Smiles Brewery came and went, leaving small traces of itself all over Bristol. As is so often the case, however, it is the breweries that failed in living memory whose stories are hardest to trace.
When this post was first published in September 2022 it wasn’t intended to be definitive. We just wanted to put together the facts that were available, with a little digging, so that others could find them – and perhaps tell us more.
Then, in late June 2024, we got an email from John Payne who founded Smiles filling in some gaps and fleshing out the story.
Why does this story matter? Because Smiles was one of the first UK microbreweries, founded in the CAMRA-led boom of the 1970s.
And because – it does not feel an exaggeration to put it this way – it was the pride of Bristol.
It’s also a story familiar to those who’ve tracked the craft beer boom of the past decade or so, with idealism eventually giving way to commercial pressure.
Let’s go back to the start, to the back room of a restaurant, at the tail end of the 1970s.
Smiles Brewery and Bell’s Diner
“It began as a plastic bucket effort,” John Payne, founder of Smiles, told beer journalist Brian Glover. “I ran a vegetarian restaurant with my girlfriend, and we thought we might as well sell decent beer with the meals.” [1]
In a note he sent us, Payne corrects the record here: “Vegetarian and fish and meat – ground-breaking at the time.”
He also confirmed that he was born in Scotland, in Glasgow, in fact, in 1951 and came to Bristol later in life, to be with his partner Shirley Anne Bell.
From November 1976 he was running Bell’s Diner alongside Bell and by 1977 was brewing on the side.
He was not by any means a professional. The official history of Bell’s Diner suggests that he “began brewing beer in a tea urn under the stairs”. Payne correct this slightly in his correspondence with us: “In the back yard.”
Another source, a 1980s promotional video for the brewery, of doubtful provenance, says in its voiceover that he “started brewing at university” and then got a “brewing bucket” for Christmas. The video says this happened in 1978 but Payne places the event much earlier:
“I lived on a malting barley farm whilst at St Andrews University. The chemist father of a friend of mine gave me a plastic bucket and some beer recipes for Christmas 1971. Inspired by him and ‘Boston on Beer’ I started mashing barley and brewing.”
‘Boston on Beer’ was a regular column in The Guardian by journalist Richard Boston which first appeared in August 1973.
Home-brewing was booming in the 1970s, with features in national newspapers and equipment increasingly easy to buy in high street shops.
In all accounts of these early days, there is a common theme: the reaction of restaurant customers to Payne’s homebrew was positive. That encouraged him to stick at it, and to think about going professional, on a larger scale.
He asked some pubs, free of any tie to the dominant local giant Courage, to try selling his beer over the bar and report back on customer reaction. [2]
In his correspondence with us Payne said:
“There were only five free houses in Bristol at that time: The Cutter, The Plume of Feathers, The Highbury Vaults, The Old Fox and the Seahorse. I started… selling directly in polypins and, later, beer boxes.”
The response was good. It was time for phase two.
Smiles Brewery at Colston Yard
The back page of CAMRA’s newspaper What’s Brewing for November 1977 contained a small story under the headline ‘Bristol Ale’:
The West country is to get its second new brewery within six months… John Payne has produced his traditional Smiles Bitter for his restaurant, Bells Diner, York Road, Bristol, for the past year. Now he has got permission to set up a new brewhouse in the heart of the city at Colston Yard. Production will be about 30 barrels a week and Mr Payne says he already has strong interest from the local free trade.
‘Bristol Ale’, p.12
Colston Yard was a Victorian industrial space off Upper Maudlin Street, behind and under a row of shops, where there is currently an Indian restaurant called Haveli.
Permission to brew was one thing but paying for the building of a new brewery was another. Payne mortgaged his house to find the £6,000 needed – about £30,000 in today’s money. [3]
The new brewery was ready by 1978 and Payne set about learning how to brew in this new, more professional environment.
In a 1981 interview he said:
In the early weeks I relied heavily on a friend of my father’s, a brewing chemist… He was like a doctor. I would tell him everything I had done and when I had finished he would tell me where I had gone wrong.
‘The Renaissance of Real Ale’, Mitch Payne, Illustrated London News, 1 February 1981.
Filling in details more than 40 years later Payne told us that this was actually his godfather, Dick Heron of Heron & Comrie, a firm of brewing chemists based in Stockport.
By April that year, Payne was happy with the quality and consistency of the beer being produced.
That first beer, Smiles Best Bitter, was brewed without sugar or malt extracts, with an original gravity of 1040 (about 4% ABV). It was fermented with yeast from the Courage brewery in Bristol. [4] As Payne recalled in his correspondence with us in 2024: “I walked in with a bucket to get the yeast… I only did it once.”
In November 1978, with winter coming, Payne added a second beer to the line-up: Exhibition, at 1051 (around 5.3%), which briefly also had the name Champion. Then came Old Vic, a 7% special beer – “Very rare,” recalls Payne – and Brewery Bitter at 1036.
