“I’m from Burton-on-Trent,” said Emma on our first date, almost seven years ago, and I still remember the unexpected thrill of those words.
Burton-on-Trent. The most famous brewing town in Britain, and once the beer capital of the world. That simple sentence recalled all the history and lore I’d read about the place. I knew that the town’s geological and geographical location enabled its singular success. Burton was built upon layers of gypsum, and its hard, mineral-heavy water yielded exceptional Ales. Its water helped in another way, too. Though it is one of the most inland towns in England, miles from the sea, Burton has extensive canal and river connections that link it to the country’s major rivers and ports, and which gave it early access to the world.
The town’s first exports were dark Ales to the Baltic ports, but the fortune of Burton changed when it started to brew Pale Ales, including the beers that would become known as India Pale Ales. In 1822, the year Samuel Allsopp & Sons brewed its first beer for Indian export, Burton had five breweries, totaling some 10,000 barrels. By contrast, London’s brewers collectively made 1.5 million BBLs. But by the 1880s, following decades of remarkable growth (aided by the growing national railway network), Burton would be brewing twice the volume of London, and more beer than any other town or city in the world.
In its heyday, Burton was a bona fide “Beer Metropolis” which “has reached a point which has no parallel in the world,” wrote Alfred Barnard, a brewery historian, who described red-brick brewery buildings “as big as the Houses of Parliament.”
That’s hardly hyperbole—the Victorian scale of its industry was awesome. Bass, then the world’s largest brewer, had three breweries in town, with 28 coppers, 24 teak mash tuns, and 5,000 4-BBL casks in its Burton Union fermentation system. It used 60 tons of hops a week, and brewed 1 million BBLs a year. Beyond Bass, the town had over 100 malthouses and 30 other breweries (seven of them made over 100,000 BBLs annually), employing over 8,000 people who could drink in more than 150 pubs. All of this was packed into little more than a square mile.
This past is beyond meaningful comprehension or analogy today, especially when you walk through its quiet town center and see what little remains. And yet, whenever I’m back in Burton with Emma, I feel more drawn in, my curiosity taking on definition and color like a Polaroid mid-shake. But as more of Burton is revealed to me, I’ve also come to realize how much the town is a place of memories, and that even those memories are now disappearing.
Today, Burton is a name that’s mostly spoken in the past tense. People don’t visit like they would Munich, Brussels, or Prague. Many locals have little knowledge or appreciation of its history, and most no longer have a family or emotional connection to Burton beer.
But there are still those who do. The Burton I want to know is the one remembered by the people who lived and worked there for their whole lives, while they’re still able to tell their stories.
“When we were younger, if you went anywhere and people said, ‘Where do you come from,’ if we said, ‘Burton-on-Trent,’ everybody said, ‘Ooh, that’s where the beer comes from.’ You don’t get that now. We’re not known for that now. It’s such a shame.”
That’s Irene. She’s one of 25 people on a social Zoom meet-up arranged by the Burton Albion Football Club Trust. Also on the call is Peter, an ex-brewer at Bass. There’s Linda, whose dad was a maltster at Truman’s—she remembers how his trouser turn-ups would be filled with malt every night. And then there’s Sue, who was a tour guide at Bass; her husband also brewed there. “It was great fun. It was absolutely wonderful,” she says.
“As little kiddies we used to go with a jug to the off-license and buy me grandad’s beer,” says Irene. “I didn’t like it but me sister used to be sipping it all the way home, and she’d be seven or eight.” For Carol, “Treat of the week was being taken to sit in a pub yard with pop and crisps [soda and potato chips] whilst parents were inside meeting friends and having a pint.”
Most of the group smile and laugh as they share their experiences growing up in Burton during the 1950s and 1960s. Though not Joyce, a nurse who moved to Burton from Ireland as a 17-year-old. She remembers the town’s distinct odor: “The smell was horrendous!”
In the mid 20th century, Burton’s air was a pungent reflection of the different factories in town. There was the almost-constant boiling of wort, with its sweet and hoppy aroma. Leftover brewers’ yeast was reduced down into Marmite, which has been made in Burton since 1902, producing a strong, savory smell. And there was Robirch, a meat pie factory with its own abattoir.
