being run by Arthur Lee’s nephew, Edward Guinness. But Edward, although only in his mid 30s, was slowly moving towards disentangling himself from the business. In 1873 he had married a distant cousin, Adelaide Guinness, who was the great-granddaughter of Arthur Guinness I’s brother Samuel. With his eldest son still a child, Edward had apparently solved the problem of maintaining family control by bringing in his wife’s youngest brother, Claude Guinness, as a senior manager in 1881. Claude was 29, he had graduated from New College, Oxford with a first-class degree, and he possessed a natural business brain. Now Edward could find the time to use his wealth in the pursuit of leisure. In 1880 he took a three-year lease on a Scottish grouse moor, an excellent excuse to extend hospitality to the socially influential. In 1882 he bought a schooner from the Earl of Gosford, a good friend of the Prince of Wales, which brought him into the yachting set that surrounded the future Edward VII.

In 1890, three years after the brewery had been floated as a public company, Edward Guinness left the Guinness board. Claude, 38, was managing director, with his older brother Reginald 48, now chairman. Later that year Edward was granted the title he longed for, becoming Lord Iveagh. In 1894 he acquired the stately home to go with the title, buying Elveden Hall in Suffolk for £159,000, the equivalent of £6 million in early 21st century money.

Edward’s plan to leave the daily concerns of St James’s Gate to his wife’s brothers and immerse himself completely in the golden life of an English aristocrat began to be derailed almost as soon as he acquired Elveden Hall. One day early in 1895 the brilliant Claude Guinness had a complete mental breakdown while working at St James’s Gate, and had to be removed from the brewery in a straitjacket. The trauma of the managing director being carried off raving was so great, somebody tore out the relevant page in the daily brewery log. There were rumours in the Guinness family much later that it was General Paralysis of the Insane – dementia brought on by the final stages of syphilis – and Claude was dead within a few weeks, aged 43. However, there is no other evidence to support this diagnosis: he had two healthy daughters, born 1891 and 1893 who, if he HAD been suffering from syphilis, would have been expected to show symptoms themselves. His sister Adelaide, Edward’s wife, also suffered from dementia as she grew older, ending her years out of sight in a private wing at Elveden Hall.

Coppers at the St James’s Gate brewery, 1939

Reginald Guinness, who had only reluctantly become chairman in 1890, now had to become managing director as well. In 1897 Edward rejoined the company board, and when Reginald retired in 1902 aged 60, Edward took back the chairman’s role, though 55 himself. He remained in control until his death in 1927 aged 80. It has been suggested that Claude’s death, by bringing Edward back to be in ultimate charge of the company for so long, prevented Guinness from reacting appropriately to the difficulties it faced after the First World War, with product quality problems and declining demand for its beer.

While Edward Guinness was helping to make the family synonymous with stout, another branch was bringing the Guinness name to the attention of the public in a completely different field: Biblical Zionism. Henry Grattan Guinness, son of Arthur Guinness I’s youngest brother, John Grattan Guinness, had been born in 1835, became an evangelical preacher in his 20s and, like his uncle Hosea, Arthur’s oldest son, had been ordained a minister. Henry worked among the poor in the East End of London, but also turning himself into an expert in “Biblical prophecy”.

In books such as The Approaching End of the Age, which sold 15,000 copies in eight years, and Light for the Last Days (1888), Henry told the world that the Bible showed the “times of the Gentiles” was coming to an end, which would be marked by the return of the Jews to their homeland in Palestine. Using figures obtained from the Old Testament, which he linked to astronomical observations, Henry predicted in Light for the Last Days that a key year in this eventual return would be 1917.

Among the people who read Henry Grattan’s analyses of history as seen through the prism of Biblical prophecy was Arthur Balfour, who wrote to Henry in 1903, when he was prime minister, to say that he was very interested in Henry’s books and had studied them closely. Henry died in 1910, but in November 1917, Balfour, then foreign minister, signed what became known as the Balfour Declaration, a letter to Lord Rothschild which declared that the British government would use its “best endeavours” to facilitate the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.

Did Balfour act deliberately to bring Henry Grattan’s prophecy to pass? He certainly must have issued the declaration knowing what Henry Grattan had said about 1917. However, late 1917 was strategically probably the first and best time such a declaration could have been made by Britain anyway: the Allied armies had finally begun to overcome the Germans and Turks in the war in Palestine. Five weeks after the Balfour Declaration was issued, Sir Edmund Allenby’s troops liberated Jerusalem.

Whatever Henry Grattan’s influence on the Balfour Declaration, Britain initially encouraged Jewish immigration into Palestine, under its post-First World War League of Nations Mandate to govern the territory. After the Arabs living in Palestine eventually broke out in revolt in the 1930s over the continuing arrival of Jewish settlers, Britain tried to curtail the number of Jews allowed in. During the Second World War, the restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine remained in place, a policy that caused increasing anger among Jewish militants in the territory.

Giant storage vats, some 24 feet high, at the Guinness brewery in 1939

In November 1944, as part of a terrorist campaign directed at trying to get those restrictions lifted, two members of a Jewish group known to the British authorities as the Stern Gang shot dead in Cairo the British Minister Resident in the Middle East – Walter Guinness, Lord Moyne, Ernest Guinness’s third son, and Henry Grattan Guinness’s first cousin twice removed. If Henry did inspire the Balfour Declaration with his predictions, then, arguably, he set off a chain of dominoes that resulted, 56 years later, in his father’s brother’s great-grandson getting hit by three revolver bullets as he sat in the front passenger seat of his black Humber limousine waiting to be let into his official residence after a trip to the British Embassy in Cairo.

(Incidentally, in The Search for God and Guinness, published 2009, Stephen Mansfield claims that “Henry Grattan Guinness, writing nearly sixty years before the event, predicted the miraculous event of 1948 [the declaration of the founding of the State of Israel] when Israel again became a nation. This remains one of the most prescient works of an author in history.” I am not aware, however, that Henry Grattan ever referred to 1948 in connection with Israel in any published work: this appears to be another Guinness myth. The nearest we get to that claim is a note by Michele Guinness in her book The Guinness Spirit that Henry had “scribbled in pencil” 1948 at the end of the final paragraph of the Book of Ezekiel in his “large black Bible”.

The cooperage yard at St James’s Gate in 1939

If all that has given you a thirst for more Guinness, here’s my personal list of the 10 best books about the brewery, its history, the family and the product:

1 The Guinnesses Joe Joyce 2009
Best general study of the brewery and the family, reasonably free from error (though it gets the origins of porter wrong), and far fuller than most on events such as the Arthur Lee scandal: Joyce has a journalist’s eye for a good story, and excellent command of a multi-stranded narrative.

2 Arthur’s Round Patrick Guinness 2008
The essential antidote to many Guinness myths and misunderstandings, and the most in-depth study of Arthur Guinness I’s roots and the early years of the enterprise.

3= Guinness’s Brewery in the Irish Economy 1759-1876 Patrick Lynch and John Vaizey 1960
3= Guinness 1886-1939: From Incorporation to the Second World War SR Denison and Oliver MacDonagh 1998
(only two thirds of the original manuscript, which sits in the Guinness Archives)
Two of the best business history books on any subject, and essential if you want to understand the growth and expansion of the company. Pity about the 10-year gap in coverage between 1877 and 1885 …

5 A Bottle of Guinness Please David Hughes 2008
Primarily meant to be a history of Guinness bottling and exporting, but fabulously detailed on everything from the brewing process to the label printing, and superbly illustrated. Major flaw – no index

6 The Book of Guinness Advertising Jim Davies 1998
13 years later, and therefore more up to date, that the identically titled and also excellent book by Brian Sibley. Guinness porn. Unfortunately now 14 years out of date, which means, for example, the Surfer ad from 1999, regarded as one of the greatest advertisements ever made, is missing.

7 The Guinness Book of Guinness Edward Guinness 1988
Massive collection (540 pages) of anecdotes covering the first half-century of the Park Royal brewery, rammed full of fascinating stuff, such as the way the new brewery was “painted” with vat bottoms from St James’s Gate before it opened to try to ensure the same microflora and fauna were present and get the authentic Guinness flavour right. Major flaw – again, no index.

8 Requiem for a Family Business Jonathan Guinness 1997
A revealing study by the third Lord Moyne of the fading of family control of the firm, which culminated in the appointment of Ernest Saunders and the scandal of the dodgy dealings that went on in the Distillers takeover in 1987.

9 The Guinness Spirit Michele Guinness 1998
500-page volume by a Guinness-by-marriage on the whole family, not just brewers but bankers and missionaries, soldiers, politicians, socialites. Repeats a fair number of myths, but good for appreciating the evangelical strand that powered so many members of the Guinness family, and took them around the world, to China, to the Congo and to New Zealand, as well as the East End of London.

10 Guinness Times: My Days in the World’s Most Famous Brewery Al Byrne 1999
Al Byrne joined Guinness in 1938 aged 14 as a boy-labourer and rose through the ranks, working as a “number-taker” (recording the numbers and destinations of full casks as they left the brewery, and ticking them off when they returned) while, somehow, taking a degree at Trinity College, despite being a Roman Catholic. He graduated in 1945 and was immediately rewarded by Guinness with a staff job, unheard-of in the social conditions of the time. Later he worked as a “traveller” (sales rep) and in the internal communications department, producing the Guinness Times newspaper, before he left in 1978 to be a journalist. It’s an insightful view of conditions at the company over a period when it was starting to struggle, well produced and excellently illustrated.

There is still plenty more to be told about the history of Guinness that has not yet been revealed: I was lucky enough to get a day peeping into the archives at the Park Royal brewery in London before it closed, and there was masses of fascinating stuff, including a fair bit on the long, slow development of nitrogen-dispense draught Guinness, and all the technical problems that surfaced along the way. Must pull those notes out of the attic …

The occasional free beer is, of course, one of the benefits of writing a blog about hopped alcoholic refreshment: but it doesn’t usually come to me via random interactions in the road.

Strictly, I wasn’t actually on the public highway. I was standing in what used to be Black Eagle Street, a turning off Brick Lane, in the heart of what is now Banglatown in the East End of London. Black Eagle Street was swallowed by the expansion of Truman’s brewery, at one time London’s biggest brewer, which closed more than 20 years ago. It is, now, since the old brewery site began to be converted into (quote) “East London’s revolutionary arts and media quarter”, a slightly scruffy pathway lined with slightly scruffy food outlets, bars, art galleries and the like.

I had just come out of one of those bars, where, in an attempted homage to the brewery’s past, I had drunk an Anchor porter from San Francisco. Anchor porter, inspired, ultimately, by the original 18th century beer style that made Trumans famous, was introduced in 1972 – the year after Trumans lost its independence at the end of a ferocious takeover fight.

Alice Churchward, left, and Laure Roux of Hobsons brewery, parked up in the Dray Walk at the former Trumans Brewery off Brick Lane

While pondering that, and other ironies, I spotted a van in the impossible-to-miss livery of Hobsons Brewery, from Cleobury Mortimer, a tiny town on the Shropshire/Worcestershire border some 120 miles from the East End, parked 20 feet away.

Fortunately the two young women with the van were not put off by a grey-bearded loony in a blue hoodie approaching, claiming to be a beer blogger, and demanding to know what they were about. Seems that Hobsons, undeterred by the boom in London’s own brewing scene, has decided there is an opportunity for a brewery whose logo is a bowler hat to sell its beers in the capital. The van, as well as dropping off casks to pubs, was delivering mild ale for the guests at a preview show for an exhibition due to take place at one of the art galleries on the Trumans site.

They, in turn, wanted to know if I knew Hobsons (answer: heard of, never drunk) and would I like to try some, they happened to have a few bottles in the van? There’s probably a bye-law somewhere in the constitution of the International Beerbloggers’ Union that says you’re never allowed to turn down unsolicited free beer. So entirely unexpectedly, thanks to Alice Churchward of Hobsons and her companion Laure Roux, I left the former Truman’s porter brewery with a bottle of British-brewed porter, Hobson’s Postman’s Knock (and also a bottle of Hobson’s Manor Ale). Thank you very much, Alice – tried the Postman’s Knock, a fine medium-strength easy-drinking porter that would be an excellent match, I suggest, with Shropshire Blue cheese.

That very pleasant surprise made up for the unpleasant surprise three minutes later when I turned out of the top of Brick Lane, crossed the road, and discovered that Mason & Taylor, recommended as “one of London’s most ambitious new beer bars” by people I respect, doesn’t open until 5pm. I’m sure the people running the bar have what they believe to be excellent operational reasons for being shut at lunchtimes and in the afternoon, but frankly, I don’t care. If you’re not open to serve me at what I regard as a perfectly reasonable hour to be served, you’re not doing a good enough job.

Instead I went to the Water Poet nearby in Folgate Street. It may be almost a parody of the trendy Spitalfields bar – the wacky artwork on the walls, the second-hand leather sofas with the stuffing bulging out and the faux-ironic Scotch eggs on the menu (I don’t recall spotting any dimpled beermugs, but most other boxes were ticked). However, the Water Poet did manage to serve me a very pleasant pint of Truman’s Runner (from the people who revived the Truman’s name in 2010) at 3.15 in the afternoon, which is very considerably better than bleedin’ Mason & Taylor managed.

I was actually in East London on a roundabout journey from my semidetached paradise in the west to the Draft House on Tower Bridge Road for the UK launch of two lagers from the Heineken-owned Czech brewer Krušovice: a trip made less for the free beer and much more because I have known Shirley Braithwaite, whose PR company, Newshield, had organised the launch, for more than 20 years. Good PR people are worth supporting, almost regardless of the client.

This was my first time in the Draft House, another highly-praised-by-people-I-like beer bar, since it was a pub called the Copper. The former name reflected the fact that it was just round the corner from the Courage brewery in Horsleydown. Courage, unlike Truman’s, began as a mild ale brewery, and only grew large in the second half of the 19th century, when mild ale began to replace porter as London’s favourite beer.

I attempted to suggest to my fellows at the launch in the Draft House that one of the Krušovice beers – the almost black 3.8% abv Černé – might well be mistaken for a dark mild if warmed up a bit, but from the looks I was getting back, I fear they believed I was talking utter cobbler’s awls. Ah well – here’s a video review of the event from Marverine Cole, otherwise the Beer Beauty, which will tell you everything you require about the beers and what they’re like. At about two minutes in, you can spot me stuffing my face with devils on horseback while talking to Martin Kemp – not that one, or indeed that one, but the man behind the Pitfield Brewery, and someone else I have known for more than 20 years. (I have, on occasions, been mistaken for Martin – clue for telling us apart: he’s the one with the ponytail. Sadly, no one will ever mistake me for the Martin Kemp who played Reggie Kray.)

Black Eagle sign, Brick Lane

The huge sign on the outside of the building on the corner of Hanbury Street and Brick Lane is clear enough: Truman Black Eagle Brewery. Nobody passing by could have any doubt what used to happen here, even though no beer brewing has taken place on the premises for more than 20 years. But what few people know is that for a couple of decades in the middle of the 19th century, this was the biggest brewery in the world.

Today Brick Lane, Spitalfields, in the East End of London is bustling and cosmopolitan, the heart of what is sometimes called “Banglatown”. For hundreds of years Spitalfields – filled with cheap housing, in large part because it was to the east of the City, so that the prevailing westerly winds dump all the soot from the West End over it – has been a place where poor immigrants to England come to try to scrabble a living, generally in trades connected with making clothes: Huguenot silk weavers from France fleeing Catholic oppression,  Irish linen weavers fleeing unemployment in Ireland, Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms in Russia, Bangladeshis fleeing poverty, all adding their tales to a place crowded with both people and history. But it wasn’t always thus: the author Daniel Defoe, who was born in 1660, remembered Brick Lane from his childhood in the early years of the Restoration as “a deep, dirty road frequented chiefly by carts fetching bricks into Whitechapel”.

Over the decade after Charles II returned to England, as London expanded, development spread up Brick Lane itself from the south, and new streets were laid out in Spitalfields where previously cows had grazed. Two of these streets, on the west side of Brick Lane, were named Grey Eagle Street and Black Eagle Street. Thomas Bucknall, a London entrepreneur, is said by some to have built the Black Eagle brewhouse in about 1666, the year of the Great Fire of London, on land known as Lolsworth Field, Spittlehope belonging to Sir William Wheler. However, it remains unclear whether Bucknall actually was a brewer: the best that can be said is that on the land he leased “in 1681-2 the lay-out of buildings on this part of Brick Lane approximated to the present arrangement of brewery buildings round an entrance yard, and that this lay-out may date back to 1675.”

Joseph Truman is sometimes said to have acquired the brewery in 1679, from William Bucknall, going on to take out leases on neighbouring property. However, it is not until 1683 that Truman is found as a brewer in any records that survive today. He appeared that year in the register of St Dunstan’s, Stepney, on the birth of his daughter, as a “brewer of brick lane” [sic]. He became a freeman of the Brewers’ Company, the city’s guild of brewers, in 1690, five years after the guild had won a charter extending its control over brewers, like Truman, in London’s suburbs. The earliest known lease involving Truman is dated 1694, and refers to a brewhouse, granary and stable in the occupation of John Hinkwell (or Huckwell). With the premises came the use of two passages, one into Pelham (now Woodseer) Street, and one into Brick Lane, which indicates a site, confusingly, on the east of Brick Lane.

Maps of Brick Lane, 1744 and 2013. Note the roads that disappeared into the growing brewery, Black Eagle Street and Monmouth Street, and how some streets changed their names while others to the north and west vanished with the arrival of the railway and Commercial Street in the 1840s. Double-click all pics to embiggen

Not until 1701 is Truman’s name known to be connected with the west side, when he obtained a sub-lease from Humphrey Neudick of a piece of land apparently to the north of Black Eagle Street upon which stood a dwelling-house and brewhouse. From this tangled narrative we can say that Joseph Truman was brewing in Brick Lane by 1683 at the latest, possibly on the east, Bethnal Green side, and had certainly acquired a lease on a brewery on the west, Spitalfields side of Brick Lane by 1701.

Who his partners were at this time is not known, but by 1716 they included his son Joseph II and Alud (or Alan) Denne, a publican. Another of Joseph Truman senior’s nine children, Benjamin, who was born in 1699 or 1700, became a partner in the brewery in 1722, the year after his father’s death in 1721. At this time there were four separate brewhouses on the site. They provided enough wealth for Joseph Truman II to retire to Trowbridge in 1730, and to be “reputed worth £10,000” (more than £20 million, in today’s terms) when he died in 1733, leaving behind only a daughter, Jane. (Jane Truman married William Butts, an apothecary from Derby, in 1742: one of her grandsons, Thomas Butts Aveling, born 1782, became head clerk at the Brick Lane brewery.)

What beers the Brick Lane concern was brewing when Benjamin Truman joined we don’t know either, but we can be pretty sure that one sort was dark brown, strong and well-hopped: the beer that eventually took the name porter, because of its popularity with the porters of London, the thousands of men who earned a living moving goods on and off ships moored in the river (the “Fellowship porters”) and around the city’s streets (the “Street” or “Ticket” porters, who also delivered parcels, letters and messages). Porter was developed around 1720 or so as an aged, hoppier version of the original London brown beer (the first known mention of porter by name comes from 1721), and it turned out to be the earliest beer suitable for mass production.

One of the necessities for making good porter was storing it in bulk for some months – as long as two years for stronger beer – to let it mature: at first it was stored in 108-gallon casks called butts, hence an alternative name for the brew, “entire butt beer”, but gradually the larger brewers began building bigger and bigger vats at their breweries to mature the beer. The best porter came from the biggest producers, who could afford the vessels to store the beer in and had the funds needed to tie up capital in maturing beer, a virtuous circle that meant the larger porter specialists began to pull away from their smaller rivals, especially those making the less popular, less hoppy brews. Eventually an aristocracy of half a dozen big porter brewers developed in London, supreme among 140 or so other much smaller concerns. Among those big porter specialists was Benjamin Truman.

In 1741 the brewery “rest book” (the end-of-year accounts) showed Brick Lane was making amber ale, three types of stout (brown stout, pale stout – stout originally meant any strong beer, not necessarily dark – and elder stout), and also “mild”. This last beer was not mild in the sense we know it today, but unaged porter, and it was already easily the most important beer produced. The brewery had getting on for 300 publicans on the books, though only 26 or so were tied houses actually owned by the brewery. The partners in the brewery were “the executors of A. Denne” with two 18ths, John Denne with six 18ths, Francis Cooper with three 18ths and Benjamin Truman with the remaining seven 18ths. A couple of years later, Truman’s share had risen to eleven 18ths, Cooper still had his three shares, and Ann Denne owned four shares.

Sir Benjamin Truman by Thomas Gainsborough

In the 1740s Benjamin Truman, who had been living nearby in Princelet Street when his brother was in charge of the brewery, had built a big new house in Brick Lane in splendid Georgian style. But he had moved out of London by 1754, to a home near Hatfield, in Hertfordshire, just within commuting distance of the Black Eagle brewery along 18th century roads. In 1757 he confirmed his position as a country gentleman by taking over Pope’s Manor, a newly built house to the east of the Marquess of Salisbury’s Hatfield Park. Four years later, in 1761, the seal was almost literally put upon his arrival among the upper classes when he was “pricked” to become the High Sheriff of Hertfordshire.

As Sheriff, it was Truman’s job that year to deliver a loyal address from the county to the new King, George III. Truman had links with the royal family from many years before, in 1737, when Frederick, Prince of Wales, George III’s father, had thrown a public celebration outside his home, Carlton House, in London, for the birth of his daughter. The story that has come down is that the crowds had rioted over the quality of the four barrels of beer provided by the Prince’s regular household brewer. The next night the Prince repeated the public party, but Truman supplied the beer instead, to the satisfaction, it is said, of all.

According to the legend, George III was reminded of this incident 24 years earlier by Truman’s appearance at court with the address, and rewarded the Brick Lane brewer with a knighthood. The truth is that Truman’s elevation was more a reward for the large loans he made to the Crown to finance the country’s wars. The brewery had made Truman an extremely wealthy man: the “weekly money” he withdrew from the concern in the 1760s ran to almost £3,750 a year, the equivalent in earnings to more than £5 million today. His portrait, with a landscape in the background, was one of the largest Thomas Gainsborough ever painted.

All this wealth came from ever-increasing production of porter. Over the decades the paler beers had mostly disappeared from production at Brick Lane, with the books listing only mild porter, stale porter (that is to say, aged, or matured, not “off”) and brown stout, plus a little pale stout, probably for export. In 1748 the Black Eagle brewery was the third biggest brewery in London – and, probably, the world – with 39,400 barrels of beer produced in a year, behind only the two concerns owned by the Calvert family, the Hourglass Brewery in Upper Thames Street and the Peacock brewery in Whitecross Street, near the Barbican, both making 53,000 to 56,000 barrels a year. By 1760 Truman’s was still the third biggest of the London porter brewers, with just over 60,000 barrels a year, narrowly behind Samuel Whitbread in Chiswell Street (though still some way behind John Calvert’s Peacock brewery, on nearly 75,000 barrels a year).

Frances Villebois by Thomas Gainsborough

In 1776 the brewery had slipped to fourth place, though output was up again, at 83,000 barrels a year. Truman seems to have been pretty much running the business himself during this growth, though between 1767 and 1776 he had a partner called John Baker, with a one-third share in the business: presumably this was the successful Spitalfields weaver of the same name, who seems to have been Benjamin’s brother-in-law, having apparently married one of Joseph Truman I’s daughters.

