I noticed a tweet by Tottenham brewery Redemption earlier noting that it was brewday for their award winning beer Hopspur (they are indeed very close to White Hart Lane) and how they loved the smell of brewing.
So do I, to my perpetually clogged nose- as a born and bred Londoner-its a rather malty smell, a reminder one hopes of some delicious beer to come.
Nowadays of course you can access that smell very often by visiting one of the craft brewery taprooms that exist all over the UK (Northern Ireland has a different law for now). But even 15 years ago you either had to work in a brewery or go on a guided tour to get into a brewery, see the brewing process at work and get that brewing smell.
Except there was one other way and that was if you lived in a city or town with a substantial brewery as part of its centre. Eldridge Pope in Dorchester was mentioned in the above twitter exchange. The brewery is long gone but the chimney remains.
Brains in Cardiff moved from their Old Brewery site on the Cardiff Castle side of Cardiff rail station to the old Bass site immediately on the Cardiff Bay side of the station a while back. I’ve lived partly in Cardiff for 25 years and one of the great smells of a morning in the City centre was the waft of the smell of brewing across the streets. It was arguably one of the defining smells of the place and a reminder of an industrial heritage.
The brewery is currently being demolished (Brains have built a new one nearer the Bay) although the chimney is staying. The smell however has gone forever.
Update
This post got a large number of responses from people who remembered the smell of brewing from locations where it mostly doesnt take place anymore. Michael Rosen recalled Benskins in Watford, then there was Boddingtons in Manchester, Scottish & Newcastle in Newcastle and Edinnburgh and so on. Burton, thankfully is one place, where the smell of brewing can still be found.
Its clear that aside from the physical buildings the smell of the brewing process in a location provided a sense of place and local or regional identity.
Now the more popular beer brands are brewed mostly in mega-breweries, by definition, rarely in town centres and the sense of regional presence, smell and indeed taste has been lost.
I used to travel from Putney to Brixton to work in the 70s, the shires horses from the Wandsworth Ram Brewery often slowed my bike down as they pulled their loads of beer: the smell around the pub (forget the name) nearby where we went to listen to folk music evenings was also pungently beery.
Definitely remember the smells of the brewery wafting over Reading from the Courage brewery up at the well-named Worton Grange in the 80s at the height of the mass production dream. And that would have been the case for generations before me, too, with beer being the first of the three Bs for which Reading was known (Simonds, in those days, located in the centre). Brewing stopped there in 2010 as a result of Big Beer getting ever-bigger and I *think* it’s now a Holiday Inn. Some good stuff here, for those that like this sort of thing: https://www.28dayslater.co.uk/threads/the-curse-of-worton-grange-courage-brewery.52369/
Apparently, Worton Grange was the location for a Chas and Dave cover shoot in 1983. Well, they did always enjoy a pint of Best…
Scrub that thought – the actual site is occupied partly by the Tesco distribution centre (I was distracted in entirely the wrong direction by the Holiday Inn’s Imperial Way address…)