The idea was that the whole of England and Wales would be served by just two breweries: Cape Hill and Runcorn. Beer brewed in Runcorn would be shipped by train to a depot in Stratford, East London. The train would later return to Runcorn with empties.
It was a personal project of H Alan Walker, chairman and chief executive of Bass Charrington. A man with, to put it mildly, a rather autocratic management style. Despite many in the company having misgivings about the plans, no dissent was allowed. The chairman made it very clear than anyone raising objections would be sacked.
After some delays, the brewery opened in 1974. With all the company’s breweries in Lancashire closing as well as the Charrington brewery in Mile End to make way for it. For some reason, the packaging plant was built far away from the brew house meaning beer had to be moved between the two through a very long pipe. Not exactly an efficient way of operating.
At the time, Bass Charrington was weirdly keen on having most of the brewing kit outdoors. Not just conical fermenters, but even the brewhouse itself. Something they had already done at Tennent’s Wellpark Brewery in Glasgow.
As soon as the brewery opened, it ran into problems. On the one hand, it struggled to replicate the beers from the existing breweries. And on the other, it had terrible industrial relations, leading to repeated strikes.
CAMRA weren’t great fans, as the brewery produced no cask beer. And had entailed the closure of a string of regional breweries: Barrow, Blackpool, Burnley, Liverpool, Manchester, Aberbeeg, Fernvale and Mile End. It left the group with no brewery further south than Birmingham.
Eventually, they did manage to sort out the problems at the brewery, albeit too late:
"The beer was improved by rebuilding the brewery along orthodox lines, and the beer became acceptable for what it was, and not a pretence of being something else. Just as everything was going quite well the depression in the brewery trade descended, and there was too much brewing and canning capacity."
"The Brewing Industry 1950 - 1990", by Anthony Avis, 1997, page 109.
The brewery closed in 1993. Fewer than 20 years after first coming onstream.
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4 comments:
There's a Bass promotional film from the seventies in the British Film Institute collection Roll Out the Barrel in which the management team take a rather bemused looking young French guy from a wine company they deal with up in a plane to see the new Runcorn brewery from the air, and serve him a can of their lager in a plastic cup.
I think Bass Charrington still had the Hancock's brewery in Cardiff which was still operating in 2000 as far as I know.
Britain is compact enough to make feasible a single brewery serving all areas. If brewers had implemented more flexible (and traditional) brewing methods, the packaging economies would still have been attractive.
In the US in the 60s and 70s, new brewing methods were less accepted, possibly because the existing ones were already fairly industrial and efficient. Packaging saving was the primary driver of centralization. Cost of returning bottles and kegs was a minor consideration by then. However, Schlitz implemented accelerated aging, which possibly contributed to their sharp slide. And Carling built at least one continuous fermentation facility, but that didn't last. Some effort was made to maintain standards. When Stroh purchased the almost-new Schaefer brewery, they added a new copper brewhouse to duplicate the "fire-brewing" used in Detroit. Now with the proliferation of styles in the US, ABInbev has modified their NH brewery to produce a wider variety of styles in smaller batches.
So the beer equivalent of British Leyland.
Oscar
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