By coincidence, Truman’s near neighbour in Hertfordshire was the brewer just ahead of him in porter production, Samuel Whitbread, who moved to Bedwell Park, Essendon, only a mile away from Pope’s Manor, in 1765. There is strong evidence that the two did not fraternise: Whitbread and his family were patrons of Essendon church, while Truman avoided that village, travelling past it from Pope’s Manor to worship at a church another couple of miles east in the village of Hertingfordbury. It was in Hertingfordbury churchyard that Benjamin’s only son, James, was buried in 1766, the same year as Benjamin’s wife Frances. Benjamin followed his wife and son into the grave in 1780, only three years after he had commissioned from Gainsborough four paintings, of himself, two granddaughters and two great-grandsons. (In the 1980s the tomb at Hertingfordbury was half-hidden under a yew, with the inscription barely readable, but the Truman arms – three hearts – could still be seen.) That year the Brick Lane premises were valued at £8,095 – around £70 million today, on a share-of-GDP basis.

Sir Benjamin Truman’s daughter, also called Frances, born 1726, had married a man called Henry Read, a landowner from Crowood, Ramsbury, Wiltshire, and given birth to two sons, William and Henry Truman Read, and three daughters, the eldest of whom, another Frances, had married her French dancing master, William Villebois. Neither William Read nor Henry Read were, apparently, interested in brewing, although Sir Benjamin assigned a one-eighteenth share in the Black Eagle brewery to William in 1775, and left a note in that year’s rest book that suggests William was expected to be working at the brewery in the future, if not working there already: in the note, Sir Benjamin emphasised to his grandson the need for hard work to ensure profits: “there can be no other way of raising a great Fortune but by carrying on an Extensive Trade. I must tell you Young Man, this is not to be obtained without Spirrit [sic] and great Application.”

John Truman Villebois and his brother, by Thomas Gainsborough

After Sir Benjamin’s death the business took William Truman Read’s name, becoming Read’s Brewery. But Sir Benjamin left the bulk of his estate, worth £330,000 (perhaps £460 million today), including most of the brewery business, to the sons of his eldest daughter, his young great-grandsons, John and William Truman Villebois. Sir Benjamin clearly hoped that these two, at least, would enter the family business, for his will gave instructions that the brewery house in Brick Lane should be kept in good condition until the two boys were 21, and he encouraged his granddaughter and her husband to live there: “it shall be a place of Residence for my said two Great Grandsons the Villebois as they are to be bred up to the Business conceiving it must be agreeable to Mr and Mrs Villebois to see how the Trade is going on which in a few years their said Sons are designed to have the benefit of …”

With William Read apparently uninterested in being a practising brewer, the management of the brewery stayed in the hands of Sir Benjamin’s head clerk, James Grant. In 1786 Read’s Brewery was the second-biggest producer in London, with just over 121,000 barrels brewed a year. This was only some 14,000 barrels behind Whitbread, but well ahead of the third-placed brewer, Thrale’s Anchor brewery in Southwark (soon to be renamed Barclay Perkins) at not quite 106,000 barrels a year.

Two years later, in 1788, James Grant bought William Truman Read’s one-eighteenth share in the brewery, Read apparently finally having given up any pretence of involvement in the business. Shortly after, however, on July 9 1789, Grant died at his country home, in Motcombe, Dorset. Within a few weeks, by August 26 1789, a 30-year-old Quaker businessman, Sampson Hanbury, had purchased Grant’s share and come to live in the brewer’s house.

Hanbury, whose family were originally from Monmouthshire, but whose grandfather had moved to London by 1724, setting up as a tobacco importer, was a member of an extensive network of Quaker merchants, bankers and brewers. His father, Osgood, was a banker in London, his mother Mary was the daughter of Sampson Lloyd of Birmingham, founder of what eventually became Lloyd’s bank; one uncle was David Barclay, the London banker who had led the purchase of Henry Thrale’s brewery in Southwark in 1781, turning it into Barclay Perkins (and who must have had discussions with his nephew about the wisdom of purchasing a rival London porter brewery); his wife, Agatha Gurney, one of the most beautiful women of the time, was from another old Quaker family with banking connections. Both Agatha’s father and brother were partners in Barclay’s Bank in London, and the clan also had a bank in Norwich, led by another of Sampson Hanbury’s uncles, John Gurney. This network was invaluable in helping the brewery’s finances, with Sampson Hanbury taking out regular loans from his relatives’ banks.

Sampson Hanbury

While Hanbury ran the business, which changed its name to Truman and Hanbury, Sir Benjamin’s half-French Villebois great-grandsons remained majority owners but, despite their great-grandfather’s wishes, stayed strictly sleeping partners. Trade slipped badly at first, with the Brick Lane brewery falling to fifth place among the London brewers in 1792, selling only 98,000 barrels a year (Whitbread, for comparison, managed to produce more than 170,000 barrels). All the same, the business of a Truman’s pub at the time can be judged by an advertisement in The Times in January 1793 for the sale of the lease of the brewery tap house, the Black Eagle in Brick Lane, opposite the brewery. It was advertised as selling 14 butts of porter a month – 50 gallons a day – with “a considerable consumption for wine, brandy, compounds, &c” as well. As the century neared its end, in 1799, Hanbury had increased sales to 117,000 barrels a year, but Whitbread was still way ahead with more than 200,000 barrels and Barclay Perkins was making 136,000 barrels a year.

Steam power only seems to have arrived at Brick Lane in 1805, 20 years after most of the other big London porter brewers had taken up the new technology, when Hanbury ordered a beam engine from Boulton and Watt of Birmingham, at the same time building a new vat house. An earlier attempt to install a steam engine at the Black Eagle brewery, in 1788, had stalled when the partners failed to find room on the site for the engine house. Mechanical mashing only began in 1814, according to the Victorian journalist John Bickerdyke: before that date each mash was stirred the traditional way, using long oars or mash forks worked by “sturdy Irishmen”.

The year Brick Lane acquired its first steam engine, Hanbury had built his share up in the brewery from 1/18th to a third, after slowly buying more and more shares off the Truman Villebois brothers (two 18ths in 1799, for example), borrowing heavily from the brewery each time he purchased more shares, and paying the money back out of his share of the profits over the next year or two. Eventually, like Benjamin Truman, Hanbury amassed enough of a fortune to purchase a Hertfordshire estate, buying Poles, near Ware, and becoming Master of the local hunt, the Puckeridge Fox Hounds.

Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, 1st Baronet

In 1808 Hanbury’s nephew, Thomas Fowell Buxton, son of Thomas Fowell Buxton of Earl’s Colne, Essex, and Anna Hanbury, joined the brewery, aged 21 or 22. Buxton (who was not a Quaker, though his wife was) became a partner in 1811, at the age of 25, with a 1/12th share, bringing the last element to what would eventually, by 1827, be called Truman, Hanbury, Buxton and Company. By now the Black Eagle brewery was making 142,179 barrels of beer a year, some 20,000 barrels more than Whitbread, but a long way behind the number two London brewer, Meux Reid in Liquorpond Street, near Clerkenwell, on 220,000 barrels, and trailing Barclay Perkins in Southwark, on 264,405 barrels a year, by a large margin.

Buxton’s wife was one of the Gurneys of the Norwich bank, and a cousin of Sampson’s wife Agatha. A few years after he became a partner, in 1815, the shares in the brewery were redivided into 41 slices, and Buxton, evidently after bringing in some extra capital to the firm, increased his share to 8/41ths. His greatest gift to the brewery was sorting out the management of a concern that, by 1815, owned 200 pubs outright and financed another 300 landlords. But he also successfully intervened to prevent a disaster that might have destroyed the business.

The big London brewers had undoubtedly all been shaken by the disaster at Meux’s brewery just off Tottenham Court Road in 1814 when a giant vat containing 3,550 barrels of maturing porter burst, knocking down a wall and flooding out into the slums alongside, killing eight people. None of Truman’s vats seem to have been as big as that: the brewery gyle-book for 1812-1813 lists more than 60 vats, but the largest was only a little over 1,700 barrels, with the smallest 500 barrels. All the same, three years after the Meux tragedy, Buxton’s vigilance prevented a similar catastrophe at the Brick Lane brewery. In December 1817 he wrote in a letter to a friend:

“On Saturday last, in consequence of an almost obsolete promise to sleep in town when all the other partners were absent, I slept at Brick-lane. S. Hoare [a Quaker banker] has complained to me that several of our men were employed on the Sunday. To inquire into this, in the morning I went into the brewhouse, and was led to the examination of a vat containing 170 ton weight of beer [that is, about a thousand barrels]. I found it in what I considered a dangerous situation, and I intended to have it repaired the next morning. I did not anticipate any immediate danger, as it had stood so long. When I got to Wheeler-street chapel, I did as I usually do in cases of difficulty – I craved the direction of my heavenly Friend, who will give rest to the burthened, and instruction to the ignorant.

“From that moment I became very uneasy, and instead of proceeding to Hampstead [where he lived], as I had intended, I returned to Brick-lane. On examination, I saw, or thought I saw, a still further declension of the iron pillars which supported this immense weight; so I sent for a surveyor; but before he came I became apprehensive of immediate danger, and ordered the beer, though in a state of fermentation, to be let out. When he arrived, he gave it as his decided opinion that the vat was actually sinking, that it was not secure for five minutes, and that, if we had not emptied it, it would probably have fallen. Its fall would have knocked down our steam-engine, coppers, roof, with two great iron reservoirs full of water – in fact, the whole Brewery.”

Fermenting vats in the Brick Lane brewery in the 1830s

The brewery had been surrounded by poor, overcrowded housing for many years, and soon after his arrival Buxton gave some of his energies to trying to improve the lives of the local people: he sought to give the labourers in the brewery an education, with the brewery’s partners providing a teacher (the brewery workers were encouraged to learn by Buxton telling them: “This day six weeks I shall discharge every man who cannot read and write”). He then widened his attention to the poor people living around the brewery itself. In 1816 he spoke at a meeting at the Mansion House in the City of London about conditions in Spitalfields, and raised £43,000 to aid the weavers who made up much of the population of the district, and who were close to starving because of a lack of work.

Huguenot silk weavers had begun settling in the area from the 1680s – there was a French chapel in Black Eagle Street in the 18th century – to be followed later by Irish weavers. In 1831 it was reckoned there were between 14,000 and 17,000 looms at work in Spitalfields, which had a population of about 100,000, half of whom were said to be “entirely dependent” on the weaving industry. But regular crises in the industry saw many of the residents mired in poverty, and throughout much of the 19th century Truman’s as a company was making frequent donations to charities set up to help the local poor: the Spitalfields Soup Society, for example, founded in 1797, which in just five months in 1826 gave away more than 66 tons of meat and 121,000 gallons of soup, and served nearly 14,000 people a day (and which was still in action more than 40 years later); and the Spitalfields Blanket Association, which provided hundreds of blankets every cold winter to those who could not afford bedclothes. The partners in the brewery supported the opening of a school in Spicer Street (now Buxton Street) in 1812, for children aged six to 16, with a fee per child of a penny a week; but even this sum was too much for many of the Spitalfields poor. Eventually the school closed, to be replaced in 1840 by All Saints’ National School, founded by Robert Hanbury, Sampson’s nephew, and linked to the newly built All Saints church, in Spicer Street. Truman’s also supported the vicar of All Saints, who was paid £50 a year to be the brewery chaplain as well.

Two years after the Mansion House speech, in 1818, Buxton was elected MP for Weymouth, aged 32. He was noticed by the great anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce, MP for Hull, who asked Buxton to in 1821 to be his partner in the struggle to get slavery banned in Britain’s colonies. The Anti-Slavery Society was founded by Wilberforce, Buxton and others in 1823, but it was another 10 years of campaigning by Buxton and the abolitionists before an Act to abolish slavery was finally voted through in August 1833, with Emancipation Day a year after that. Buxton lost his parliamentary seat at the general election of 1837, but three years later he was created a baronet for his anti-slavery work. He died in 1845, and a statue in his honour was erected in Westminster Abbey, close to the memorial to Wilberforce. The cost of the statue was £1,500, of which £450 was donated by freed slaves in Africa and the West Indies.

The plaque to Sir TF Buxton on the wall of the brewery in Brick Lane

He was succeeded at the brewery by a younger son, also called Thomas Fowell Buxton. However, this Thomas, who lived, like Ben Truman, in East Hertfordshire, was an entirely different character from his father, if the comment of a man who had business dealings with him locally is to be believed: “As he is one of the richest men in the county, so he is the meanest. So thoroughly is he despised … not a village boy touches his hat when the wealthy brewer passes.”

Even before Buxton had become distracted by humanitarian issues, Truman’s had still felt the need in 1816 to strengthen its management, and its financial base, when the opportunity came to take on board as partners a couple of other Quaker brewers. Robert Pryor and his brother Thomas Marlborough Pryor were members of a family which ran a brewery and malting operation in Baldock, in Hertfordshire. But the two had been leasing another concern, Thomas Proctor’s brewery in Shoreditch High Street, just over a third of a mile from Brick Lane, which had ranked 23rd (out of more than 140) among the London brewers in 1792. One of the pubs the Pryors owned, and brought into the Truman’s estate was the Blue Last, Curtain Road, traditionally (although almost certainly wrongly) said to be the first pub to sell porter. (The rebuilt Blue Last is now in Great Eastern Street.)

When the Pryors’ lease on Proctor’s brewery ran out, the brothers brought to Truman’s their trade, worth 20,000 barrels a year, their capital, £47,350 (giving them three shares each in the Brick Lane brewery) and their own pubs, including the Blue Last. Sampson Hanbury thought it was an excellent deal, telling the Villebois brothers, whose agreement was needed to extend the partnership: “Our good friends and neighbours, Messrs Pryor … only wish to have as much profit of our trade, or a trifle more, as they can bring trade with them … they will add capital, more than equivalent which with truth I can say seems very advisable, if not necessary … We want capital and managers, I question if the whole trade could produce two persons who would unite so much of what we want – knowledge of the brewery in every part, economical habits, industry and respectability with money. Could you manage to come to town next week?”

The agreement was made, and for the next 138 years the brewery in Brick Lane was to be run exclusively by members of the Hanbury, Buxton and Pryor families. The immediate effect of the Pryors joining, however, was a big leap in production, to 185,412 barrels a year in 1818, putting the Black Eagle in second place among the big London porter brewers, though Barclay Perkins, then probably the biggest brewery in the world, was still far ahead, on 340,560 barrels a year.

In September 1819 the brewery was visited by the United States “Minister Plenipotentiary” (ambassador) to the United Kingdom, Richard Rush, who wrote in his memoirs:

“We were told that there had been brewed at the brewery last year two hundred and ten thousand barrels of beer, each containing thirty six gallons. The whole was performed by a steam engine equal to a twenty-six horse power. There were eighty vats and three boilers. We understood that the whole cost of the establishment, including the building, machinery, implements, horses and everything else, together with the capital necessary to put the brewery into operation, was upwards of £400,000. ‘And was this investment necessary before beginning the business?’, I asked. The answer was, yes, on the scale that I saw.

“The stable was scarcely the least curious part of the establishment. Ninety horses of the largest breed were employed, not as large as elephants, it is true, but making one think of them, and all as fat as possible. Their food was a peck and a half of oats a day, with mangers always kept full of clover, hay and cut straw, chopped up together with a machine, and hay in their racks throughout the night. It was among the largest breweries in London, but not the largest, Barclay’s, established by an American, taking the lead.”

Barclay’s huge dominance was not to last: a “splendid” new brewhouse was erected at Brick Lane around 1820 and by 1827, while Truman’s was selling 202,532 barrels of beer a year, Barclay Perkins was pushing out 276,000 barrels a year. To reward their head clerk, Thomas Butts Aveling, who had held that job for at least 20 years, for his role in the brewery’s increasing prosperity, the Black Eagle brewery partners gave him two of the now 47 shares in the brewery, the Villebois brothers giving up two of the 23 they still held. (Aveling, who was a great-grandson of Joseph Truman II via his mother, Frances Butts, had actually been allowed to be “interested in the profits and loss but not the capital” of the two shares since 1814. He and the Villebois brothers, of course, shared a great-great grandfather, Joseph Truman I.)

For more than a century, Black Eagle Street had been the thoroughfare on the southern edge of the brewery premises, running between Brick Lane and Grey Eagle Street, and then, as the brewery expanded, the thoroughfare through the middle of the brewery. But passers-by were increasingly having to dodge the brewery’s traffic: in October 1829 a complaint was made to the local magistrates that the brewery was placing its drays in Black Eagle Street by the side of the brewhouse “and suffering them to remain there until wanted for use, to the almost total destruction of the passage of the street.” Monmouth Street, which ran parallel between Grey Eagle Street and Brick Lane, had already been swallowed up by the brewery by 1826, but Black Eagle Street was not closed to the public until 1912/13, when it became the Dray Walk.

In July 1831 Brick Lane was the scene for what became known as “the Cabinet dinner”, when the Prime Minister, Lord Grey, and other members of the Government, including the Lord Chancellor, Lord Brougham, and seven other members of the House of Lords, visited the brewery for a tour and dined afterwards on beefsteaks “dressed at the stokehole” of one of the brewery furnaces. According to Truman’s own company history, Thomas Fowell Buxton had wanted to provide a banquet, but Lord Brougham (like Buxton, a passionate anti-slavery campaigner) had insisted that only steaks and porter would do. Among the guests at the dinner was the Spanish General Miguel de Álava, a good friend of the Duke of Wellington, and the only man to have been present at both the Battle of Trafalgar and the Battle of Waterloo.

The same year the partners in the brewery signed a further lease on the brewery land, for 61 years at £1,500 per annum and four kilderkins of the “Best Beer or Porter called Stout”. The brewery’s continued expansion was marked in November 1832 by the unveiling of a huge new circular fermentation tun with a capacity of 1,300 barrels, the first of four new tuns, and supposedly, according to a report in the Morning Advertiser, “the first of its size and shape ever to be constructed”. It stood on iron pillars 15 feet high, and its inauguration was celebrated by a luncheon for “the principal persons connected with the brewery” of 106 pounds of rump steak, once again “cooked at the stoke hole”, and “the best stout and ale which the establishment could furnish”.

Sampson Hanbury died childless in 1835. His heir was his nephew Robert Hanbury, who had joined the brewery in 1819 or 1820, aged around 23, and who inherited Sampson’s home at Poles in Ware. According to the Victoria County History of Middlesex, Robert Hanbury “possessed great business abilities,” and when Thomas Fowell Buxton’s parliamentary and campaigning duties “withdrew him from the active management of the brewery, the superintendence and control of the business passed entirely into [Robert Hanbury's] hands.” Robert Hanbury is also credited with starting ale brewing again at Brick Lane, “an example speedily followed by other London breweries”, as the capital’s drinkers tastes began to change in the 1820s and early 1830s to pale mild ale and away from aged porter: although ale had probably stopped being made at the brewery in the 18th century, it was certainly being brewed in 1804, but probably not in the huge quantities seen later. The “ale gyle” books at the Brick Lane brewery, the records of every brew of ale, begin abruptly in December 1831 (the gyle books for porter and stout survive from April 1802 onwards), and 1831 may well be when, at Robert Hanbury’s instigation, the brewery started providing ale to its customers again as well as porter and stout. The Topographical Dictionary of England said in 1833 that to the “very extensive Porter Brewery of Messers Truman, Hanbury and Buxton”, “a very considerable addition is at present being made for the purpose of brewing ale.” In 1840 the author Andrew Ure wrote that “the two greatest porter houses, Barclay Perkins & Co and Truman Hanbury & Co, have become extensive and successful brewers of mild ale, to please the changed palate of their customers.”

Thomas Marlborough Pryor, who had married Hannah Hoare in 1802, had died in 1821, aged just 44, at his home, Pryor House, Hampstead Heath. Thomas’s second son, Robert, who was born in 1812, worked as a banker, although he remained a partner in the Brick Lane brewery until the 1880s. Thomas’s brother Robert lived until his death in 1839, aged 60, in the house reserved for bachelor partners at the Brick Lane brewery. It was Robert the elder who put up the money in 1836 for one of his nephews, Alfred, to buy a brewery in Hatfield, Hertfordshire from (of all people, in light of later history) the brother-in-law of James Watney of the Stag brewery in Pimlico. (By another of those convoluted links so common in brewery history, a later partner in the Hatfield brewery, with Alfred Pryor’s son, was the son of the Reid of Watney, Combe and Reid.)

Around the same time, Truman’s had been employing a chemist, Robert Warington, born 1807, who joined the company in 1831, the earliest known appointment of a chemist in a British brewery, and stayed until 1839. Even so, although Warington used a microscope to study the brewery’s yeast, it would be another two decades before Louis Pasteur first accurately described yeast’s role in fermentation.

The Brick Lane brewery 1842. Note the gentleman brewer at the brewery door in his apron, the draymen, and the railway bridge in the distance

Robert Pryor the elder introduced yet another nephew, Arthur Pryor, son of one of the Brick Lane brewery’s biggest malt suppliers, Vickris Pryor of Baldock, into the partnership in 1839. Arthur and his descendants were to play a dominant part in the brewery’s history. After his marriage Arthur Pryor lived in Down Lodge, Wandsworth, some seven miles from Brick Lane. In the 1850s, at least, every working day he would conduct family prayers at 7.45am for his children, their governess and the family’s 10 servants, before mounting his horse and riding to the local station. There he left the horse behind with a servant and caught the train to Brick Lane, returning home at 6pm.

Output at the brewery Arthur was helping to run was now a quarter ale rather than porter, and Brick Lane was challenging hard for the title of largest brewery in London, in the United Kingdom and, probably, the world. It looks as if the move into ale brewing instigated by Robert Hanbury rocketed Brick Lane into contention with its old rival Barclay Perkins in Southwark. In 1849-50 Barclay Perkins consumed 115,542 quarters of malt to make probably just over 330,000 barrels of ale and porter. Truman’s, meanwhile, consumed 105,022 quarters of malt to make only 30,000 barrels fewer. The whole operation now covered nearly six acres. The brewery used 130 horses that cost £70 each, managed by draymen earning the large sum of 45 shillings a week in the 1830s, to move the beer out to publicans, and consumed 500,000 barrels of water a year from its own 520-feet-deep artesian wells. It even had its own Thames-side wharf, Black Eagle Wharf, near St Katharine’s Dock, bought in 1841. Beer was being exported to the West Indies, North America and Australia.

Brick Lane was brewing nine different porters and stouts in 1850, including two different varieties of the standard mild (that is, unaged) “Runner” porter, one for town and one for country; “Keeping Porter”; Running Stout; Keeping Stout,; Double Stout and Imperial Stout (which had been around since at least 1847, when it sold for a price in bottle 75 per cent more than the ordinary porter). Research by Ron Pattinson has shown how the “runner” porter changed through the 19th century. In 1821 it was made from just under 78 per cent pale malt, and 22 per cent brown malt for colour and flavour, to give a beer around 6 per cent alcohol by volume from an original gravity of 1061, with three pounds of hops per barrel. But two years earlier Daniel Wheeler had invented highly roasted, deep black “patent” malt for colouring porters and stouts. This let brewers use more pale malt, which gave greater extract than brown malt, and was thus cheaper to use, and still get the same colour and much of the same flavour they did with a high proportion of brown malt.

Porter fermentation at Brick Lane in 1889, with the pontos from where the excess yeast issued into a trough

By 1830 the Brick Lane brewery was using just under two per cent of patent malt in its running porter, only 11 per cent brown malt and almost 87 per cent pale malt. The amount of black malt rose to almost five per cent by 1870, though the brown malt proportion was up to almost 10 per cent. But as the popularity of porter dived, breweries started using cheaper ingredients, and in a later brew that same year the Brick Lane brewers used nearly 25 per cent sugar, with around five per cent each of black and brown malts, and only 66 per cent pale malt, plus 2.57 pounds of hops per barrel to give a beer with an OG of 1054 and an alcohol content of 5.7 per cent. It would probably have tasted noticeably different from the running porter of 50 years earlier: drier, less full in the mouth and quite likely less bitter, though roastier.

