Three Whitbread breweries today. One in Yorkshire, which I can remember being driven past, but which closed just a couple of years befrore I moved to Leeds. It was always weird to me how few pubs Whitbread had in Leeds, given that they owned two substantial breweries in the city.
Briskwoods, I heard, was decent stuff. Though I, sadly, never got down to the South Coast to drink it. Campbell, Hope & King, on the other hand, closed too early for me to ever have a chance of trying.
Bentley's Yorkshire Breweries
Woodlesford, Leeds,
West Yorkshire.
Founded: 1829
Closed: 1972
Tied houses: 380
Bought 1968.
Brickwood
Portsmouth,
Hampshire.
Founded: 1851
Closed: 1983
Tied houses: 675
Bought in 1971. I never tried their beer, as its distribution area was too far south for me.
| beer | style | format | OG | description |
| Pompey Royal | Pale Ale | draught | 1046.9 | full-bodied, well hopped |
| Trophy | Pale Ale | draught | 1037.8 | pleasant, well-balanced |
| Mild | Mild | draught | 1031.5 | dark, pleasant |
| Sunshine | Light Ale | bottled | ||
| Brown Ale | Brown Ale | bottled |
Campbell, Hope & King
Edinburgh,
Scotland
Founded: 1710
Closed: 1970
Tied houses: 73
Bought 1967. And closed almost immediately.
If more of you bought it, I wouldn't have to keep plugging of my latest book, "Keg!". From which this is an excerpt.
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7 comments:
As a teenager in the late eighties, Whitbread Trophy was by far the beer I drank most of, on draught at my local pub and in cans and bottles at home. It seems to have transitioned from a number of rebadged cask bitters when Whitbread took over smaller breweries to being a single national keg brand, after they shut them and consolidated production in their own plants I suppose.
Pompey Royal was a lovely beer. Drank quite a bit of it when I was working near Southampton.
I have though about all those small British breweries with tied houses being scooped up by the national brewers. At least they had something of value to sell, the tied houses. In the US, almost all the smaller brewers just closed up, with nothing of value to salvage but a marginal brand name. The US antitrust authorities also killed deals where midsized regionall brewers tried to sell to larger rivals. That did nothing to reduce concentration.
Wasn’t Trophy different brewery to brewery?
Oscar
Oscar, yes Trophy was from their local breweries, It was a renamed bitter from each brewery but marketed as a national brand.
In Newcastle there was a rare Whitbread pub opposite the old Marlborough Crescent bus station which was popular with passengers and even had a clear glass pane so you could look out to see if your bus was in.
I really liked the Trophy, actually preferred it to Newcastle Exhibition. I think it must have come from the Castle Eden brewery.
However out of area at Alston the Trophy was crap, I think it came from Duttons in Blackburn over the other side of the Pennines.
Funny that they thought people would think very different bitters could all be the same.
Oscar
At least something tried to be done. In Ireland nobody stopped monopolisation.
Oscar
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