Breweries of Lewes – a historic tour with Miles Jenner

Ale and Hearty organised this one, to start at the Swan in Southover at 10am.  Free coffee and food, meeting some friends I’d expected and some I didn’t know would be there.  Miles – Head brewer at Harvey’s Brewery – decided to do a lot of intro in the pub as the sun was beating down and he felt we’d be dropping like flies if he kept us in the sun too long.

Miles Jenner in full flow at the Swan

He told us that at one time every town would have one or more breweries and malt houses to supply them with malted barley.  Water was often unfit to drink, beer had been boiled, and contained hops which have an antiseptic value (as well as a bittering one) so was safer.  Brewing was also seasonal, being easier to cool without possible infection in spring and autumn than in summer when many wild yeasts and bacteria would be in the air.  Brewing had originally been a domestic activity, but in towns busy entrepreneurs often saw a business opportunity.  In Lewes many brewers were from non-conformist families.  Baptists in the case of the Verralls who established a brewery opposite the Swan in the 1780s, and Quakers in the case of the Rickmans who opened the Bear Brewery beside the Ouse in Clifton in 1766.  Being a seasonal activity, owning a brewery was usually just one enterprise of several – owning and running the malt house, and perhaps farming to grow the malt and hops, were common additional enterprises.  One Lewes brewer was also a shipwright – harder to see the link there.

Verralls Malthouse (or maltings) in Cluny St. Notice the remaining vent for the drying fires, at the top right.

Brewers who became wealthy became interested in politics.  many supported the campaigns which resulted in the 1832 Reform Act, which gave the vote to merchants and other upper middle classes.  Miles told a fine story about a fund-raising dinner held just before the Act, during which songs were sung in praise of local brewery owners and their beers.  The government then like now, was keen to move people away from strong drink (spirits) and towards beers.  One way they encouraged this was to pass several Beer House Acts.  These pubs could only sell beer – no spirits.  Brewers were quick to see an advantage and bought property to open as beer houses.  They installed leasehold landlords to run the pubs, selling only the brewer’s products.  Such beer houses were never intended to be a sole source of income to the family running them, said Miles, and he thinks its that failure of understanding which is seeing so many pubs closing now.

RANT WARNING: Of course it might be the very high prices charged for beer and other drinks by pub-holding companies which don’t even brew.  This extra layer of profit-taking by essentially non-productive (parasitic?) organisations such as Enterprise and Punch is probably a key reason pubs are closing. End of rant.

Successful brewers tended to drift away from their non-conformist roots over generations, and become pillars of the community.  They also left the brewing to brewers, and adopted a more aristocratic lifestyle.  The Verralls ended up owning Southover Manor and by 1897 sold the brewery to Page and Overton, brewers of Croydon, complete with 35 tied houses.  The brewery was demolished in 1905.  At the end of the 19th century there were 7 breweries in Lewes and 70 pubs, now its just Harvey’s brewery and about 20 to 30 pubs.

Page and Overton’s rather pleasing terra cotta sign on the Brewer’s Arms, High Street

In 1830 Morris’s Brewery opened on the corner of Bell Lane and Southover High Street (also opposite the Swan).  It was sold and became Ballard’s in 1876.  By the 1890s they owner 41 pubs and when it was sold to Page and Overton in the 1920s it came with 71 tied houses.  It was the tied houses that the breweries sought in these take-overs.  They usually closed the acquired brewery and sold the site, whilst adding the tied houses to their own collection.

On the north side of Lewes Castle barbican there used to be a pub which brewed its own beer.  Over time the brewing side expanded, and the owners went into malting as well.  the also built themselves a grand house opposite the pub.  The house still stands, as does the malt house, but the pub and brewery have gone, though Miles did show us a bit of derelict flint wall below the house, off Castle Ditch Lane which may be all that remains of the brewery buildings.

This grand house was built with profits from the Castle brewery, which was behind the house. Nothing significant of it remains today.

Walking round to the Lewes Arms we looked at the Star Lane Brewery buildings.

