This morning, David Martin asked us if we knew anything about Cave’s Solid Beer. We didn’t, but we do now; here’s what we found out.
CSB, Cave’s Solid Beer Syndicate, was founded by George Gordon Cave in Fenny Stratford, Buckinghamshire – now part of Milton Keynes – in around 1898.
Cave was born in London in 1841. He worked in various parts of the UK including Bristol, where he shows up in the 1871 census as a ‘hotel keeper’, and Merthyr Tydfil where, in 1881, he was working as a brewery engineer. By 1891, he had arrived in Fenny Stratford and was a brewer, full stop.
His own firm, CSB, specialised in producing beer extract for shipping overseas using a patented method of Mr Cave’s own invention.
Amazingly, you can see what is probably some packaged solid beer in a photo from around the turn of the century hosted at the Talk About Bletchley website – wooden crates marked CSB CAPE TOWN.
Here’s a brief description of CSB from the Leighton Buzzard Gazette for 5 May 1903:
During his whole time in Fenny, Mr. Cave had been working at these patents, the object being to produce beer in condensed form to save enormously on the carriage of it to foreign countries and the colonies, where it could be developed under his patent process.
And here’s a note on the company registration from the International Brewers’ Journal for 15 June 1898:
Cave’s Solid Beer Syndicate Company, Ltd.,with a registered capital of £25,000, divided into 25,000 shares of £1 each, to acquire from Mr. George Gordon Cave, of Fenny Stratford, the invention protected by Letters Patent No. 2,889, of 1894, for improvements in the treatment of yeast and any further improvements and additions thereto, and all further patents granted to the said George Gordon Cave in respect of the invention above mentioned, together with the right to apply for letters patent in any foreign country or British colony in respect of the invention of any improvements thereof or addition thereto, and for the manufacture and sale of ale and beer in a solid and compact form for export as at present authorised by the Excise officials.
A few references in later local history publications refer to Solid Beer as being sold ‘in slabs’ for reconstitution with water but this syndicated news article, published in various local papers on or around 8 November 1900, specifies, as we suspected, that it required fermentation before drinking:
The Central News learns that the military authorities in South Africa have reported favourably upon the latest invention in the way of concentrated beverages, known as ‘solid beer’. This is a jelly made from malt and hops, and by its use beer, said to very wholesome and palatable, can be made anywhere and fermented, the process being exceedingly simple. practically indistinguishable from beer brewed in the ordinary manner, and it can made with equal facility and success in hot or cold climates.
That’s backed up by earlier instances of ‘solid beer’ as a synonym for ‘malt extract’, this being one of those products that people kept claiming to have invented every few years.
Will the inhabitants of London ever carry their beer in their pockets? A question, this, not so strange as at first may appear; for a Moravian, M. Rietsch, has invented a mode of making what may be termed solid beer. He brews a malt-extract; he bitters it with hops and sweetens it with sugar; he concentrates it by heat; he pours the thickened mass into wooden boxes lined with tinfoil; and he sells it in this form. The purchaser, when inclined for a draught of beer, takes some of the concentrated extract, dissolves it, ferments it, and — lo! the beer appears. It is obvious that the only question here is — not whether such beer can possibly compete with draught beer where brewers and malt and hops are plentiful — but whether it may not be a valuable addition to the commissariat stores of travellers or sojourners in distant and ill-provided countries; since the concentrated extract is suited for keeping.
The age produces some queer paradoxes, and none more so than in the results of manufacturing science. In former days it was the custom to buy bread and even beef by the yard; but we believe that it is only in the present day that we can get our beer by the pound. By a very simple process, introduced by Mr. Mertens, the wort, after being made in the mash-tub of malt and hops in the usual manner, is sucked up by a pipe into a large vacuum (exhausted by an air-pump), and then persistently worked round and round while the moisture is evaporated. The wort emerges from its tribulations with a pasty consistency, and is allowed to fall from a considerable height into air-tight boxes, in which it reposes, like hard-bake. It soon gets so exceedingly tough that it has to be broken up with a chisel and mallet, and in that condition is easily sent abroad, or to any part of the world, for people to brew their own malt liquor.
A couple of years ago, we wrote about the tendency in journalism to get excited about this kind of beer innovation – instant beer! Beer in pill form! The Keurig of beer! And so on. But none of these Victorian ‘solid beers’ were any such thing – only proto-beers, requiring further work on receipt.
Still, clever stuff for the time, requiring ingenuity in processing and packaging, and we can imagine soldiers thousands of miles from home were glad to have something even vaguely resembling the ale they were used to drinking in Blighty. Our guess, pending further research, is that an army cook could take a block of this stuff, unwrap it, pound it up in warm water, chuck in dried yeast, and a week or two later have drinkable beer to serve up to the troops.
Unfortunately, George Cave died suddenly in 1903 at the age of about 62 and the company was wound up before 1914 when the premises was advertised for sale.
As ever, more information, especially if it’s based on primary sources, would be welcome.
In 1892, Eliza Orme undertook a painstaking investigation into the working lives of barmaids, producing a report which takes us back to the pubs of the past with incredible vividness.
