Fully illustrated with stunning photographs of dray horses, coopers and grand Victorian architecture, an elegy for the loss of so many of our classic homes of beer.
The latest is Tetley’s in Leeds: by the end of this year the classic Yorkshire beer will no longer be brewed in the county, but rather in Wolverhampton, and its historic brewery in the city will have closed. But Britain’s classic breweries have been closing since the sixties, usually taking their much-loved and flavoursome beers with them.
Now, Chris Arnot visits thirty towns and cities where the historic brewery has gone, from Sunderland and Vaux in the north-east to Brighton and Tamplin’s on the south coast, and London, where the closure of Truman’s, Whitbread, Mann’s Courage and many others has left the capital with just one major brewery, and finds out from those who used to brew the beers, and those who drank them, how much was lost. This is a story of more than the disappearance of Tolly Cobbold bitter or King & Barnes’ winter ale: all too often it is part of the heart of a town like Ipswich or Nottingham dying with the brewery – something no microbrewery’s resurrection of a hallowed ale can ever restore.