Can a pub revive the fortunes of a city? In the case of the Fat Cat in Norwich, the answer is a resounding “Yes”.
The fourth annual City of Ale festival has just ended — a jamboree supported with great enthusiasm by pubs and breweries in Norwich and Norfolk.
The area is awash with great beer. But it wasn’t always the case and it took the flair and commitment of Colin Keatley to put beer back on the map.
Such has been Keatley’s success that there are now three pubs with Fat Cat in their name in Norwich. As well as selling a wide range of cask ales, cider, Belgian specialities and bottled beers from around the world, visitors will find the pubs are a shrine to the city’s long-lost breweries.
Destroyed
As befits a city at the heart of East Anglia’s “bread basket”, where the finest malting barley grows, Norwich had a number of substantial breweries. In the Fat Cats you will find pub signs, logos and posters for such revered makers of fine ale as Bullards, Morgans and Steward & Patteson.
Then in the 1960s Norwich’s long tradition of brewing was cynically destroyed by a big London company, Watneys. It arrived in the city with one aim: to buy a large estate of pubs in Norfolk and fill them with its new keg ales, of which Red Barrel was the most infamous creation.
Watneys bought and eventually closed all three Norwich breweries and, to add insult to injury, tanked in a beer called Norwich Bitter that was brewed at its plant in Northampton. When the writer Christopher Hutt arrived in Norwich in the early 1970s, researching his book Death of the English Pub, he found there was just a single outlet in the city for cask beer. Red Barrel was on scores of bars.
Succulent
Independent brewing tip-toed back in 1981 with the arrival of Woodforde’s, founded by keen home-brewer Ray Ashworth. It has moved twice, and based today at Woodbastwick, is a major presence in Norfolk. But until the pub trade was shaken up by the Beer Orders of the 1990s, Ashworth struggled to find outlets for his beer.
Then Colin Keatley arrived in Norwich and parched throats started to be watered by succulent beer. He’d worked in pubs since he was 15 years of age, first alongside his father in the Roundhouse in London’s Covent Garden.
He followed this as a relief manager for Scottish & Newcastle and then, just 21 and possibly the youngest pub manager in the country, took over the prestigious Savoy Tavern next to the Savoy Hotel.
But Keatley and his wife Marjie decided to ply their trade in the more sylvan surroundings of Norfolk and moved to Norwich. In 1991 they bought the New Inn in West End Street, a run-down and unsuccessful pub but one with that indefinable quality: potential.
Renamed the Fat Cat, refurbished and packed with nostalgic artefacts depicting Norwich’s rich brewing traditions, the Keatleys found drinkers beating a path to their door.
Abundant
The bars groaned with pumps serving cask ales from all over Britain and there were Belgian beers in abundance. West End Street is not in central Norwich but drinkers arrived by cab, bike and bus to revel in something the city had not witnessed for decades: beer choice.
Buoyed by the success of the pub, Keatley bought a second outlet in the city, the Cider Shed. The original Fat Cat is small and compact. The second has a large open-plan interior with room for a small brewery: the site is now called the Fat Cat Brewery Tap. Who better to design the brewery than Ray Ashworth, who had retired from Woodforde’s but was sweet-talked by Keatley into picking up his mashing fork once more?
The brewery is run today by Chris Richards. He brews 28 barrels a week and the demand for the beers — sold to other breweries as part of reciprocal deals — means the brewery may have to move to bigger premises. The house beers have a strong feline image: Fat Cat Bitter, Marmalade Cat, Cougar and Wild Cat. They are joined on the bar by cask and keg ales from all over the country.
Welcoming
And now there are three. Keatley has added the Fat Cat & Canary, another pub outside the city centre but, on Thorpe Road, is handy for both the railway station and Norwich City football ground — and supporters of the Canaries need somewhere to drown their sorrows these days.
In keeping with the main focus of the group, the Canary is comfortable and welcoming, with a fine range of beers, including the house range. Colin Keatley has arranged his pubs to serve three well-spaced suburban areas of the city but he has added his own private bus service that allows customers to hop on and hop off at each outlet.
Norwich, on the other hand, will never be caught on the hop again.