Eliza Orme was an interesting woman. She was the first woman in England to get a degree in law, in 1888, as Dr Leslie Howsam, who has studied Orme’s life, explains here:
[She] was 39 years old and already unofficially ‘practicing’ law out of an office in London’s Chancery Lane where she and a colleague prepared the paperwork for property transactions, patent registrations, wills, settlements, and mortgages. ‘I “devilled” for about a dozen conveyancing counsel who kept me busily employed on drafts they wanted done in a hurry, and for twenty-five years I found it both an interesting and profitable employment’, Orme recalled in a 1901 interview. This support-level work was the only legal employment open to women, who were not permitted either to be called to the bar or join the Law Society. It was only a small part, however, of Eliza Orme’s reputation as a public figure.
An early feminist, Miss Orme was a firm believer in allowing women to work in whichever industries they chose and was a member of the Society for the Promotion of the Employment of Women.
Through this, she ended up as Senior Lady Assistant Commissioner to the Royal Commission on Labour, overseeing a small team of Lady Assistant Commissioners.
Eliza Orme c.1900.
After the Commission decided at a meeting in March 1892 to undertake research into the working lives of women, Orme dispatched her team around the country, from Bristol to the Western Isles, to investigate various industries such as textile mills, chocolate factories and stocking making.
In 1836, somebody calling themselves ‘Observer’ put out a treatise in six parts comparing gin shops, or gin palaces, with pubs.
We’d never come across it until it popped up in a search for something else via the Hathi Trust website. What particularly caught our attention were the illustrations, reproduced below.
The introductory paragraph to the first issue suggests to us that it might have been a propaganda tool of brewers keen to bolster the image of beer as a healthy, moderate alternative to spirits:
A Succinct Historical Narrative of the Gin-shop; its Commencement, rapid Increase, its Collapse and System, with the inherent Evils, special Influences, deceptive Allurements, and demoralizing Nature of its Workings, carefully dissected, analyzed, and Comparisons drawn, proving the System to be worse than an intolerable Nuisance; while the Public-house System is shown to be both highly Useful and Necessary.
In fact, later on, the author grumbles that the Morning Advertiser (which, don’t forget, is an ancient institution) refused to run an advert for his series of pamphlets because it was so strident in defence of publicans and might offend gin-palace operators.
American brewery Goose Island has collaborated with beer historian Ron Pattinson, veteran London brewer Derek Prentice and the Wimbledon Brewery to produce what it reckons is the most accurate recreation of a 19th century London porter yet.
We’ve known this beer was in the pipeline for a while, not least because Goose Island’s Mike Siegel emailed us back in February asking for help finding an illustration of porter vats to be used in the promo video.
As with the stock ale produced by the same team a few years back, we were excited to try it and kept a close eye on the news. When Mike emailed last week to say it was on sale via Beer Hawk, we snapped up three 500ml bottles at £8 each, plus postage.
A quick note: Goose Island is owned by AB-InBev; so is Beer Hawk. That, along with the price, might give some principled beer geeks reason to hold off. And, further disclosure: we’ve corresponded with Mike Siegel on and off for years, we know Ron Pattinson fairly well, and someone from Beer Hawk subscribes to our Patreon.
For our part, we don’t draw a hard line re: AB and would point to this as an example of where the resources big beer is able to bring to the table pays off for curious consumers. That’s a thought echoed by Ron Pattinson in an email responding to a question from us – why work with Goose Island?
A totally honest assessment is: because they pay me cash money and pay for a load of travel. Financially, it’s one of the few collaborations that make any sense for me. It’s also a case of them being able to afford what are very expensive projects with little chance of making much of a profit on the beer. I’m pretty sure they lost money on Brewery Yard. We’ve been collaborating for about five years and have only managed two beers so far. Most small breweries couldn’t justify the effort and time for pretty much no financial return… In many ways it’s a breath of fresh air working with a large brewery. They expect to have to pay for my services. Something smaller brewers often neglect… Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had very good experiences with some very small breweries. Pretty Things and Zebulon, for example. Others really take the piss.
In this case, those resources paid for authentic brown malt kilned over hornbeam wood by Valley Malt of Massachusetts, and the wherewithal to age for a year one of the two beers blended to create the final product.
After all that effort, it only seemed fair to drink it from the oldest beer glass in the cupboard, c.1930s, and to give it our full attention.
It had fairly high carbonation but certainly not any ‘fizz’ and gave off a musty, leathery stink immediately on opening. It was deep red rather than black.
First gulps, dominated by the funky aroma of Brettanomyces, revealed a lighter body than many modern porters, despite the 6.3% alcohol by volume, and a distinct dryness.
First reactions: Ray liked it, Jess didn’t.
“Tastes like Bretted water,” was her gut response.
Ray found more to enjoy, picking up on a sort of nutmeg spiciness and more tobacco and leather.
The key takeaway, if we accept the authenticity of this recreation, is that 19th century porter wasn’t as madly challenging as we might sometimes imagine. It was an everyday drink, not an ‘extreme beer’.
As long as you’re somewhat used to Brettanomyces, it’s a refreshing, lively, fairly easy-drinking beer – not sour, heavy or sickly.
If you’re interested in historic beer, you will want to try it if you can. Having said that, we reckon you could get about 90% of the way there by blending your favourite strong porter with Orval.
What we’d really like is for other brewers to taste this and think, oh, easy – I can do that. We’d be delighted to come across more dark beers with Brettanomyces, historically accurate or not, especially if they were presented without hoo-ha, by the pint, in normal pubs.
The Fellowship Inn at Bellingham, south east London, was the first pub to be built on a council estate and as such was a focal point of our research for 20th Century Pub, not least because it was a rare example of a pub of this vintage still trading – just barely hanging on – when we were writing the book.
