For more than 200-years Horsham's King & Barnes was a dominant regional brewery. Five years after it closed, Roger Protz reports on how three separate breweries have emerged from the ashes in the Sussex town
The fallout from the closure of King & Barnes after it merged with Hall & Woodhouse, has been great news for beer lovers in Horsham, who now have three new breweries right on their doorstep.
The biggest and first to set up shop is Hepworth & Co, based in premises called the Beer Station on tracks and sidings alongside the railway line.
Andy Hepworth was head brewer at King & Barnes but he left before the closure, having seen the writing on the wall.
"I vowed never to own a brewery but then three other ex-K&B people told me they were keen to start brewing again." The three Paul Webb, John Tewson and Tim Goacher had skills in production, engineering and bottling, and Hepworth realised they could form a team with all the skills to produce good beer in a modern brewery.
Hepworth knew the beer market inside out and realised the cask sector was fiercely competitive. He spotted a gap in the bottled beer market and decided to concentrate at first on packaged products, which meant a brewery with a top-quality bottling line.
"The capital involved in building a brewery and bottling line is enormous," Hepworth says. "We got support from local people and industry: people felt affection for King & Barnes and wanted to help. Our shareholders include an electrician who carries out wiring for us and a label designer."
A multi-functional brewhouse
A brand new and multi-functional brewhouse capable of producing ale, lager and stout was built in Scotland to Hepworth's design. A fast and reliable bottling line was imported from Italy.
The beers are currently bright and sterile filtered. "It's a much better system than pasteurising," he says, "because it maintains the hop notes in the beer. Bottle-conditioned beers will be a cinch when we get around to them." He is already packaging live bottled beers for several micros, including Bath Ales, Coniston, Rebellion, and Hen's Tooth for Greene King. Packaging amounts to 400 barrels a week on top of 80 barrels a week of his own beers.
The first bottled beer produced in 2001 was the 4.2% abv Pullman. "It was the beer we wanted to drink in the brewery," Hepworth says, "but some people found it too bitter so we added Iron Horse at 4.8% abv, which is both stronger and slightly sweeter." The third beer is Sussex Light Ale at 3.5% abv, a successful attempt to recreate a style in danger of disappearing. Hepworth's lager is called Blonde and is fermented with a traditional yeast culture imported from Bavaria. It's an organic 5% abv beer and comes in a big 660ml bottle.
Pullman is on sale in Tesco, with Iron Horse in Sainsbury's. Now, three years down the road, Hepworth has started to build on the success of his packaged beers by moving into the cask sector.