If smell is the sense most associated with memory, the town’s since-vanished odor still remains vivid among those who experienced it. “What a cacophony of blinking smells!” says Steve Topliss, former Ind Coope head brewer. “Gee whiz. I loved it, but the smells were unbelievable.”
The other prominent Burton memory is the railway crossings. With brewhouses, malthouses, cooperages, ale stores, depots, and more spread out around the town, breweries laid miles of private railways to transport goods between sites, and there were 32 level crossing gates to control the flow of traffic.
The brewery trains didn’t follow a timetable, and at any time the crossing gates could come down, meaning people were frequently late for school or work. “It was phenomenal,” says Steve Wellington, former head brewer at Worthington Brewery. “They used to say if there was a bank robbery in Burton, the police would ring the crossing keepers to close all the gates because there wasn’t a road out of Burton that didn’t have crossing gates.” That’s a story I’ve heard Emma’s dad tell before. He was only a boy when the railway lines disappeared, but it’s one of those tales that remains in the collective Burton memory.
The breweries paternally provided for people in many ways, and had done so since the days when they were run by successive generations, by Messrs Bass, Allsopp, and Worthington. That practice generated a strong loyalty among the employees; you worked for the same brewery as your father, mother, uncle, or brother, a blood link being the only resume you needed. There was pride in that, the Burton residents tell me, a feeling of belonging, and it was instilled from a young age.
“Me dad worked at Basses. He were a mashman,” says Terry Elks, a Burton local whose first job after leaving school was at Bass. His mother worked at Worthington, and at the age of 13 he got a summer job there cleaning the workers’ break rooms and swilling down the union rooms.
“The following summer I were a hop lad,” he says; his job was to add the dry hop addition into full barrels of beer. “I used to have a great big barrow full of hops and a wooden bucket. I used to have to get a scoopful of hops, and then when they shouted [at] me, I had to take the hops to them and put a handful of hops in the barrel before they put the bung in.”
“As someone once said to me, ‘If beer drinking was an Olympic sport, we’d only ever have to wander down Burton High Street and you’d have an A team and a B team, no problem at all.’ People could really, really seriously drink beer. One of the key things to learn is that when you’re in a league that’s above your own, don’t try to compete. There were some guys who had hollow legs.”
Elks, as a 13-year-old, had a beer allowance of one pint a day (“I used to take mine home for me dad,” he says). Every worker had their allowance, usually a quart or a few pints daily, plus any extra they could get—and everyone knew a way of getting extra beer. The more manual the work, the more beer you received, with maltsters earning a few extra “sweat pints” if they worked in the kiln.
Drinking at work wasn’t only accepted—it was a given. Some people would have a few pints in the morning, and then a few more during the day, and even more after their shift. Teapots were filled with beer. Draymen would routinely have a pint at each pub they delivered beer to. Someone always knew which tank was filled with the Strong Ale. As legend has it, there was one bloke at Ind Coope who could supposedly drink a firkin—72 imperial pints—on a shift.
“As someone once said to me, ‘If beer drinking was an Olympic sport, we’d only ever have to wander down Burton High Street and you’d have an A team and a B team, no problem at all,” says Dr. Harry White, former director of quality at Bass. “People could really, really seriously drink beer. One of the key things to learn is that when you’re in a league that’s above your own, don’t try to compete. There were some guys who had hollow legs.”
Worthington brewed a weak beer for staff allowance, but Peter Smith, a Burton local who started working at Bass-Worthington in 1959 (the two breweries merged in 1927) and ended his career 40 years later as the malting manager, remembers how staff “used to steal beer all the way through the process. Some of the people came and clocked in at 6 o’clock in the morning and you never saw them for the whole day. They just went and slept, or drank. There were so many people employed that you didn’t miss the odd person. They just vanished and you’d find them asleep in the corner!”
Despite how commonplace heavy drinking was, no one I speak to recalls the town being full of drunks. “In my experience, not a huge number of people drank to excess,” says Topliss. In the 1970s, Ind Coope employees had a two-pint daily allowance, plus “people would have a social scoop, and steal the odd one.” Having hard laboring jobs which started early in the morning led to a moderation (of sorts).