To briefly summarise the story, which is told in more detail in the book, prior to and immediately after World War I, pubs were still seen as part of a disreputable legacy of the slums that new home-builders were keen to leave behind.
When traditional neighbourhoods were cleared and populations rehoused, they were dispatched to estates that were free of licensed premises.
Unsurprisingly, the more enterprising breweries started to think about how they could clean up their offer to make it acceptable to local councils with a barely-contained prohibitionist streak.
London brewers Barclay Perkins were pioneers in this regard, having been working with the Trust Houses since 1916 and with Alexander Part, legendary licensee and sometime spy, in particular. This meant that it was easier for them to demonstrate that they had been operating on ‘improved’ public house principles for some time and so get a foot in the door at Bellingham.
The London County Council minutes record the plan as follows:
“The building is designed to contain a large refreshment room, smoke room and lounge with ample seating accommodation as well as a spacious dining hall which could also be used as a recreation room and for social events and other meetings. There would also be a roof garden. No drinking bars would be provided…”
It was designed in glorious mock-Tudor style by Barclay Perkins’ in-house architect F.G.Newnham. On the opening day in 1924, Barclay Perkins reported that over a thousand meals were served. Again, check 20th Century Pub for more contemporary accounts of the life and colour of this and other big interwar estate pubs.
When we visited in 2016, a small part of the pub was still trading, though most of it was empty and and terrible disrepair. We were shown round by a representative of Phoenix Housing who led us through the abandoned ballroom and derelict upper floor workers’ quarters while she explained their plans for the future.
The public bar at The Fellowship in 2016.
Its decline had in some ways been its saviour – much like the Ivy House in Nunhead, lots of original features remained because entire rooms had simply been closed off and ignored during the worst of the refurbishment era. In 20th Century Pub, we wrote:
“It is hard to say whether Bellingham’s locals will take to a cinema-cafe-microbrewery-pub but it can scarcely be any less popular than the current offer – a dingy bar used regularly by only a handful of residents. It certainly seems likely that it will draw in the ever-increasing middle-class population of south London’s suburbs with baby strollers and a taste for craft beer with their Sunday roast. Either way, the building, and its remarkable architecture and history, will be preserved.”
It actually reopened three years on from our visit, in June 2019, operated by the Electric Star Group, and thus renamed The Fellowship & Star. The planned microbrewery, a relic of when Laine’s were slated to take it on, didn’t make the cut, but the cinema and everything else did.
We visited shortly after opening on a Sunday when it was fairly quiet but with a good number of reservations for lunch later in the afternoon. They had had a busy night before, too, as suggested by the dry pumps and confirmed by the staff behind the bar: “Well, we did have Don Letts here last night.”
We were really impressed with the transformation, or rather the comparative lack of it. While it definitely clean and contemporary the original wooden panelling was visible throughout, barely even retouched or varnished in some places.
Seats salvaged from the original cinema-theatre at The Fellowship.The new cinema makes use of the vast space available beyond the main pub.
What was formerly the central office, a fascinating feature of these sort of pubs where the manager could hide behind the counter, had been partly absorbed into the bar, but was still distinctly visible.
There was still a clear sense of different rooms – partitions and visual obstacles which give a sense that there’s always something else going on round the corner – a characteristic which can make an even fairly sparsely populated pub feel buzzy.
There was a great balance of illumination and shadow, too, thanks mostly to the natural light fighting its way through tall, thin original windows.
The refurbished public bar in 2019.
We had a bit of a nose around the other parts of the building that were accessible and noted that other original features were still in place there, too.
Is it gentrified? Five Points Pale Ale was £4.20 a pint, which is at the lower end of prices in London, these days but rather underlines the point that almost any pub trading in London these days is by definition something of a luxury venue.
The staff were professional and down to earth rather than aloof or cool, though, and it looked like Guinness got as much action as the craft taps.
Children are welcome, as long as carefully written ground rules are followed, and football was being shown in a couple of parts of the pub – surely a signal of sorts.
In some ways, it’s sad to see the old pub, and the culture it represented, disappear. On the other hand, the pub was originally designed to serve people of different classes, drinkers and non-drinkers, eaters and boozers, children and families… So it’s really just returned to its true purpose.
We wrote this post because we wanted to know when brewers started declaring ABV for something else we were working on and assumed a quick Google search would turn up the answer. It didn’t.
Even searching through the excellent British Newspaper Archive, the Guardian, The Times and the Economist didn’t unearth much at first.
We knew that the practice of declaring alcoholic strength on pumpclips and packaging began at some point in the 1980s but we couldn’t work out exactly when.
And the harder it was to find out, the more we became interested in why we couldn’t find it out. Was it just not considered important at the time? How can such a seismic change for consumers have happened under the radar?
Part of the problem, we realised, was that ‘ABV’ didn’t mean much to anyone at the time so changing our search criterion to the full ‘alcohol by volume’ helped a little bit.
From this, we are able to establish that a change in the law was proposed in 1987 by the Ministry for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) in response to an EEC (European Economic Community) directive.
And that was our first surprise – we had assumed it happened as a result of either consumer or CAMRA pressure, or as a result of one of the many government enquiries going on at the time. But it looks like it was actually just an all-but automatic implementation in the UK of European wide legislation.
Here’s the statutory instrument from 1989 in full which specifies that the new requirement to display ABV would become effective from 17 July 1989.
