Risen from the grave: beers Watney killed are restored to their Northampton home

After a gap of 40 years, famous names in brewing have returned to Northampton. It’s a town with a long and proud tradition of beer-making – a tradition cruelly destroyed in the 1970s by the giant London brewer Watney.

But now the revered names of Phipps and Northampton Brewery Company have been restored, with their beers brewed just yards from the site on Bridge Street where they once stood cheek by jowl. They were fierce competitors until they merged in 1957 and became tempting prey for an acquisitive London brewer seeking national coverage for its new keg beers.

Bridge Street is now the home of the Carlsberg factory whose steel silos and storage vessels produce a beverage far removed from the celebrated pale ales and stouts of the former occupants.

The beers are being brewed again in yet another old brewery, the Albion on Kingswell Road. Alaric Neville, Northampton born and bred, had long nurtured a passion to bring the names and beers of Phipps and the Northampton Brewery Company back to the town. His beers were first brewed at the Grainstore Brewery in Oakham but in 2014 he was able to move into part of the old Albion Brewery and develop their true taste with the aid of the local water.

The reason why so many breweries were built in the area was the king’s well that gives its name to the street and still delivers fine “brewing liquor” from its limestone base. Carlsberg uses the same source and the water would have been used to supply ale to the monarch of the day when he or she stayed in Northampton Castle centuries ago.

Phipps dates from 1801 when Pickering Phipps started to brew in Towcester. In 1817 he opened a second plant on Bridge Street, Northampton, and found himself under intense competition when the Phillips Brothers started a brewery next door in 1857. Phillips eventually changed its name to the Northampton Brewery Company and adopted a star logo to emphasise the clarity and sparkle of its pale ales modelled on the new beers from Burton-on-Trent.

Phipps had concentrated on darker beers of the porter and stout style but was forced to introduce pale ale and IPA as a result of the popularity of the NBC beers. But it kept a foothold in the dark beer market when it bought the Ratliffe & Jeffery Albion Brewery in 1899. It closed Albion a few years later but continued to produce Ratliffe’s Celebrated Stout.

The merger of Phipps and NBC in 1957 was an example of the brewing real politik of the times. Large regional brewers were merging to form national giants and the two Northampton companies thought they would be safer if they joined forces. But the new Phipps NBC had a combined pub estate of 1,131 that sold beer as far east as Peterborough, west to Warwick and Redditch, and south to the fringe of London in St Albans. It was a tempting morsel for the vulture that was Watney, which had merged with a famous East London brewer, Mann Crossman & Paulin, to form Watney Mann.

At the height of the 19^th century’s craze for Burton pale ale, Mann’s had opened a second brewery there – now Marston’s – and had built a sizeable estate of pubs in the East Midlands. Watney needed additional brewing capacity and pubs to achieve its ambition of flooding the beer market with keg beer. Unlike the cask ales brewed by the likes of Phipps and NBC, keg beers were filtered and pasteurised, served by gas pressure and remained in drinkable condition for months rather than days.

Its main brands were Watneys Special – it wasn’t – and the ubiquitous Red Barrel, massively advertised on television and hoardings throughout the country.

In 1959 the M1 motorway opened and offered a fast route to the Midlands and eventually to Yorkshire, meaning beer could be moved around at greater speed. A year later Watney Mann pounced and made a bid for Phipps NBC: Watneys had a war chest of £22 million while the Northampton company was worth £5 million. It was not a marriage of equals and Watney quickly showed its true aims when Red Barrel started to be brewed in Northampton by March 1960.

At the time of the takeover, the Phipps chairman, Colonel Jones, declared “there would still remain a high degree of local independence in the running of the business in Northampton. We are also particularly glad that this type of amalgamation will ensure the continuation of our own beers.”  The words had scarcely left his lips when Watney killed off the premium beer Gold Star Export Pale Ale. Phipps barley wine, Stingo No 10, followed suit and was replaced by Watneys Stingo.

Worse was to follow. In 1968, the historic names of Phipps and NBC disappeared when the company was rebranded Watney Mann (Midland). At the time of the takeover Watney Mann had promised that “Our first concern is that the identities of the companies should be retained. Those who have palates for Phipps or NBC beer need have no fears that either will disappear, there will be no rationalisation in that sense.”

But within just a few years, all the much-loved Northampton beers were axed and were replaced by Watney and Manns keg beers. Watney became even more aggressive when it 1972 it became part of the leisure group Grand Metropolitan where it joined forces with another great London brewer to form GrandMet’s brewing division, Watney Mann & Truman.

Rationalisation was a key GrandMet aim along with a desperate need to jump on the fast-moving lager bandwagon. Watney had been slow off the mark where lager was concerned, allowing Bass and Heineken to corner the new lucrative sector with Carling Black Label and Heineken.