Fire was an ever-present danger at a brewery, and like many other breweries Truman’s had its own fire engines. They were in action in May 1841 when a “lucifer and congreve manufactury” (that is, a place making phosphorus matches – both “lucifer and “congreve” were names for matches in the 19th century) at the back of the brewery buildings on the east side of Brick Lane caught fire. Although the Truman’s fire engines were quickly on the spot, together with “a party of men in the service of the firm, who exerted themselves in a manner which called forth great admiration,” and despite the attendance of the parish fire brigade and fire engines from four nearby London Fire Engine Establishment stations as well, the entire building, just off Spicer Street – today’s Buxton Street – was burned to the ground in less than two hours. Happily, no one was killed, in what The Times revealed was the third destructive fire at a “lucifer manufactury” in a month. In 1848 a fire engine from Truman’s attended a blaze at a “wadding factory” in Spicer Street, for which the firemen were given a reward of 30 shillings by the Mile End and New Town parish authorities – money the firemen donated to the poor-box at the local magistrates’ court in Worship Street.

Like most London brewers, Truman’s had long bought much of its malt from Hertfordshire, where the maltsters specialised in the brown malts needed for porter. In Sir Ben Truman’s heyday, from 1746 to 1766, nearly 90 per cent of the brewery’s malt came from Hertfordshire, shipped down the Lea and other rivers and canals. In 1842 the Northern and Eastern Railway Company built a line from Hertford to London, and within eight years 57 per cent of Truman’s malt from Hertfordshire was coming by rail. In 1855 the brewery went over to bringing in all its Hertfordshire malt by rail. (East Anglian malt was shipped by barge from Colchester.) But Truman’s was sufficiently concerned about the monopoly power of the railways in 1873 to step in and buy the Stort Navigation, down which barges could bring malt from the town of Bishop’s Stortford, on the Herts-Essex border, to stop it falling into the hands of the railway companies, who might have closed down this rival means of transport for Truman’s essential supplies.

In 1853 Truman’s was using 140,090 quarters of malt a year to make 400,000 barrels of beer, now ahead of Barclay Perkins on 129,382 quarters a year, or around 370,000 barrels. The Brick Lane brewery had become the biggest in the world. Fraser’s Magazine visited the brewery in 1855, describing the equipment, which included two 800-barrel mash tuns, five coppers, each 300 to 400 barrels, the coolers at the top of the brewery where the boiled wort spread out in shallow vessels over an area of 32,000 square feet to cool down as rapidly as possible, and the four 1,400-barrel fermenting vessels. As the beer fermented it gave off “an immense quantity of carbonic acid gas” – carbon dioxide, which, being heavier than air, stayed close to the surface of the beer. “The men can detect the height to which it has risen within an inch or two with the bare hand, which immediately becomes sensible of the thick warm feel of this poisonous vapour.” Like other porter brewers, Truman’s let its beer undergo an initial fermentation for “two nights and a day” before running it off into rows of “rounds”, or pontos, to finish fermentation, with excess yeast pouring out into a wooden trough that ran between the rounds.

After fermentation was complete, the porter was run into the storage vats, 134 in number, holding a total of 100,000 barrels of beer. The malt bill for the previous year, Fraser’s Magazine revealed, was £400,000, with another £1.4 million for hops. The malt all looks to have come from Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex. The brewery owned 80,000 casks, each costing a guinea – £1 1s – when new, and kept in good order by 60 coopers. Other workers, from storehousemen to carpenters, wheelwrights to painters (who sent out 400 new brewery signboards in 1854, and refurbished another 350, at a cost of £1,300), totalled 219, including 40 bricklayers and 21 stablemen and farriers.

The full casks were taken out to pubs by dray, and Fraser’s Magazine rhapsodised about the men who delivered the beer: “The draymen of this establishment are eighty in number. Perhaps these brewers’ labourers are the most powerful body of men in existence. They are taller than the guardsmen, and heavier by a couple of stone. The dress of the drayman is peculiar: he wears a large loose smock frock extending to the knees, and over this a thick leathern kind of tippet, which covers the shoulders and comes down in front like an apron. The simple line of the costume makes the man appear still taller than he is. The size of these men is not owing to the unlimited beer which it is popularly supposed they have at command. They are all picked on account of their inches, and are limited to a certain amount of free stout every day. The extensive stock of horses kept here necessitates a of stable attendants: of these and there are twenty-one, so that the Messrs Hanbury & Co could, if they pleased, furnish a troop of the very heaviest cavalry at a moment’s notice.”

The Mid-day Rest by George Frederic Watts, featuring a Truman’s drayman

(It never seems to have supplied actual cavalry, but in 1859 the brewery agreed to pay the expenses of a rifle corps formed by its workers in response to the nation-wide Volunteer Force movement, which began that year. The brewery workers’ rifle corps seems to have eventually become part of the 1st battalion, Tower Hamlets Rifle Volunteers, of which Charles Buxton, third son of Sir Thomas, was the lieutenant-colonel in 1865.)

In 1865 a two-man commission from the Ale and Porter and Lager Beer Brewers of Philadelphia toured the brewery, on their way to Burton upon Trent and after having previously visited Dublin and Edinburgh, and been shown round Barclay Perkins and Whitbread. They found the only difference between Truman’s and its rivals was that many of its rounds, squares and pontoons were made, not of the usual wood, but slate, a material more usually associated with Yorkshire brewers. Truman’s had been using slate vessels “long enough to test their qualities, and are highly pleased with them on account of their cleanliness and durability,” the commissioners reported. (An article in the magazine Engineering in 1868 suggested that Barclay Perkins had installed slate vessels as well, but the idea does not seem to have spread far among London’s big brewers.)

On July 10 1866 the Brick Lane brewery was visited by the 25-year-old Prince of Wales, who was met by a delegation of three Hanburys, three Buxtons, one Pryor, the brewery manager, Alexander Fraser, and Henry Villebois, who still owned a substantial slice of the business, as the great-great grandson of Sir Benjamin Truman. The Prince of Wales’s own great-great grandfather, Frederick, Prince of Wales, of course, had been supplied with beer by Truman. Villebois was master of the West Norfolk Hunt, and his home, Marham House in Norfolk, was only eight miles from the Prince’s estate at Sandringham, which had been bought for him in 1862. He had become a good friend of the Prince through a mutual love of foxhunting, hounds and horses: it seems most likely it was Villebois who had invited Queen Victoria’s eldest son to the brewery. (Three of the brewery partners who met the Prince that day were Members of Parliament at the time: Robert Charles Hanbury, MP for Middlesex, Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, MP for Lyme Regis, and Charles Buxton, MP for Maidstone. Henry Villebois is sometimes said to have been MP for West Norfolk: he never was. His closest involvement in politics seems to have been that his sister Henrietta was, for a while in the 1830s, Benjamin Disraeli’s mistress.)

The Times report on the Prince’s visit dwelt with Victorian pride in the staggering statistics: 17,000 quarters of malt on the premises, about 2,500 tons, barely 10 per cent of the 174,674 quarters now used every year (suggesting an annual production of 500,000 barrels of beer), along with 900 tons of hops, again about a tenth of the total yearly requirement; 250,000 gallons of water used every day; five acres of cellars, with room for 100,000 barrels of beer. The brewery workers, in red stocking caps and white coats, showed off one huge porter vat in the cellar actually named the “Prince of Wales”, since it was finished and baptised the day the Prince was born, November 9 1841, and he was presented with a half-pint of Truman’s stout poured from a large silver jug. When he had drunk some he was cheered, literally, to the echo, as the hurrahs bounced down the vaults.

The Prince was also shown a dray being loaded with barrels using a hoist powered by a “gas engine”, an early form of internal combustion engine: alas, the report does not give the name of the manufacturer, but “Lenoir’s Patent Gas-Power Engine” was being advertised in The Times in 1864, suggesting that Truman’s may have been using one of the two-stroke engines powered by coal gas and patented by the Belgian engineer Étienne Lenoir in 1860. The Times report revealed that the brewery had nine steam engines and two gas engines in total, and used 9,000 tons of coal a year, as well as burning 8,000 to 9,000 tons of used hops to help power the boilers. All the furnaces for the steam engines had been fitted for the past 18 years with special “smoke-consuming” apparatus, to stop the surrounding district being covered with black soot.

Only 20 of the drayhorses were in the stables, the rest being out at work, but the Prince was shown a large painting by George Frederic Watts called “The Mid-day Rest”, featuring a Truman’s drayman, in red cap, with a couple of drayhorses, and he was also introduced to the drayman who had posed for the painting.

While the London porter brewers had coped fairly well with the rise in sales of mild ale, both they and the original mild ale brewers found themselves under pressure from the 1850s onwards from brewers in Burton-on-Trent, where the water was so much better for making the increasingly popular pale bitter ales, and where the two biggest brewers, Bass and Allsopp’s, were speedily outpacing the output of Brick Lane. By 1877 Bass was making a million barrels a year, wresting the crown of World’s Biggest Brewer from London, and the previous year Allsopp’s had hit a peak of 918,000 barrels.

Truman’s decided that if it could not beat the Burton breweries, it would join them. After a couple of abortive attempts to set up agency agreements with Staffordshire brewers, in 1873 Truman’s bought the brewery in Derby Street, Burton, next to Burton Station, founded in 1865 by the Phillips brewery of Northampton. It was not a pioneer: Ind Coope, of Romford, Essex had acquired a brewery in Burton almost 20 years earlier, in 1856, apparently to supply the export trade, and the year before, 1872, an East End of London mild ale brewer, Charrington’s acquired a brewery in Abbey Street, Burton to make bitter beers. The following year, 1874, a third East End brewer, Mann Crossmann and Paulin, opened a branch in the Staffordshire town, building a completely new brewery in Shobnall Street, Burton (now owned by Marston’s).

The Black Eagle Brewery, Burton upon Trent, pictured in 1951

Arthur Vickris Pryor, son of Arthur Pryor, who had become a partner in the brewery in 1868, aged 22, was sent to Burton to run Truman’s new acquisition, and between 1874 and 1876 Truman’s enlarged and completely refitted the old Phillips brewery. The brewery gave Truman’s the advantage of being able to sell Burton pale ales under its own name, which is why so many ex-Truman’s pubs to this day still carry the phrase “London and Burton” carved into their fascias. Research by Ron Pattinson turned up the recipes for Truman’s two pale ales at the Burton brewery in 1877, both made with 100 per cent pale malt and hops from the United States and Sussex (English brewers were regular importers of American hops in the second half of the 19th century), with the P1 at an original gravity of 1066.5 and alcohol by volume of 6.6 per cent and the weaker P2 at 1062.3 OG and 5.7 abv. By the early 1880s, at the latest, Truman’s Burton brewery was also making the typical local range of Burton Ales, sweetish, fruity beers, made from pale malt (mostly around 96 per cent) and sugar, running from the super-strong No 1, which would later be called a barley wine, down to No 8, a 1054 OG mild. Burton Ale became a popular style in London, and most London brewers offered a Burton Ale right through to the 1950s at least, before they faded from the bar-top.

At first Truman’s Burton operation – which was also called the Black Eagle brewery – lost money, and the partners considered selling it. Eventually, by 1880, trade picked up and the first profit was shown. Still, the Burton brewery generally ran well below capacity, and London publicans never rated Truman’s Burton beers as highly as Bass or Allsopp, partly, it is said, because Truman’s often blended its Burton and London beers together, not always successfully. But in 1880 the company as a whole was making 580,000 barrels of beer a year, 100,000 barrels ahead of its nearest London rival, still Barclay Perkins, though still a long way behind both Bass and Allsopp’s in Burton and also, now, Guinness in Dublin, which was making more than 940,000 barrels a year, up from 350,000 barrels a year in 1868. (Guinness would hit 1.2 million barrels in 1886, seizing for itself the title of World’s Biggest Brewer.)

While the Burton brewery made pale bitter beers and Burton Ales, Brick Lane was still brewing considerable amounts of porter, but its biggest seller by now was X mild ale, a pale, unaged beer of the kind that was the standard public bar drink in London, selling for four (old) pence a quart. In 1880, X mild was 53 per cent of output at Brick Lane, made of 86 per cent pale malt and the rest sugar, its OG hovering around 1055 to 1056, lightly hopped compared to Burton bitter, at two pounds to the barrel, the alcohol by volume probably around 4.5 per cent, so likely a comparatively sweet beer. “Runner”, Truman’s “ordinary” mild (that is, unaged) porter, represented just under 25 per cent of output, “Running Stout” 10.6 per cent, Double Stout 5 per cent, Imperial Stout 2.5 per cent, and another five or so ales and beers the rest.

About the same time as it started its Burton venture, Truman’s was expanding its sales outside its London heartland. In 1879 it acquired a “large block” of public houses in Chatham, Kent. A year later a brewery stores was set up in Swansea, South Wales. Another agency was set up in Newcastle upon Tyne, where in 1897 Truman’s acquired a bottling business.

Partners of Truman, Hanbury and Buxton 1886
1 Sir (Thomas) Fowell Buxton 3rd baronet 1837-1915, son of Sir Edward North Buxton, 2nd bart, grandson of 1st Sir TFB, MP for King’s Lynn 1865-68, Governor of South Australia 1895-1899, married to a daughter of the Earl of Gainsborough
2 John Henry Buxton 1849-1934, eldest son of TF Buxton, the 2nd son of Sir TF Buxton, 1st Bart
3 Arthur Pryor 1816-1904, 1st chairman of Ltd Co
4 Edward North Buxton (jnr) 1840-1924, 2nd son of Sir Edward North Buxton, MP for Walthamstow 1883-6, bought Hatfield Forest in Essex and donated it to National Trust
5 Arthur Vickris Pryor 1846-1927, eldest son of Arthur, married the Countess of Wilton in 1886 when he was 40 and she 50. Ran the Burton branch brewery
6 John Mackenzie Hanbury 1861-1923 2nd (& eldest surviving) son of Charles Addington Hanbury, and later chairman of the company.
7 Gerald Buxton 1862-1928, son of Edward North Buxton junior
8 Robert Pryor the elder, 1812-1889, second son of Thomas Marlborough Pryor
9 Charles Addington) Hanbury 1828-1900 or 1901 2nd son of Robert Hanbury, nephew of Sampson Hanbury
10 Thomas Fowell Buxton 1822-1908, son of Sir TFB 1st Bt,
11 Edmund Smith Hanbury, 1850-1913 son of Robert Culling Hanbury, former MP for Middx, 1823-1867, who was eldest son of Robert Hanbury, 1796-1884, nephew of Sampson Hanbury
12 Robert Pryor junior 1852-1905, 4th son of Arthur

Nine years earlier, in 1889, the partners in the brewery had finally taken the step of turning it into a limited company, Truman, Hanbury and Buxton Ltd. Other breweries had been turning themselves into limited companies since Guinness had raised millions in the first public float of a brewery three years before, but what may have pushed the Brick Lane partners into the move was the death in 1886 of Henry Villebois, last representative of the Truman family in the partnership. Villebois still had a 34 per cent stake in the business, and his surviving family wanted to take that money out. A grand £1,215,000 of ordinary share capital was issued, all of it taken up by the partners, with another £1.2 million in debenture shares. The first board of directors consisted entirely of Hanburys, Buxtons and Pryors, with Arthur Pryor, then 73, as first chairman. Pryor stayed in the chair until 1897, to be followed by Edward North Buxton, grandson of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton. The share prospectus revealed that the brewery owned more than 300 pubs, leasehold and freehold.

The year Truman’s became a limited company, the journalist Alfred Barnard visited the brewery. He found work starting at 4am, as draymen loaded the drays and clerks and foremen supervised, “so that advantage may be taken of conveying the beer through the metropolis as early as possible before the traffic commences.” Barnard was hugely impressed with what he saw, proclaiming: “These London brewhouses exhibit a magnificence unspeakable … Entering the brewhouse from the courtyard we found ourselves on the floor of a most elegant and church-like structure, one of the largest of its kind in London. Looking up at the noble roof, and then right and left to the wide and spacious galleries by which it is surrounded, and the massive columns which support the various stages, on which are placed the numerous and gigantic vessels, we were struck by the beauty and utility.”

The company was still producing around 500,000 barrels of ale and porter a year, the second-largest quantity in London and the fourth-largest in the United Kingdom (which still included Dublin). It had dropped most of the strong, aged black beers: alongside the now dominant ales, the brewery made just “Runner” porter, “Country Runner”, Stout and Export Stou, with occasional brews of Imperial Stout.

Around 1900 Truman’s moved up into Essex, buying the pubs belonging to a concern called Grimstones – evidently not a brewery – based in Colchester. However, the Brick Lane brewery by and large refused to take part in the rush of take-overs that was already halving and quartering the numbers of British breweries, preferring to rely on its reputation to sell its beer. A drawing by the famous Edwardian illustrator Will Owen, published in a magazine called Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday in 1908, underlines the brewery’s reputation for strong beer: it shows a Cockney called Bob slumped against a wall and declaring to his pal that he cannot get up because he is being held down by three men – “Truman, ’Anbury and Buxton!”

A few years earlier, in 1903, the brewery had taken on its first female employee, Miss G Key, something regarded as “a great innovation”. Spitalfields was still a violent district, and rather than let Miss Key walk to and from the station to work, Truman’s made sure she was carried in a brougham, a one-horse carriage named for the Lord Chancellor who had dined at the brewery just over 70 years before.

After the First World War Truman’s made its first London take-over, when it bought Michell and Aldous of the Kilburn brewery, Kilburn High Road in 1920. Six years later, in September 1926, Truman’s acquired the Swansea United Breweries and some 100-plus pubs, to add to the 21 pubs the Brick Lane brewery already controlled in Swansea. Swansea United was the result of an amalgamation in 1890 of Crowhurst’s Orange Street brewery and the Glamorgan brewery in the town, and its trademark was the White Horse. However, the purchase was not a huge success for Truman’s, and despite the fears of Welsh brewers it was not followed by a wave of other take-overs by English firms.

In 1923, on the death of the firm’s chairman, John Mackenzie Hanbury, his widow, Christine, was appointed to the board, the first female appointment to a position of power in the firm’s history. The main Brick Lane brewery underwent a rebuild in 1924, the same year Truman’s introduced a bottled brown ale for the first time, which was being sold under the name Trubrown by 1929. A price list from Christmas 1927 showed seven different bottled beers available “per large bottle” and “per flagon”: Dinner Ale, Eagle Pale Ale, Brown Ale, Oatmeal Stout, Eagle Stout, Special Stout and No 1 Burton barley wine, the last being sold in nips (6 2/3rd fluid ounces) only. The following year the Brick Lane brewery stopped brewing draught porter, after two centuries of supplying the beer to thirsty Londoners. An off-sales price list from the mid-1930s showed the company still making a London Double Stout and a Milk Stout, as well as Trubrown brown ale, Eagle pale ale and Sparkling Mild, while from the Burton brewery came No 6 Burton Mild Ale, a penny a pint bottle dearer than the London mild; Ben Truman Best Pale Ale; and, still,  No 1 Burton barley wine.

Brewery chimney, Brick Lane

At the start of the 20th century, Truman’s still had 200 horses at Brick Lane for beer deliveries. The brewery was using steam drays by 1921 at least, and petrol drays from 1926. Gradually the number of horse-drawn drays decreased, releasing the land where the stables stood for a much-needed new boiler house. The old beam engine had been removed in 1896, and eight new boilers installed. These, too, were replaced in 1929, with a new boiler house on the other side of Brick Lane. At the same time the East End acquired another landmark, in the new 160-feet-high, 1,000-ton brick boiler house chimney, with the Truman’s name down the side. But Truman’s was still using drayhorses in the early 1950s, and in 1950 its Suffolk Punches won a prize at the Essex County Agricultural Show.

In 1930 Truman’s made another of its rare take-overs, buying Russell’s West Street brewery in Gravesend, Kent and its 223 tied houses. Russell’s, which dated back to at least 1834, when it was called Heathorn & Plane, had itself acquired four other breweries in North Kent and one in Essex. About the same time that it bought Russell’s, Truman’s seems to have acquired the six or so pubs around Bishop’s Stortford in Hertfordshire owned by the long-defunct Flinn’s brewery there. Brewing continued at Gravesend through until the 1960s.

Meanwhile up in Burton, Truman’s brewery was still busy, sending 90 per cent of its trade away by rail. Like the other Burton breweries, Truman’s had its own sidings, and even its own engines. (The Brick Lane brewery also had a siding, built after a special Act of Parliament in 1872, and in 1952 British Railways made for Truman’s a special bulk beer tanker for journeys between the two breweries.) The Burton brewery used the union system for brewing pale ale, although in 1934, at least, most of its mild beer was fermented in vessels fitted with skimmers.

The Brick Lane brewery came through the Second World War physically pretty unscathed, unlike some of its London rivals, such as Taylor Walker in Limehouse, which was forced to close for 18 months in 1941 after being hit by German incendiary bombs. But within a month of the war starting, on October 1 1939, the brewery had lost one of its directors, John “Jock” Hanbury, son of John M and Christine Hanbury, great-great-great nephew of Samuel Hanbury, who was a Pilot Officer with the RAF, killed aged 33 when his aircraft crashed in an accident while on duty. The sheer number of men called up caused problems: in April 1943 Truman’s was advertising for a “Chemist, wanted immediately, single-handed, for brewery laboratory.”

Dray Walk, Brick Lane brewery, 1951, showing horse-drawn drays still being used alongside motorised ones

At the end of the Second World War Truman’s bought its own hop farm, and in 1947 it added its own maltings, at Long Melford in Suffolk. The first-ever non-family board member, Henry Mallen, who had joined the company as a boy in 1896, was appointed in 1954. The shock evidently spurred Truman’s, four years later, into another rare take-over, of Daniell and Sons Breweries Ltd in Colchester and West Bergholt, Essex and its 146 pubs. Brewing ceased at West Bergholt in January 1959 (it had stopped at the Castle Brewery, Colchester in 1892, five years after the two Daniell concerns had merged, though Colchester continued to be Daniell’s head office). But Truman’s kept a depot and regional offices at West Bergholt until 1986.

By the mid-1960s Truman’s had 1,300 pubs, concentrated mainly in the South East of England. It was losing some traditions: in 1967 the last apprentice cooper at the Brick Lane brewery passed out into a business where metal casks were steadily making coopers a rare species. The same year the last two dray horses, Suffolk Punches called Prince and Charlie, left Brick Lane for the West Bergholt depot.

The brewery was still a place where family members could find employment, and one was a young Francis Pryor, who joined Truman’s from university as a management trainee in 1967. Pryor, the great-great-great grandson of Thomas Marlborough Pryor, recalls that every morning the wind direction at the top of the brewery was recorded and the windows and roof vents were adjusted by the duty brewer to try to ensure that wild yeasts did not blow in from the nearby Spitalfields vegetable market. Francis did not continue his brewing career, however, going on to be an archaeologist, author, farmer, and one of the presenters of the Time Team programme on television.

Derek Prentice, now a brewer with Fuller, Smith & Turner in Chiswick, West London, also started his brewing career in the late 1960s at Truman’s in Brick Lane, and remembers that the Burton brewery, which was still going, would ship down three cask beers, called PA1, sold as Ben Truman, PA2, a “running” Burton pale ale, and, in the winter, an ale known simply as Burton, a darker 5 per cent beer “very akin to Young’s Winter Warmer, which was also originally known as Burton.”

The beers now brewed at Brick Lane included a pale ale sold as Eagle bitter with an original gravity of around 1036, a dark mild of around 1032 OG, a light mild called, internally at least, LK, for London Keeper, again around 1032 OG, and a stout called Eagle Stout with an OG of around 1040, the last survivor of a quarter of a millennium of porter and stout brewing at the Black Eagle brewery. The brewery also made a barley wine that consisted of a stock ale brewed in Burton and shipped down to London in cask at an original gravity of 1120 OG which was then blended with a “runner” beer brewed in Brick Lane at around 1065 OG. The blending rate “depended on final ABVs”, to give an alcohol by volume for the finished beer of about 8 to 9 per cent.

Skimming the yeast from a fermenting vessel, Brick Lane brewery, early 1960s

Truman’s was still using the “double drop” method of fermentation, where the beer began fermenting in one vessel and then, after one or two days, was dropped into a shallower vessel on the floor below, to complete fermentation. The idea of the system was to leave behind the products of the “cold break”, proteins that had settled out as sediment, and aerate the wort. The vessels that received the still-fermenting wort at Truman’s were known as “cleanse batches”.

