Burton on Trent has been well-known to beer lovers for centuries – thanks to the mineral-laden water from the town’s wells, ideal for brewing. The town’s central location in the country and good transport links gave its brewers an advantage when selling their product. So by the end of the 19th century, more than 30 breweries were in business in Burton. The most famous was the Bass brewery, which was once the biggest in the world.
Bass is now closed, but on part of its site is the modern Molson Coors brewery, the largest in the UK. And next door is what was once the Bass Museum, now known as the National Brewery Centre. This is the ideal place to visit if you want to learn the secrets of the art of brewing, and to discover the meaning of obscure terms such as mash tun, grist and wort.
The first gallery is laid out like a traditional brewery, and there’s a mock-up of a malting floor. Malt was spread on the heated floor, and maltsters spent all day turning it by shovel to dry. This was a tough job that few wanted to do, so the brewers brought in labourers from East Anglia for the task. They were given one-way railway tickets… It’s thought that this was the origin of the phrase ‘Gone for a burton’.
Mechanisation took away a lot of the hard labour, and on display is a machine from 1902 that turned the malt. Next to it is a screening machine that removed the dried barley rootlets from the grain. Both machines can be seen in action at the push of a button.
At the brewing copper stage, hops are added to the ground malt, known as wort, and boiled. In the past, this was done in open coppers, heated by furnaces on the floor below. So violent was this boiling that local residents complained that their houses shook. The open vessels were later sealed with copper domes, making the process less hazardous. One of these domed vessels can be seen outside the museum.
In the next stage, the wort had to be cooled before the yeast was added. Cooling was done in open troughs where there was danger of infection by bacteria or wild yeasts. It was therefore vital to do the cooling quickly which is why brewing was only done in winter. It was only with the introduction of refrigeration in the 1870s, which speeded up cooling, that all-year round brewing became possible.
For the mechanical engineer, some of the most interesting exhibits are those to do with power and transport. There’s an impressive tandem compound steam engine, built by Robey of Lincoln in 1905 and in use at a malthouse until 1959. Visitors can see it in steam on certain days. Power was transmitted around the maltings through line shafting driven by ropes from the engine’s 13ft flywheel.
The Bass brewery once used a range of steam engines for tasks such as pumping, milling and hoisting. An underground shaft system transmitted power around the site from these engines. Individual machines were then served by pulleys and belts in each area. You can see the drive pit inside the entrance hall of the Brewing Heritage Galleries.
The museum has an eccentric collection of vehicles, including old fire engines from the days when big breweries had their own fire brigades. There are two cars once used for publicity purposes, a Ford Model T and a Morris Cowley 15hp Sport built in 1923.
A different time... breweries used to have their own dedicated fire engines (Credit: National Brewery Centre / Facebook)
And, for a bit of fun, there is a van that looks like a barrel and a bottle-shaped car. The barrel was built on a 1961 Morris light van chassis, and was used in Leicester to make daily beer deliveries from the Everard’s brewery. The Worthington’s White Shield Bottle Car, once used for marketing drives, has a 3.3-litre Vauxhall Bedford engine from 1950 and Daimler controls. The bottle’s neck projects from the car windscreen over the bonnet. In the 1950s, the police were worried that the neck impeded the driver’s view of the road, so it was lowered.
It’s well worth climbing to the top floor of the Brewing Heritage Galleries to see the most impressive train set you’re ever likely to come across. The model took six years to build and depicts the scene in 1921, when three big breweries dominated the centre of Burton. The striking aspect is the astonishing degree to which a dense network of railway tracks criss-crossed the area. The Bass brewery alone had 16 miles of track, handling 1,000 wagons a day.
The architect of the Bass railway, which operated until 1967, was the company’s chief engineer William Canning. His successor in the late 19th century was Herbert Couchman, who was known as a hard taskmaster. Couchman designed a steam locomotive that could cope with moving heavy ale wagons over difficult brewery tracks with many sharp curves.
This locomotive, the Bass No 9 engine built in 1901 by Neilson Reid of Glasgow, is on display outside the galleries. Alongside is a diesel locomotive from the Worthington brewery, and a railway coach that was originally built for the directors of the Manchester Ship Canal and was later used by Bass for transporting VIPs.
As you wander around the Brewing Heritage Galleries, you can’t escape the smell from the microbrewery on the ground floor. You can sample some of its excellent traditional ales in the museum’s own bar, the Brewery Tap, where you can spend the beer voucher you receive with your entrance ticket. There’s no better way to round off your visit.