This instrument also specifies that the ABV should be shown to the nearest one decimal place and gives tolerances for acceptable differences between the figure displayed and the actual strength.
So that’s the when – pubs had to start communicating alcoholic strength to customers from July 1989.
We’re still none the wiser as to the politics (or lack of politics) around it, though.
We went through editions of CAMRA’s newspaper What’s Brewing for the relevant period and found one brief reference in October 1987, which was presumably when the move was first announced. The then chairman of CAMRA, Jim Scanlon, commented:
“This is something we have been working on for a long time. The effects will be very interesting and I look forward to a great many drinkers being surprised by the actual strength of their session lagers.”
We haven’t been able to see much evidence of this as a CAMRA priority for the preceding period, although there were plenty of digs at lager, tied pubs, brewery takeovers, additives…
In chapter three of our book Brew Britannia we tell the story of how in 1974 the early Campaign used a sympathetic chemist to compare the original gravity of Big Six beers to independent producers. But we haven’t noticed this translating into a coherent campaign to make breweries or pubs display this information.
A March 1988 follow up article made reference to CAMRA making a submission in response to the MAFF proposal but we haven’t been able to find any consultation documents with our various Google searches.
That piece also quotes a MAFF spokesman saying that strengths would not have to be displayed on handpulls “because we were informed that it would be prohibitively expensive”. The statutory instrument suggests that as long as ABV is declared somewhere, e.g. on a price list, it doesn’t need to be on the pumpclip. So it’s interesting that this is now almost universally how it is done.
In July 1989 when the legislation came into effect, CAMRA marked this momentous occasion with a couple of paragraphs on page six, below a story about Tetley’s providing south east pubs with special dispense mechanisms to recreate a proper northern head.
We couldn’t dig up much industry comment either, which again surprised us – given the general accusation in the air at the time that breweries were systematically making beer weaker, we had assumed they would resist the move.
But perhaps they had been expecting it for a while, or assumed that making a fuss about it would just draw attention to it.
It could also be that with changes in licensing and the 1989 report of the Monopolies and Mergers Commission, AKA the Beer Orders, that they had other things to focus on.
It’s quite hard to pull together evidence of things not happening, though, so if we’ve got anything wrong here, or you remember debate at the time, please do let us know.
William Schlackman was an American psychologist specialising in attention grabbing market research projects carried out on behalf of big companies. In 1966 he suggested that, for English drinkers, beer was a substitute for sex.
We’ve struggled to track down a copy of the research report itself which is, uh, frustrating, but there’s a summary of its contents in A Monthly Bulletin for January 1967:
At the superficial Freudian level of the unconscious mind, beer-drinking was found, incredibly, to be equated with sex. More profound research revealed this equation with sex to be but a defence enabling the beer-drinker to deny his true motivation… Hunger, the psychologists pointed out, is strong enough in primitive man to stimulate the hunt and the kill. In primitive man, in other words, hunger is overtly a more powerful drive than sex… It comes as a surprise to most of us to learn from the leader of the brewery’s research team, William Schlackman, an American doctor, that what a beer-drinker feels when opening time approaches “is the primitive tension of the hunt.” In civilised man, as in primitive man, “it may outweigh the sex drive.”
The Daily Mirror also picked up the story, quoting Schlackman extensively. Here’s a clearer explanation of his point about beer and sex, in his own words:
The regular drinker puts his love life secondary to his pub life, which is the real reason why so many marriages founder over drink… Confirmed drinkers are rarely womanisers. In fact, they are often hostile to women and to pubs that encourage women’s custom.
So beer displaces sex – got it.
The Mirror article also picks up on a suggestion by Schlackman that the particularly British taste for “tepid” ale rather than cold lager was because…
Beer, which traditionally even schoolboys used to drink for breakfast, subconsciously bears an image very close to that of soup.
Schlackman’s research team came up with a set of personality types matched to beer preference:
The typical draught-bitter drinker was a farm worker on his way home from the plough-field… The mild-and-bitter drinker: A 50-year-old underpaid clerk, dreaming of winning the pools… The Bass and Worthington drinker: A hairy-chested docker… One of the interviewed people though that the typical Bass drinker would probably be a wife-beater, too.
That’s one of those startling statements that makes clear just how much the perception of brands and types of beer can change over the course of decades.
Of course, this should all be taken with a pinch of salt: this kind of pop Freudian analysis has rather gone out of fashion. In 1969, Schlackman suggested that English people liked tea because it reminded them of home, mother and the womb, which says it all, really.
You can read more about William Schlackman and how he ended up living and working in London this obituary – he died in May at the age of 88.
The Golden Bee is the ‘English pub’ at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs, USA, and it has intriguing origins.
We can’t recall how we first heard of it but the part of the official origin story that grabbed our attention was this:
You’ll feel transported right to jolly old England at the Golden Bee, The Broadmoor’s 19th century British Pub. The pub was actually transferred to The Broadmoor panel by panel, directly from the UK.
So, this isn’t a recreation or a sham – it’s a real English pub interior relocated across the Atlantic.
How did this come to happen? And which pub did the fixtures and fittings come from?
There’s something a little exciting about the thought that a London pub long-demolished or converted might live on across the ocean, still serving something like its original function.
Our usual research avenues didn’t turn up much but fortunately, the Broadmoor, being something of an institution, has an archivist, Jamey Hastings, with whom we were able to get in touch. Jamey very kindly provided copies of historic press and publicity notices which, while still contradictory and confusing at times, do provide useful information from close to the moment.
