Look back in

lager In many peoples' minds, lager is a child of the 70s, as far as the UK is concerned.

The truth is very different and Britain's lager brewing history dates back well over a century.

The Austro-Bavarian Brewing Company is reckoned to be the first brewer of lager in the UK.

This was undertaken in Tottenham High Road, north London by an entirely German staff in 1882.

The company was renamed as the Tottenham Lager Company four years later but finally ceased trading in 1903.

The year 1883 saw the establishment in north Wales of the Wrexham Lager Brewery, which specialised in dark Bavarian-style lagers.

The company ran into problems trying to chill the cellars where the lager was left to condition, and it took three years to sort out matters before it could start producing golden pils-style lagers.

Perhaps the most notable event around that time was the introduction of Tennent's lager from the Wellpark Brewery in Glasgow in 1885.

In 1897, Allsopp's erected a 60,000-barrel lager plant at Burton on Trent.

The plant was transferred to Arrols of Alloa in 1921 and, six years later, the Scottish brewery introduced Graham's Golden Lager.

This turned out to be a runaway success and within 10 years was one of the most widely-distributed beers brewed in Scotland.

After the second world war, interest started to mount as lager brewers sought to change Britain's drinking tastes, notably EP "Eddie" Taylor, chairman of Canadian Breweries, whose leading product was Carling Black Label.

Taylor signed an agreement in 1953 with specialist bottled beer brewer, Hop & Anchor Breweries of Sheffield, for it to brew Carling under licence.

The British tied-house system meant that Carling's progress was much slower than Taylor anticipated.

Eventually, he decided to forge his own brewing conglomerate in the UK to get Carling on to British bar tops.

In 1960, he brought together Hope & Anchor, Hammonds United Breweries of Bradford and another seven concerns to make United Breweries, with some 2,000 tied pubs.

Over the next few years, United merged with Charrington, and then Charrington with Bass, to form Britain's biggest brewer.

The other company convinced that Britain would eventually take to lager was Guinness, which sought the services of leading lager brewer Dr Hermann Muender of the Dom brewery in Cologne.

Guinness then built a lager brewery at Dundalk, Ireland, and eventually went into production of Harp lager in June 1960.

Sales in Ireland were such that a British launch was planned within a year and the first consignment arrived at Liverpool docks in April 1961.

After six months of selling only in north west England, Harp went on national sale in November 1961.

This meant Guinness had to build a brewery in England to help slate the growing thirst for its lager.

Work began on the brewery in 1961 at Alton in Hampshire, where Courage, a partner in the launch of Harp, had owned a pale-ale brewery.

The old Arrol's brewery in Alloa had eventually become part of the Ind Coope set-up, and, in 1959, Ind Coope relaunched Graham's Golden Lager as Skol.

Ind Coope's merger in 1961 with Tetley of Leeds and Ansells of Birmingham, to make what be-came known as Allied Breweries, gave it the mass to make Skol a rival to Carling and Harp.

Even with these three brands, total lager consumption only accounted for 2% of beer sales by 1963.

However a sea change was to occur in 1965 when Harp solved the technical problems of serving up a glass of beer, rather than a pint of froth, quicker than its rivals.

It was enormously successful, particularly in Scotland, where it captured 20% of the beer market within a year.

By 1971, lager, both keg and bottled, was taking just under 10% of total beer sales.

A couple of years earlier, Whitbread had started brewing a lower-gravity version of Heineken under licence from the Dutch company.

This move started to gain momentum to such an extent that, within a few more years, Heineken had 20% of the lager market in England and Wales.

Watney was also keen to get in on the act and entered a partnership with Carlsberg to brew the Danish firm's lagers at a new site in Northhampton.

The London brewer gained the premises when it took over a local firm, Phipps, in 1960.

The Carlsberg brewery opened in 1973, by which time lager sales in Britain had increased 50% in two years.

The next three or four years saw a series of unusually hot summers, and sales continued to rocket.

By 1976, total lager sales across the country were equal to almost one in four pints.

In Scotland, lager accounted for 40% of sales in 1977 ­ the year after S&N started brewing McEwan's lager at the New Fountain Brewery.

Artois of Belgium signed an agreement with Whitbread to let its Stella Artois be brewed in the UK.

Guinness signed up the French brewer Kronenbourg in 1975 as its brewed-under-licence premium lager.

Watney (by now Grand Met) began brewing Australian brand Foster's in the UK in 1981.

Foster's, like Heineken, was brewed to a lower abv than anywhere else in the world.

And Allied launched Castlemaine XXXX in the UK in 1984.

Lager sales continued to rise.

In 1979, they hit 29% of the total.

In 1986, sales hit 43.5%.

UK-produced lager now represented more than 95% of UK lager sales, up from 71% in 1966.

Lager in all its forms, draught, bottled and canned, finally captured the majority of the UK beer market in 1990, with sales of 51.4%.