He took on his first employee, Harry Mansfield, the former cellarman at the Bristol Student Union, initially as a part-timer. [5]
They worked flat out through 1978 and 1979, including a particularly hectic Christmas in 1979, which saw them working 18-hour days to brew “265 barrels” in four weeks. [6]
Payne claimed to have drawn no salary himself in this period [7] and told us in 2024 that he propped up the business with his wages from waitering at Bell’s Diner.
But it was clear the business was on the right track. As Brian Glover wrote in his decade-on retrospective:
By 1981 demand had out-stripped production, and the self-made brewery was completely re-equipped to increase capacity three-fold, backed up by a new laboratory.
New Beer Guide, 1988.
In 1982, Smiles acquired its own pub, The Highbury Vaults at the top of St Michael’s Hill. This was a response to the disappearance of freehouses in Bristol as larger brewers such as Allied, Marston’s, Eldridge Pope and Devenish snapped them up.
Payne was especially frustrated by CAMRA’s decision (or rather, that of CAMRA Real Ale Investments) to sell its own Bristol pub to Marston’s:
[They] said they were pulling out of The Old Fox as their job was done. But they sold out just when they were needed as the free trade was beginning to disappear then.
‘Bolting the bars again in Bristol’, David Jarvie, What’s Brewing, October 1983.
Writing to us in 2024, however, he recalls that there was an upside to this change:
It strangely enabled us to sell to the CAMRA pub, The Salisbury Arms, Cambridge, which was taken over by The Old Fox landlord. We made a two-weekly exchange of Greene King beers brought to the New Inn, Waterley Bottom, by a friend of Rick Sainty its owner. That lasted several years, filling Greene King casks for delivery to Cambridge.
Until this time the brewery’s de facto brewery tap had been The Sea Horse, across the main road from the brewery. When it began to seem under threat, Smiles entered a bidding war with Marston’s and Allied for The Highbury Vaults instead.
They were rumoured to have paid Simon Stevens, who also owned The Plume of Feathers [8], £125,000 for the pub – a shocking price for a small neighbourhood boozer at the time. [9]
Payne doesn’t seem to have wanted to buy a pub, or to have much enjoyed being responsible for it. “It diverts a lot of our attention,” he told CAMRA’s David Jarvie in 1983.
But it was vital because, according to Payne, there were only four other suitable outlets in the city.
A glance at copies of the Good Beer Guide from the period backs this up: almost every pub listed was selling beer from Courage, or was tied to an out-of-town brewery such as Wadworth or Davenport’s.
Real People making Real Ale
The brewery continued to grow through the 1980s, as recorded in this rather marvellous artefact – a promotional video apparently from 1984:
The source of this video was a mystery until John Payne contacted us in 2024 and confirmed he had uploaded it: “This was used at beer festivals. I had it on VHS.”
It tells us that by the mid-1980s Smiles was brewing more than 3,000 gallons of beer each week (about 83 barrels) with Harry Mansfield now as full-time head brewer.
We also meet three other new employees: Sue Pinnell, a brewery assistant; Nicholas Martin, a spectacularly bearded drayman; and Peter Taylor, a rather dashing marketing and sales executive.
As Payne recalled in the notes he sent us in 2024:
“Nicholas Martin (later Otto Faber) who had been an art teacher at Filton, joined Smiles as a drayman and then later developed all the sales, graphics material and interior design and fittings – often recovered from skips whilst he delivered beer.”
There are various clues to the brewery’s brand identity in this video: old-fashioned barroom piano music; the vintage Bedford dray of c.1950; and faux-vintage hand-painted graphics on every surface.
The slogan at the end is: “Smiles – real people making real ale.”
A second video from the same source is an out-and-out advertisement, attempting to compete with those from, say, Courage, or Whitbread.
This has more of the same, including flat caps all round, knitted vests and ten-sided pint glasses. Smiles, the advert implies, has been serving Bristol for years – for generations, even.
Never mind the facts.
“This was made by a student at Bower Ashton Art College for an MA project,” recalls John Payne today. “Made on a Sunday when the Clifton Suspension Bridge and Wilson Street, St Pauls, were empty.”
The Pride of Bristol
In 1992, when the brewery was approaching its 15th anniversary and owned multiple pubs, John Payne gave a rare interview to Stephen Cox for CAMRA’s What’s Brewing.
Cox was a fan of Smiles and the piece is celebratory, not only of Smiles 15 years’ of success but also of Payne’s approach to the business of beer.
“I dream of locking some brewery executives in the Tap for a week with John Payne”, he wrote. “But I doubt the common sense would rub off.”
In the interview, Payne attempted to articulate “the Smiles Way”:
All you can do is be committed to a quality product, put out your stall, and let them decide. If it’s any good, it doesn’t need advertising.