This from the Colorado Springs Gazette for 16 February 1964 gives a good summary of the story and feels as it might be the truth purely because it feels less neat and romantic than the typical marketing blurb:
The fixtures, the bar and accessories are those of an English pub built in the 1880s and later brought to this country intact and set up in New York. When the Broadmoor decided to build the Bee, it asked W. and J. Sloane and Co. to find it some authentic pub fixtures.
The firm did more than that. It found an entire pub, covered with dust, in a warehouse in New York… The pub itself had been operated at one time in an area near the old London Terrace section of New York, once one of the fashionable residential districts of the city.
Another article, from just after the pub launched in 1961, says more or less the same only it specifies that the pub interior went from England to New York as far back as the 19th century.
So far, so good, until we come to a similarly credible story from Broadmoor Bonanza for spring 1984, which suggests a slightly different chain of events:
Forty years ago, The Golden Lion was a popular 17th century pub located near the Thames River in London. It’s not in London anymore but it’s still popular. Now called The Golden Bee, it’s one of The Broadmoor’s truly remarkable traditions… In the mid-1950s, Thayer Tutt, Honorary Chairman of The Broadmoor, heard about an authentic English pub for sale from a friend, Sir Guy Bracewell Smith, who was owner of the Park Lane Hotel in London. The pub was owned by the Whitbread House and they wanted to sell it to an American business to aid in publicizing their ale in the United States. Through the Broadmoor’s interior design firm, W.J. Sloan, and its representative, Leslie Dorsey, Mr Tutt arranged to purchase the dismantled bar for $20,000.
The suggestion here, then, is that the pub was older by about two hundred years, was still intact in London as late as the post-war period, and was owned by Whitbread. That’s plenty of concrete information to latch on to.
So far, though… Nothing. We have a pretty good run of 1950s editions of The House of Whitbread, the brewery’s in-house magazine, and can’t find any mention of this sale. It’s not mentioned in any of the official histories to which we have access, either. Nor does A Monthly Bulletin seem to cover it in any of the issues we’ve got.
One item we did dig up is in The Taverns in the Town by H.E. Popham, from 1937:
In the Fulham High Street is The Golden Lion, a fifty-year-old house standing on the site of a very ancient tavern of the same name. The original building, which dated back to the reign of Henry VII, is said to have been the residence of Bishop Bonner… On the pulling down of the original Golden Lion, the panelling was purchased by Lord Ellenborough for the fitting up of his residence, Southam House, near Cheltenham.
So there was at least one historic Golden Lion interior divorced from its original location and floating around.
At this stage, we’re left with more questions with answers.
Because all the sources are American, and because we suspect a certain amount of obfuscation, it’s certainly possible the details might have got mangled – that the original pub wasn’t called The Golden Lion, or wasn’t in London, or wasn’t owned by Whitbread. Although that last seems the most likely to be true.
So… Does anyone have any evidence that might unlock this? Not guesswork but references to newspapers, books, magazines or other papers that might pin this down.
Further reading: Gary Gillman has been writing extensively about the idea of the English pub in American culture for some time, as in this post. Do check out his back catalogue.
A while ago someone on Twitter said they’d like to read a history of the Leeds beer scene. We wanted to read one, too, but didn’t feel it was our place to write it. Then we recalled the success of a couple of pieces we’d written ‘in their own words’ and decided that at least we could facilitate.
What follows is based on emails and interviews, some dating as far back as 2013 (John Gyngell and Christian Townsley), others from the past month or so, with light editing for sense and clarity.
We’ve also used a quote from Richard Coldwell’s blog because we get the impression he wouldn’t want the mere fact that he sadly died in July stop him contributing on a subject about which he was so passionate.
Ian Garrett Drinker and CAMRA activist I first drank in Leeds in the early 1970s, when I was a student in Bradford and visited the city to go to gigs at the University. The only pubs that beer lovers talked about were The Victoria Family and Commercial Hotel, and The Whitelocks. Leeds was awash with Tetley pubs and I remember when doing a PGCE in Leeds the wonderful aromas wafting over the city centre as they mashed in. I guess the ‘beer scene’ in Leeds had a few faltering starts. There was the CAMRA owned pub The Eagle which always seemed to be struggling whenever I ventured there. Then, in the 1980s, The Fox & Newt brewpub opened and, of course, The Felon & Firkin where Dave Sanders first plied his trade.
Barrie PepperBeer writer and veteran CAMRA activist
Leeds had a beer explosion came around the turn of the century. I think Ian Fozard – now the Chairman of SIBA – had quite a bit to do with it. The amazing success of his Market Town Taverns company, which he started in the mid-1990s with the Long Boat in Skipton, like Topsy, just grew and grew. His policy was to sell a good selection of cask beer in pleasant surroundings to accompany good food. There were also continental beers and a fine wine list. The estate grew to ten pubs – all in Yorkshire, five in Leeds – and by the issue of the 2008 Good Beer Guide, every one of the ten pubs was in it. There were some other factors of course. Tetley’s opened a few brew pubs and was developing its Feast group and some Festival pubs which had guest beers on their bars. Other breweries followed suit. A couple of small breweries located at pubs opened with prize-winning ales. The city’s drinkers had an impressive choice.
Christian Townsley (left) and John Gyngell at North Bar c.1997.