The 1960s were a time of huge upheaval for the British brewing industry: new national-sized giants, such as Allied Breweries and Charrington United, had grown up, as smaller family brewers succumbed to take-over offers. But in 1968 Truman’s chairman, Maurice Pryor, was declaring his company “fiercely independent”, even though ancient rival Whitbread, which had grown to become a national concern itself, swooping on family brewers all over the country, held a 10 per cent stake in the Brick Lane business.

The Truman’s board, at that time three Pryors, three Buxtons and a Buxton relative-by-marriage, responded to criticisms of the company’s then lower-than-average profits by appointing a 34-year-old management consultant, George Duncan, as a director in April 1968. It was quite likely Duncan who persuaded Truman’s in 1970 to sign an agreement with Tuborg to brew the Danish company’s lager at Brick Lane, and sell it in Truman’s pubs. The same year Truman’s dropped its last links with traditional cask beers, spending the large sum of £500,000 on new 100-litre metal kegs, and rebuilding its draught beer packaging lines.

Late in 1970 Truman’s announced the closure of the brewery in Burton upon Trent. Its 73 pubs around Burton, plus a depot in Warrington, were to be sold to Courage, another growing national brewer, in return for 36 pubs in London and £850,000 cash, making the deal worth a total of £2 million. At one point in the negotiations it looked as if Courage would take over the Burton brewery as well. But in the summer Courage had acquired John Smith’s in Tadcaster, giving it ample capacity in the North and Midlands.

Maurice Pryor had died suddenly in December 1969, and the brewery was now being led by the outsider, George Duncan, who had become chief executive. Truman’s was being thoroughly shaken up, to give its shareholders (30 per cent of them institutions) a better return on their capital. Closing the Burton brewery had saved £500,000 a year, and the brewery in Brick Lane was being rebuilt, for £6 million, to improve costs (wastage from old, too large brewing vessels was estimated to be hitting Truman’s for £300,000 in extra Customs and Excise payments alone).

Duncan and his management team were openly admitting that profits from the Brick Lane brewery and its now 980 pubs (830 of them run by tenants) would not show a real turn-around from their level of £2.3 million pre-tax until 1972-3. Quite possibly it was this candour that led on July 1 1971 to a sudden and completely unexpected takeover bid for Truman’s from an outsider to the brewing business, Maxwell Joseph and his Grand Metropolitan pub and hotel chain. (The previous month Joseph had quietly asked Whitbread if it would sell him its 10.7 per cent stake in Truman’s, and had been rebuffed.)

Joseph, who obviously felt Truman’s and its pubs would fit in perfectly with his 250 Berni Inns and Chef and Brewer pubs, was offering £34 million, or 311.5p a share, well over their pre-bid price of 254p. If the bid was a surprise for Duncan and his chairman, Derrick Pease (a descendant of Edward North Buxton’s daughter-in-law’s family), it stunned another London brewer, Watney Mann (itself an amangamation in 1958 of what had once been the Pimlico porter brewery run by the Elliott family and the ale brewer Mann Crossmann & Paulin of the Mile End Road, Whitechapel). Over the preceding four months Watney’s had been quietly planning its own bid for the Brick Lane brewery.

Watney’s, then Britain’s fifth-biggest brewer, had a problem. It wanted to close two of its high-cost breweries, the former Tamplin’s plant in Brighton and the Mann’s brewery in Whitechapel,  and concentrate brewing at a rebuilt Mortlake Brewery by the Thames near Richmond. But Mortlake would not be ready until 1975, at a cost of £7 million. Michael Webster, chairman of Watney’s, had decided that Truman’s new plant, which had lots of capacity, could meet his company’s needs immediately, and save a great deal in running costs. Unfortunately for Webster, Joseph’s bid put a big foot in the middle of his preparations.

The first reaction from the brewing trade to the Grand Met bid was that someone, perhaps Whitbread, with its tithe of Truman’s shares, would rescue the Brick Lane brewery from the attempted embrace of the outsider Joseph. After all, the brewers had rallied together 12 years earlier when Sir Charles Clore had tried to take over Watney’s. There was also a certain amount of racism around in some quarters over the Joseph bid: the Daily Telegraph felt obliged to point out that no British brewery had ever fallen into Jewish hands.

However, Whitbread remained cool. It had decided that acquiring the Brick Lane brewery did not fit in with its own development plans. Instead Watney’s, galvanised by Joseph’s move, launched its own bid for Truman’s just over a week later, topping the Grand Met offer by £4 million. At the same time Watney’s bought almost a million shares in Truman’s on the stock market, taking its holding in the Brick Lane company to 18 per cent.

The Truman’s board, which itself controlled around ten per cent of the company’s equity, announced that it had accepted the Watney offer. But in fact the board had been completely split, with half voting for Grand Met and half for Watney Mann. The Truman’s ruling families were even divided among themselves. Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, the sixth baronet, was a Grand Met supporter, his cousins and fellow directors Henry and Mark Buxton voted for Watney. Only Derrick Pease’s casting vote as chairman had carried the day for the beerage against the outsider.

Joseph was far from quitting, however. Four days after the Watney bid, he raised his offer for Truman’s by more than a quarter, to £43 million. Within hours Watney Mann was back with a revised bid of its own, again topping Joseph by £4 million. What The Observer was to call “the most incredible take-over battle of all time” was under way.

By now Whitbread had pledged its ten per cent stake to Grand Met, obviously feeling that it would rather not see Watney’s get any larger. But the Truman’s board was still divided between those who wanted the extra money being offered by the Red Barrel brewer and those who pointed out that a Watney take-over would mean 20 to 25 per cent redundancies at Brick Lane, with the loss of 800 jobs in one of the poorest parts of London. Amid rumours that several other big brewers were thinking of launching a bid for Grand Metropolitan itself, Truman’s workers voted in favour of the Joseph offer, and Watney’s announced it now owned between 22.5 and 25 per cent of the Brick Lane company. On July 20 1971, just under three weeks after Joseph made his first bid, the Truman’s board voted – unanimously this time – to accept the Grand Met revised offer.

As is common in many take-over attempts, the offers from the two rivals were a combination of cash, and shares in the bidder’s own company. As the share prices of Grand Metropolitan and Watney Mann swayed up and down during the weeks, so the value of their two offers in real terms had altered. By July 29, with the fight still unresolved despite the Brick Lane board’s vote, the two offers were virtually equal, with Grand Met’s now worth £44 million and Watney’s £45 million. Watney’s felt compelled to put its offer up yet again, valuing it at £47 million. The Red Barrel men admitted their plans would involve 260 redundancies at Brick Lane, but said they could double output from Truman’s brewery within 12 months, and achieve savings of £1 million.

It took six days for Grand Met to come back with a revised offer, this time just £800,000 above Watney’s. In the meantime each side had been buying Truman’s shares on the stock market, with Grand Met happily paying almost £1.4 million to grab a block of 300,000 shares representing just 2.75 per cent of the total. By this point, five weeks after Joseph made his first bid, both sides owned about 30 per cent each of Truman’s. Grand Met still had the promise of the ten per cent controlled by the Truman’s board. But on August 14 Watney’s made another offer, this time valuing Truman’s at £49.5 million, close on half as much again as Grand Met had initially tried to pay.

This latest Watney offer again split the Truman’s board, which withdrew its recommendation of the Grand Met offer. Four of the Brick Lane brewery’s directors, led by Duncan, the chief executive, backed Watney’s. The other five, led by chairman Pease, supported Grand Met. The struggle had already bought a strike by Truman’s workers against the Watney bid. On Sunday August 16 it sparked a sermon in St Paul’s Cathedral from Canon John Collins, who attacked both bidders, saying they had no consideration of national interests, let alone Truman’s workers or the Brick Lane brewery’s many small shareholders.

Each side, meanwhile, was still paying out to buy more Truman’s shares on the stock market; the Prudential Assurance, showing its normal impartiality, sold Watney’s and Grand Met 50 per cent each of its £2 million holding in Truman’s. But 350,000 more Truman’s shares, owned by a pension fund and another insurance company, all went to Joseph. By August 24 Watney’s reckoned it owned outright 38 per cent of Truman’s, with supporters bringing that up to 45 per cent. But Grand Metropolitan was claiming a beermat’s width less than 49 per cent. With the usual number of Truman’s shareholders dead, vanished, on holiday or not bothering to reply to any letters from either side, Watney’s had to concede that it could not catch up.

On August 25 1971 Watney’s waved the white flag, and agreed to sell its holding in Truman’s, worth £16 million, to Grand Met. After nearly eight weeks, eight bids and counter-bids, and furlongs of newspaper coverage, the great battle was finally over, with Truman’s being sold for around 460p a share. Watney’s could not complain too much. It made a profit of £2 million on its Truman’s shares, and also secured an agreement that the Brick Lane brewery would supply it with 400,000 barrels of beer a year for five years, to supplement its own brewing capacity.

One of the first moves after the take-over was by George Duncan, the Truman’s chief executive, who resigned from Brick Lane to take up the head man’s seat with Watney’s. He had supported Watney’s throughout the battle with Grand Met, and clearly he was never going to sit easily alongside the new owners of the Brick Lane brewery.

Loaded dray at Truman’s 1889

Duncan’s first job was to try to make sure that what had happened to his last employers did not happen at his new ones. Six months after failing to win Truman’s, Watney’s succeeded in taking over International Distillers and Vintners, the Gilbey’s gin company, in which it already had a one-third stake. Shortly afterwards Watney’s grabbed the 73 per cent it did not already own of Samuel Webster, the Halifax brewer. This left it a 6,500-pub drinks group worth some £400 million, inviolate, the Watney’s directors must have thought, against any predator.

Maxwell Joseph, however, had his own agenda. Having swallowed one brewery group, he clearly decided he liked the taste. Even though Grand Metropolitan was now smaller than the newly enlarged Watney’s, in mid-March 1972 Joseph made a £360 million offer for the Red Barrel company. The struggle again swayed backwards and forwards, enlivened by a late bid in May by the Rank Organisation, which offered £425 million for Watney’s – only to have to withdraw after a revolt by its American shareholders, who did not want to see earnings from the Rank Xerox joint venture diluted by some low-yield brewery concern. Grand Met’s eventual offer of around £435 million, easily the highest takeover price seen in the UK at that time (and equal to perhaps £10 billion today), was too much for the Watney’s board to stand against. By the end of June 1972 it was all over bar the final counting. Joseph had his revenge. He now owned both Truman’s and Watney’s, and Grand Met was the 12th biggest company in Britain.

Truman’s new brewhouse opened that same year, and in October 1972 Ben Truman Export, a keg “premium” bitter, first saw the light of bar taps. Sadly, the jokes were no longer about the ability of Truman’s beers to put you on the floor. Instead drinkers were asking what the difference was between Ben Truman and a dead frog, and giving the answer: “There are more hops in a dead frog.”

A year later Grand Met bought its two brewing wings together, merging them into a new company, Watney Mann and Truman Holdings. The Brick Lane brewery’s pubs still kept their own identity and beers, however, and in 1976 Grand Met expressed its faith in the brewery by bringing in Ove Arup, one of Britain’s foremost architects, to design new offices for Brick Lane. When Arup’s work was completed, in 1980, it brought much praise for the way a wall of glass had been made to provide a new frontage, linking the two 18th century buildings to the north and south, the brewer’s house and the directors’ house, in a surprisingly sensitive fashion.

Off-sales price list 1930s

Meanwhile Truman’s had found itself wrong-footed by the upsurge of interest in cask-conditioned ales. In 1977 it introduced a compromise beer, Truman’s Tap, cask conditioned but served by air pressure hand pumps. It never caught on, and four years later Truman’s started brewing a proper, traditionally-served beer, Best Bitter. Tap disappeared altogether in 1982, to be replaced by Prize Mild, Bitter and Sampson Extra Strong alongside the Best Bitter, all handpumped beers.

This did little to end the dissatisfaction among workers at the Brick Lane brewery, who had seen the number of people employed there fall from 1,300 in 1972 to just over 700 in 1984. The unions at the brewery produced their own action plan in 1984, decrying the lack of investment by Grand Met in Brick Lane and expressing their fears for the future. Gradually the brewery’s new real ales began disappearing – in a piece of beery comedy Truman’s had to reinvent a recipe for the last one left, Best Bitter, which had been a blend of the Sampson and ordinary bitter.

Insiders were predicting the brewery’s imminent demise in 1988. In January 1989 it was finally announced that the Brick Lane brewery was to close, after more than 300 years. The ten-acre site was to be developed – this was the top of the late 1980s property bubble, and the nearby Spitalfields Market development, over 11 acres, was estimated to be worth £500 million when finished. Against that sort of return on property, Grand Met declared that the investment necessary to refurbish Truman’s old plant and carry on brewing “was not justified”.

Almost 200 workers lost their jobs with the closure. For a while it looked as if there might still be a link with brewing, for Grand Met, which still owned four breweries and thousands of pubs after closing Truman’s, was making the Brick Lane buildings its corporate headquarters. But in the big shake-up that followed the Conservative government’s Beer Orders of 1989, Grand Met sold its pubs and pulled out of brewing to concentrate on spirits – the IDV holding that Watney’s had taken over to try to make itself safe from takeover – and food.

The collapse of the property market put redevelopment plans at the brewery into the cupboard, and Grand Met continued to use the place for offices. In 1995 it sold the site to the Zeloof Partnership, which began to turn the 10-acre site into workshops, recording studios, apartments, galleries and the like. It was sometimes a slow business – clearing the equipment from the old fermentation rooms took two and a half years. Dray Walk, the former Black Eagle Street, which was closed off in 1911, opened in July 1998 with the first of a planned 25 shops and boutiques. Today, as The Old Truman Brewery, the site is home to bars, cafes, clothes shops, art galleries, a weekend food hall in the old boiler house that has take-away food from an amazing spread of countries, markets on Saturdays and Sundays, exhibition halls, shows and festivals.

At the same time the Truman’s name is back on bar tops, after a new brewing concern started up in 2010 under the Truman’s name, and using the company’s eagle trademark. Its beers, including one called Runner – though a bitter, rather than a porter – were brewed at first at the Nethergate brewery in Essex and then at Everard’s in Leicester while the partners behind the venture searched for premises in London. But in the spring of 2013 a new Truman’s brewery is due to open in East London, in Stour Road, Hackney Wick, a little more than two and a quarter miles from Brick Lane as the soot flies.

I believe strongly in the old cliché about what to do if life hands you a ton of lemons: set to and make the very best lemonade you can. So when I wound up working in Hong Kong, I thought the worthiest use of my spare time was to write the first history of beer in Hong Kong. This turned out to be vastly easier than I had feared, because the Hong Kong library service had digitised every English language newspaper produced in the colony back to the 1850s, and while the OCR wasn’t perfect (it never is), it still threw up a mass of detail about Hong Kong’s brewing pioneers, much of it fascinating. And gave me a surprise on my doorstep.

The most beautiful setting for a brewery anywhere in the world? The Sham Tseng brewery site, New Territories, Hong Kong in the 1950s © San Miguel Corp

Beer and Hong Kong were mixed up right from the moment the British seized the island in 1841 during our row with China over whether or not our traders should be allowed to sell the Chinese opium: for some reason the Emperor of China felt foreigners flogging his subject hard drugs and getting them addicted just to turn a profit wasn’t really on. Naturally, the British went to war on behalf of the drug pushers. Indeed, as I suggested in the article that eventually ended up in Brewery History magazine, it’s arguable that if it hadn’t been for alcohol, Britain would never have seized Hong Kong.

To quote myself from Brewery History magazine: One of the crucial events leading up to the start of the First Opium War happened on July 12 1839, when seamen from two sailing ships owned by the British trading company Jardine Matheson, sheltering in the natural harbour between Hong Kong island and the mainland, were on Sunday shore leave on the mainland, Kowloon side. They were joined by others sailors, British and American, and got stuck into the “sam shu”, san shao, distilled rice liqueur, in a Kowloon inn. When that ran out, it appears, they moved on to what was then the neighbouring village of “Jianshazui”, today the district of Tsim Sha Tsui, in search of fresh supplies. Several houses were raided by the sailors, a Taoist temple vandalised, a fight broke out with the locals, in which, according to one report “many of both sexes, including children and women 70 years of age” were “desperately wounded” , and one villager, Lin Weixi, or Wei-hsi, was struck across the chest with a stick, dying the next day.

The British Chief Superintendant of Trade in China, Captain Charles Elliot, effectively London’s representative in the region, was with the merchant fleet, trying to negotiate with the Chinese over the opium question. He paid Lin’s family 1,500 silver dollars, put up $200 as a reward for evidence leading to the murderer’s conviction, and handed out $500 in general bribes to the locals. Elliot also held a court of inquiry into Lin’s death on board one of the ships off Hong Kong. Five sailors were tried for the affray and found guilty of riot, but on the evidence as presented, no murderer could be identified. The British sailors blamed the Americans, who, they said, had drunk more of the san shao.

British toops in Hong Kong 1846: undoubtedly hot and thirsty

The Chinese High Commissioner in Canton (today Guangzhou), Lin Zexu (or Tse-Hsu), had been sent in March that year by the Emperor of China, Daoguang, to stop the British bringing opium into the country, and had already destroyed more than a thousand tonnes of British opium. With the weight of a proud and ancient nation behind him, he demanded that the British hand over the murderer of Lin Weixi. Elliot refused to hand anybody over, saying it had not been possible to identify who struck the killer blow. In addition, Elliott knew that anyone who was handed over to the Chinese would quite likely simply have been summarily executed – which would have caused outrage back in Britain. In retaliation for this refusal, an angry Lin Zexu ordered his countrymen not to supply the British ships with food or water, poisoned wells known to be used by the British, and told the Portuguese authorities in Macau, the Portuguese-owned settlement on the other side of the Pearl River delta, not to supply the British either, and to drive all British ships there out of the harbour. The Portuguese, who had been in Macau since 1557, complied with Chinese orders, unwilling to upset the Emperor.

Lin Zexu’s orders resulted in several skirmishes between British ships and the Chinese fleet in which a number of junks were sunk. The rumbling argument broke out into an official declaration of war in London early the following year, in large part to secure compensation for the opium destroyed by Lin, with 4,000 marines and four steam-powered gunboats sent to the Pearl River delta from Singapore. As part of the subsequent fighting, Elliot, apparently deciding that the Portuguese in Macau could not be trusted and Britain needed its own territorial base in China, seized Hong Kong island in the name of Queen Victoria. This de facto land-grab became de jure in August 1842 with the signing of the Treaty of Nanking that ended the First Opium War and handed Hong Kong officially to Britain.

It could, perhaps, be argued that if the sailors in Hong Kong harbour had had access to supplies of beer, they would never have gone drinking san shao in Kowloon, Lin Weixi would not have died, the Portuguese would not have been forced by the Chinese to bar the British from Macau, and the British would never have decided they needed Hong Kong as a secure home of their own to conduct trade with China from. On the other hand, the natural harbour between Hong Kong island and the mainland – quickly named Victoria Harbour by the British – was a prize worth seizing by anyone.

Whatever might have happened, on January 26 1841 the British took physical possession of Hong Kong. By April 1842, even before Hong Kong’s capture had been ratified by the Treaty of Nanjing, Alexander Matheson of Jardine Matheson was reporting that beer, porter and pickles were “pouring into this market, ten times as much as a whole army could consume”, with the company’s newly built godown in Hong Kong “full of the stuff”.

That was beer from Britain, almost certainly, and for the next 30 or 40 years, beer from the United Kingdom pretty much seems to have dominated the market in Hong Kong. Quite likely much of the beer in Hong Kong was being drunk ice-cold, as it was in India and mainland China: an Austrian traveller, Ida Pfeiffer, talking about Canton in the 1840s, wrote: “Portuguese wines and English beer are the usual drinks – ice, broken into small, pieces and covered up with a cloth, is offered with each.” Much of the beer drunk in 19th century Hong Kong was porter. The British forces were particularly keen to ensure supplies of beer for the troops stationed in Hong Kong, and a parliamentary select committee on “the mortality of troops in China” in 1866 was told that without beer being available the troops would go into town and drink “a deadly liquor called samshoo” (san shao again) which cost four pence for a “reputed quart”, a container the size of a 75cl wine bottle. However, the committee was told by Colonel William Sankey, who had commanded the 2nd battalion, 9th (East Norfolk) Regiment of Foot in Hong Kong in 1864/65: “When we were, in the middle of the summer, able to purchase porter or beer from the merchants in the town, we had in the canteen a large ice box, and we kept ginger beer and similar draughts, and the soldiers drank a great deal of iced ginger beer with porter or ale mixed with it, and at that time there was very little drunkenness among the men … As long as good and cheap porter remained at the canteen the men always drank there and not in the town.”

By 1869 English beer “of excellent quality” was being brewed in Shanghai, 900 miles north along the coast, by “Messers Evans and Co, who during the season have sold between Shanghai and the outports over 50,000 gallons of beer”, that is, about 1,400 barrels. However, while it very well might have, there is no evidence that Evans’s beer reached Hong Kong. (This mention of Evans’s brewery, incidentally, knocks on the head the claim by Tsingtao to be the first Western brewery in China.) Meanwhile the colony’s tastes were changing: British ale and stout were being replaced by lager. As early as May 1876 the Hong Kong importer and retailer Lane Crawford was advertising “Danish beer from the Tuborgs Fabrikker”, Tuborg then being just three years old. In 1886, beer from the Brauerei Zur Eiche in Kiel, North Germany was being advertised for sale in the colony. By 1896 the Seattle Brewing and Malting Co had opened an agency for China and Japan in D’Agulier Street, Hong Kong, and was selling “Braun’s ‘Export’ Beer”. Lager beer from the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association (brand unstated), presumably imported all the way from St Louis, was on sale in Hong Kong in 1899. Two years later, in 1901, Hongkongers were being offered Kirin from Japan, “a delicate lager”, in quarts and pints.

Then in August 1903 the China Mail newspaper reported: “We hear arrangements have been made to start a Brewing Company in Hongkong. As Breweries have been conducted successfully in Manila [that was San Miguel, founded in 1890], Shanghai and in Japan for some years, there seems no reason why a similar success should not attend a Brewing Company in Hongkong, provided it is under able management. The amount of beer that is consumed in Hongkong in the course of a year must be tremendous, and the consumption is more likely to increase than decrease, in spite of the efforts of the Temperance Party.” The concern the China Mail had heard rumours about appears to have been the Hongkong Brewery Company Ltd, which held its first shareholders’ meeting at 15 Queen’s Road, Central on February 15, 1904. The shareholders were told that the company intended to erect a brewery alongside the Metropole Hotel, on the then Shaukiwan Road (now King’s Road) at North Point, some three miles east of what was then Hong King proper, and by what was then the seashore (land reclamation means that today’s shoreline is some 250 yards further north). The chosen site was “practically the bed of a watercourse”, shareholders were told, and via that watercourse, an “abundance of pure, good water, suitable for beer brewing purposes” ran through the site.

I was staggered when I read that: because the site of the former Metropole Hotel was literally right outside the front door of the apartment block where I was living in North Point. Indeed, the 26-storey block that now stands on the site, with shops on three floors and apartments above, is still called the Metropole Building. Could some strange Jungian synchronicity have brought me to live right by where Hong Kong’s first brewery was founded?

The site of the Metropole Hotel today: you can just see part of that tramway in the postcard above

Alas, no: although the Hongkong Brewery Company Ltd had found a master brewer in Germany who was “ready to come out and attend to the building and fitting up of the brewery as soon as we are ready for him to come out,” the company never seems to have raised the money to build the brewery, and in 1906 it was wound up.