GrandMet moved quickly and signed a deal with Carlsberg to supply its pubs with the Danish lager. As a result, the last Phipps beer, Stein Lager, was dropped. The writing was on the wall: in July 1970 GrandMet and Carlsberg announced a joint project to rebuild Bridge Street as a lager facility. Not only had the names Phipps and NBC disappeared but now no ale would be brewed on the site. By the mid-1970s both breweries had been demolished (above) to make way for the Carlsberg behemoth.

Alaric Neville calls the period between 1974 and 2004 the “dry years”. He’s an archaeologist but his brother Quentin Neville had worked for Scottish & Newcastle’s pubs division: S&N had acquired the former GrandMet pubs following the fall-out from the government’s Beer Orders in the early 1990s. Quentin obtained the rights to the Phipps and NBC names and brands from S&N and in 2008, following four years of diligent research into old recipe books, Phipps IPA reappeared with Alaric at the helm.

Fortunately for the Neville brothers, there was no shortage of brewing experience to help them. Dusty Miller was head brewer at Phipps and transferred to Carlsberg but he swiftly moved on to Ruddles in Leicestershire. When Ruddles was swept up in the Watney’s cow catcher, Dusty helped Ruddle’s brewer Tony Davis launch the Grainstore Brewery in nearby Oakham and they brought their expertise to bear on the revived beers.

Further input came from Pat Heron who had joined NBC in 1954, following in his father’s footsteps. Pat became head brewer and, following the closure of the Bridge Street breweries, he moved to Hall & Woodhouse in Dorset. He advised on the new Phipps NBC beers and brought with him old brewing books dating back to the 19^th century. The true taste was aided when Alaric was able to source the original Phipps and NBC yeast strains from the National Collection of Yeast Cultures in Norwich.

The first beer to be brought back was Phipps IPA (4.3%), first brewed in the 19^th century. It was stronger then but was reduced in World War One. The revived beer was based on an authentic 1930s recipe and is brewed with pale malt and Fuggles and Goldings hops. It was followed by Ratliffe’s Celebrated Stout, also 4.3% and brewed with crystal and roasted malts. Red Star, a 3.8% bitter, was a former NBC beer and its recreation was overseen by the eagle eye of Pat Heron. The return of the 5.2% Gold Star Export Pale Ale restores the first beer killed by the Watney axemen.

The beers sold well but Alaric Neville was determined to bring them back to Northampton. His dream became reality in January 2014 when part of the old Albion Brewery became available. Months of work followed to install new brewing kit and to make the building fit for brewing again – since its closure it had been used both as a tannery and a lemonade factory. A 20-barrel plant was built by Johnson of Bury in Lancashire who – fortuitously – had also created the kit for two other revivalist breweries, Lacon’s in Great Yarmouth and Truman in East London.

The plant is now going full bore. Alaric has four full time staff and two part time. Key people include brewery manager Mel Tudno-Jones and brewer John Smith – a name with a certain resonance in brewing circles.

Hoggleys Brewery, originally based in Litchborough, has moved into the Albion site and brewer Roy Crutchley uses the plant to brew his range of beers (above John Smith on the left with Roy Crutchley). Four fermenting vessels are not sufficient to cope with the demand for all the beers and more are on order, while Alaric is excited by the news that an original Phipps mash tun will move back to Northampton from Hall & Woodhouse.

The only blip has been caused by the original Phipps and NBC yeast cultures, developed for open fermenters, have not transferred well to closed conical vessels at the Albion. Alaric says the beers tasted fine but were unacceptably cloudy. A proprietary yeast is being used while the originals strains are analysed to see if they can be adapted for modern use.

The beers can be enjoyed in a pop-up bar at the front of the brewing hall. There are plans to turn this into a fully-fledged pub, the Albion, during 2015. Some of the beers can also be sampled from time to time in the Malt Shovel (below), the famous pub that now stands opposite Carlsberg but was once the NBC brewery tap.

The Malt Shovel, decorated with old Phipps and NBC memorabilia, is a favourite watering hole for Carlsberg workers. 

What happened to Watney

By the time Watney Mann & Truman disappeared it had left a bone yard full of closed breweries: Manns in Whitechapel, Crowleys in Alton, Hampshire, Tamplins in Brighton, Drybrough in Edinburgh, Wilsons in Manchester, Beverley Brothers in Wakefield, and three breweries in Norwich, Bullard, Morgan and Steward & Patteson, along with Phipps and NBC. Watney’s own London brewery at Mortlake now brews “American” Budweiser but is due to close.

A Monopolies & Mergers Commission report into the brewing industry in 1989 led to the Thatcher government’s Beer Orders that instructed the country’s big brewers to turn a proportion of their pubs into free houses, offering beers from smaller producers. Rather than comply, Watney sold its breweries to Courage in return for Courage’s pubs, putting both companies outside the terms of the Beer Orders.

GrandMet merged with Guinness to form the global drinks group Diageo. Courage was bought by Scottish & Newcastle, which in turn was bought by Heineken. Most of the former Watney’s pubs were sold to the Japanese bankers Nomura. The pub company was first called Inntrepreneur but was renamed Unique. It was eventually sold to Britain’s biggest pubco, Enterprise Inns.