Zak AveryBeer writer and retailer
John Gyngell and Christian Townsley from North Bar were pioneers, doing the beer thing before craft beer existed.
John GyngellCo-founder of North Bar
People thought we were making a mistake opening a bar on Briggate. This was kebab alley. I remember driving past here with my Mum and showing her the site and she just said: “What the hell are you doing?”
Christian Townsley Co-founder of North Bar
I was 22 when we opened on 26 June 1997; John was a bit older. It was really quiet for the first six months, or something like that. At first, the beer wasn’t anything special, largely because of the brewery loan from John Smith’s. Back then, that was really the only way to finance something like this, if you didn’t have a rich mummy and daddy.
John Gyngell
I can’t remember if we approached James Clay or they approached us, but that’s how we started getting more interesting beer. We’ve always had a great relationship with them, and we became more-or-less their brewery tap. Brooklyn, Goose Island, that kind of thing.
Christian Townsley
Erdinger Weissbier was an early one. We were the first place in the UK to sell it and I guess we’re a bit proud of that. In bottles, we had the Chimays, Duvel and Anchor Liberty, when they were pretty hard to find. We’d been drinking Liberty at the Atlantic and at Mash. That was a real landmark beer – probably where, for me, something clicked.
Matt Gorecki Owner of Zapato brewery, industry ‘face’
The first Belgian beer I had was a Hoegaarden in some terrible pub down lower Briggate and I almost smashed a tooth on the huge glass. The same night I was introduced to North Bar by a friend and marvelled at the freely flowing pints of Erdinger. When I started working at The Cross Keys [part of the North chain] I was educated by Mr Christian Townsley in the beauty and subtlety of some of the imported US, Belgian and German beers that were available at the time from James Clay. Leeds at that point had a few stand-out venues but interesting cask ale was only really just starting to take hold. My first ever beer purchase as manager was casks of Marble Ginger – the first time over the Pennines!
Ian Garrett
Special mention must go to the original BeerRitz which was a wholesale-retail warehouse where it was possible to pick up some great Belgian beers by the bottle or case.
Zak Avery
After university, I was working on a PhD with the Open University and also writing music. I was living in Headingley just round the corner from BeerRitz and one day in 2000 they put up a sign advertising for a part time shop assistant. Eighteen months in, I was managing the shop and a couple of years after that had launched thebeerboy.co.uk to host beer tastings as corporate events. The shop went from strength to strength – best independent beer retailer 2003 – and I started writing beer-related website content. In my mind, it was before blogging was really a thing, but I might be wrong about that. From 2008, I started doing video beer reviews – I’ve been blamed for the whole phenomenon by various people – and get chosen as Beer Writer of the Year by The British Guild of Beer Writers. 2009 saw the blog Are You Tasting The Pith? launch and in 2011 my business partner and I bought out Beer Paradise and BeerRitz.
Neil WalkerBlogger, later employed by CAMRA and now SIBA
Dean at Mr Foley’s was the guy that dragged Mr Foley’s into the 21st century, got good keg beers on the bar and modernised what they were all about. It was always a good ale bar but 2011 was when it started to get really interesting.
Dean Pugh Head of European bar operations for BrewDog
I moved to Leeds for university in 2003 and was working part time at Wetherspoons. I had a shift manager there who taught me everything about cask ales and cellar management. I moved into management and different Wetherspoon locations in Leeds, always taking on the responsibility of the cellar and organising real ale festivals. I had a friend who was running the tap room at York Brewery and they were purchasing a bar on the Headrow called Dr Okells. I joined as general manager and the bar was rebranded as Mr Foley’s, opening in 2007. My initial aim when opening Foley’s was to become the best cask ale pub in the city, and we were named Leeds CAMRA pub of the year in 2008. Around the same time I joined Foley’s in 2007 I was also discovering American craft beer, mostly through visits to North Bar. I remember Brooklyn Chocolate Stout being one of the first beers that really grabbed my attention and showed me a different side to beer. I brought this back to Foley’s, beginning with an extended bottle list, but soon convinced my bosses to hand over that draft lines too.
Neil Walker
Mr Foley’s felt like the common room for the Leeds beer scene. Its ample space and relative cheapness made it ideal for events and beer-gatherings – bottle-shares, beer launches and so on. We even had a beer dinner there with Garrett Oliver [of Brooklyn Brewery] pouring Ghost bottles of wine-lees aged saison paired with buffalo chicken wings and pulled pork prepared by Tyler Kiley.
Dean Pugh
I think towards the end of my time at Foley’s we had around six to eight rotating taps for craft beer, two BrewDog taps, ten cask ales, bag-in-a-box real cider and probably up to a hundred bottled and canned beers.
Neil Walker
One of the early, key moments for me was IPADay in 2011. It felt like an important moment – everyone seemed to be there and everyone remembers it. As well as the international beer list there were some great offerings from British brewers and I remember Zak Avery and Dave from Hardknott making impassioned and semi-incomprehensible speeches on the style. My first memory of feeling like I was in a beer scene was the Brewdog IPA is Dead launch at North Bar. There were just so many bloggers there and at that time it felt a little bit competitive, albeit in a friendly way, and I remember writing up my tasting notes at about 6 am the next morning to make sure I was first to press.
Zak Avery
I was shit broke in 2010, really struggling to make ends meet, managing the shop, trying to go freelance, a new parent. I was selling things to meet mortgage payments. I wrote a really well-paid advertorial for Guinness. It wasn’t all totes craft amazeballs, you know?
