Courage in the 1970s

I have very mixed feelings about Courage. Having ended up owning both of my hometown of Newark’s brewers, they owned almost all the pubs. All but one of which sold no cask beer. On the other hand, they brewed Russian Stout.

On the other hand, my first job after school was working in their Newark plant, the former Holes brewery. Filling kegs. It was so much fun. Not really. It was very heavy work. Which my 18-year-old body could cope with. Then there was all that free beer.

In the North and Midlands, Courage produced no cask beer at either their Tadcaster or Newark breweries. Drinkers in the South were luckier, with the London and Bristol plants producing some cask. Though Worton Grange, the replacement for the former Simmonds brewery in Reading, produced only keg beer.


London
Horselydown, the original Courage brewery on the South bank of the Thames opposite the Tower of London, was open all through the 1970s, not closing until 1982.

It produced at least some cask right up until its closure. Though it wasn’t always easy to tell which of their breweries the beer had been brewed in.

Reading
The former Simonds brewery in Reading was one of the constituent parts of the original group, Courage Barclay Simonds.

Having a good reputation for their beer, there was quite a bit of consumer resistance to its closure, orchestrated by CAMRA. Of course, this had no effect on the decision to close it.

Worton Grange
The replacement for Reading was a massive brewery, with a capacity of six million barrels. Designed as a keg beer plant, it never brewed any cask beer. It was never greatly loved and closed in 2010.

It was one of the megakeggeries built in the 1970s when brewers assumed that beer consumption would continue to rise and that extra capacity would be needed. When consumption started to fall in the 1980s, the industry was left with considerable overcapacity.

Bristol
The former George’s plant in Bristol had a long history and a good reputation. After the closure of Reading, it became home of Courage Bitter and Directors.

It was founded in 1781 and had grown to a decent size. When Courage bought it in 1961 it had almost 1,000 tied houses, which would have made it one of the largest independent brewers. It finally closed in 1999.

I’m pretty sure that I drank both Courage Bitter and Directors which had been brewed in Bristol. Perfectly serviceable beers, if not particularly exciting by that date.

Newark
The former Holes plant has a special place in my memories, being the only brewery I’ve ever been employed in.

Bought by Courage in 1967, it continued in much the same way as before. Except that, as the other Newark brewery (Warwick & Richardson) had also ended up in the hands of Courage and been closed, they went from serving half the pubs in Newark to virtually all of them.

It continued to brew the former Holes beers such as AK and Mild. But also brewed one Warwick & Richardson beer, IPA. One thing had changed, however: none of the beer was cask. It was all bright beer, filled into 50 and 100 litre kegs and served by electric diaphragm pump.

The beers weren’t terrible, not being heavily pasteurised. Definitely better than keg beer. But not a patch on decently-kept cask.

Fellow Newark exile John Clarke recalls of Holes AK:

After Holes had been closed I went on a CAMRA trip to Simpkiss whose head brewer at the time was the former head brewer at Holes up to closure. He told us that AK was only very rough filtered, so rough in fact that it was sometimes sold under its own pressure. How true that is, I don't know, but I definitely recall him telling me that.

Tadcaster
The former John Smiths brewery is the only Courage plant still in operation. In the early 1970s they phased out cask beer. And didn’t brew any again until the early 1980s. Which was frustrating, because, in cask form, their beer was pretty decent.

The Bitter was quite dark, dry and reasonably Bitter. Magnet was similar, but stronger. For a while, quite a few Courage pubs in Newark had cask again. And fairly good cask. Then John Smiths Smooth came along and fucked everything up again.

Barnsley
A much-beloved brewery, famous for its Bitter. Which was the first good beer I ever tasted. Having taken over Warwick & Richardson before being gobbled up themselves by John Smith.

A few pubs in Newark still served Barnsley Bitter when I started drinking in the early 1970s. But, as the Barnsley brewery was scheduled for closure, most had swapped over to beer from Newark.

When the brewery closed in 1976, only one pub in Newark, the Wing Tavern, was still selling Barnsley Bitter.

Plymouth
This was one of Courage’s latest acquisitions, happening in December 1970. The brewery soldiered on for a reasonable length of time, not closing until 1983.

I remember coming across their beer at the Great British Beer Festival. They were unusual in using cast iron casks which weighed an absolute ton. Heavy, their Mild, was top class.