Some of the most popular places to drink were the brewery sports and social clubs, which were big venues that put on entertainment every week. Beer businesses had their own teams, covering a wide range of sports or activities. Games were played between breweries and departments, which gave workers a chance to know more of their colleagues. Bass also held an annual Field Day where employees could enter flowers and vegetables into a competition and win cash prizes. They put on fireworks displays and barrel-rolling competitions. During Christmas there were parties, and all staff were given vouchers to redeem for a turkey at one of the town’s butchers (many also took home a case of the strong Winter Ale or Barley Wine). In the past, the breweries even arranged day trips for staff and their families to go to the seaside, traveling on a great fleet of trains. These town-wide, cross-brewery social experiences were once the heart of Burton’s social world.
By the 1960s—as imminent changes were coming—the breweries were already considered Victorian anachronisms, old companies with old values, and with miserly and headmasterly directors who the laborers addressed as “Sir.”
Wellington recalls a memory of Lord Gretton, who was in charge of Bass’ ingredients. A laborer was walking across the brewery yard and the sole of his shoe was loose and flapping when he caught Gretton’s attention. “‘Come here my boy,’ and he said, ‘What’s the matter with your shoe?’” Wellington recalls. The young lad replied: “‘Yes Sir, yes my Lord, it’s come off.’” Gretton took a huge roll of money out of his pocket, “And this bloke thought, ‘Christ, he’s going to buy me some shoes!’ and [Gretton] took the elastic band off, gave it to him, and said, ‘Now wrap that around your shoe!’ That was the sort of bloke he was. He was as mean as anything.”
Then there was Jack Leachman, Bass’ production director. He had steel caps on his shoes, and if you heard the clacks, you went in the opposite direction. One day, the sparge arm broke on a mash tun. Two planks of wood were spread across it, and an engineer named Goodall crawled out along them. Without warning, the mash tun doors slammed shut behind Goodall and he heard people running away. He fell in the hot mash up to waist. “He was screaming when suddenly the doors opened to the mash tun,” says Wellington. “Leachman looked in and he said, ‘Ah, hello Goodall, are you all right?’ and he said, ‘Yes Mr. Leachman, I’m fine, Sir.’ Jack shut the door and walked off again. Click click click. That’s the sort of fear they had for him.” (Goodall was wearing thick overalls, and was fine despite the heat.)
But interactions like this would soon be a thing of the past. Advances in the breweries and the British beer industry in general had begun to accelerate through the 1960s, and they’d fundamentally change the town of Burton.
In 1960, Bass employed close to 3,000 people. Over 500 of them were engineers, more than 300 worked in the cooperage and on cask cleaning, and over 200 transported goods. A wide range of other trades and professionals were also represented: “We had cobblers, we had tailors, we had wheelwrights, we had coffin makers for god’s sake,” says Wellington. There were tinsmiths, coppersmiths, plumbers, electricians, decorators, sign writers, stablemen for the horses, and even firefighters.
Any Burtonian not employed by a brewery likely worked in an ancillary industry, including brewery fabricators, wood suppliers and turners, independent cooperages and maltings, and beer mat printers. Beer provided for the whole town in one way or another, so when the changes came, they struck at the heart of Burton, its community, and its identity.
It was the materials and the machinery, and the shift from wood to steel and to automation, which had the greatest overall impact. That change meant fewer laborers and skilled tradesmen were needed, fewer people were employed, and fewer people were connected to the breweries. Associated local industries lost their standing to national or international suppliers, and they had to adapt to avoid going out of business. Labor became rationalized to a monetary number instead of a person’s name; no longer were children taking over from parents, with educated recruits moving to Burton to take positions in the breweries. The family connections which created such strong links in the community were disappearing.
The most prominent role lost in the town was the coopers. The cooperages were once “an absolutely phenomenal sight,” says Wellington. Tens of thousands of wooden barrels were stacked up, hundreds of thousands were in circulation, and every one of them was built and repaired by hand. “There used to be hundreds of coopers. When stainless steel casks came, they all dispersed,” says Wellington. “These highly skilled people, who could make a waterproof wooden cask, and quite a lot of them were seen [doing other jobs]. What a shame.”
“There used to be hundreds of coopers. When stainless steel casks came, they all dispersed. These highly skilled people, who could make a waterproof wooden cask, and quite a lot of them were seen [doing other jobs]. What a shame.”
