Archive for the ‘Breweries’ Category
Hog’s Back Brewery Shop
May 22nd, 2010 |
Whenever I’m driving over towards Farnham I always try and visit the Hog’s Back Brewery shop which is connected to the brewery in Tongham – it’s always worth a detour.
Evening Pub Crawl of Lewes – Part 1
Dec 3rd, 2009 |
Recently, Jon and I took an evening trip to Lewes for a bit of a crawl round the pubs. We’d been to Brighton for the evening many times before and wanted a change so Lewes was selected – partly because of our love of Harvey’s beers. A quick glance at our Southern Railway timetables showed that although the trains from London to Lewes were not as frequent as to Brighton, they were still just as quick.
I’d been to Lewes before but never drunk there – not even on bonfire night which they take very seriously in Lewes. The town itself is a really attractive traditional old town – well worth a visit for things other than pubs.
Arrival in Lewes
There is evidence of the presence of the Harvey’s brewery all over the town. It starts when you get off the train and see the small distribution warehouse across the station car park.
From here I walked up a curving path that used to be, or used to run next to the southern end of the railway line that once linked Lewes with Uckfield and Tunbridge Wells. Looking back towards the station just a bit after the Harvey’s distribution warehouse there is what looks like a tunnel mouth. I’m not familiar enough with the original path of the railway or its history in Lewes, but was the warehouse directly linked to the railway here? Some historical research needed when time permits.
The Harvey’s Brewery (from the outside)
The path of the railway gets lost as you approach the High Street but I soon found myself at the bridge over the River Ouse. Diagonally opposite you can see the classic tower structure of the brewery itself – the view seen in many photos obviously taken from the bridge, including the one shown here.
As I wandered down into the brewery yard I was immediately struck by how small the brewery was – no bigger than a small town church really. Given the growing popularity of Harvey’s beers these days I wondered immediately how they managed to cope. I thought immediately of other small scale breweries that were forced to move by the capacity restrictions of their original premises – eg Dark Star and Hop Back. But fortunately for now the brewery shows no sign of having to move.
I had not booked onto a visit so I didn’t stay for long. I made a mental note to return to look tround the brewery one day – although I gather the waiting list is substantial.
I quickly popped into the brewery shop round the corner in Cliffe High Street. Apart from the expected merchandising for sale, the shop appeared to be surprisingly full of bottles of wine rather than beer. Takeaway containers are available here and presumably the draught beer is served straight from the adjacent brewery.
But I didn’t take advantage of that as it was straight on to the first of the pubs on the list – pausing only to explore the pumpkins outside Bill’s cafe on the High Street.
The next post in the series covers the first few pubs we visited in Lewes. A third post covers the last couple.
There’s a map of our Lewes Pub Crawl here.
St Peter’s Bottles Changing?
Aug 21st, 2009 |
This picture was taken on a recent trip to the Jerusalem Tavern in Farringdon, London. Apologies for the poor quality – it was taken on my rubbish mobile.
For those who are not familiar with this pub, it is the only London outlet of the St Peter’s Brewery in Suffolk. It’s worth a visit if you like good beer and you’re in the area. The St Peter’s beers are very distinctive in their flavour tasting unlike beers from any other brewery. They usually have 4 or 5 on draught at any one time and most of the rest of the range are available in bottles.
I happened to notice these two bottles on the table on front of me (they weren’t mine) and was intrigued by the one on the left. If you’ve bought St Peter’s beers in the supermarket before you’ll be familiar with the elliptical shape of the base. It doesn’t come over so well in the picture but the left hand one has a circular base. I wonder if this is the new shape? It’s definitely got the St Peter’s badge moulded into the glass so they’re not brought in temporarily from somewhere else.
It would be a shame if the elliptical bottles disappeared.
Firkin Dogbolter
Jul 7th, 2009 |
Firkin Dogbolter Pump Clip
Originally the page was a rant about how Bass/Punch Taverns had taken over the chain from Allied Lyons (later Allied Lyons) in 1999 and had closed all the breweries – thus spoiling at a stroke the unique nature of many of the establishments. Many of the pubs became O’Neills pubs – pretend Irish pubs. I subsequently updated the page a couple of times with further facts about the takeover, and then after a while forgot about it.
However, whenever I used to check the hit counter for my pages I almost always found that the Firkin page was by far the most popular page on the site – with many people using ‘Dogbolter’ as the search word that brings them to the page on my site.
Something I have just found out however is that Dogbolter lives on! The Ramsgate Brewery of er… Broadstairs produces a bottled beer called Gadds’ Faithful Dogbolter Porter which is a good copy of the original Bruce’s beer. You can read more on the Gadds’ Beer Shop blog and also enthusiastically reviewed on the Boak and Bailey’s beer blog.
I’d love to be able to taste some of that – Dogbolter was the highlight of any trip to a Firkin pub. Being quite strong though it did tend to monkey about with one’s head…
If you want to read more about the history of the Firkin chain you could have a look at my Firkin page (now relocated into the Good Beer, Good Pubs articles section) or check out Wikipedia.