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Real ale hero
Real Ale Heroe s Number 40: Brewery History Society
Preser ving our brewing past
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Celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, the Brewery History Society has compiled a vast amount of information and published many books that trace the development of British brewing and its key role in a changing society, writes Roger Protz
The anniversaries come thick and
fast. Last year marked 50 years since CAMRA was formed, and 2022 celebrates 50 editions of the Good Beer Guide. And not to be ignored, this year also marks the 50th anniversary of the Brewery History Society (BHS).
The BHS may not enjoy such a high profile as CAMRA, but its contribution to our knowledge and appreciation of beer and its history are equally profound. Britain’s role in the development of brewing is of major importance. The rise of porter and stout in the 18th century and pale ale a century later helped drive a commercial brewing industry, and these beer styles transformed both the nature and the quality of beer.
But British brewing has deeper and older roots, and it’s thanks to the BHS that we can learn of beer being brewed centuries earlier. Mike Brown, one of the key historians in the society, says in his weighty, 426-page tome London Brewed, that in the 15th century, Fleet Street, best known as the centre of the modern newspaper industry, was home to many small breweries run by women known as brewsters, who used water from the Fleet river that ran beneath the street.
Mike’s book dispels the myth that commercial or ‘common’ brewers scarcely existed before the arrival of porter. London Brewed lists commercial breweries from 1650 when the government introduced duties on beer and brewers moved from medieval guilds to a recognisable industry that grew at a rapid pace and saw many mergers and takeovers. By 1800, Mike says, the six biggest London brewers had outputs of more than 100,000 barrels a year each and they were starting, through loans to publicans, to create a tied-house system.
CAMRA was founded by a handful of beer lovers determined to save cask beer. In a similar fashion, the BHS was created by a few people who not only enjoyed beer, but were fascinated by the architecture and history of the industry that made their favourite tipple.
BHS chairman Jeff Sechiari says the
society grew out of three men of Kent, Bob Burdon, Roger Kelly and Tony Page, who immersed themselves in the history of brewing in the county. They decided
Clockwise from left: Happy and healthy – Beer Street print by William Hogarth; play your cards right – beer to the fore in this image; brewery cooper’s art captured in print
to form a society that would delve into the history of brewing throughout Britain. Peter Moynihan and Norman Barber, who became two of the BHS’s most influential members, joined soon after and Peter helped stage an exhibition of breweries in Maidstone. Norman went on to write, in collaboration with CAMRA, a widely read book, Where Have All the Breweries Gone?
Jeff joined the society in 1978 by a similar route to the Kentish founders. He went on Rail Ale Rambles, the first to Bath and South Wales, organised by Crookham Travel using chartered trains to take beer lovers far and wide throughout the country. He met people who shared his interests and he heard about the formation of the BHS.
From these humble beginnings, a society emerged and grew. Today, it has 500 members who include 69 corporate members, mainly brewers and maltsters. Jeff describes the members as “beer and breweriana enthusiasts” who have used their skills over the years to find images, descriptions and beer recipes that have helped create a formidable resource of information. There are more than 10,000 breweries on the BHS Wiki pages with priceless images, a resource that’s available to all beer lovers.
In return for an annual membership
fee of £33, members receive a chatty quarterly newsletter edited by former Bass brewer Roger Putman, and a quarterly journal with long and impressively researched articles on
Left, right and
below: Images are a vital part of the society’s archive
breweries in both this country and throughout the world.
Dr Tim Holt has edited the journal for a remarkable 20 years. He says some articles come from people approaching him with their work, others are the result of his hearing of PhD or MA theses that have not been published elsewhere and contain priceless information about breweries. A third strand comes from blogs and Tim helps the writers to organise their thoughts in a way that’s fit for publishing in the journal.
He studied for a PhD in London in social theory and archaeology, which led him to develop an interest in pubs and breweries. He says the current times are a golden age for beer writing and history, and he’s especially proud of the work the BHS and the journal have done on brewing in the 19th century.
“Brewing was the second most important industry in the country,” he says. “Men like Michael Bass were not just brewers but were politicians as well, deeply involved in the emancipation of the working class at the time. Brewing had a massive impact on the economy and politics.”
Online information has become “amazing”, according to Tim. Before the arrival of the internet, academics would look for original material in universities. Writers would spend hours in the vaults of newspapers, while others would search for documents in county record offices.
Martyn Cornell, beer writer, historian
and a member of the BHS journal editorial board, agrees with Tim that it’s a golden age for beer writing due to the internet and online information.
“There’s now so much information on the web,” he says. “Newspapers have been scanned, which saves vast amounts of time when researching.” He also agrees with Tim that one role played by the society is to break down myths about brewing history, and he’s spent a large amount of time researching the origins of porter in the 18th century.
As a result, he can say with authority that the long-held belief that East London Ralph Harwood “invented” porter has no evidence to support it.
“Harwood’s role was written about in 1802, 80 years after he was alleged to have invented porter,” he says. “If he had, there would have been written evidence at the time.
“Porter was the result of the government imposing higher taxes on beer to pay for the war with France. To keep prices down, brewers used cheaper malt and more hops. The malt
was smoky, so the beer was stored to allow the smoky character to go away.
“Brewers took a popular brown beer of the time and added more hops. Later, there became a fashion for mixing fresh porter with aged porter. The longer it was aged, the better it tasted.”
BHS archivist Ken Smith agrees with Tim and Chris that online information has changed research for the better. He says Mike Brown spent 10 years researching London Brewed and he had to devote months looking at family wills, newspaper cuttings and cross-referencing licensing records. A lot of the basic information came from Post Office directories and Roger Kelly’s directories that gave basic information about when breweries opened and closed or were taken over. The London Metropolitan Archives were an especially valuable source of information.
Ken is a photographer and he’s used his skills to build the image side of the BHS archives. He has photographed many old breweries and he says supporters have donated priceless images. They include six boxes of glass negatives of Young’s and other London breweries in the late 19th century.
“I’ve also nicked a few!” he laughs. All the images are in the public domain.
Beer can’t be made without grain and Amber Patrick plays a special role in the society by researching the history of turning grain into malt. She has spoken to archaeologists currently involved in a major dig in Norfolk on an Anglo- Saxon site where they have unearthed not only a brewhouse, but maltings that show malt was produced on an industrial scale and used not only by lords but also made available to local churches and to villagers for home brewing.
Amber says making malt for brewing dates from the Iron Age, with digs finding kilns sunk into the ground. In Norfolk, she adds, rye was often used as well as barley and wheat.
She also dispels an urban myth that production of pale ale was made possible only in the early 19th century with the development of coke as fuel for kilns. She says coke was available in the late 16th century, but the main sources of fuel used in kilns were wheat straw and gorse, while malt used to make brown beer was heated over beechwood.
All aspects of brewing are recorded by the society including coopering
As the society celebrates its 50th
year, its work continues unabated. Books about regional breweries have joined national publications, and the monumental work, A Century of British Brewers 1890–1990, is currently being revised for a new edition that will be extended to 2012. Regular visits to breweries are held and the 2022 annual meeting was held in Burton-on-Trent.
And proof that research into longdead breweries is easier today was clear when I told Jeff Sechiari that my home town of St Albans had a brewery called Adey & White. Tap, tap, tap went Jeff on his keyboard, then a moment later, he said: “Ah, yes, Adey & White, 1868, taken over and closed in 1936 by JW Green of Luton with 56 pubs,” followed by an image of the brewery.
It’s simple when you know how.