It was a quick demise, going from all-wood, to steel-lined wood, and then to just steel, within around five years. The breweries gained greater consistency with the beer, but that was of no consolation to the coopers. That paradigm shift prompts a question that speaks to Burton and the wider world: What happens when something isn’t needed anymore?
Burton is still a significant beer town, but through numerous consolidations, closures, and changes in ownership, just two big breweries remain today. The combined sites of Bass, Ind Coope, and Allsopp are now owned by Molson Coors Beverage Company, while down the road is Marston’s, now part of Carlsberg. All of the famous old names are gone.
The losses and the changes are hard to reconcile with the positive feelings and memories of people who knew the breweries well. From laborers to ex-directors, those I speak to have genuine affection for their time working in the local industry. Neil Jackson, an ex-Marston’s employee, holds forth for an hour as he recalls japes and scrapes from a 25-year career in the brewery.
“One morning they started the bottling line up and the first thing down the line was this guy, a well-known big drinker, fast asleep,” he laughs. Then there was the story of the naked forklift drivers. A car wrapped in clingfilm. An on-site wedding. A swoop bucket filled with discarded beer. Motorbike races. The joy and challenges of working on the Burton Union system (“To operate it is to love it,” he says). The way a disgruntled contractor, who had the job of putting up the large lettering outside the brewery, decided to hang the two S’s upside down.
Like most of the stories I’m told, these anecdotes evince camaraderie, which is a word I hear repeated by many. “It’s all about the people,” says Jackson. “Everybody knew everybody. It was like going to work with your brothers.” As Peter Smith says, “To some people, the breweries and their connections were their total life.”
“People were proud of the company they worked for,” says Topliss. “It was a family. When you were taken on by one of the breweries in the late ’60s, early ’70s, you were proud of that, and almost made in terms of your career.” As time went on, there was a “dilution of the culture and the feeling of belonging,” he says. “Unless you were there, it’s really hard to put across how strongly you felt about the brewing family. Now there isn’t that.”
I can’t tell if Burton is unlovely or just unloved. The 1960s and 1970s were decades of dust, as the old breweries were demolished. It certainly isn’t handsome now, with its mix of graying Victorian red bricks, ugly 1970s steel and glass, and characterless 2000s retail parks.
This post-industrial working-class town hasn’t replaced its lost industry. The old sites of hard labor are now places of light recreation—a cinema, gym, chain restaurants, homeware stores, fashion outlets. There are minimal signs of gentrification, and today, Burton is a market town with just a few lonely stalls left. There are fewer than 20 pubs when once there were over 150.
And still I feel a certain nostalgia for Burton. Or maybe it’s more like a romanticized yearning for a past which was knocked down decades before I first visited the town. I walk by the old boozers, the boarded-up shops, and all around me are buildings and sites which were once something else, vestiges of the era when Burton thrived. It’s that ghostly something else which continues to fascinate me.
“The town was built on beer,” says Ian Webster, a Burton beer historian who’s written several books about the town. “The municipal buildings, churches, houses, they were built by the breweries.” The blueprint layout of the town comes from when the breweries were rapidly expanding, and everything else had to fit in around them. On a walk together, Webster helps me to orient myself in the town, and points out everything important that remains as well as what no longer exists.
We stroll down the High Street, where William Bass opened his brewery in 1777 on an unpaved road with no sewers, once equipped with stepping-stones to allow people to cross. Bass’ townhouse is still there, behind a rusted iron gate, the front steps worn with years of use, but years of disuse mean weeds are growing up through the cracks in the concrete. It’s a sad sign of how the past—and a really important, ground-zero part of it—is being ignored.
Bass’ neighbours were Worthington and Allsopp. The original Allsopp brewery land is where the Molson Coors head office is now situated. Beside it is open green space, which used to be where Thomas Salt & Co. and the Burton Brewery Company stood. One of the original water wells is still there, next to the leisure center.
One important site survived demolition: the old Bass water tower, built in 1866. It’s next to the Washlands, which was at the rear of all the breweries, a dense wall of factories and chimneys backing onto the River Trent. Today, it’s a pleasant green space where children play and people jog. It’s hard to lament that change.