In fact the first brewery in Hong Kong, I discovered, the Imperioal Brewery, opened the following year, 1907, in a converted house in Wong Nai Chung Road, Happy Valley. It only lasted two or three years: but meanwhile another new brewery had started up in the colony, across the water from Hong Kong island in Lai Chi Ko, New Kowloon, which began operations in 1908. The promoters behind the venture were led by an Englishman, Alfred Hocking, who was born in Cornwall, England in 1852 and emigrated to the United States as a young man. After several years he moved to Hawaii where he ran a lumber mill and a sugar plantation before starting the Honolulu Malting and Brewing Company around 1898, building a brewery on Queen Street in 1901 which became famous for Primo lager. The advertising slogan ued by the Oriental Brewery was “The Beer that’s Brewed to Suit the Climate”, and one of its brands was “Prima”, echoing the Honolulu brewery’s Primo brand. However, in October 1912, the Oriental Brewery Limited was in liquidation, and the following year its brewing equipment was dismantled and shipped to Manila, in the Philippines.

That was the end of brewing for more than 20 years, until 1933, when a newly built brewery opened at Sham Tseng – a name meaning “deep well” – by the seafront on the Castle Peak Road, in the southern New Territories, and about 11 miles west of Kowloon. The entrepreneur behind the venture, the Hong Kong Brewers and Distillers Ltd, was Jehangir Ruttonjee, a member of a family of Parsee traders who had arrived in Hong Kong in 1884. The equipment was being supplied by the Skoda Works in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, home, as the new company pointed out, to the original Pilsen lager, and the brewer, Mr V. Woitsch, a graduate Engineer Brewer of the Vienna Brewing Academy, was “for many years technical and commercial director of one of the largest breweries in Pilsen”, the Český plzeňský pivovar (which traded as Světovar, or the “World Brewery”), and later state superintendent of breweries in Czechoslovakia, and his assistant brewmaster, F. Drapal, was a former managing brewer in Czechoslovakia.

The brewery held its official opening ceremony in August 1933, an event attended by more than 600 prominent citizens from Hong Kong and Kowloon, driven out to the brewery site in more than 100 cars organised by the Hong Kong Hotel Garage. Catering – “teas, cakes, ices etc” was organised by Lane Crawford in a large open matshed erected for the occasion between the brewery (itself decorated with bunting and hung with flags) and the sea, while music was provided by the Band of the South Wales Borderers. Mrs Borrett, the wife of the General Officer Commanding (that is, commander of British troops in China), Major-General Oswald Borrett, formally opened the doors of the brewery with a silver key (which she was allowed to keep), after which her husband gave a “witty” speech.

The major-general was followed by a speech from the brewery chairman, Stanley Dodwell, who assured the crowd that “nowhere in the world is beer brewed in more beautiful surroundings,” while the picturesque hills behind “pour down to us a constant supply of ideal water for our purpose, water … found to be equal in quality to, and just as suitable as, the Pilsen water itself, where the famous Pilsener beer is brewed.”

Unfortunately, macroeconomic matters way outside the company’s control quickly brought it serious problems. It had paid for its plant at an exchange rate of 11.5 pence sterling to the British trade dollar (the then name of the local currency), but when Britain left the gold standard in September 1931, the pound slumped more than 30 per cent against the trade dollar, to one shilling and three pence. At the same time, for political reasons – pressure from senators representing the seven electorally important western silver-producing states – the United States government had been buying silver, which dramatically increased the price of the metal, sending it up almost threefold between 1932 and April 1935. Hong Kong and China were the last places in the world to still tie their currency to silver, and higher silver prices hammered their exchange rates. By the middle of 1935 the trade dollar was nearly two and a half times higher against the pound than it had been in 1930.

The rising value of the trade dollar made exports dear and imports into Hong Kong much cheaper, so that British beer was on sale at the same price as the local product, despite the cost of shipping it 12,000 miles by sea: Stanley Dodwell complained in June 1935 that “had exchange remained anywhere near where it was when the Brewery project was started, we could have supplied the Colony with very much cheaper beer than that imported from anywhere else except perhaps Japan.” Six months later, after the brewery had lost 300,000 (British trade) dollars, it went into liquidation. (Ironically, a week earlier the colony finally abandoning the silver-based British trade dollar and pegging its currency to sterling, introducing the Hong Kong dollar.)

The following year, Jehangir Ruttonjee incorporated a new firm under almost exactly the same name, the Hong Kong Brewery and Distillery Ltd, and bought the Sham Tseng brewery from the liquidators. In August 1939 the brewery celebrated its sixth anniversary, with a lengthy write-up in the Hongkong Telegraph. The Telegraph’s report revealed that the malt for brewing came from Australia, Canada and Europe, and the hops from Great Britain and “the Continent”. It described the landscaped garden, with flowers laid out to depict the words “H.B. Brewery”; the dormitories for the Chinese staff, “built on the plan of semi-European flats”, with messrooms and cooks; and the separate quarters for the “female operatives” who worked in the bottling hall. The women workers “live like girl students in a school dormitory” under a matron who was also the forewoman during working hours. All the female workers in the bottling hall were required to have “a complete tub bath” twice a day, before starting work in the morning and again in the evening when they left for their quarters.

The start of the Second World War seems not to have damaged the brewery’s ability to get raw materials too much, since it was still advertising its Blue Label “British Brewed” lager inside the Hong Kong Sunday Herald on June 9, 1940 when the front page of the newspaper was full of the evacuation of the BEF from the beaches of Dunkirk. At the same time Japanese beer was still being advertised in Hong Kong newspapers. But on December 8 1941 – in the centenary year of British occupation – four hours after the Japanese had struck at the American fleet in Pearl Harbour, Hong Kong found itself in the front line, when the 20,000-strong 23rd Corps of the Japanese Army threw itself at the 10,000 British and Commonwealth troops defending the colony. The Battle of Hong Kong lasted until Christmas Day, when the British finally accepted the inevitable and surrendered.

Jehangir Ruttonjee avoided being interned in Stanley Camp after the Japanese victory, though he supported the smuggling of food parcels into the camp, where Indians were interned along with Britons, Canadians and other nationalities, and he housed nearly the entire Hong Kong Parsee community in his home, Dina House, in Duddell Street. Ruttonjee and his son Dhun were badly tortured by the Japanese after they refused to encourage members of the Parsee community to collaborate with the occupiers. Meanwhile the Hong Kong brewery was one of a large number of local businesses, including Lane Crawford’s department store, that were “taken over” by the occupying Japanese under the new governor, General Rensuke Isogai, with the brewery apparently “farmed out” by Isogai himself to a businessman from Osaka called Inouye Yahei.

Japanese authority in Hong Kong lasted until August 1945, when, after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nakasaki, Japan agreed to end the war on the Allies’ terms. A British fleet under Rear Admiral Cecil Harcourt arrived in Victoria Harbour on August 30, 1945, and the Japanese forces in Hong Kong formally surrendered to Admiral Harcourt on September 16. Four days before that, on September 12, Jehangir Ruttonjee, “accompanied by Royal Navy officers”, had travelled out to the Hong Kong brewery to see what sort of state it was in. Ironically, the worst damage had been caused by the United States Air Force “some months” earlier, when a bombing raid in the near vicinity had scored hits on the brewery site. The China Mail reported that “some barrels of recently brewed beer” were discovered by Ruttonjee and the RN officers, indicating that Yahei or his successors had been busy, “but these were found to have soured.”

The brewery seems to have recovered within a few months from the occupation, with Ruttonjee back in charge. By September 1946 its HB brand beer was on sale, since it appears in the official government list of price-controlled goods: HK$1.10 a pint in the shops, HK$1.50 a pint in a pub or bar. For comparison, Carlsberg, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Schlitz, “Kangaroo” and Tuborg were all HK$1.70 a pint in a bar

In March 1947 Ruttonjee – who had been awarded the CBE in the 1947 New Year’s Honours List “for courageous and loyal services during the enemy occupation of Hong Kong” – was visited by the author Compton Mackenzie, who described him as “the owner of the Kowloon brewery, a wealthy and respected Parsee.” That year, however, the brewery was sold to the San Miguel Brewery Inc, the Philippines brewer. It looks to have taken some months to sort out the handover, because the inauguration of the new San Miguel brewery was not marked until the following year, on May 21 1948, with a reception at the Hongkong Hotel attended by “hundreds” of Hong Kong’s leading businessmen, along with David MacDougall, the Colonial Secretary (that is, head of Hong Kong’s civil service.) The first stocks of freshly brewed San Miguel beer would be coming onto the market “immediately”, the brewery revealed. First-year sales volume was 4,000 hectolitres – around 2,500 barrels.

That same year, 1948, Ruttonjee, who was now 68, donated HK$500,000 to fund the building of a tuberculosis sanatorium at the former Royal Navy hospital in Wan Chai, Hong Kong in memory of his daughter Tehmina, who had died of TB during an outbreak in 1943. It was said to be the largest donation to charity in the colony’s history. Ruttonjee’s total donations eventually reached HK1.3 million. The sanatorium is now the Ruttonjee Hospital.

San Miguel carried on brewing at Sham Tseng until 1996, when it moved to a new brewery in Yuen Long, a few miles to the north, and where it still brews today. Meanwhile among the new breweries to have opened in Hong Kong in the past few months (that is, after I left to come back to the UK – blimey, I left London in 2009 and the place exploded with new breweries, I left HK in 2013 and ditto: what is this?) is one called Young Master, founded by Rohit Dugar, who was born in New Delhi – and who is clearly following the tradition set by Jehangir Ruttonjee.

The architects who designed the Sham Tseng brewery, Leigh & Orange, are still running today in Hong Kong, and while all their records of the original brewery were lost in the Secondf World War, I was thrilled to find they still have photographs of the brewery from when they worked on it after the war, which they were happy to copy for me. San Miguel, too, also had photographs of the interior and exterior, and if you want to see a fine selection of those, and read an even longer version of the brewery history of Hong Kong, you can find it in the Winter 2013 edition of Brewery History magazine. Oh, and thanks are due to Evan Rail, for fnding experts who could interprete those interior shots for me, and identify the various bits of 1950s lager-brewing kit.

A view of the mash tun at the Sham Tseng brewery in 1959, with the brew kettle visible on the left and the lauter tun in the background.

Wherever you are at 5.30pm this evening, please stop a moment and raise a thought – a glass, too, if you have one, preferably of porter – to Hannah Banfield, aged four years and four months; Eleanor Cooper, 14, a pub servant; Elizabeth Smith, 27, the wife of a bricklayer; Mary Mulvey, 30, and her son by a previous marriage, Thomas Murry (sic), aged three; Sarah Bates, aged three years and five months; Ann Saville, 60; and Catharine Butler, a widow aged 65. All eight died 200 years ago today, victims of the Great London Beer Flood, when a huge vat filled with maturing porter fell apart at Henry Meux’s Horse Shoe brewery at the bottom of Tottenham Court Road, and more than 570 tons of beer crashed through the brewery’s back wall and out into the slums behind in a vast wave at least 15 feet high, flooding streets and cellars and smashing into buildings, in at least one case knocking people from a first-floor room. It could have been worse: the vat that broke was actually one of the smallest of 70 or so at the brewery, and contained just under 3,600 barrels of beer, while the largest vat at the brewery held 18,000 barrels. In addition, if the vat had burst an hour or so later, the men of the district would have been home from work, and the buildings behind the brewery, all in multiple occupancy, with one family to a room, would have been much fuller when the tsunami of porter hit them.

From a Dr Who cartoon novel in 2012: was the Great Beer Flood caused by time-travellers? (No, obviously not …)

Here’s about the only eye witness report of what it’s like to be hit in the back by a giant wave of beer, written by an anonymous American who had been unlucky in taking a short-cut down New Street, behind the brewery, when the vat burst:

All at once, I found myself borne onward with great velocity by a torrent which burst upon me so suddenly as almost to deprive me of breath. A roar as of falling buildings at a distance, and suffocating fumes, were in my ears and nostrils. I was rescued with great difficulty by the people who immediately collected around me, and from whom I learned the nature of the disaster which had befallen me. An immense vat belonging to a brew house situated in Banbury street [sic – now Bainbridge Street], Saint Giles, and containing four or five thousand barrels of strong beer, had suddenly burst and swept every thing before it. Whole dwellings were literally riddled by the flood; numbers were killed; and from among the crowds which filled the narrow passages in every direction came the groans of sufferers.

Accounts today of the Meux brewery beer flood are full of claims of “besotted mobs flinging themselves into gutters full of beer, hampering rescue efforts” and claims that “many were suffocated in the crush of hundreds trying to get a free beer” and “the death toll eventually reached 20, including some deaths from alcohol coma”. None of this is borne out by any newspaper reports at the time, and nor are the stories about riots at the Middlesex Hospital when victims were taken there stinking of beer, because other patients smelt the porter and thought free drink was being given away, or the floor at the pub where several of the victims’ bodies were laid out collapsing under the weight of sightseers and more people being killed. All those stories appear to be completely made up. It would be an interesting exercise to track these myths back and see when and where they first arose.

Here’s an account of the accident from a contemporary journal:

DOMESTIC INTELLIGENCE

DREADFUL ACCIDENT

Monday night, the 17th October, one of those accidents which fortunately for the inhabitants of the metropolis is of rare occurence threw the neighhourhood of St Giles’s into the utmost consternation. About six o clock one of the vats in the extensive premises of Messrs Henry Meux and Co in Banbury street St Giles’s burst apart; in a moment New street George street and several others in the vicinity were deluged with the contents of 3,555 barrels of strong beer. The fluid in its course swept every thing before it. Two houses in New street adjoining the brew house were totally demolished. The inhabitants, who were of the poorer class, were all at home. In the first floor of one of them a mother and daughter were at tea; the mother was washed out of the window and the daughter was swept away by the current through a partition and dashed to pieces. The back parts of the houses of Mr Goodwin, poulterer, of Mr Hawse, Tavistock Arms, and Nos 24 and 25 in Great Russel street were nearly destroyed. The female servant of the Tavistock Arms was suffocated. Three of Mr Meux’s men employed in the brewery were rescued with great difficulty. The site of the place is low and flat, and there being no declivity to carry off the fluid in its fall, it spread and sunk into the neighbouring cellars, all of which were inhabited. Even the cellars in Russel street were inundated and breaches made through the houses. The inhabitants, to save themselves from drowning, had to mount their highest pieces of furniture. The bursting of the brew house walls and the fall of heavy timber materially contributed to aggravate the mischief by forcing the roofs and walls of the adjoining houses. It was feared at first that the lives lost exceeded 20, but we are happy to find the account reduced to eight, whose bodies have been all recovered.

And here’s a report of the coroner’s inquest:

On Thursday a Coroner’s Inquest was held on the dead bodies at St Giles’s workhouse. George Crick deposed that he was store house clerk to Messrs H Meux and Co of the Horse Shoe Brew house in St Giles’s, with whom he had lived 17 years. Monday afternoon one of the large iron hoops of the vat which burst fell off. He was not alarmed, as it happened frequently and was not attended by any serious consequence. He wrote to inform a partner, Mr Young, also a vat builder, of the accident, he had the letter in his hand to send to Mr Young, about half past five, half an hour after the accident, and was standing on a platform within three yards of the vat when he heard it burst. He ran to the store house where the vat, was and was shocked to see that one side of the brew house, upwards of 25 feet in height and two bricks and a half thick, with a considerable part of the roof, lay in ruins. The next object that took his attention was his brother, J Crick, who was a superintendent under him, lying senseless, he being pulled from under one of the butts. He and the labourer were now in the Middlesex Hospital. An hour after, witness found the body of Ann Saville floating among the butts, and also part of a private still, both of which floated from neighbouring houses. The cellar and two deep wells in it were full of beer, which witness and those about him endeavoured to save, so that they could not go to see the accident, which happened outwardly. The height of the vat that burst was 22 feet; it was filled within 4 inches of the top and then contained 3555 barrels of entire, being beer that was ten months brewed; the four inches would hold between 30 and 40 barrels more; the hoop which burst was 700 cwt, which was the least weight of any of 22 hoops on the vat. There were seven large hoops, each of which weighed near a ton. When the vat burst the force and pressure was so great that it stove several hogsheads of porter and also knocked the cock out of a vat nearly as large that was in the cellar or regions below; this vat contained 2100 barrels all of which except 800 barrel also ran; about they lost in all between 8 and 9000 barrels of beer; the vat from whence the cock was knocked out ran about a barrel a minute; the vat that burst had been built between eight and nine years and was kept always nearly full. It had an opening on the top about a yard square; it was about eight inches from the wall; witness supposes it was the rivets of the hoops that slipped, none of the hoops being broke and the foundation where the vat stood not giving way. The beer was old, so that the accident could not have been occasioned by the fermentation, that natural process being past; besides, the action would then have been upwards and thrown off the flap made moveable for that purpose.

Richard Hawes deposed that he lived at No 22 Great Russel strcet Bloomsbury, the Tavistock Arms Public house; about half past five o’ clock on Monday evening witness was in his tap room when he heard the crash; the back part of his house was beaten in and every thing in his cellar destroyed; the cellar and tap room filled with beer so that it was pouring across the street into the areas on the opposite side; the deceased, Eleanor Cooper, his servant, was in the yard washing pots at the time the accident happened; she was buried under the ruins, from whence she was dug out about 10 minutes past eight o’ clock; she was found standing by the water butt, quite dead.

John Cummins deposed that he was a bricklayer and lived in Pratt’s place, Camden Town, being the owner of some houses in New street where the principal part of the persons who were lost, resided; he attended on the spot all day on Tuesday to render assistance to the sufferers. Elizabeth Smith, a bricklayer’s wife, was the first body they found, about twelve o’clock in the ruins of a first floor. Sarah Bates, a child, was discovered in about an hour afterward in the ruins of No 3 New street. Catharine Butler, a widow, Mary Mulvey and her son Thomas Murry, a boy three years of age, were found about four o clock, on Tuesday afternoon. Hannah Banfield, a girl about four years and a half old, with her mother and another child, were at tea on the first floor; the two former were washed by the flood into the ruins; the dead body of Hannah Banfield was found in the ruins about half past six; the mother was carried to the Middlesex Hospital, and the last mentioned child was found nearly suffocated in a bed in the room.

The Jury without hesitation, returned a Verdict of Died by Casualty Accidentally and by Misfortune.

Why did they store such huge quantities of porter at the brewery in such enormous vessels? Because experience had shown that porter stored for months in vats acquired a particularly sought-after set of flavours, and storing it in really big vessels reduced the risk of oxidisation (since the surface area merely squared as the volume cubed). This “stale” (meaning “stood for some time”, rather than “off”), flat and probably quite sour aged porter was then send out in casks when ready, and mixed at the time of service in the pub with porter from a cask that was “mild”, that is, fresh and still lively, and probably a little sweet. Customers would specify the degree of mildness or staleness they would like their porter drawn, having it mixed to their own preference. Tastes changed over the 19th century, “stale” porter fell out of favour, and by the 1890s the big vats were being dismantled, the oak they were made from recycled into pub bar-tops. Quite possibly there are pubs in London now whose bars are made out of old porter vats.

The Meux (pronounced “mewks”) brewery stood at the corner of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street until the early 1920s, but production was shifted in 1921 to Nine Elms (itself now demolished and the site of New Covent Garden flower and vegetable market) and the Horse Shoe brewery was replaced by the Dominion Theatre. The Horseshoe Inn next door remained open until the 1990s or so, but eventually closed itself: you can still get a drink on the site, as a branch of Cafe Rouge now occupies the ground floor, but you can’t, alas, get a pint of porter.

At the Brewery History Society we have been trying to get a plaque put up to commemorate the event, and honour the victims, but with no success: I believe the American company that owns the Dominion Theatre failed even to reply, while the Camden Historical Society, inside whose borough the site now falls, took the strange view that “not enough people died” to make it worthwhile having a permanent memorial. How many dead women and children is enough, Camden?

The Meux brewery at the corner of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street exactly 100 years ago, in 1914

(There’s a rather fuller account of the flood, and the history of the Horse Shoe brewery by me here.)

You can hardly get fresher beer than from a bottle snatched off the production line by the managing director of the brewery, only seconds after it had been filled and capped – and, indeed, it’s excellent, cold, refreshingly flavourful and welcome, even at 10.30 in the morning. Mind, there are few or no Anglo-Saxon breweries where this would be possible, since health’n’safety barriers would be in place to prevent anyone from being able to reach across into the filling machinery and grab a passing bottle from the conveyor. However, this is Italy: while in a British brewery everybody would be forced into hi-vis jackets, ear protectors and goggles, here, where life is visibly more relaxed, visitors can wander about unworried by the HSE.

Menabrea brewery managing director Franco Thedy pulls a bottle out of the line

I am at Menabrea (pronounced roughly “MENahBRAYah”), one of the few surviving family-run Italian breweries, with roots that go back to before Italy was a single country. Menabrea is based in the town of Biella in Piedmont, 1,400 feet up in the foothills of the Alps, 40 miles from Turin to the south-west and 50 miles from Milan to the east. It is a town of 46,000 people, with soft water coming down from the Alps that, with plenty of nearby pastureland for sheep, has encouraged a local woollen industry: the town is home to Cerruti and Fila, among others. That same soft water is also very good for brewing lagers.

Inside the Menabrea brewery in Biella

The brewery was started in 1846 by a couple of cafe owners, Antonio and Gian Battista Caraccio, and Antoine Welf, from Gressoney in the Aosta valley, to the north-west of Biella. Welf was a Walser, that is, a speaker of the Walliser dialect of German found in the Swiss canton of Valais and surrounding territories such as Aosta. Welf disappears, and in 1854 the Caraccio brothers started leasing the brewery in Biella to another Walser, Anton Zimmermann, also from Gressoney, and his compatriot Jean Joseph Menabreaz (sic), who were already running a brewery in the town of Aosta itself. Piedmont – and Aosta – were at that time part of the Kingdom of Sardinia, ruled by the House of Savoy, but in 1861, with some help from the French and Giuseppe Garibaldi, Victor Emmanuel, King of Sardinia, was able to declare himself King of a more-or-less united Italy. Three years later, in 1864, Zimmermann and Menabreaz – now, post-unification, with Italianised first names, Antonio and Giuseppe, and, in the latter’s case, a more Italian-looking surname as well, with the final “z” disappearing – bought the brewery in Biella from the Caraccios.

In 1872 Zimmermann left the Biella partnership to concentrate on the brewery in Aosta. However, he died the following year, and the Aosta brewery fell under the control of his nephew, Antonio Thedy. A couple of decades later, in 1896, Antonio Thedy’s brother, Emilio Thedy, who had married one of Giuseppe Menabrea’s granddaughters, was helping to run the Biella brewery, and it is Emilio’s descendant, Franco Thedy, who is now the MD there. Strangely, considering how many old-established Italian breweries have vanished, the Aosta brewery where Joseph/Giuseppe Menabrea started in the beer business is also still going, albeit on a different site, and is now one of four Italian brewing plants operated by Heineken, and producing Moretti, among other beer brands.

The town of Biella

Menabrea itself ran into financial problems in the early 1990s, but in 1991 Paulo Thedy, Franco’s father, signed a deal which saw the company acquired another family brewer, Gruppo Birra Forst, founded in the South Tyrol village of Forst in 1857 (when the area was still part of Austria-Hungary: it passed to Italy after the First World War). The deal saw Menabrea keep a considerable degree of independence, with the Thedy family still in charge. Today production is around 180,000 hectolitres a year, 45 per cent bottled and 55 per cent keg, and 90 per cent sold in Italy – and of that, 50 per cent is sold in the north-west of the country, making Menabrea pretty much the Italian equivalent of a family-owned regional brewer.

