 is effectively finished by the Friday, but the beer sits in the unions until the Monday, when it is run off to be packaged in cask, bottle or keg. Despite the expense, Marston’s brewers firmly believe the union system produced a beer with great stability and considerably enhanced flavours, and it is the only method used to make the brewery’s flagship Pedigree pale ale, as it was the main method of brewing in the many other breweries that once filled the town’s air with the beautiful scent of mashing barley, in the glorious past when Burton sent constant trainloads of IPA out around the world
And now, for the first time, Marston’s unions have been used to make an Imperial stout, the latest in the “Horninglow” series of one-off beers, which is why I was up in Burton, to talk to the head brewer, Pat McGinty, about the new beer, and also to have my first ever look at the Marston’s union room (shameful, I know. Call myself a beer writer?)
It’s not totally unknown to use unions to make porters and
stouts, and by coincidence only a few days before my trip to Burton I was
reading an article in a brewers’ trade magazine from 1878 by Charles Howard
Tripp of the Stogumber brewery, near Taunton, in Somerset about brewing porter
in unions. But I’m not aware of anyone making an Imperial stout that way.
Equally unusually, Pat McGinty has made this 7.5 per cent abv beer using
straight-up Burton well-water, rammed as it is with sulphates, which, conventionally,
is seen as terrific for pale beers but not so great for dark ones, where a more
London-like brewing liquor, with lots of calcium carbonate in, is regarded as
optimal. The reason for not altering the water chemistry, Pat says, is to
ensure this stout has a proper “Burton” character, which search for a
Burton character is the reason for brewing the stout in the unions, and fermenting
it with the standard Marston’s union yeast as used in making Pedigree. (The
yeast apparently got on fine with the dark grains and the higher OG of the
stout, though the brewers had to spend twice as long as they normally do, 4½
hours, cleaning the unions used for stout brewing, to ensure no contamination
of the next batch of Pedigree.)
To make up for the possibly unsuitable mineral profile, Pat
has used malted oats in the brew, to help round out the mouthfeel: the other
grains are pale ale malt, roasted barley, chocolate malt (Charles Howard Tripp
was keen on chocolate malt, which had only just been invented in his time, saying:
malt [gives] a capital rich and full flavour to the porter in which it is used”)
and malted wheat, while the hops are Challenger. The beer, which will, I
believe, be exclusive to Waitrose, was only two weeks old when we sampled it, unfiltered
and heavy on the roasty flavours, and it still had to be filtered, partially
carbonated and sent to the bottling plant, where each bottle will be seeded
with the same union yeast the beer was originally fermented with (the union
yeast apparently happily drops to the bottom of the bottle). It will then be
held on to for 14 days before being sent out for sale in stores, though Pat
McGinty suggests keeping the bottles for six to eight months to be “nicely
As well as a look at the union room we were also given the chance
to meet Marston’s last remaining cooper, Mark Newton, who spends most of his
time maintaining and repairing the union casks. That was fascinating, too, and
rather sad: Mark has trained up an apprentice, who now works elsewhere in the
brewery, but he is currently the last man in the town doing a job that once was
carried out by hundreds. Here’s a little photo-essay.
I’ve been going on holiday with my family to the Mani, in the middle “finger” of the Peloponnese, pretty regularly since 2006: it’s a beautiful, almost entirely unspoilt place, the beaches are broad and sandy, the sun almost continuous, the people are friendly, the food is excellent, locally sourced and cheap. The beer, until now, has generally not been up to much, but when it’s 32ºC almost anything cold and wet will do. All the same, I was thrilled to discover this