Legendary publican calls 'time' at Derby's famous railway tavern and microbrewery

Graham Yates retired last week from the Brunswick Inn in Derby. Publicans call it a day on a regular basis but Yates was no ordinary publican and the Brunswick is no ordinary inn.

Running a pub is a demanding enough job but Yates also brewed on the premises. As I discovered a few years ago, when he invited me to join him as “brewer for the day”, you ache in every sinew after long hours of humping sacks of malt and hops.

When we’d finished, I went home to bed. Graham Yates went back behind the bar and put in another long stint, pulling pints and chatting to the regulars.

The Brunswick is one of Britain’s great pubs. It’s marvellously accessible, just a couple of hundred yards from Derby train station. The pub is rooted in the city’s railway history and heritage. It’s an oddly-shaped, triangular red-brick building that stands at the end of a terrace of cottages. The site – houses and pub -- was built in the 1840s as homes for railway workers by the Midland Railway.

A top architect of the time, Francis Thompson, was hired to design cottages fit for railway employees, and they came with their own inn at the end of the block.

Following World War Two the pub was sold to the Nottingham brewer Hardys & Hansons but it went into decline as the surrounding cottages were either sold off or became derelict.

The Victorian philanthropic project was saved in the 1980s by Derby Civic Society, which restored the houses and inn, and had the entire site Grade II listed. In 1987 Trevor Harris, a licensee from Mickleover, took over the Brunswick and lavished love and care on the pub. In 1991 he added a 10-barrel brewery at the back of the building, using water from natural bore holes on the site.

The Brunswick quickly gained a fine reputation for its ales, served in the unique atmosphere of a pub that’s like a warm and friendly parlour. It has open fires, wood-panelled walls, a large bar sporting 15 handpumps, and several separate rooms and snugs off the main corridor. It’s decked out with railway memorabilia from the age of steam.

When Harris decided to move on and open the bigger Derby Brewing Company, the Brunswick was bought by Everards of Leicester, which installed Graham Yates. He’d never brewed before but had long experience of the industry and the pub trade.

Yates is from Birmingham and in1968 joined the local brewery Ansells as a laboratory technician. Ansells became part of the national Allied Breweries group and when the Birmingham site closed Yates was moved around the country, working at Wrexham Brewery and then Ind Coope in both Burton and Romford.

In 1986 he joined Everards and went on the road, sorting out beer quality. The unofficial slogan in the brewery’s trading estate, Yates says, was “nice pubs, pity about the beer. Bitter was brewed for Everards by Whitbread in Samlesbury and it tasted like water. Tiger was brewed in Everards’ other brewery in Burton and was never bright and usually full of bacteria.”

When a new managing director, Nick Lloyd, took over, he worked hard with Yates to improve beer quality. Tiger was brought back to Leicester, Beacon was launched as a premium bitter and the company’s reputation soared.

“I had a holiday booked in Turkey in 2002 but two days before I was due to leave I got a call from Everards asking me if I’d like to run a pub in Derby they’d just bought. I said ‘No way’ but I changed my mind when they said it had its own brewery.

“I’d never been a brewer or a licensee before. I spent a day with Trevor Harris and then took over and found he’d taken the hydrometer [that measures the gravity of beer] with him!”

The range of beers at the Brunswick is phenomenal: three milds, a porter, the best-selling Triple Hop, a premium bitter called Old Accidental, many occasional brews and anything Yates felt like making. The acclaim for the beers is such that they’re sold in other pubs in the area.

He took on a local chef, Ralph Edge, who was keen to match beer and food. The result was such lunchtime dishes as pork fillet with Stilton, leek and walnut sauce with Old Accidental, Gressingham duck breast with Porter and mushroom sauce, and tomato fettucine with pancetta and Railway Porter. Beer-and-food dinners were staged in a large upstairs room.

Now, after close to 11 years of hard, daily grind, Yates has finally hung up his brewing boots. He’ll spend more time fishing but, as he now lives in Derby, will regularly prop up the bar of the Brunswick “unless they bar me.”

If you’ve never been to the Brunswick, make the trip and fall in love with this wonderful old inn. If there’s a jovial chap at the bar with a Brummie accent, buy him a pint. You’ll get change from £2.50.

*Pictures by Cath Harries

First published in the Publican’s Morning Advertiser, 9 April 2013