Kmflett's Blog

Bring Back Watney’s… Imperial Stout

Adrian Tierney Jones in the Daily Torygraph is calling for the return of Watneys. I see a potential vote winning slogan here for that paper’s preferred candidate for the Tory leadership Mr Johnson.

Tierney Jones writes in part:

2016 saw the launch of Watneys Pale Ale, citrusy and very on-trend, and now there are two others, a ‘craft’ lager and a Double IPA, all of them brewed under licence at selected breweries. In addition to this, a crowd-funding drive has been launched on Seedrs to raise £400,005 (of which £330,774 has already been pledged), to “make Watneys a great beer brand once again”.

Watneys’ co-founder, Nick Whitehurst, has been quoted as saying, “the nostalgia and history of Watneys give us provenance but what we’ve done is taken this heritage and reinvented the brand to appeal to a whole new generation of drinkers.”

Watneys certainly had provenance and history. It was founded in 1837 and as Watney Combe & Reid became one of the largest breweries in Victorian London. Beer historians would argue that the rot set in with the launch of Red Barrel in the 1960s. It was filtered, pasteurised and served cold and fizzy. Even its snazzy advertising with posters featuring Mao and Che Guevara lookalikes championing the ‘Red revolution’ couldn’t save it.

Like Tierney Jones I am of course all in favour of the red revolution….

The aside as Martyn Cornell reminds us the Reid bit of Watneys, Combe and Reid was a stout brewery

http://zythophile.co.uk/2008/02/14/the-hunting-of-the-stout/

While the Watney’s cask beer brewed under licence a while back was as Tierney Jones notes highly drinkable, and the idea of a Watney’s DIPA is intriguing surely the real tradition lies in a Watney’s Imperial Stout.

A decent iteration of that classic beer style could Watney’s name back on the brewing map and help to erase the memories of Red Barrel and Party Sevens