Franco Thedy

The remaining 10 per cent is exported to 28 countries around the world. It is Franco Thedy’s ambition to grow that export figure that is the reason why I am in Biella, along with a bunch of style bloggers mostly about a third of my age, courtesy of Tennent’s the Glasgow-based brewer that is now importing Menabrea beers into the UK. Peroni, the SAB Miller-owned Italian beer brand, is massive – massive – in the UK, with sales in this country not far off ten times Menabrea’s entire output. Nobody at Tennent’s, or Menabrea, actually says so over the weekend I was in Piedmont with them, but clearly the thinking is that even a small slice of Peroni’s UK market would be very welcome for the Biella boys and girls. The company has already started to gain a small toehold: if you’ve been in the Zizzi pizza restaurant chain recently, you’ll have found Menabrea’s pale lager on sale.

The brewery is on a 7,000 square metres (1.75 acre) site on the Via Ramella Germanin in the centre of the town, with some of the buildings dating back to the earliest years of the operation, including the circular former icehouse where ice was stored to enable the beer to be cold-lagered. The cramped site makes it difficult to expand, but Menabrea is now planning to build in 2016 a €2.5 million new modular brewhouse – the fourth on the site – with German kit that will take potential capacity up to 200,000 hectolitres. The current brewhouse, although put up only in 1986, “is at the end of its life”, Thedy admits: the equipment was second-hand when Menabrea acquired it, from what had been a test brewery for Heineken at one of its plants, and is now more than 40 years old, having been built in 1974. The new brewery will also give Menabrea the ability to produce more specialist beers, and seasonal brews – “It’s what the Italian market wants now”, Thedy says. Menabrea will not, however, he says, be producing the sort of wacky barrel-aged beers and so on that new Italian micros have been coming out with in the past few years: it sees itself as a brewer, not an experimenter. The latest expenditure comes after a €16 million spend over the past ten years to refurbish the plant, which includes €700,000 of German bottling equipment that flushes the oxygen from the bottles twice, to try to ensure there is as little oxygen inside the bottles to stale the beer as possible before they are capped.

Conical fermenting vessels at Menabrea

Factbox time: the brew length is 175 to 185 hectolitres – about 4,000 gallons, or 110 barrels. The beers are made with 73% malted barley from France and 27% maize, and, today, Danish yeast, though for a while the yeast was coming from the Carlsberg-Tetley operation in England, flown in to Milan airport, and soft water from the mountains that can be seen from the brewery. In the past the brewery made its beers from malt and rice, with the rice coming from the neighbouring Piedmontese province of Vercelli, famous for rice-growing. It started using maize 35 years ago, because it found that rice was too difficult to deal with in the brewery. The hops are pelleted Hallertau and Saaz. The main brews are the 4.8% abv “bionda” pale lager and a tasty 5% abv amber beer, with hints of chocolate and coffee, which is also being imported into the UK; three beers made under the “Top Restaurant” brands, including a pils and a bock, sold in Italy and the United States, but not in the UK; and a regular Christmas special. The brewery also produces a number of oddities besides its own beers, including all-malt “private label” beer for an Italian retailer, and also Allsopps Strong Lager, a 7.5% bottled beer brewed under licence from Carlsberg – today’s owned of the Allsopp name – for the Italian market, a last echo of the pioneering role Kirstie Allsopp’s ancestor’s played in introducing lager brewing to Britain.

The current fermentation cellars have 15 tanks, each holding 650 hectolitres, and all fermenting the beer at 14ºC for two weeks. Once fermentation is completed to the brewers’ satisfaction, the temperature is taken down to 0ºC and the yeast drops to the bottom of the fermentation vessels. The yeast is drained off to be reused, up to a maximum of seven or eight times, after which it is sold for pig food, and the fermented beer is run into vessels in the maturation cellar, where it is lagered for four weeks at the usual 0ºC. The company is building a new fermentation cellar with four new tanks to increase capacity, and also installing extra kegging capacity to give the brewery the ability to fill one-way kegs for the export market. It also fills 1,000 litre and 500-litre tanks for beer festivals and restaurants with unpasteurised, unfiltered beer, though currently only five retail outlets, one in Biella itself, the others in or near Milan, are being supplied with tank beer.

A Sbirro cheese round

Most of the spent grain is sold to farmers as cattle feed, but some goes across the road to the Botalla cheese-making plant, where it goes into a “beer cheese” called Sbirro, which is also an Italian slang word for “cop”, policeman. The collaboration, Thedy says, came about 11 years ago when he and the owner of the cheese factory were having a 6pm beer together before going home. “I asked him, ‘hey, Andrea, how can we make a beer cheese?’, because when I went to Belgium I saw a lot of beer cheese. He said, ‘I’ve no idea, but we’ll try – why not?’ So we started the Menabrea beer cheese project. We were the first to produce a beer cheese in Italy, and now it’s a phenomenon, really popular.” The cheese is dropped into Menabrea’s “ambrata” amber beer, then covered on the outside with spent grain, which makes it look very different, and spends three months in the cellars of the cheese factory, maturing. A wholesaler is now selling the beer cheese in the UK, and if you see it, I can recommend it: a firm, tangy cheese with a hint of hops, good on its own and excellent melted on top of pizza.

Early gas-pressure lager font using wooden barrel, at Menabrea’s museum

Menabrea’s USP, Thedy believes, is the passion its people feel for the product. Modern craft brewers are using computers and automatic systems to make their beer, just like the really big breweries, Thedy says: “People are not really connected with the product.” At Menabrea, however, he insists, they are: the workers have been there for decades, with some retiring after 35 years at the brewery, and people whose fathers and grandfathers worked there. “Menabrea is one big family.” The people who work in the brewery, he says, “they are connected with the beer, they love this product. We want to keep the feeling, the passion, the tradition in this brewery. We want to sell our product, and our passion for the product, around the world. It’s not just beer – it’s a part of the Italian beer story.”

The Blsck Madonna shrine on a wall at the Menabrea brewery

It was certainly fascinating, for me, to contrast and compare Menabrea with the Hook Norton brewery in Oxfordshire, which I went round last year: the two breweries are almost exactly the same age, both are still run by descendants of the founder, and the management of both breweries clearly have the same passion for the beers they produce, and the same urgent desire to see their companies survive and thrive. The kit is rather different, of course: Hook Norton is able to use equipment that is a century old or more, while the Biella operation’s brewing vessels are considerably newer, and much shinier. Both breweries, interestingly, have space devoted to artefacts from the past, though Menabrea’s is the more interesting simply because itr’s rearer, in my experience, to see items from an old lager brewery than stuff from an old ale brewery. Italy being Italy, the Menabrea brewery has a very good restaurant attached, in converted stables, which despite having easily 150-plus covers was packed out the night I and the style-bloggers threw ourselves at the typical Italian six-course blow-out: I’m not sure they’d be able to maintain that level of gastronomic intensity in the rural Cotswolds. Nor can I see any British brewery having anything like the picture of the Black Madonna of Oropa to be seen on one wall of the Menabrea brewery, a shrine marking the fact that the brewery was the first stop on the parading round the town of this ancient religious relic.

So: what chance for Menabrea in the UK market? I’d certainly like to see the ambrata widely available, there aren’t enough examples of that style of beer on sale here. Judging by my experience with the beer pulled right off the production line, the bionda will succeed if Tennent’s can crack one of the hardest problems facing any beer operator: logistics. I’ve increasingly grown to understand that the main problem with much of the lager sold in the UK isn’t that it’s not very good, but that it’s too old, and/or it’s been handled badly in the supply chain. This is true of many beers, but particularly so with lager: it really does need to be as fresh as possible.

And now, since while searching for background material for this post, I came up with a fair amount of information about the Biella brewery’s past, here is

A short history of Birra Menabrea

A Menabrea staff photo from 1897

The roots of the current brewing operation in Biella lie 30 miles away, where Anton Zimmerman, a member of the German-speaking Walser community in Gressoney-Saint-Jean in the Aosta valley, born 1803, who had studied brewing in France and Germany, and Jean Joseph Menabreaz, also from Gressoney, started the Birra Zimmermann in Via Xavier de Maistre in Aosta itself in 1837, using barley grown largely in the nearby valley of Great St Bernard. According to one source, Menabreaz and Zimmermann were the first brewers in the Kingdom of Sardinia to use Bavarian-style bottom fermentation techniques. Meanwhile a third Walser from Gressoney, Antoine Welf, went into partnership in 1846 with two brothers, Antonio and Gian Battista Caraccio, cafe proprietors in Biella, to found a brewhouse there, taking advantage of the water that flows down from the nearby Oropa mountain. In 1854 the Caraccios, who were from from Bioglio, a village six miles north-east of Biella, began leasing the Biella brewery to Menabreaz and Zimmermann, who were presumably introduced to it through the Gressoney connection.

The Menabrea brewery frontage circa 1900

On October 3 1864 the brewery was bought by Menabreaz (now, since the unification of Italy, called Giuseppe Menabrea) and Zimmermann (now Antonio rather than Anton) for 95,000 lire, £3,800 in contemporary British currency, or about £330,000 in modern money. Three years later, on September 17 1867, a partnership agreement was drawn up which gave Zimmermann a 25 per cent share of the Biella brewery, Giuseppe Menabrea a 50 per cent share and two of Guiseppe’s sons, Francesco and Carlo, 25 per cent between them. In 1869 Giuseppe gave Francesco and Carlo another 12.5 per cent each, so that all four partners each now owned a quarter of the operation. Three years after that, Zimmermann, now in his 70s, evidently decided to concentrate on the Aosta operation, and on July 6 1872 a new company was formed to run the Biella brewery, G. Menabrea and Sons, the sons this time being Carlo, and Alberto, who was just 19.

Guiseppe Menabrea, centre, and his two sons Carlo and Francesco

Alberto died on August 5 1880, aged just 27, and just eight months later, on April 18 1881, Giuseppe Menabrea died as well. Carlo carried on with the business, forming another partnership with his brothers-in-law Antonio Mehr and Giuseppe Bieler to make beer and soda water and sell it “retail and wholesale”, paying himself and his partners a salary of two thousand lire a year. By 1882 the brewery was producing at least two types of lager, a blond Pilsner style and a dark version in the Munich dunkel style. The beers received praise that year from the Italian finance minister, Quintino Sella, who called it ” squisita”, and it may have been the minister’s praise that prompted the King of Italy, Umberto I, to make Carlo Menabrea a Knight of the Order of the Crown of Italy

19th century wort cooler at Menabrea

Three years on, in 1885, Carlo Menabrea also died, leaving his widow, Eugenia Squindo, a member of another Walser family originally from Gressone (and originally called Squindoz – like Joseph Menabreaz they lost the “z” to look more Italian), with three young daughters Albertina, Eugenia and Maria, aged 12, nine and seven. The widow Eugenia carried on with the brewery, helped by her brother Pietro Squindo, who ran an iron foundry in Biella. After her death, two of her sons-in-law, Emilio Thedy, a nephew of Antonio Zimmermann, who had married the young Eugenia, and Agostino Antoniotti, husband of Albertina, founded a partnership in 1896 to run the business. Among the changes they brought was the replacing of the brewery’s old wood and coal-fired coppers by modern copperrs heated by steam. Soon after, in 1899, the brewery won a silver medal at the Turin esposizione, followed by a Diploma of Honour and Cross in Dijon, and other prizes in Munich and Ghent, and then in 1900 a Grand Prix at the Paris World Exhibition, the first of a string of awards over the past century.

About this time the brewery had more than thirty employees, and production was about 8,000 to 10,000 hectolitres a year, hitting 10,814hl in 1910-11. About 90 per cent of production was of dark Munich-style lager, rather than the pale Pilsner kind.

The Menabrea stand at the Esposizione Agricola Industriale di Vercelli in 1930

The brewery came through the First World War, though it lost the services of Federico, Emilio Thedy’s eldest son, who was called up to fight for his country. Production rose to 19,611 hectolitres in 1920-21. Under the Thedys, in 1930, Menabrea bought several “prestigious” taverns in the two biggest cities in Piedmont, Turin and Novara, to help advertise the brewery’s beers. It survived a period of high beer taxes in Italy in the 1930s, and the tumult of the Second World War, still with Emilio Thedy in charge, and when Emilio died in 1949 he was followed at the helm by the second of his five sons, Carlo.

Lagering vessels at the Menabrea brewery circa 1900

By 1964 the brewery was still being run by Carlo Thedy, with the help of his nephew Paolo, son of his youngest brother, Franco. Eventually Paulo took over, and production crept up, passing 36,000 hectolitres and then 40,000 hectolitres in the 1980s. Menabrea had also begun importing beers from Britain and Germany, including John Bull Bitter. But financial worries caused Paolo Thedy to enter into a deal that saw the company become part of the South Tyrol-based family-controlled brewing operation Gruppo Forst, albeit with considerable autonomy and with the Thedy family still in charge. Thus when Paolo died in 2006, two years after production hit 100,000 hectolitres, he was followed as managing director by his son Franco, born in 1968.

Meanwhile in Aosta, Anton Zimmermann died in 1873, aged 70, and his nephew Antonio Thedy, one of six sons of Federico Thedy and Marta Zimmermann – whose younger brother Emilio, born 1876, was to marry Carlo Menabrea’s daughter Eugenia – took over. Thedy updated the brewery, and started the brewing of Munich and Pilsen-style lagers. Thedy’s daughter Matilde had married a man called Corrado Vincent, and in 1915, after Italy entered the First World War on the side of the Allies, the concern dropped the Germanic Zimmermann ( the name means “carpenter” in German) and became a limited partnership under the name Birra Aosta di Matilde Vincent e Compagnia, though with Thedy still in charge, since Corrado Vincent did not become the boss until 1925.

Corrado’s and Matilde’s son Roberto Vincent took over, aged 20 in 1936, and pushed production up from just 2,600 hectolitres in 1931 to 7,000 hectolitres in 1955, despite having to serve in the Italian army during the Second World War. When Roberto Vincent died in 1965, aged just 51, after a serious illness, the company was sold, and in 1966 a new concern, Socièta Industrial Birraria, was set up to run the Aosta brewery. A new brewery was built in the nearby village of Pollein, and capacity eventually pushed up to 500,000 hectolitres.

SIB was bought by Henninger Brau of Frankfurt in 1973 and then sold to Dreher, owner of breweries in Trieste, Padua, Genoa and Turin (and controlled by Heineken since the early 1970s) in 1988. Plans were put in place to boost production to one million hectolitres, and the brewery is still running in 2015, one of four Heineken plants in Italy, producing brands including Moretti, Dreher, Prinz and Von Wunster, with an agreement signed earlier this year that it will continue in operation until at least 2026.

Tank beer – “tankova” – may be a hot new trend in London, with Meantime in Greenwich and Pilsner Urquell delivering fresh unpasteurised beer to pubs in beautiful shiny big containers, but the idea of putting beer in cellar tanks to deliver better quality is, even in London, more than a century old.

The first “tank” beer system in the capital appears to have been introduced by Hugh Abbot, a brewer at Watney’s original Stag brewery in Pimlico, London, just around the corner from Buckingham Palace. In 1913 he had three standing butts fixed up in the cellar of a Watney’s pub, and beer delivered in an old horse-drawn tank wagon of the sort that brewers used to transport beer to their bottling stores. The experiment was successful enough that by 1920 Watney’s had electric-powered tanker lorries, fitted with copper tanks, taking beer around to its pubs. It was still using electric vehicles in 1949, though by then tank deliveries to pubs were done using trailers mounted behind standard tractor units.

Large ceramic cellar tanks made by Royal Doulton in a Hull Brewery pub cellar

Another of London’s “big seven” 20th century brewers, Charrington’s, of the Anchor brewery in Mile End, was also delivering tank beer by the early 1920s, and a Charrington’s brewer, Alfred Paul, described the system to the Institute of Brewers in a talk in May 1922. Only “bright” mild beer, chilled and filtered, was delivered by Charrington’s tankers to its pubs, he said, although “experiments are being made with a tank for the bulk delivery of naturally conditioned beer.” The road tanks, made of copper lagged with iron, had a capacity of 24 barrels each, that is, 864 gallons, and the tanks in the pub cellars generally held three barrels each. “On arrival of the delivery tank, or road tank, at the house, the hose, is let down through the cellar-flap or any other available aperture, and the beer allowed to run down into the cellar tank. Should the fall from the street to the cellar be insufficient, a band-pump attached to the foot-board of the chassis could be used.” Charrington’s cellar tanks were generally made of earthenware, Paul said, being upright, cylindrical vessels, with a glazed inside, but ” experiments are now being carried out with aluminium and glass-lined steel.” The tanks, he said, “are carefully examined prior to filling, with a powerful electric torch. The men, who are carefully selected, are definitely instructed not to fill a tank unless, in their opinion, which by constant practice has become expert, the tank is scrupulously clean.”

According to Paul, the savings from using cellar tanks were considerable: each barrel’s worth of trade required three actual wooden barrels, one in the cask-washing shed, one on the road and one in the pub cellar, he declared, so one three-barrel cellar tank, costing £30, was the equivalent of nine wooden barrels. If a brewery went over entirely to cellar tanks, he said, it would eliminate coopers, cask washers, cask racking and the clerks needed to track all the casks as they left and returned

An electric-powered beer tanker used by Watney’s in 1929

Despite Charrington’s and Watney’s advocacy of tank beer, by 1936 Sydney Nevile, who worked for Whitbread, could only say that while “a substantial number of brewers have adopted for a portion of their trade the principle of delivering filtered beer in tank wagons into tanks in the licensed house,” and “this has met with a considerable amount of success,” still “for one reason or another” the tank beer movement “does not appear at the present time to be making further progress.”

One problem seems to have been that tank beer was most suited to pubs with a quick turnover of large amounts of beer, and London looks to have had a smaller proportion of that kind of outlet than the North of England, which is where tank beer seems to have been most popular. Like Charrington’s, the Hull Brewery in Yorkshire began installing huge glazed earthenware jars in its pubs from the early 1920s. They came in sizes of 108, 54 and 36 gallons (the capacities of the traditional butt, hogshead and barrel), and were made by Royal Doulton.

A Thorneycroft beer tanker belonging to the Hull Brewery Co

The beer was delivered to the pubs by specially built Thorneycroft tankers, and while the earthenware jars eventually gave way to stainless steel, much of the brewery’s beer was still brought by tanker to many of its pubs, and served up by compressed air from mild steel tanks fitted with disposable plastic liners, through until the brewery closed in 1985.

Other breweries in the North of England, such as Burtonwood, Mansfield in Nottinghamshire and Nimmo’s in Castle Eden, County Durham, also installed cellar tanks in their pubs, many of them 90 or 180-gallon capacity and made in stainless steel by Porter-Lancastrian of Bolton, or the now-closed Grundy’s of Teddington, in West London (which also made aluminium casks and kegs, supplying Truman’s with its first 100 litre/22 gallon kegs in 1971). But tank beer was particularly popular with the “club” breweries, such as the United Clubs Brewery in South Wales, and the Northern Clubs and Federation Brewery (the “Fed”) in Newcastle upon Tyne, set up after the First World War to give working men’s clubs a cheap, reliable source of beer.

At least one of the attractions of tank beer for the club brewers was the speed and convenience with which clubs could be supplied with beer. In 1970 the transport manager at the Federation brewery in Newcastle revealed that “Friday is the busiest day for us, with clubs suddenly realising that they want extra beer to meet the weekend demand.” It was much easier to send out a tanker and pipe the beer into the clubs’ cellars than hump casks or kegs.

Beer tanker used by the Northern Clubs Federation Brewery in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1970

One of the big proponents of tank beer was the Cornbrook Brewery of West Gorton, Manchester, which had most of the larger outlets in its estate of 230 or so pubs fitted with five-barrel refrigerated cellar tanks by the end of the 1950s, all supplied by Porter-Lancastrian. According to Anthony Avis, this was because Cornbrook’s managing director from 1958, David Constable-Maxwell, was “connected” with Porter-Lancastrian. When the Cornbrook Brewery was acquired from its owners, the aristocratic Fitzalan-Howard family, by Eddie Taylor’s fast-expanding United Breweries in 1961, Constable-Maxwell persuaded William Tudor Davies, the managing director of Hammond’s, the largest component in United at that time, that tank beer should be rolled out around United – allegedly without revealing his connection with the manufacturer of the tanks.

Davies was enthusiastic, and a trial was held in Bradford, with all the company’s pubs being converted to tank beer on the same day. Unfortunately, what no one had apparently considered was that the Cornbrook brewery’s beer had been brewed to be delivered through the tank system, while Hammond’s pubs were serving beer brewed at the Tower brewery in Tadcaster which was made to be served from casks. At the same time, Porter-Lancastrian had rushed to complete the contract for the new tanks, and the quality of the equipment they supplied was, in many cases, poor, with the CO2 pressure regulators often not working properly, meaning the beer foamed too much when it was dispensed. After a week, according to Anthony Avis, Hammonds had hardly any pubs serving beer: all that came out of the nozzles in the bars were pints of froth.

Bedford-based beer tanker used by Nimmo’s of Castle Eden

The solution was discovered by the wife of one Hammond’s tenant who had taken her rage out on the new cellar tank by beating it furiously with a broomhandle. When she stopped, the beer suddenly flowed freely, with much less froth. Every ironmongers in Bradford was immediately bought out of broomhandles, and tenants were instructed to belay their cellar tanks regularly during opening hours, to knock the excess gas out of solution and allow the beer to flow.

That was not the last of the problems United had with exporting the Cornbrook cellar tank system to other parts: it was discovered that keeping the tanks clean was beyond most licensees, resulting in cloudy beer. In addition, pubs that might only turn over four barrels a week had two five-barrel tanks in their cellars, which meant stale beer. The plastic linings inside the tanks started reacting with the acid in the beer; and the mild steel the tanks were made of began rusting. The problems cost United Brewers, and its successor companies, Charrington United and Bass Charrington, many thousands of pounds to solve.

While brewers such as Hull (or North Country, as it became in 1974) filtered and carbonated their tank beers, it was perfectly possible to treat the tank like a giant cask, and add finings to the beer once it had been delivered, to allow it to settle and mature naturally. The disadvantage for brewers was that unless they were the “disposable liner” type, as Hammond’s found, the tanks then had to be thoroughly cleaned when empty.

Dennis ‘Horla’ tank vehicle owned by Watney’s in 1948

In the early 1970s a brewery such as Mansfield was putting nearly two thirds of its beer into tanks. But by 1994, changes in tastes had cut that to less than 20 per cent, and tanks were coming out of cellars. Ironically, the demise of tank beer in Britain in the 1980s and early 1990s proved a boon to the growing craft beer movement, both here and, especially, in the United States. Redundant pub and club cellar tanks, cheap and easily available, some of them 50 years old, were converted into fermenting vessels and conditioning tanks in their thousands for new small breweries, and “Grundy tank” became the general term in the United States for imported UK-built pub cellar tanks, even though many were not actually built by Grundy.

(An even shorter version of this history appeared in Beer magazine in 2013)

Flag on the top of the Mortlake brewery 1932

It is one of history’s ironies that just as London hits more breweries than at any time in the past 110 years, its brewing capacity is more than halved with the closure of the last of the capital’s remaining megabreweries, at Mortlake.

That the brewery at Mortlake, which has been pumping out hundreds of thousands of barrels a year of Budweiser for the past two decades, should have survived to be at least 250 years old this year is remarkable: it lost its independent in 1889, and the guillotine has been poised above its neck for the past six years.

The Mortlake site, famous as the home of Watney’s Red Barrel, was one of eight huge breweries still operating in London in the mid-1970s, which between them made one in every five pints drunk in Britain. Four closed between 1975 and 1982: Charrington’s in Mile End, Whitbread’s on the northern edge of the City, Mann’s in Whitechapel and Courage by Tower Bridge. Truman’s brewery shut in Brick Lane in 1989, and Ind Coope in Romford in 1992. In 2005, Guinness closed the Park Royal brewery. With the shuttering of Young’s in 2006 (yes, I know there’s still brewing on the site, but it’s not a commercial operation), in 2007 brewery numbers in London hit what was almost an all-time low, of just 10.