The Bass water tower is opposite the library, which used to be Worthington’s maltings. A railway line ran from there past the Worthington Brewery and the brewery tap, which is now a pub called The Crossing. The railway line became a road, which passes by Home Bargains and roast chicken chain Nando’s. On the right is the retail complex which was Bass’ Middle Yard. In 1960 it stored 25,000 casks of Ale. Now it’s a parking lot for hundreds of cars.
Opposite KFC and the retail park is the vast Molson Coors brewery and depot, with banks of tall steel tanks. That’s next to the National Brewery Centre, home to a rich archive of Burton beer memorabilia, including a model of the town in the late 19th century, steam engines, a heritage brewery, and recreations of old pubs. It’s the best place to begin to understand Burton when it was Beer Town. Outside is an old Burton Union System, a handsome, aging relic in the shadow of the charmless vessels which replaced it.
Elsewhere, the Everards Brewery and Truman Brewery are now housing estates. The old Charrington Brewery is a budget sportswear store. Sainsbury’s supermarket is on Bass’ land. The shopping center is on Worthington Brewery’s land, and called Cooper’s Square—there’s a statue of a Burton cooper inside, a reminder of how important that trade was to the town.
The one significant old brewing site that remains in the center of town covers much of the old Bass, Ind Coope, and Allsopp breweries. It’s still one of Britain’s biggest breweries. Many of the old buildings, however, are unused, or no longer part of the brewery, like the impressive Allsopp building opposite the train station, which is now empty office space.
All around are silver fermenters, and through those pass some one billion pints a year, much of it Carling, Britain’s biggest-selling on-trade beer. And yet with all this brewing, I’m not sure I’ve ever been able to smell the sweet, hoppy wort aroma floating through the air.
At 70 years old, Steve Topliss continues to brew. His swansong to Burton beer is at The Roebuck pub in Draycott in the Clay, eight miles outside of Burton. His IPA is the kind of beer which made Burton famous: It’s 5% ABV, all fudgy malt and soft-bodied, with upfront sweetness drying down into a lasting, peppery bitterness, laced with marmalade-like English hops. Soon Topliss will pass the brewing down to his son-in-law.
There are other breweries around town making classic Burton Ales, like the 40-year-old Burton Bridge Brewery and the Tower Brewery, whose Imperial IPA is a local favorite. There’s also Burton Town Brewery, Gates Brewery, and Marston’s, whose Pedigree Ale is still made using the Burton Union System, and whose barrels are still maintained by a cooper, the last remaining in town.
Marston’s also brews the cask-only Draught Bass, and drinking a pint is still an iconic beer experience in Burton (even if the brand is now owned by AB InBev).
“We should be shouting from the rooftops about Burton-on-Trent. We should be having people coming in by the train-load to come and visit the town, and visit the breweries, and visit the National Brewery Centre. It’s got such a diverse selection of pubs which are built on very traditional values that go hand-in-hand with Burton: good beer, good company, well-run establishments, which are typically well-maintained.”
“If you’re going to drink good Bass, there’s no better place to drink it than Burton because if it’s not up to standard, people will tell you about it,” says Carl Stout, who, along with his wife Nicky, owns The Devonshire Arms, once the Ind Coope brewery tap. “There’s a really hearty drinking culture in Burton. Burton’s lost a lot of things, but it doesn’t seem to have lost its heart [and] the quality of the beer has to be absolutely spot-on.”
A pint of Bass. It’s such a simple bar call, and yet it comes with its great weight of history as the once-best-selling Ale in the world. I still feel excited when I order one.
The Draught Bass at The Devonshire is the best I’ve had in town. It’s served through a sparkler—a nozzle on the tap—to give it a thick, creamy foam. The distinctive color glows like a shiny penny. It has a Burton Ale’s malt richness and initial sweetness while being light and bitter, with a fruity yeast character that lifts it. Like all the world’s classic beers, it’s the most normal beer you can drink here, and yet it’s also the most important, the most loved and argued over; it’s a pint that’s always familiar and yet always a bit different, always engaging, forever reflecting some key element of the town.
“We should be shouting from the rooftops about Burton-on-Trent,” says Stout. “We should be having people coming in by the train-load to come and visit the town, and visit the breweries, and visit the National Brewery Centre.” It’s the pubs which he holds in the highest regard: “It’s got such a diverse selection of pubs which are built on very traditional values that go hand-in-hand with Burton: good beer, good company, well-run establishments, which are typically well-maintained.”
