Brewing up historic ales
For many beer drinkers, 1968 will forever be remembered as the time when traditional Northamptonshire Phipps real ale disappeared from pubs.
But two brothers Alaric and Quentin Neville have now launched a project to open a new brewery and pub in Towcester, which they hope will one day sell Phipps recipe beers as they were once known.
The task will need research and the Northamptonshire-born pair are keen to hear from anyone who once worked for Phipps and may have an insight into original recipes or brewing methods.
Alaric said: "They produced a range of beers from Stingo – which was the strongest and had a bit of a sting to it – right down to their pale ales and lagers. We will be concentrating on a Phipps India Pale Ale (IPA), a draught bitter and hopefully a Ratliffe's celebrated stout.
"There are some records at the Northamptonshire Records Office but we know Watney Mann took most records back to London when they shut the brewery in 1974."
Nevertheless the Neville brothers have managed to track down a 1949 Phipps brewers book and would like to speak to former employees who might be able to decipher some of the more mysterious letters and numbers in the document.
Alaric explained: "We would like to call for people to contact us if they have anecdotes, recipes or photos, or who may have trained with the last head brewer Bill Urquhart at his microbrewery in Litchborough."
Phipps was a well known name in Northampton beer-making history, having originally been established in Towcester in 1801 and expanding to the point where the ales were being sold in more than 1,000 pubs.
The firm later merged with the Northampton Brewery Company (NBC), but it was only when the multi million pound firm Watney Mann took over in the 1960s when real changes started to take place.
Not only was the Phipps name dropped, but the brewery stopped brewing the old style bitter in wooden casks, in favour of the new kind of chilled and filtered best bitter produced in metal casks.
The brewery building was finally demolished in 1974 to make way for Carlsberg.
Douglas Bayley, aged 61, followed in his father Albert's footsteps to work at the company.
He said: "My father used to work for Phipps and by the time I worked there it was called Watney Mann's. His title was brewers' labourer. On the odd occasion he used to go in on Sunday morning and I would walk around the whole factory. I was 10 or 11 at the time.
"It was exciting for me at that age, all the vats were open and the beer looked like a loaf of bread; it was crusty on top as there was a bit of fermenting."
He continued: "Before that the dray men who delivered the beer would go out with a horse and cart to deliver the beer."
Alaric has his own family memories of Phipps beer.
He said: "It all really goes back to my grandfather who was a big drinker and lived opposite a Phipps pub in Rushden. He would have sat at the bar and had his last pint of Phipps and he would have grumbled.
"I think both my brother and I thought of my grandfather when we started doing this. He was used to rolling out of his house to the pub across the road and he was unhappy when 1968 came around.”
If anyone can help with the Phipps project, Alaric can be contacted by emailing alaric.neville@googlemail.com. More information can be found by logging on to www.phipps-nbc.co.uk.
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