It’s instructive to see how brewery numbers have fluctuated over the past 300 years:

1700 London had 190 breweries, producing a total of 1.7 million barrels of ale and beer.
1786 Still around 161 brewers in the London area, though the top 12 London porter brewers made up half the capital’s beer production
1826 London has 93 commercial brewers, and 61 retail or pub brewers
1850 More than 40 London breweries had closed in the previous 20 years. However, the capital can still boast some 160 brewers
1904 London still had 90 breweries, out of a total of 1,503 in England and Wales. It also had just one pub still brewing its own beer, although in the rest of the country there were another 3,108 home-brew pubs.
1913 Brewery numbers are starting to drop, with just 65 left still operating
1919 The First World War, and high beer taxes, have see a big cull, with only 46 breweries now left in London
1923 London is now down to some 42 or so operating breweries
1952 London still had 25 operating breweries, run by some 19 or so companies, out of around 560 breweries in the whole of the UK.
1960 16 breweries left, including some surprising survivors – Harman’s in Uxbridge, for example; the Wenlock Brewery, off the City Road in Shoreditch; Woodheads, running at the South London Brewery in Southwark Bridge Road until 1964; and the Essex Brewery in Walthamstow, which was being run by the Ipswich brewers Tolly Cobbold when it closed in December 1971
1976 After all but two of London’s smaller breweries had shut, and with the closure of two of the largest, Charrington’s and Whitbread, the capital reaches an all-time low of just nine breweries
1981 A burst of pub-brewery openings lift numbers to 20
1998 The growth of the Firkin chain helps push brewery numbers up to a post-Second World War high of 34
2000 Closure of the Firkin breweries sees numbers fall to just 20
2007 While the rest of the country sees brewery numbers rising, London is now down to just ten
2010 Brewery numbers start to climb again, to 14
2012 A surge of openings sees a new post-war high of 36
2013 Brewery numbers almost double in a year, to hit 70
2015 Numbers now believed to be around 80, more than for 110 years

We’re one more down, now though: and whatever you thought of the beer it brewed in recent years, it’s still, I think, a little sad that this is the end of an important chapter in London’s industrial heritage. So here’s my small tribute:

Weatherstone’s brewery, split by Thames Street, from Samuel Leigh’s 1829 Panorama of the Thames

Much of the commentary about the brewery’s closure claims it was founded in 1487, when a Welshman, John Morgan, was “induced” (to use a term first used by an antiquarian writing in 1886) to start a brewery at Mortlake, supposedly to supply the largely Welsh household of the new Tudor king, Henry VII, who was to base himself at the palace at nearby Sheen – shortly to have its name changed to Richmond. It has also been claimed that the brewery sprang from a brewhouse at Mortlake Manor House, which was occupied by the Archbishops of Canterbury from at least the 11th century. But the archbishops continued to own the manor house until 1535, after which it went to a multitude of hands, before being demolished, apparently, soon after 1700. There is absolutely nothing currently known to link either Morgan or the manor house to the two small breweries recorded in 1765 either side of Thames Street in Mortlake, leading to the Town Dock, one owned by James Weatherstone and the other by William Richmond, which are the first recorded commercial breweries in what was then a small village.

By 1780 Richmond’s brewery had been bought by a man called John Prior. Weatherstone meanwhile went into partnership with Carteret John Halford. In 1807 Weatherstone and Halford bought land next to the river with a frontage of 104 feet and extended their brewery premises northward. Four years later, in 1811, they acquired Prior’s brewery, merging them into one, though Thames Street still separated the two halves. Weatherstone passed on his brewery to his nephew Thomas, who carried on the partnership with Halford until he died around 1825. The business was substantial enough by now that it employed a clerk, called John Stephenson and a brewer called George Dyson, who signed the codicil to Weatherstone’s will in 1824. Halford was then in partnership at the brewery with William Topham: at one point they were “brewers to her Majesty”, according to a directory entry. By 1840 Halford was dead, and Topham had entered into a new partnership with George Streater Kempson, who looks to have been a relative by marriage of Halford’s. In 1841 Kempson and Topham’s operation at Mortlake was described as a “considerable establishment”.

Charles James Phillips, son of a corn and coal merchant, became a partner in the firm in 1846, which was listed in 1849 as CJ Phillips and GS Kempson. Then in 1852, James Wigan, aged 20, the son of a hop merchant, bought a half-share in the business for £15,000, and it became Phillips and Wigan. By that time the brewery was using around 5,000 quarters of malt a year, suggesting an output of between 20,000 and 25,000 barrels of beer. In 1865 Phillips and Wigan bought the freehold of all the properties along the river frontage, for £2,350, and in 1866 they moved to shut the alleys and streets that ran through the brewery premises, including Thames Street and Brewhouse Lane. The people of Mortlake fought to prevent this, but the brewers eventually won, after a court case. The brewery was then substantially rebuilt, and a stone in the main wall still marks this, with the monogram P and W and the date 1869. In 1876, however, Wigan bought Hawkes’ brewery in Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire and although he continued to live in Mortlake, control of the brewery passed in 1877 solely to the Philips family.

The brewery is often said to have “held lucrative contracts for supplying beer to the Army in India”, but if it did, it was not alone: in 1873 the India Office revealed that there were “about eighteen” of the “great London brewers” on the list of suppliers of beer to the Indian army, a trade worth 150,000 barrels a year. Two sets of recipients of Mortlake brewery beer every year were the crews who took part in the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race: Charles Phillips regularly held a lunch for them at his home at the end of the race.

Mortlake brewery from the Middlesex side of the river in 1931

By the end of the 1880s brewers were starting to gobble each other up as the only way of acquiring new pub customers, with, particularly in the South of England, very few free houses left. In 1889 the Phillipses accepted a takeover offer from Watney’s of the Stag brewery, Pimlico, once one of London’s Big 12 porter brewers, and two of Charles Phillips’s sons, Charles junior and Herbert, joined the Watney’s board. It was not just the Mortlake brewery’s pubs that Watney’s was after: the Pimlico concern needed somewhere that could make the increasingly popular pale ales and bitter beers, and the Mortlake brewery seems to have had a good reputation for them. For many years after the acquisition, all the bitter for Watney’s London trade was brewed at Mortlake and taken down river by two barges, called Mollie and Ann.

In 1898 Watney’s merged with two other long-established London porter brewers, Reid’s of Clerkenwell and Combe’s of Covent Garden, to become the largest brewing concern in London. Reid’s brewery was closed, but Combe’s ran for another six years, until the Mortlake brewery had been rebuilt enough to supply the enlarged operation, including an I eight-storey maltings built by the riverside in 1903 on the eastern corner of Ship Lane.

With the restrictions on beer production brought about by the First World War, brewing at Mortlake actually ceased for a while during the conflict, and the site was used for the production of (unrationed) honey sugar, sold under the Union Jack brand in cut-down quart beer bottles.

Coppers in the ‘pale ale’ copperhouse at the Mortlake brewery around 1938

Mash tuns at the Mortlake brewery circa 1939

In 1930 Watney’s bought a bulk beer pasteuriser from a firm in Germany, installing it at Mortlake, and began experimenting with “container” bitter – pressurised keg beer. The first customer was the nearby East Sheen Lawn Tennis Club, where a Mortlake brewer, Bert Hussey, was a member. But “keg” beer was also being installed in pubs as early as 1933: when the Chequers Inn in Isleworth, a few miles from Mortlake, was rebuilt, the Watney’s house magazine, The Red Barrel, said:

“A feature of this house is an innovation in the system of supplying the beer to the bar from the cellar. It is delivered under pressure direct from the cask and does not go through any pump of beer engine. It is one of the most hygienic methods of service known and this is one of the first houses in the country to be so equipped. It ensures that the beer is served to the customer in the same condition as that in which it leaves the Brewery.”

Rolling barrels in the Mortlake brewery yard 1932

Two years later, in 1935, the company launched the Mortlake-brewed Watney’s Special bitter, stronger and more expensive than the “ordinary” bitter, at eight pence a pint in public bars, nine pence in the saloon

In 1959 the original Watney’s site in Pimlico closed. Mortlake was still not big enough to brew all the company’s beers, and a year earlier Watney’s had taken over Mann’s brewery in the East End to ensure it had enough capacity. By 1971 Mann’s was looking old and cramped, however, and Watney’s set in train plans to shut Mann’s and expand the Mortlake brewery again. In the meantime the company decided that since Mortlake would not be ready until 1975, at a cost of £7 million, it needed to buy more capacity. It was about to bid for another East End brewery, the recently refurbished Truman’s in Brick Lane, when Joseph Maxwell of Grand Metropolitan made an unexpected move on the Brick Lane brewer. The two-month fight that followed seems to have exhausted Watney’s, the loser, so much that it succumbed itself to a bid from Grand Met the following year.

Mortlake brewery on Boatrace Day around 1938

By the 1980s, under Grand Met, Mortlake was essentially a massive lager brewery, with Fosters and Holsten Export the big brands, though according to one ex-Mortlake brewer, Watney’s Special and Watney’s Pale Ale were still “reasonable” volumes, with Watney’s Pale Ale a “significant” bottled beer brand. However, automation meant that the number of employees had plunged, from 1,400 in the 1960s to just 400.

The brewery changed owners several times in the 1990s as the reverberations of the 1989 Beer Orders saw Britain’s giant brewery companies merge, evaporate or quit brewing, and in 1995 the Mortlake site, which had been given the former name of Watney’s premises in Pimlico, the Stag brewery, was leased to Anheuser-Busch to make Budweiser. It still had a capacity of a million barrels a year in 1995, though it has probably not been making more than about 650,000 barrels a year in very recent times: even now, probably more than all the rest of London’s breweries put together.

An announcement that the site was to close was originally made in 2009, by which time only around 180 people were employed there, though a year later it appeared that a surprise increase in sales of Budweiser had stayed the axeman’s hand. Now, however, AB, or rather AB InBev, as it has become, which eventually bought the leasehold of the 21-acre site, has shut it down, and sold it to a Singapore-listed company, City Developments Ltd, for £158m. There are, apparently, no firm development plas yet, but one extimate reckons 850 homes could be fitted onto the site – you can see how big it is here.

Are you a mature but still lively Victorian brewery? Do you worry that younger breweries, with their weird American hop varieties, shiny stainless steel lauter tuns and one-off wacky recipes, are luring your customers away? Is your 150-barrel minimum brewlength too inflexible to make experimental brews on? Worry no more: install your own microbrewery on the premises, and you too can be hitting the bartops with mango-flavoured double IPAs and smoked malt saisons. Comes with clip-on manbun and removable extra-bushy beard for all brewhouse operatives …

That’s unfairly sarcastic: I have no problems at all with big brewers who respond to the craft micro-brewery challenge by bringing in their own tiny set-up: I had great fun playing with the 10-barrel mini-brewery Brains installed at its site in Cardiff. The Brains plant, like those installed at Shepherd Neame in Kent, Hook Norton in Oxfordshire and Adnams in Suffolk, is designed to brew short-run one-off beers for selling in the company’s pubs. The Caledonian brewery in Edinburgh, however, has gone for something craftily different: an on-site microbrewery that is solely for experimenting with, making brews that, should they prove to be successful, will then be scaled up for commercial production in the main brewery.

The Caledonian brewery, Edinburgh in 1989

I last visited the Caledonian brewery more than a quarter of a century ago, in 1989, which was just two years after it had been the subject of a management buy-out to acquire it from Vaux, the Sunderland brewer, which had bought it in 1919. The brewery was founded by George Lorimer and Robert Clark in 1869, and Vaux took it over to supply the North East of England with Scotch Ale, a style of dark, fruity beer then very popular in the region. Edinburgh was once the third biggest brewing city in Britain, after Burton and London, and even in 1958 it has 18 surviving breweries. One upon one they closed: Vaux announced it wanted to shut the Caledonian in 1985. Fortunately for posterity, its then managing director, Dan Kane, an active Camra member, and his head brewer, Russell Sharp, felt there was enough demand for the traditional beer it made for the business to be viable on its own. In a regular irony, the lack of investment by Vaux over the years meant the Caledonian brewery still retained old-style equipment long replaced elsewhere, most notably open direct-fired coppers, which gave the brewery an excellent marketing story.

Steaming wort runs into an open copper at the Caledonian brewery, Edinburgh, in 1989

Despite a couple of fires at the brewery in the 1990s, those coppers are still there (though one is a replica, replacing a vessel lost in the fire of 1998, and they now appear to have suspended lids I don’t remember from before). Brewery manager Craig Steve says the now unique coppers give all the brewery’s beers a distinctive rotundity he always recognises in blind tastings. In 1991 the brewery launched a golden IPA using the name of another old Edinburgh operation, Deuchar’s, which had closed in 1961. That beer’s popularity was cemented with the award of the Champion Beer of Britain title by Camra in 2002, and it remains one of the UK’s best-selling cask ales. Then in 2004 the Caledonian Brewery lost its independence again, being bought by Scottish & Newcastle after S&N closed the old McEwan’s Fountainbridge brewery in Edinburgh. Just four years later the Dutch giant Heineken swooped on S&N, and Caledonian is now the second-smallest brewery (out of 165-plus) in what is currently the world’s third-largest brewing group.

Marble bust of George Lorimer, founder of the Caledonian brewery

Which is why, presumably, they can afford to fly me up to Edinburgh, stick me in a four-star hotel, take me out for a very fine dinner in one of the Scottish capital’s best eateries, and all so I can see the new “Wee George” microbrewery (named for George Lorimer) and try the first beer to be scaled up and rolled out after trials on Wee George, an American-style IPA called Coast to Coast. There are those beer writers who would turn down being filled full of roast venison at a brewer’s expense in the belief that it would compromise their independence: I like to claim I’m not that cheaply influenced. (That is to say, you CAN influence me, but it will cost you lots …)

Talking of independence, Caledonian’s MD, Andy Maddock, who joined the Scottish brewer in March last year after six years as a senior sales and marketing man at Heineken, says his operation has an “arm’s length” relationship with its Dutch parent, allowing it to be entrepreneurial and to follow its own path as a “modern craft brewer”. There seems to be considerable fondness for the Caledonian brewery at the top in Heineken: they like its hands-on old fashionedness, and Michel de Carvalho, husband of Charlene Heineken, who inherited the business from her father Freddie in 2002, has apparently said Deuchars is his favourite beer.

The advantages Caledonian has over most of its rivals, of course, are that as part of a huge conglomerate its financing is cheaper to arrange than a totally independent operator could manage, though it still has to have “all the rigour” in its budgets that any commercial operation has to have; and it can use its Heineken connections to get into other markets. Currently 95 per cent of sales are “domestic”, but in the next four to five years, Maddock says, he wants to see exports increasing, with Deuchars in particular and also Coast to Coast and the brewery’s new “craft lager”, Three Hop, being aimed at Western Europe. He also wants to see Caledonian’s beers making a bigger impact in the off-trade (“We haven’t punched our weight there yet,” Maddock says), and a greater awareness among drinkers that Deuchers is a Caledonian beer: it appears many Deuchars drinkers don’t actually know who makes it.

An original Deuchar’s brewery mirror, now in the tasting bar at the Caledonian brewery, rescued from a pub in Bath

On the other hand, they know why they drink it, or at least Caledonian does: “drinkability”, that mysterious characteristic no brewer knows for certain how to achieve, but which is vital for a beer to win a substantial slice of the market. Strangely, Caledonian is one of the few breweries I’ve visited where “drinkability” has been emphatically placed in the heart of the business strategy. Maddock says that the future of Caledonian will be based on a “modern” range, with beers such as Coast to Coast, that emphasises “distinctiveness and accessibility”, and a “traditional” range, led by Deuchars, where “drinkability is really important”. The idea, clearly, is that if you fancy trying one of those new craft beers, you can be reassured by the Caledonian name that it won’t be a frightening experience you’ll never want to repeat; and if you’re looking for something comfortable and more familiar, Caledonian has that for you as well. “Comfortable and familiar” are, frankly, far too under-rated among beer raters: most people most of the time don’t want to be challenged by their beer. Indeed, probably, most people don’t want to be challenged by their beer any of the time. “Predictable but not boring” is a great position for your brand to take, if you can capture it. “Predictable” also has to mean “predictably good”, of course, and part of that means making sure your raw materials are top quality: Caledonian has insisted for a long time on using what it says is the best malting barley in the world, from the east coast of Britain, both Southern Scotland and East Anglia, it also only uses whole-leaf hops, and it has now altered the way it buys hops, eschewing the traditional hessian hopsack for vacuum-packing in foil, believing this to keep the hops fresh for longer.

The ‘Wee George’ microbrewery set-up at the Caley: note mini-hopback above the drain

So to Wee George: Caledonian’s answer to the fact that there are now 100 breweries in Scotland, very few of which can match it with the popularity of its “traditional” line-up, but at least some of which offer are going to have widespread appeal – “widespread appeal” being the market sector Andy Maddock and his crew would like to own most of, thank you. It’s a £100,000 collection of hand-assembled stainless-steel kit capable of producing just 400 litres at a time, around a thirtieth of the main brewery’s capacity, but it has its own filler that can be used to put the beer into bottle, cask or keg, and it even has a hopback, just like the “big” brewery. Hopbacks are an old-fashioned item of kit today, replaced almost everywhere by whirlpools, but brewers who have kept them have realised that a hopback can be a terrific tool for adding all sorts of flavour to your hot wort. The new kit went in on June 1, and since then it has been producing one beer a week – the first being a version of Deuchar’s IPA, presumably to see how different the recipe would turn out on the Wee George kit compared to the Big George kit. Scaleablity was a problem at first, but the Caley brewers are getting better, they told me, at working out what tweaks were likely to be needed to translate a brew from Wee George to the main brewery.

The first Wee George beer to make it from experiment to scaled-up bar-top brand, Coast to Coast, was pushed through in eight weeks, which shows that for a 146-year-old, the Caley can be nimble enough when it wants to be: most big breweries barely have a meetings cycle that short, never mind the NPD pipeline. The name comes from the combination of West Coast of American hops – Simcoe, apparently – with East Coast of Britain barley. It’s a perfectly fine craft-beer-with-training-wheels, I suspect there’s an as yet untapped market for such brews among people looking for a beer to have when you’re only popping in for one and you want something with more flavour that usual but not TOO much, and I’d give it a fair chance of doing very well. Though if I were any good at predictions, I’d be much richer than I am.

Many thanks to the Caley crew for taking me north to meet Wee George, and I look forward to tasting future roll-outs.

Mash run with Steele’s masher, Caledonian brewery

Inside the drained mash tun, with the grains still waiting to be removed

Filling a copper at the Caledonian brewery, 2015

One of the three copper coppers at the Caledonian brewery

A lovely rocky head in a fermenting square at the Caledonian brewery

A steaming louvre over the copper room at the Caledonian brewery

Caledonian brewery, Edinburgh, 2015

Nick Sharpe of the St John's Tavern, pub enthusiast

It’s an ill wind that doesn’t have a silver lining – or something like that. Anyway, I’m delighted to be able to give you a chance to see and hear Nick Sharpe of the St John’s Tavern, Archway, North London, give one of the most passionate expositions on the British pub, its present and its future, that I’ve heard. What I particularly enjoy about Nick’s views on pubs is that they are clearly rooted in a love of pubs’ past, without being fetishistic about it: he’s running a 21st century business at the St John’s Tavern, he delights in being able, thanks to help from English Heritage and his local council, to reflect some of the pub’s 19th century origins in the renovations that have been carried out, but he’s not about to turn it back into the multi-bar warren it would have been when it opened, because we no longer live in a society where Public Bar Man never mixes with Saloon Bar Man.

Click on the video you’ll find here, ignore (sorry) the first two minutes 45 second of the video – Jack Adams is a nice guy, but he’s a better interviewer and video maker than presenter, go and make a cup of tea, take the top off a bottle of beer or something until he’s finished – and then come back and listen to Nick talk with feeling and depth about pubs, about why he did what he did with the St John’s Tavern, and what he would like to do with it if his pubco would just let him.

If you want to see what the pub looked like at its Edwardian peak, go here and click on “Renovation”: you’ll see the magnificent lamps Nick talks about. From a beer historian’s viewpoint, the boards on the outside of the pub advertising “Bass & Co’s Pale & Burton Ales” (regular readers of this blog will know that pale ale and Burton Ale are two very different beers), and Watney’s Imperial Stout and “Pimlico Ales” (those would be mild ales, almost certainly, brewed at the former Watney’s brewery, which was halfway between Buckingham Palace and Victoria Station) suggest what was popular in North London at the time: I remember my grandfather Alf Donno, who was born in 1890 and grew up in Crouch End, about a mile and a half from the St John’s Tavern, telling me that he and his pals would search out pubs selling Bass, in the (probably correct) belief that it was of much higher quality than the local brews.

The video of Nick is available because the Pub History Society had to cancel its conference, for which it was made, when several speakers dropped out: their ill wind is our silver lining. There’s another important conference on next month for those interested in Britain’s beery past, called “The Last Drop: England’s Surviving Brewery Heritage”. It’s been organised by the Brewery History Society, which is promoting the report on preserving England’s brewing heritage put together by Dr Lynn Pearson (author of the excellent British Breweries: An Architectural History) and the Brewery History Society as part of English Heritage’s Strategy for the Historic Industrial Environment. It will be discussing what can be done to save and enhance what’s left of the evidence of our brewing past,and attempt to identify priorities for future action, it’s at the National Brewery Centre (the Bass Museum/Coors Visitor Centre as was), Horninglow Street, Burton-upon-Trent on Saturday 12 March, it starts at 10.30am, it costs £24, and you can download a programme and booking form here. For anybody reading this with roots in the Newark area (hello, Ron), among the talks is one titled “Two Newark Breweries: Applying Conservation Philosophies to Adaptive Re-use”, by Rebecca Lamb.

Excellent news, I think, that Wells & Young’s has acquired the Scottish brands McEwan’s and Younger’s from their current owner, Heineken.

The announcement last week that W&Y was bringing back Courage Imperial Russian Stout genuinely excited me, and not just because it’s a fantastic beer. It showed that the Bedford company has a shrewd understanding of the sort of niche a medium-sized brewer can exploit with the right brands, and it has cottoned on to the growing desire of drinkers in the UK, the US and elsewhere to drink authentic, heritage beers again. McEwan’s and Younger’s have plenty of heritage – Younger’s No 3, for example.

But I’d like to make it clear, now, that if I notice ANY references by the brand’s new owners to Younger’s being “established in 1749”, I shall be driving up to Bedford and administering a few slaps. Because it wasn’t. This claim of a 1749 foundation date has been around since at least 1861, making it 150 years old, or more, and it still regularly pops up. Only yesterday the Scotsman newspaper printed this rubbish

“William Younger founded Edinburgh’s historic brewing industry when he set up his firm in Leith in 1749.”

There are two big errors in that one sentence: Edinburgh’s brewing industry is, of course, far older than 1749: the city was stuffed with breweries long before, so much that its nickname, “Auld Reekie” (“Old Smoky”), is sometimes said to have come from all the smoke that came out of the brewery chimneys. In addition, William Younger never started a brewery in Leith, in 1749 or any other year. In fact he was almost certainly never a brewer at all.

William Younger was only 16 in 1749, which was actually the year he moved to Leith from the family home in West Linton, Peeblesshire. It has been claimed that his first job was working for a brewery in Leith, sometimes said to be the one run by Robert Anderson, one of the town’s bigger brewers, with an output of 1,500 barrels a year. Unfortunately, there is no known documentary evidence to back this up: if there had been, the book printed to celebrate Younger’s “double centenary” in 1949 would have trumpeted it. Instead the author quietly danced around the issue of whether William had been a brewer or not.

By 1753, aged 20, William was working as an excise officer, and married to a young woman from his home village, Grizel Sim. Their eldest son, Archibald Campbell Younger, was born in 1757, to be followed by at least two more boys, Robert, and William Younger II, born 1767. Less than three years after William II was born, however, his father died aged only 37. Two years later Grizel Younger married Alexander Anderson, who had been brewing in Leith since at least 1758. When Anderson died in 1781, Grizel ran Anderson’s brewery herself before retiring in 1794, aged 65. It was Grizel, therefore, who was the first of the brewing Youngers.

