O Caledonia

Heineken is to shut the Caledonian Brewery in Edinburgh, leaving the Scottish capital without a large brewery for the first time since the eighteenth century (a host of English cities are in the same position, including Birmingham, Leeds, Newcastle and Nottingham, and London might ultimately join them following the Asahi takeover of Fuller's). 

Founded in 1869 by George Lorimer and Robert Clark, Caledonian has passed through a number of hands since, being acquired by Sunderland's now defunct Vaux Brewery in 1939 and Scottish and Newcastle in 2004, not long before S&N were themselves taken over by the Dutch megabrewer Heineken in 2008.

As part of the S&N/Heineken portfolio, Caledonian's Deuchars IPA became a nationally distributed brand - at one point, it seemed to be on the bar of every Wetherspoons pub you went in - and still ranks in the top ten cask beers by sales.

Caledonian beers will now be contract brewed at the Greene King-owned Belhaven Brewery in Dunbar, although I wouldn't be surprised if, like Manchester's Boddingtons Bitter, they eventually embark on an odyssey of multinational breweries where once famous regional beers eke out a strange half life in keg or cask form.

Only Connect

Since the start of the first lockdown in the spring of 2020, I've contributed a few bits and pieces to a local history website. One of the things that has emerged from the discussions on the Facebook page related to it is the link between farming in the area and the Stockport brewery Robinson's.

William Robinson was born in Northenden, then a farming village on the southern bank of the Mersey in north Cheshire, in 1800. In 1838, he bought the Unicorn Inn, built on Lower Hillgate, Stockport, in 1722, which he'd been landlord of since 1826. He left the pub in the hands of his son George in the mid eighteen forties, after the death of his first wife, remarried and moved to High Grove Farm in Heald Green, where he owned 41 acres (see the 1841 tithe map and 1851 census below). George brewed the first Robinson's beer in the backyard of the Unicorn in 1849 and became the licensee in 1850, relinquishing it in 1859 when his younger brother Frederic took over. The pub closed at the end of 1935 and was then demolished to make way for an extension of the brewery, with a plaque now marking the spot on the wall of the brewery yard (let's hope it survives the upcoming sale of the site when brewing moves to Robinson's bottling and canning plant in Bredbury).

There is still a Robinson's Farm in the Heald Green area, although I don't know if it's linked to the William Robinson who started the Stockport pub and brewing company in the late eighteen thirties and farmed here in the eighteen forties and fifties.  I suppose we shouldn't be surprised by the connection between farming and brewing given that the process begins by mashing malted barley.

Census returns from The History of Robinson's Brewery by Dr Lynn F. Pearson, 1997

(S)pot the difference

A photo popped up yesterday in an online Manchester history group I belong to of a mustard pot almost certainly connected to the large community of German cotton merchants and factory owners that flourished in the city in the nineteenth century, the best known of whom was Marx's pal/financer Friedrich Engels (the foundations of the Albert Club, Chorlton-on-Medlock, named after the German prince who married Queen Victoria, where he drank Pilsner beer with other emigrés in between riding to hounds with the Cheshire Hunt, were discovered in the course of building works a few years ago).

As you can see from the images below, it's pretty similar in shape to the one I snapped the last time I was in the Rhineland in 2015 in Brauerei Schumacher near Düsseldorf's central station (the pub where I finally got to drink a glass of Altbier on my first trip there in 2009).