Star Lane Brewery – home of Beards. Note the sack hoist for taking in the malted barley.

This was a working brewery from the 1740s, and was Beard’s Brewery from 1845.  Beard’s had its own malt house just to the north – Mount Pleasant way I think – which still exists and has some big timbers said Miles, but I failed to note its current function or address, sorry.  But Beard’s must have been expanding at some point because it bought the malt house belonging to the Castle Brewery, which is handily right beside the Star brewery.  When George Beard died in 1958 it was agreed that Harvey’s would brew beer for Beard’s and the old Star brewery closed.

Castle brewery maltings – note the rounded end which would have contained the drying room where fires would direct warm air up through the damp sprouted barley spread out on the drying floors

Beard’s kept its tied houses until 1998, when they were sold to Greene King – which resulted in difficulties in 2006/7 when Greene King decided to stop selling Harvey’s beer in the Lewes Arms.

Then we walked over to Cliffe to spot the brewery and malt house of The Southdown Brewery (est. 1838).

The end of the Southdown Brewery building.

The frontage of this brewery is still visible down Thomas Street, but not for much longer I fear, as it is all fenced off and felt like a development site.

Frontage of the Southdown Brewery in Thomas Street

By 1874 it had 21 tied houses, and 28 in 1888.  Augustus and Thomas Manning bought the brewery in 1895, as well as the Dashwood’s brewery in East Grinstead.  They renamed this business The Southdown and East Grinstead Breweries, and went on to add Edward Monk’s Bear Brewery (beside the Ouse just beyond Harvey’s brewery tap in Bear Lane, as well as breweries in Cuckfield and Crawley.  The business went into a decline in the early 20th century, and the two working breweries of the company name, complete with 100 tied houses were bought by the Brighton brewery, Tamplin’s, in 1920 for £274,000.

Southdown Brewery malthouse

This was good for Harvey’s because they got the head brewer from the Southdown brewery, complete with his book of recipes.  Harvey’s had been having a bad time, and the arrival of Dai Evans was the start of 20 years of stability for the brewery.  The malt house went on malting barley until 1964.  Miles told us how he visited the malt house and was most impressed by the sight of the maltsters frying bacon and eggs on shovels over the flames in the drying oven.

From the forecourt of a petrol station Miles quickly told us about the South Malling Steam Brewery, for which no buildings remain, but there is a small excavation into the chalk cliff behind the Pets Corner car park on Malling Street which was part of the brewery.  Originally the Cliffe Brewery and Maltings it was sold in 1866 to Alex Elmsley, who saw it burn down soon after.  Fortunately it was fully insured so the Steam Brewery rose from the ashes, as did a fine house (Coombe Villa – still there today) for Alex.  In the 1920s it became a soft drinks firm called Philips.

Coombe Villa – built for Alex Elmsley of the South Malling Steam Brewery

Before adjourning to Harvey’s Brewery to sample a few beers Miles took us to Bear Lane (outside the John Harvey Tavern) to point out the one surviving gate post (brick and stone) which marks the entrance of the Bear Brewery, established by the Rickman family in 1766, and finally bought by the Southdown and East Grinstead Brewery and closed down in 1897.

One gatepost – all that remains of the Bear Brewery (also known as Monk’s Brewery).

John Harvey, a wine and spirit merchant from London, learnt how to brew beer at the Bear Brewery, and brewed beers there on a seasonal basis from about 1820 to 1840.   In 1838 he was able to buy the wharf behind his wine and spirits shop to establish his own 8 quarter brewery.  Eight quarters is 2 hundredweight in old British units, and that is 224 pounds (lb.) or about 100 kilograms, and I guess that is the amount of grain in a single mash and fermentation.  A small brewery by modern standards, I think it would make about 200 gallons of an easy drinking beer in a single batch.

Just down the lane beside the Gardener’s Arms you will find some homes converted from the Bear Brewery malt house.

Once the maltings for the Bear Brewery, now converted to housing.