It’s a typical English pub scene. In the Elephant & Castle there are handpumps on the bar and, to the side, there are casks on stillage where more beer is served straight from the tap.
But all is not what it seems. A man approaches the bar and places an order: “Une pinte de Bom-bar-de-ay, s’il vous plaît, et les bangairs et mash.” We are not in England at all, but in a pub in Lyon, France’s second city.
The Elephant & Castle is owned by Charles Wells, the family-owned brewery and pub business based in Bedford. Wells runs 12 pubs in France and plans to expand that number.
I came across Wells’s French operation as a result of writing a new edition of A Brewery in Bedford, which I first penned in 2005.
So much has happened in the decade that followed that managing director Paul Wells asked me to write an update. I am not, as a campaigning journalist, the sort of person who writes brewery histories. They are all too often brown-nose jobs, saying what a truly wonderful company it is, without a blot on its copybook.
But Wells is not like that. Paul Wells and his family and colleagues are up front about the errors they have made, including almost going out of business in the 1990s as a result of concentrating on supermarket “own label” brands. They have clawed their way back from that near disaster and have turned Bombardier into one of the top 10 premier bitters in the UK.
There has also been continuing turbulence with the loss of the lucrative Corona and Red Stripe beers. But they have been replaced by Kirin Ichiban from Japan and more recently Estrella Damm from Spain.
The big new story was the merger and then de-merger with Young’s, the former London brewery. The result was Wells and Young’s. When the two companies decided to go their different ways in 2011, the parting was amicable: Young’s had become purely a pub company while brewing remained Wells’s heartbeat. The Young’s beers continue to be brewed at Bedford.
It’s been a busy, dizzy 10 years since the first edition of the book. Along the way, Wells picked up the Courage and McEwan’s brands from Scottish & Newcastle, now Heineken UK. This gives the Bedford brewery a major presence in Scotland with some revered beers, including McEwan’s Export, a tartan version of IPA. At the same time, Wells has restored the good name of Courage, with the Cockney classic Best Bitter plus Directors premium ale.
And then there’s France. Back in 1995, Charles Wells dipped its toe in the French market by buying a restaurant in Paris and turning it into a pub called the Bombardier. That venture worked well and, as a result, the global drinks giant Allied Domecq offered to sell its John Bull brands and pubs in France and eastern Europe to Wells.
Wells didn’t rush into the deal and spent some time checking out the terrain. But in 2014, it bought the John Bull Pub Company, which has been renamed Charles Wells France, with the pubs in eastern Europe run under licences.
Wells has pubs in Paris, Lyon, Bordeaux, Toulouse and Montpellier. The design of the pubs is not uniform and avoids English clichés, though I was amused to find the words “apples & pears” marked on stairs in the Elephant & Castle in Lyon, possibly the first sighting of Cockney rhyming slang in France.
But there is a strong emphasis on English branding in the pub names. They include King Arthur, Charles Dickens, Shakespeare, Sherlock Holmes, Robin Hood and George & Dragon.
Customers can play darts in some, but the emphasis is on beer and food. Ed Robinson says that in the early days keg beer was the mainstay, but Wells has accepted the challenge of offering Bombardier, Eagle IPA, Directors, McEwan’s Export and Young’s Special on traditional handpumps.
Robinson says it has taken some time to explain to the French that cask ale needs to be served at a warmer temperature than keg beer. It’s been a slow going but, from my observations, the message has got home and French drinkers now appreciate la bière Anglaise au naturelle.
And there’s the food. Ed Robinson employs both French and English chefs to prepare such staple dishes as fish and chips, ploughman’s, burgers and curries as well as “bangairs et mash”. Sunday roasts are a major attraction as are breakfasts.
The success of Wells’s French pubs shows just how far the brewery has developed since Charles Wells, a retired sailor, opened his brewery in Bedford in 1875. These may be different times, with different beers and different demands, but it is heart warming to find the brewery and its pubs still in family hands and spreading the message of good English ale as far afield as France.