Mike Hampshire Former local CAMRA chair, owner of Mike’s Tap Room
The single key turning point in Leeds beer has been the closure of Tetley’s Brewery in 2011. As sad and difficult as it was, it effectively hit the reset button on the Leeds beer scene. The US craft revolution was well underway and lots of micro-breweries started popping up, seeing the huge gap in the Leeds market for traditional ales and US-influenced modern styles.
Ian Garrett
In its heyday, Tetley’s was one of the biggest breweries in the UK, Tetley’s Bitter was the best selling beer in the UK, Leeds drinkers knew what to expect from a good pint of Tetley’s, and they drank it by the gallon.
Leigh Linley Retired blogger, author of Great Yorkshire Beer
The buzz around the first Leeds International Beer Festival in 2012 was fantastic. A real independent beer festival in Leeds, a shift toward keg being not only accepted but expected.
Maria Estibaliz Organiser of the Leeds International Beer Festival
We wanted to create a festival that celebrated and embraced the independent craft scene in the UK as existing beer events weren’t really recognising the amazing things that were going on in the industry and a lot of new, great breweries were being overlooked. We also wanted to create something that was a lot more accessible and inclusive for younger audiences, particularly women in this age group, as the industry and festivals at the time were incredibly male dominated. We also wanted the brewers themselves to attend the festival, meet audiences and talk about their beer – and at the same time we encouraged audiences not be afraid to ask the brewers questions.
Leigh Linley
I recall sitting behind my desk at work eavesdropping on a group of colleagues who had no prior interest in beer who had got tickets for the Festival excitingly detailing what beers they were going to try. That felt different, for sure.
Zak Avery
The first LIBF, held in the city centre at the glorious town hall, marked a point where the scene started to properly cross over into the mainstream.
Leigh Linley
Leeds hosted the European Beer Bloggers Conference in 2012 – an event that probably passed a lot of non-bloggers by but the importance of having that many journalists, bloggers, writers and retailers in the city can’t be overstated. I think a lot of influential writers went away rethinking what Leeds was about. We did the city proud.
Gareth PettmanBlogger
Friends of Ham opening in 2012 was the game changer for me – one of those ideas that a lot of us had dreams of, but not the ability to execute. Tyler Kiley took over as head beer buyer there and under the Kitchings it was unbelievably rammed almost every night of the week.
Leigh Linley
Here was a bar that embraced beer culture but offered something totally different. It was a tiny, well-put-together bar with good beer but also more than that. It bridged the gap between beer and food (although it really wasn’t beercentric – it sold plenty of wine and sherry, too) in a way that really shook up the bar scene. And it did it in a ratty part of Leeds that’s thriving now, due to keystone businesses like FoH.
Richard Brownhill Little Leeds Beer House, Brownhill & Co
Claire and [Anthony ‘Kitch’ Kitching] really raised the bar in terms of quality in Leeds when they opened. It coincided with my move to Leeds and their focus on service and the originality of their concept was a real scene-setter at the time.
Zak Avery
Even though Friends of Ham has been through ‘financial restructuring’ which left a bad taste in a lot of mouths (metaphorically rather than literally, of course) I don’t think their importance can be overstated in changing the Leeds beer scene. It was qualitatively different from anything that had gone before, and set the blueprint for much that followed
Richard Brownhill
It was a real shame what happened with Friends Of Ham. I think their struggles just show the fragility of small independent businesses, regardless of reputation or standing in the industry. It’s an ever crowded market out there and it’s very easy for offerings to become diluted. It’s great that they managed to strike a deal to stay operating, and it’s starting to get back to it’s best – they have some great new people in there who have a real passion for the product.
Gareth Pettman
I arrived quite late to the scene itself and without friends who shared my burgeoning interest in beer, it wasn’t until Simon Girt, AKA ‘Leeds Beer Wolf’, organised a Twissup in 2014 that I actually made an effort to get to know people in Leeds and beyond. So for me, personally, the period between 2014-2016 was when the scene was at its peak, with regular bottleshares, mostly organised by Rob Derbyshire, AKA Hopzine, and held at Little Leeds Beer House or Northern Monk. The opening of Northern Monk was the next big leap forward in itself – without a significant number of breweries in Leeds this was probably the kick up the arse that others needed.
Russell Bisset Northern Monk Brew Co.
I started Northern Monk in a parent’s cellar in 2013, launching at The Sparrow in Bradford the summer of that year. Originally operating as a cuckoo brewery, we built our own brewery in a listed mill just outside the centre of Leeds, which launched in October 2014.
Matt Gorecki
Northern Monk are absolutely up there and their rate of growth and mastery of the market has been astonishing. Their beers have helped put the UK on the map across the rest of the world and especially in the US. Kirkstall’s cask offering and extremely solid expanding range of beers has been quietly winning hearts all over the place. Kirkstall have also breathed life into two pubs that had gone to the dogs and managed the importation of so many of the gateway brands and exciting US beers – the entire scene owes a lot to Steve Holt and Dave Sanders. There are also scene leaders and crossover successes like Bundobust, Little Leeds Beerhouse and the team behind Whitelocks – Ed Mason of Five Points and Ash Kollakowski – who’ve put this venerable pub back at the heart of the scene.