Archibald Campbell Younger had been apprenticed to his stepfather’s brewery when he was 15. When he reached 21, in 1778, Archibald left Leith to start his own brewery in the precincts of the Abbey of Holyrood House in Edinburgh. If any date can be given for the start of the Younger’s brewing concern, therefore, 1778 is the year. The site Archibald chose had excellent well-water, and, because it was within the abbey precincts, it was outside the jurisdiction of Edinburgh Town Council: thus Archibald and the three other brewers in the abbey precincts did not have to pay the council’s 2d-a-pint beer tax.

The Abbey brewery, Edinburgh in 1861

After eight years, in 1786, Archibald was able to buy a larger brewery nearby in Croft-an-Righ (“Farm of the King” in Gaelic), a lane behind Holyrood palace. He had become famous for brewing Younger’s Edinburgh Ale, according to the writer Robert Chambers in 1869, “a potent fluid which almost glued the lips of the drinker together, and of which few, therefore, could dispatch more than a bottle.” It sold in the bothies of Edinburgh for three pennies a bottle, 20 per cent more expensive than ordinary ale. Five years later, in 1791, Archibald moved again, to a new brewery in North Back Canongate with a capacity of some 15,000 barrels a year, where he was in business with his brother-in-law, John Sommervail.

Archibald’s brother Richard was running a brewery just off Canongate in Edinburgh from at least 1788, though by 1796 he had moved to London. That was the same year that William Younger II opened his own brewhouse within the Holyrood Abbey precincts. By 1802 Mr William Younger’s “much admired” ale was being advertised for sale at the Edinburgh Ale Vaults in London, in cask and bottle. The following year he acquired James Blair’s Abbey Brewhouse, Horsewynd, Holyrood. William and Archibald were briefly partners in a venture to brew porter, from 1806 to 1808, but this seems not to have been successful, and William acquired new partners, while in 1809 Archibald retired from brewing.

William Younger, ‘Established 1749’ – not

In 1818 the Abbey concern became William Younger & Co, with William II in partnership with Alexander Smith, the brewer and superintendent of the Abbey brewery. In 1836, when William II was 69, he made his son William Younger III, aged 35, a partner in the business, along with Andrew Smith, son of Alexander Smith. William Younger III had no particular desire to be involved in the business, but Andrew Smith had worked there since he was 16, and it was under his command that the company began bottling for sale overseas in 1846, and exports started to grow. The reputation of Younger’s India Pale Ale and Edinburgh ale helped it rise to be easily the biggest brewer in Edinburgh by 1850, mashing 10,292 quarters of malt. This was nearly a third as much again as its nearest rival, Alexander Berwick, who had bought Richard Younger’s old premises off South Back Canongate (now Holyrood Road), 300 yards away.

Eight years later Younger’s bought Berwick’s premises from his nephews for £1,600. Eventually production of India Pale Ale (brewed, like the Burton article, in unions) was concentrated at the Holyrood brewery, while the Abbey brewery made the Edinburgh ale. By the early 1860s the the firm was exporting its ales as far as Honolulu and New Zealand, using a red “triple pyramid” trademark, greatly annoying Bass, which felt it resembled its own red triangle trademark too much.

A description of the Abbey brewery in the Official Illustrated Guide to the Great Northern Railway in 1861 included mention of two 50-quarter “mash tubs” equipped with Steele’s mashers; two wort coppers, one holding 116 barrels; and the tun and fermenting rooms, “each having 30 fermenting tuns, and beneath them 12 settling synores [sic].” It’s clear from the context what a “synore” is, but I have never seen the word before, and it appears to exist nowhere else in Googledom but here. If anyone has any more information I’d be delighted to hear it. “Synore” there is evidently a typo for “square”.

The GNR guide is also the first reference I have found to the “established in 1749” canard, though I am sure there are earlier ones out there. By now William McEwan had started his own brewing operation at Fountainbridge in Edinburgh, but although he would become a ferocious rival, Younger’s continued to thrive: it was the first brewer in Scotland to register as a limited company, in 1887, and by 1905 it was reckoned that Younger’s produced a quarter of all Scotland’s beer.

In 1930 it was announced that Younger’s and McEwan were linking up as Scottish Brewers, though their three breweries continued until 1955, when the Abbey brewery was shut and converted into offices. (In 1999 it became part of the site for the new Scottish parliament building.) The consolidation of the brewing industry in the UK saw Scottish Brewers join up with Newcastle Breweries in 1960 to form Scottish & Newcastle, which would eventually, by the start of the 1970s, be the smallest of the “Big Six” UK brewing conglomerates. That was how it stayed, until the 1990s, when another storm hit the UK brewing industry, and by 1995 S&N had acquired what had once been the Courage and Watney brewing empires to become the biggest brewing concern in Britain. It was clear, however, that consolidation was not just a regional, UK, phenomenon, but global. S&N tried to expand enough to compete on the world stage, buying the French brewer Kronenbourg to become the second biggest brewing concern in Europe.

It also started a joint venture with Carlsberg, Baltic Beverage Holdings, to run the Baltika brewing operation in Russia. Carlsberg, however, seems to have eventually decided it wanted all of Baltika’s profits for itself: knowing it would never be allowed to take over S&N on its own (too many markets where it would own too great a share), in 2007 the Danish firm invited Heineken to join it in carving up S&N, with Heineken getting the UK brewing operations.

Slowly Heineken appears to be realising that comparatively “niche” products are best run by a specialist, hence the sale of McEwan’s and Younger’s to Wells & Young’s, which at a bound becomes the third largest premium ale producer in the UK, after Marston’s and Greene King. I wish them well: just don’t mention 1749 in the promotion literature.

The London Brewers Alliance beer festival at Vinopolis, by Borough Market, a couple of Saturdays ago was a terrific event, thoroughly enjoyable. In one room were gathered a dozen or more (I forgot to count) stalls representing breweries from in and around London, with the brewers themselves serving their beers and happy to talk to the punters about them.

It was the kind of “meet the brewer” show common in the US but almost unheard of in the UK that we really should be seeing repeated across this country. And it’s good to see London’s brewers working together in the 21st century to support each other in exactly the same way their ancestors did almost eight centuries ago, when the Brewers’ Guild was founded at All Hallows’ Church, London Wall.

It was also good, for me, to see that the Brewery History Society had a stall there: the LBA clearly has an interest in London’s history as a world-class brewing city, and everybody needs to be reminded of this almost forgotten heritage. I’d argue that, historically, London has an excellent claim to be regarded as the greatest brewing city in the world. Yes, I AM a Londoner, so of course I’m biased, but I dare you to deny that over the centuries London has given the world more new beer styles than any other brewing centre on the planet:

Porter
Developed around 1718 by London’s brown beer brewers and taking its name from London’s street and river porters, the strong, hoppy, aged porter eventually became the world’s first widely drunk beer style, and was imitated by brewers from America to Russia.

Stout
The stronger forms of porter were known as brown stout, eventually shortened to just “stout”. London remained a centre of stout brewing until after the Second World War.

Russian Imperial Stout
Several London brewers developed particularly strong versions of stout for export to Russia in the late 18th and 19th centuries, in a style that eventually became known as Russian Imperial Stout.

India Pale Ale
The Bow brewer George Hodgson was the first brewer to make a name for exporting well-hopped pale ale to India, from at least the 1790s, and Hodgson’s was the first beer to be called an India Pale Ale.

Brown Ale
In 1902 Thomas Wells Thorpe, the newly appointed managing director of Mann, Crossman and Paulin in Whitechapel, introduced the first modern bottled brown ale, Mann’s Brown. After the First World War brown ale became an increasingly popular style, with almost every brewer in the country eventually producing one.

London was also home to the UK’s first lager-only brewery, in 1882 and, until the 1870s, home to a succession of the biggest breweries in the world, including Barclay Perkins, Whitbread and Truman.

The crowd at the London Brewers Alliance beer festival 2011. There are at least two well-known beer writers half-hidden: can you spot them?

The first London Brewers Alliance festival, last year, featured a “co-operative” porter brewed using the combined resources of alliance members, and this one included a “joint effort” production of London’s other great innovation, IPA. Now, here’s where I DO have some criticism: the IPA was served on a stall by itself with, effectively no publicity, nothing to explain what this beer was, nothing to explain the significance of the links between IPA and London, and nothing about this particular brew, the hops, the grain bill, the fact that it was being served (IIRC from my chat with Kieran, a nice young man from the Windsor and Eton Brewery) at least eight weeks old, nicely matured. That was all a bit of a fail. My impression is that there’s a growing appreciation of heritage, of authenticity, of local roots among beer drinkers under 35 (indeed, among young consumers of anything at all), and they love learning that sort of stuff.

I’d also suggest that the “half pint minimum” serve is an improvable idea as well: third-of-a-pint glasses would enable drinkers to have 50 per cent more samples in their four-pint “free” (for the £20 admission) allowance. (And to be honest, half a pint was much more of a couple of the beers available than I wanted to drink. The standard of beers was generally very high, but there was at least one that really shouldn’t have been on sale: an English bitter should NOT taste like someone dropped a shot of Scotch into it.)

That apart, it was a great evening, and my egotistical little heart overflowed when I spotted that the Tottenham-based Redemption Brewery, one of 2010’s start-ups, had on its stall a beer called Fellowship Porter. “You know your brewing history,” I said to the guy on the stall, who was evidently Andy Moffat, the Redemption head brewer. “Yes,” he said, “I got the name from a book by Martyn Cornell.”

Considering that only five years ago, London was down to just 10 breweries, the smallest number since the all-time low of nine in 1976-1978, and a long way from either the post-Second World War peak of 34 in 1998 and the 25 that existed 60 years ago, there has been a tremendous resurgence in brewery numbers in the past couple of years. Currently more than 20 breweries are actually running, or will be running shortly, within the Greater London area. What is a tad depressing is that only two of those breweries date from before 2000. But hey – even Fuller’s was a start-up once.

The BHS guys asked me to produce a couple of London-specific items, so I put together a rough map showing the major London breweries of 1850 – actually a low point in the 19th century for brewery numbers, but interesting because it was still a time where you could differentiate between the big porter brewers, such as Barclay Perkins, Reid, Meux, Whitbread and Truman, and the by-now fast-growing ale brewers, such as Mann, Goding, Charrington and Courage. Here’s that map – double-click on it to see it full-size. Anyone who wants to, please feel free to reproduce it. Below the map is the London brewing time line, I did for the event: again, London brewers, feel free to use this yourselves. And finally, here’s a little verse:

London’s brewing, London’s brewing
Rise up early! Grind the malt!
Pour on water, good hot water
Stir the mash tun, stir the mash

London’s brewing, London’s brewing
Sparge the mash tun! Drain the grains!
Fill the copper, tip the hops in,
Boil the wort and cool it off.

London’s brewing, London’s brewing
Fill the vat high, pitch the yeast!
Watch the foam rise, see it settle
Rack in hogsheads, drink it up!

London brewing: a brief timeline

1118 Thomas Becket, patron saint of the Brewers’ Company, born in London around this year.
1286 The brewery at St Paul’s Cathedral made 67,814 gallons of ale in a year.
1342 The Brewers’ Guild founded by John Enfield at All Hallows’ Church, London Wall.
1372 Henry Vandale bought four barrels of “beere” in London, the first known mention of the hopped drink in the city’s history (it was probably made in the Low Countries).
1419 Richard “Dick” Whittington, Lord Mayor of London, angry that the brewers ate “fat swans” at their St Martin’s Day feast, ordered them to sell their ale for a penny a gallon the next day. Around this time London had around 290 commercial brewers.
1424/5 London’s ale brewers complained about “aliens” (from Continental Europe) “nigh to the city dwelling” (probably in Southwark) brewing beer.
1483 London’s ale brewers, trying to maintain the difference between (unhopped) ale and (hopped) beer, persuaded the city authorities to rule that ale must be made only from “licour, malt and yeste”.
1542 Henry VIII’s royal brewers – he had at least two, one for ale, one for beer – were supplying more than 13,000 pints a day to Hampton Court palace.
1574 There were 58 ale breweries in London and 32 beer breweries. The biggest Elizabethan London beer brewer consumed 90 quarters of malt a week, enough to make around 14,000 barrels of beer a year, very roughly.
1578 The Brewers’ Company wrote to Queen Elizabeth apologising for the annoyance caused by the smoke from the seacoal used in their breweries, and offered to burn only wood, rather than coal, in the brewhouses closest to the Queen’s home, the Palace of Westminster.
1580 The Hour Glass Brewery in Thames Street looks to have begun some time before this year: later, as Calvert’s and then the City of London Brewery Company it ran through until brewing stopped on the site in 1922.
1616 The Anchor Brewery, Southwark, later Barclay Perkins, founded around this year.
1635 Thomas Cole began brewing in or before this year in Twickenham: the Coles only stopped brewing in 1892.
1666 Brewers’ Hall, the home of the Brewers’ Company, was destroyed in the Great Fire of London, along with 16 brewhouses, all in and around Thames Street, close to the fire’s heart. The same year, or thereabouts, the brewery that became Truman Hanbury and Buxton opened in Brick Lane.
1700 London had 190 breweries, producing a total of 1.7 million barrels of ale and beer.
1718 Around this year London’s brown beer brewers started to hop their beer more, and store it longer, eventually developing a drink that took the name of its keenest customers, the city’s many street and river porters.
1748 The biggest London brewers were now the specialist porter manufacturers, with the largest making more than 50,000 barrels a year. Their profits enabled them to buy themselves country estates.
1780 Around this time Southwark replaced Stourbridge fair, just south of Cambridge, as the biggest hop market in England.
1784 Henry Goodwyn of the Red Lion porter brewhouse at St Katharine’s, Wapping (later Hoare’s) installed the first steam engine in London.
1786 The top 12 London porter brewers made up half the capital’s beer production, leaving another 150 brewers to supply the rest.
1793 The first record of George Hodgson of the Bow brewery exporting pale ale to India. This would eventually develop into the beer that became known as India Pale Ale.
1814 The Great London Beer Flood: on October 17 a 22-feet-high vat at Meux’s porter brewery off Tottenham Court Road burst, releasing 3,550 barrels of beer, weighing 570 tons, into the slums behind the brewery. Amazingly, only eight people were killed, all women and children.
1815 The 12 “principle” porter brewers now made 75 per cent or more of the city’s beer. The combined output of all the seven biggest ale brewers in London totalled just 85,000 barrels, the same as one porter brewer, Barclay Perkins, could produce on its own in just four months.
1823 Porter output in London hit 1.8 million barrels, the highest it would ever be.
1832 The London excise district contained 115 brewers, though most of the beer was produced by the 20 or so largest.
1833 Increased sales of mild ale started to force the London porter brewers to brew ale as well, while London’s ale brewers, such as Mann, Charrington and Courage, began to grow in size.
1835 First known use of the expression India Pale Ale, in an advertisement by Hodgson’s of Bow.
1850 More than 40 London breweries had closed in the previous 20 years.
1872 Meux & Co, of the Horseshoe brewery, off Tottenham Court Road, long one of the biggest brewers of porter, started brewing ales as well.
1877 Reid & Co of the Griffin brewery, Clerkenwell, the last porter-only London brewery, began production of pale and bitter ales alongside the black beer.

Derek Prentice of Fullers studies a page from a 1930s brewing book at the BHS stall

1880 New openings had pushed the number of London breweries up to the levels of 1830 again.
1882 Britain’s first lager-only brewery , the Austro-Bavarian Lager Beer and Crystal Ice Company, began brewing in Tottenham High Road.
1887 Porter now made up only a third of the London trade.
1893 London’s brewers owned an estimated 3,000 horses.
1898 Three of the former big 12 London porter brewers, Watney, Combe and Reid, merged to form one firm, with breweries in Pimlico and Mortlake.
1902 Thomas Wells Thorpe, the long-serving head brewer at Mann, Crossman and Paulin in Whitechapel, introduced the first of a new kind of beer, Mann’s Brown Ale.
1904 London still had 90 breweries, out of a total of 1,503 in England and Wales. It also had just one pub still brewing its own beer, although in the rest of the country there were another 3,108 home-brew pubs.
1921 Meux’s brewery in Tottenham Court Road closed, with production moving to Thorne Brothers’ brewery, Vauxhall.
1922 The last brewery in the City, the former Calvert’s brewery in Upper Thames Street, known since 1860 as the City of London Brewery Co Ltd, closed and transferred production to Stansfeld & Co’s Swan brewery in Fulham.
1933 Hoare & Co, the Red Lion brewery, by St Katharine’s Docks, another former porter giant, was taken over by Charrington’s and closed the following year.
1936 Guinness opened a brewery in Park Royal to supply much of England with its stout.
1940 Brewers’ Hall was destroyed for a second time, in a German air raid.
1941 Whitbread brewed porter for the last time at its brewery in Chiswell Street.
1952 London still had 25 operating breweries, run by some 19 or so companies, out of around 560 breweries in the whole of the UK.
1955 Barclay Perkins merged with Courage.
1958 Watney merged with Mann Crossman and Paulin and closed the Pimlico brewery the following year.
1959 Ind Coope of Romford acquired Taylor Walker in Limehouse, closing it early in 1960.
1967 Charrington of Mile End merged with Bass to form the biggest brewing concern in the country.
1974 Watney Mann merged with Truman Hanbury & Buxton.
1975 Brewing stopped at Charrington’s.
1976 Brewing stopped at Whitbread’s brewery in Chiswell Street. London hit an all-time low of just nine breweries.
1977 Godson’s brewery, the first of London’s new generation micro-breweries, opened, originally in Clapton, before moving to Bow in 1979. The venture ultimately closed in 1987.
1979 Brewing stopped at Mann’s in Whitechapel. The same year David Bruce opened the Goose & Firkin in Southwark, London’s first home-brew pub for many decades.
1981 A flurry of pub-brewery openings saw the number of London breweries rise from 11 to 20.
1982 The Courage brewery by Tower Bridge closed.
1989 Truman’s brewery in Brick Lane closed.
1992 Ind Coope in Romford closesd.
1998 The growth of the Firkin chain helped push London’s brewery numbers up to a post-war high of 34.
2000 The closure of the Firkin chain the previous year saw brewery numbers drop back down to just 20. The Meantime brewery opened in Greenwich.
2005 Guinness Park Royal closed.
2006 Young’s brewery moved its operations from Wandsworth to Bedford.
2007 London’s brewery numbers hit their second post-war low, of just 10.
2009 Plan to close the Stag brewery at Mortlake announced (though this has apparently been postponed until 2014).
2010 Brewery numbers starting to climb again, up to 14, with new brewers such as Kernel.
2011 A surge in new openings pushes brewery numbers in London back up to 21, the highest this millennium: of those 21 breweries, all but three have opened since 2000.

If there is one blessing the Oxford Companion to Beer has brought us, it’s the beginnings of a much better, and myth-free understanding of the origins of the world’s most popular beer style, pale pils lager, and the brewery that first made it, Pilsner Urquell, which is in what is now the Czech Republic. We didn’t get this new understanding from the OCB itself, obviously, but from Evan Rail, who lives in Prague, who writes with insight and erudition about Czech beer, Czech beerstyles and Czech brewing history, and who knows the number one rule about writing history: go back to the original sources – an apt commandment here, since “Urquell” – “Prazdroj” in Czech – means “original source”.

If you haven’t already, I urge you to read his latest blog post adding, clarifying and correcting the OCB’s Czech-related entries.

Evan has done something few, if any, writers in English about the origins of Pilsner Urquell, the “world’s first pale lager”, have bothered doing. He has uncovered, and read, the document in 1839 which effectively founded the brewery in Pilsen, the “Request of the Burghers with Brewing Rights for the Construction of Their Own Malt- and Brewhouse”, made by 12 prominent Pilsen burghers. He has also read the brewery’s own history, written for its 50th anniversary, Měšťanský pivovar v Plzni 1842-1892.

Among the fascinating facts that Evan has revealed so far, the following seem particularly worthy of note:

• The town of Pilsen was already being “flooded” by bottom-fermented “Bavarian-style” beer in 1839, the 12 would-be founders of the new brewery declared, and it seems one big reason why they wanted to build their own new brewery was to fight back against imports of lager beers from elsewhere, by making their own bottom-fermented brews in Pilsen.
• The builder of the new brewery, František Filaus “made a trip around the biggest breweries in Bohemia which were then already equipped for brewing bottom-fermented beer,” while in December 1839, the brewery’s architect, Martin Stelzer, “travelled to Bavaria, so that he could tour bigger breweries in Munich and elsewhere and use the experience thus gained for the construction and furnishing of the Burghers’ Brewery.”
• The yeast for the new brewery was certainly not “smuggled out of Bavaria by a monk”, as far too many sources try to claim (did anybody with their critical faculties engaged ever believe that?), nor even, apparently, brought with him by Josef Groll, the 29-year-old brewer from the town of Vilshofen in Lower Bavaria who was hired to run the new brewery. Instead, “seed yeast for the first batch and fermented wort were purchased from Bavaria,” according to the 1892 book. (The Groll family brewery, incidentally, no longer exists, but another concern in Vilshofen, the Wolferstetter brewery, still produces a Josef Groll Pils in his memory.)
• The maltings at the new brewery were “dle anglického spůsobu zařízený hvozd”, that is, loosely, “equipped with English-style malt kilns”, according to an account from 1883. That meant indirect heat: the same 1883 account says the kilns were “vytápěný odcházejícím teplem z místnosti ku vaření“, which looks to mean “heated by heat from the boiler-room”. Indirect heat makes it easier to control the heating, and easier to produce pale malt, which is just what the Plzeňský Prazdroj brewery did to make its pale lager.

That still leaves THE big mystery: if the burgher brewers of Pilsen wanted to compete against Bavarian-style bottom-fermented lagers, which would still have been quite dark (think “Dunkel”), why did they make a pale beer? Were they attempting to imitate English pale beers? Since pale bitter beers were only just taking off even in Britain in 1842 (although pale mild ales had been around for a couple of centuries), I don’t personally find that particularly likely.

However, Evan has promised “more on the origins of Pilsner Urquell coming up”, and I am hugely looking forward to reading additional revelations. I was delighted to read that Stelzer had toured the big breweries of Munich before the Plzeňský Prazdroj brewery was built, because I suggested in an article for Beer Connoisseur magazine in the US two and a half years ago that he must have done. In Munich he surely met Gabriel Sedlmayr II, of the Spaten brewery, who had been round Britain looking at the latest brewing and malting techniques being practised in places such as London, Burton upon Trent and Edinburgh, and Sedlmayr would have been able to tell him about English malting techniques. Munich, at that time, was becoming a magnet for brewers in Continental Europe because of the advances in brewing methods being made by Sedlmayr, as he perfected the techniques of lager brewing.

Sedlmayr wasn’t, at that time, making pale malts: however, the man who accompanied him to Britain on one of his trips, Anton Dreher of the Klein-Schwechat brewery near Vienna, DID come back and start producing paler English-style malts, allied with Bavarian-style lagering, which resulted in a copper-brown beer, the first “Vienna-style” lager. Vienna was then, of course, the capital of the Austrian empire, of which Bohemia (and Pilsen) were still a part: it would not be surprising if Stelzer, a citizen of the Austrian empire, also visited Vienna and met Dreher (whose name, it always amuses me to note, translates as “Tony Turner”), and talked about malting techniques, but there seems to be no evidence as yet that he did so.

I’d also love to know why Josef Groll was hired (apparently by Stelzer) to run the new brewery: Vilshofen, while nearer Pilsen than Munich is, is a comparative backwater, and if Stelzer had been to Munich, why did he not bring a Munich brewer back with him to Bohemia? This site claims (on what authority I know not) that Groll studied under both Sedlmayr and Dreher, but both allegedly complained about his rudeness, obstinacy, stubbornness and lack of self-control. If that’s true (I have no idea), it doesn’t look as it Stelzer bothered checking up on Groll’s references before he hired the young brewer …