It might have been a geological fluke but it was one which the Staffordshire town of Burton upon Trent exploited for all its worth during the 19th century. Built upon layers of gypsum, its hard, mineral-rich water, high in calcium sulphate was found not only to enhance the bitterness of hops but also to preserve beer, making it ideal for sending it distances both in the UK but also abroad. Its other geographical advantage was that even though it is one of England’s towns that is furthest from the sea, it had developed extensive canal and river connections that linked it to the country’s major rivers and thereby to the ports, giving its goods relatively access to the world. This armed, Burton set to conquer the world with beer.
The town’s first beer exports were dark ales sent to the Baltic ports, but the game changer came when Burton’s mineral-rich water proved to be an answer to a problem facing the East India Company – how to supply its employees in far off India with potable beer. Perfect for pale ale production, the town’s water together with a higher level of hops helped preserve the beer’s flavour on its long journey through hot climes.
The first Burton-brewed pale ale was shipped to India in 1823 by Allsopp’s. They did not have it all their own way, though, and by 1834, there were nine brewers in Burton producing what came to be known as Indian Pale Ale (IPA), a term first used in print in the Liverpool Mercury in 1835. It was also brewed for home consumption where it was known as “Indian Beer”.
IPA had a transformational effect on the town’s fortunes. By 1840, some 350 men were working in the breweries producing around 60,000 to 70,000 barrels of beer a year. London’s brewers collectively made 1.5 million barrels. However, the brewing industry in Burton experienced a dramatic expansion between the 1850s and 1880s. By the end of the 1880s, there were 32 brewers in Burton, operating from 36 breweries with an annual production of some 3,025,000 barrels. Over half the working population was employed in the industry and one-third of the town’s land was occupied by brewing, malting, and ancillary industries.
By the mid-1870s, Bass had become the largest brewing company in the world, turning out around 980,000 barrels a year from its state-of-the-art New Brewery built by William Bass in 1858. It had three breweries in Burton, with 28 coppers, 24 teak mash tuns, and 5,000 4-barrel casks in its Burton Union fermentation system. It used 60 tons of hops a week.
Not to be outdone, Samuel Allsopp opened what was described as the largest brewery in the world in 1860 and between them Bass and Allsopp employed two-thirds of the people working in the town’s brewing industry. In all, there were over 30 breweries, over 100 malthouses, all packed in little more than a square mile of land. Anyone not employed directly by a brewery was likely to work in an ancillary industry, such as wood suppliers and turners, independent cooperages and maltings, and beer mat printers.
As well as the town’s very distinctive smell, one of Burton’s most notable features was its railway crossings. With brewhouses, malthouses, cooperages, ale stores, depots etc spread around the town. Brewers laid miles of private railway tracks connecting the various sites and there were 32 level crossing gates to control the flow of traffic. The trains ran to no regular timetable and the crossing gates would come down at any time, disrupting the flow of pedestrian and vehicular traffic. Apocryphally, it was said that if there was a bank robbery in the town, the police would order all the crossings to be closed as there was no road out of Burton that did not cross one!
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