Richard Brownhill
Leeds Beer Week was started by myself, Matt Gorecki and James Ockelford from Refold Design in 2016 – both to complement the very popular Leeds International Beer Festival but also to have a week where the many venues of Leeds were all under one umbrella and in the spotlight. I had found as both as manager of Tapped Leeds in 2014 and at the fledgling Little Leeds Beerhouse in 2015 that although LIBF brought many people to the festival at the town hall, the impact was quite insular. The first couple of years were tough but we’ve now expanded the team to include more than ten people and it is 100% independently funded. We have so many amazing venues in Leeds who sponsor the week financially every year, and James produces world class design for our yearly guide which promotes all venues, big or small. I am particularly proud that we have built a model which is not for profit – we are paid a little for our time each year, and we pay our committed team, but every other penny from sponsorship, advertising and merchandise goes back into the festival to help it grow each year. Which is a good job as Matt’s bunting fetish knows no bounds.
Ian Garrett
Today’s scene, for me, is overcrowded as all the new bars try to entice the same handful of people. I tend to stick to a handful where I know there’s either excellent cask, well-kept, or a decent choice. Too many have eight varieties of IPA but that seems a common practice. It still looks like a healthy beer scene and new bars still appear, Brownhill & Co being a recent addition trying to do something a little different.
Richard Brownhill
Brownhill & Co is a blueprint for everything Bryony and I love about the drinking experience and is focused on providing relaxed, simple table service in a chilled environment. Ten taps of quality, no filler, and balanced with all sorts of styles – a rotating lager line and rotating cask beers. Many years of visiting Belgium had us wondering why the UK is allergic to table service in pubs and bars. I personally can’t think of anything better than not moving all day while a nice, friendly, knowledgeable person brings me lots of beer. We’re delighted to have been selected to host this year’s Cantillon Zwanze Day.
Leigh Linley
Leeds is still Leeds – there’s still a pub for all tastes within walking distance and the majority of the classic places are still there, doing well. There’s even more choice and it’s hard to not encounter ‘craft’ in most places now, like in any major city. At the risk of sounding like an old man, it’s getting increasingly expensive to drink in the city centre, but the scene itself is thriving – beer is mainstream, there’s no need to guide people anymore. There’s a new generation of drinkers discovering beer and enjoying some incredible venues that we’d have been over the moon to have enjoyed back in the early 2000s.
Richard Coldwell Blogger
There’s no doubt in my mind that Leeds is one of the premier beer cities in the UK and that includes making the stuff as well as consuming it. We just need to shout out and make our mark. I often think Leeds is a bit slow to catch on to self promotion. (2016.)
Matt Gorecki
There’s always something going on and a number of quality breweries are coming through, pushing things forward. Venues are higher quality and you’re starting to see some really good quality and curated selections rather than just a list of questionable hype beers that taste roughly similar. Leeds is at its peak right now.
Photo credits: All ours except the one based on ‘Leeds Town Hall at Night’ by Enchufla Con Clave via Wikimedia Commons and the picture of John Gyngell and Christian Townsley which they kindly supplied to us in 2013.
We’re very grateful to everyone who found time to respond to our questions so fully and frankly, but especially Zak Avery and Leigh Linley. This post was supported by Patreon subscribers like Will Jordan and Peter Sidwell. Please consider signing up, or just buy us a one-off pint via Ko-Fi. Alternatively, you can give us a boost by buying one of our books, or just by sharing something we’ve written on social media. Cheers! Ray & Jess.
When I’m not obsessing over beer I sometimes obsess over architecture which is why I’ve been reading Walter Ison’s The Buildings of Georgian Bristol.
It was first published in 1952 and revised for a second edition in 1978. It mostly comprises fairly dry research into buildings and street layouts – who designed or built what with reference to original contracts, whether the pediment is segmental or not, and so on – but you won’t be surprised to learn that there are a couple mentions of brewing that leapt out.
The first is with reference to Queen Square, which you can see from Small Bar on King Street, to give a beer geek friendly reference point. Originally marshland, it was divided up into plots from 1699 and built up between 1700 and 1718. It had a dual carriageway running through the middle for most of the 20th century but is these days once again a peaceful public space.
Ison quotes from the city records for 1699 which include the terms of what we would now call planning permission for the first house on Queen Square:
[No] Tenement [is] to be lett out to any sort of Tenants particularly no Smiths Shopp Brewhouse nor to any Tallow-Chandler or to any other Tradesmen who by noyse danger of ffire or ill smells shall disturbe or annoy any of the Inhabitants who shall build neer it…
This was a classy development for well-to-do folk and it wouldn’t do for it to pong or otherwise exhibit evidence of people working. These days in Bristol, breweries tend to be on industrial estates – the logical conclusion of this kind of zoning regulation.
The second reference comes in a description of the development of Portland Square from 1788. Here, Ison quotes for a sale notice for the middle house on the south side of the square from 1812:
[The house contains] three arched under-ground cellars, a servants’ hall, housekeeper’s room, back-kitchen, larder, brew-house, and other offices…
A brewhouse is an interesting addition to a large, fashionable house as late as the early 19th century. Other houses nearby seem to have had wine cellars rather the brewing facilities, at least according to Ison’s notes, so the owner of this one was clearly one of us.
But who did the brewing? What did they brew? Where would we even start looking to find out?
Main image: detail of ‘The Mansion House at the corner of Queen Square looking along Queen Charlotte Street’, Samuel Jackson, 1824, via Watercolour World/Bristol Museums.
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