A colleague, Martin Love, expanded on the idea: “It’s something to do with not forcing things down people’s throats.”
We learn that Smiles’ pubs didn’t serve stout (Guinness specifically, Payne clarified in 2024) or draught lager on principle, only the brewery’s own beer, along with guest ales from other independents.
Nor did they have gambling machines.
“If you measure the space they take up,” Payne is quoted as saying, “and fill that space with drinkers, you make as much money. Besides, pubs are about talking to people.”
This preceded similar policies and rhetoric from the micropub movement by about 20 years.
All of these principles were put into practice in a brand new pub, The Brewery Tap, constructed in front of the brewery premises on Upper Maudlin Street in 1991. (It was later known as The Colston Yard.)
It was notable for opening at 8am to serve breakfast, extending the business’s viable hours beyond those when it could legally sell alcohol. [9]
In 1992 it won CAMRA’s pub design award – the first time any pub had proved worthy of the prize since 1985. An article in What’s Brewing described its “clean cut, attractive appearance”:
Ash wood and a slate bar, together with a black-and-white tiled floor, give an impression that is reminiscent of a good Belgian café. The Brewery Tap manages to be in the mainstream of the traditional pub without resorting to tiresome alehouse clichés.
Behind the scenes, though, the brewery was struggling.
“Struggling because I had become more of a personnel manager without enough hands-on time,” recalls Payne today, “but sales were climbing.” He credits Martin Love, formerly sales manager at Wadworth, another West Country brewery, with beginning to turn things around.
But it was apparently too late.
The management buy-out trend
A month after Stephen Cox’s gushing interview with John Payne, and in the same month the design award victory was announced, Iain Loe’s regular column in What’s Brewing for February 1992 included this item:
The first brewery news to reach me is another brewery takeover – the first of 1992. But the deal doesn’t feature a well-known company whose shares are traded on the Stock Market but a micro-brewer who has sold his company to someone who liked the brewery enough to stump up £2 million… The purchaser, Ian Williams, has an accountancy background… and has financed the £3 million deal, which includes covering bank borrowings of £1 million, with the help of a £½ million input from [private equity firm] 3is.
Williams had worked for the accountancy firm which managed Smiles’ accounts and he knew the business well. So, although not part of the Smiles management team, this was nonetheless reported as a form of ‘management buyout’.
Management buyouts were a big thing in the 1990s – see the Redruth Brewery for another example.
More usually, they involve people already working in a business to acquire it from either the founder (perhaps a hippy hipster brewer) or a larger corporate owner (such as Whitbread) which had lost interest.
They offered a route for businesses that were stumbling or failing to go on, with new leadership that was either more money-minded or more passionate about the product, depending on circumstances.
Smiles continued to expand under Ian Williams until it eventually had 17 pubs – a substantial estate for a regional independent less than 20 years old.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t sustainable. In November 2000, most of the pub estate was sold to London brewery Young’s for £5.8 million. [11]
Thereafter, what was at that point Bristol’s only remaining brewery seemed to be in retreat, though local real ale drinkers continued to regard the beer fondly.
The brewery was sold again in 2003 to City Centre Breweries Ltd, a new company run by Ron Kirk, formerly managing director of Mansfield Brewery.
Then, in December 2004, it was announced that the brewery had gone into administration. Staff were laid off and production of Smiles-branded beer was moved to the Highgate Brewery in Walsall. [12]
Smiles-branded beers seem to have disappeared from the market altogether after 2007, at least as far as we can tell from online beer review websites.
Just about remembered
There are still occasional reminders of Smiles to be seen around Bristol, most notably at The Highbury Vaults.
Beneath 20-plus years of Young’s branding can be seen the odd bit of Smiles signage – and a photograph from that early 1980s promo shoot still hangs on the wall in the snug.
We’re frustrated by the bittiness of the story we’ve been able to tell above. It feels unfinished – and we’re certain people are going to have additions and corrections.
To which we say, bring it on!
We’d love version two of this post to have more human voices, more pictures, and more detail from the frontline.
If you worked at Smiles, or, indeed, founded it, we’re contact@boakandbailey, or @boakandbailey on Twitter, if you want to get in touch.
Notes
- New Beer Guide, 1988, p.52.
- ‘The Renaissance of Real Ale’, Mitch Pryce, Illustrated London News, 1 February 1981.
- Pryce, 1981.
- ‘Selling beer: it’s Payne and Love’, What’s Brewing, January 1992.
- Promotional video, 1984.
- Pryce, 1981.
- Pryce, 1981.
- ‘Bolting the bars again in Bristol’, 1983.
- Correspondence with John Payne, 2024.
- CAMRA Good Beer Guide 1992, published in 1991.
- The Times, 17 November 2000.
- ‘Smiles Brewery Closed’, Richard Brooks, Pints West, Spring 2005.
This post was first published in September 2022. It was updated in June 2024 with new information from John Payne.