Around the corner from The Devonshire Arms is The Coopers Tavern, probably the most famous pub in Burton. “There’s history on every wall in here,” says Mandy Addis, the pub’s landlady. There’s history in every wall, too: It started out as the Bass brewer’s house before being used to store malt and then Imperial Stout. Bass’ coopers used to drink here, and it’s been a pub since 1858. It’s small, cozy, welcoming, and the distinctive feature is the taproom at the back, where four casks of Ale—always including Draught Bass—are lined up and poured via gravity instead of a handpull.
“People come from everywhere to drink Bass,” says Addis. “I’m in the middle of Burton, the brewery capital that was. It’s a proper drinkers’ pub, a talkers’ pub,” where you sit close to others and speak with them. It’s a pub where many stories have been shared over the decades. “If these walls could talk,” she says, her voice trailing off.
It was meeting Emma and regularly visiting Burton which gave me a new appreciation for the town, and a desire to know more about it, perhaps because I love beer and its place in social history, or perhaps as a connection to Emma and her family.
One of Emma’s grandfathers, as well as her great uncle, worked as plumbers at Truman’s. The other grandfather worked in the bottling hall for Ind Coope. Emma’s parents remember the employment options out of school as being a choice between making beer, pies, slippers, or biscuits. But neither ended up in the factories when they started their careers in the 1970s: Her dad first joined the navy and then the Burton fire service, and her mum the National Health Service. They were the first generation since the mid 1800s who were born in Burton and didn’t work in a brewery.
Emma’s grandfathers died before she was born, and she didn’t grow up with the breweries as any part of her life. “It’s been around me my whole life. Maybe it was so visible that I didn’t notice it,” she says. “The brewery is just these big buildings in the town you pass on the way to the shops. I don’t think I ever put together that Cooper’s Square meant the coopers.” It was just a place, a name; it meant nothing until it meant something.
Maybe that’s the same for anyone in their hometown. I grew up in Chatham, Kent, a major naval port. We used to hang out at the dockyard and dockside, but I didn’t make the association with its history until I’d moved away from the town. Emma asked her friends what they remember growing up, and one said she just assumed every town had a brewery in the middle.
Emma and her friends didn’t drink beer, or go to the old pubs. “No way would I go in them. I’d feel like an outsider going in,” she says. “At 18 we weren’t going out to drink pints of brown beer like Bass. We had fluorescent-blue alcopops.” This is a cultural change that happened all across the country—I drank blue alcopops before I drank brown pints of Ale—but then most towns don’t have the unique legacy of Burton.
While Emma has known Burton for her whole life, she barely had a conscious awareness of beer growing up. “Burton’s this forgotten little town,” she says, meaning it’s neglected its own heritage. Unless something radical happens, the next generation, the kids growing up there now, will know even less about it or its storied history.
The stories I’ve heard from the people who knew Burton have been familiar, and while I don’t recognize their content, I know their tone and affection: They are from the pub. They are stories repeated whenever old friends meet. They combine real life and the apocryphal, tales elevated—exaggerated—by pints of Ale, taking on new significance through the passing of time. That’s how the spirit, camaraderie, and old pride of Burton remain.
Those first-hand stories will soon disappear, and the warm memories will be replaced by cold facts: the biggest brewery, millions of barrels, India Pale Ale, Bass. Whenever someone repeats the words “IPA came from Burton,” it revives the narrative of the town, but there’s such a great distance from that myth to the reality that “Burton” is becoming a fictionalized idea.
Steve Wellington brewed in Burton for almost 50 years, and I wonder how he reflects on his career. “I wouldn’t have changed a thing,” he says. “I’ve enjoyed it so incredibly much. It’s been absolutely fabulous, and I wish I could exude that into other people in some way or other.” Wellington and all the others I spoke to—including many who didn’t even make it into this article—shared the same sentiment, and a longing to have others appreciate it the way they do.
“This is a world-famous town of brewing, so for god’s sake, try to think of things you can do that will make people interested in coming to Burton,” he says. “We have something very, very important and unique. It’s the center of the brewing industry in the United Kingdom. It’s famous all over the world. And we don’t say that.”
Words by Mark DredgeIllustrations by Colette Holston
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