Hops and Glory was the cause. Simon, the Reluctant Scooper, and I had talked ourselves into something after reading it, and since we could not get to Mumbai for a bank holiday weekend, and neither of us fancied the beers we would find there if we did, we settled on Burton instead. I drove two hundred and fifty miles up to Derbyshire for fly fishing and IPA.
One rule: no phoning a PR company. We could have rung whoever handles Coors and been given the inside track, a tour and a warm bottle of something. That would have proved nothing. This had to be done the way any other beer tourist does it. People go to Cologne for Kolsch, Dusseldorf for Alt, Bamberg for rauchbier, Brussels for lambic and gueuze, San Diego for double IPA, Chicago for barrel aged beer. Each of those towns gave the world a style and each of them will sell it to you over a counter. IPA was an export product, yes, but Burton is where it comes from. There should be some semblance of it available.
We were not optimistic. Simon knows the area far better than I do, and between us we reckoned the realistic haul was two bottles: Worthington White Shield and Burton Bridge Empire IPA. Empire is one of the beers the Beer Judge Certification Program lists as a commercial marker for English IPA, which is a strange kind of compliment. Look down the rest of that list and you find beers from London, Gloucestershire, Hampshire, New York, Chicago and Brooklyn. Exactly one of them is brewed in Burton. Whatever else that tells you, it tells you the style has moved out and rented elsewhere.
The day started as it meant to continue. I collected Simon at ten and we went for a fry up in Derby, on the reasoning that strong beer needs a liner. The tea arrived somewhere around the end of the bacon and egg, which I took as an omen. We then drove up and down a lane at Willington several times looking for a fly fishery that the map insisted was right there. It was only when we stopped and asked that we learned the lake is now a marina serving canal boats. Progress, from a certain angle.
On to Burton, where the approach is heralded by the enormous Pirelli depot, and then by Victorian industrial redbrick scattered around the fringes of the town. Simonâs plan was the Coopers Tavern, the local CAMRA pub of the year, on the grounds that if anywhere had an IPA it would be there. It is a flat fronted, multi room place that has been there a very long time, full of breweriana, most of it Bass, with a noticeable quantity from other Midlands brewers mixed in. The walls are a museum of companies that no longer make anything here. That detail set Simon off on a train of thought, and it stayed with me too.
I had a pint of gravity served Bass, which was genuinely passable and one of the easier pints of the day, and a taster of the new Red Shield, which I assume is a brand extension of White Shield. No cask of something experimental. No brewerâs reserve. Nothing to pull a beer geek off the motorway. In a town whose name is on the style, that is the finding.
Not long before, at a pub beer festival at the Bull in Horton Kirby, I had tried White Shield on handpump and it was not the beer I know from the bottle. Pete writes about the contract bottler, which is very much a live issue now and was an important part of the trade then. There is family history in this for me too. White Shield was one of my fatherâs favourites, and I remember the effort he went to keeping it on in our pub, even as a freehouse, through the years when the brand was being kicked from brewery to brewery, well before Steve Wellington helped turn its fortunes around.
We moved on to Burton Bridge, which was heaving with people drinking pale ale. Stairway to Heaven was on, five per cent, decently hoppy over good golden malt, and their Festival too. Then we walked round modern Burton, which is Sainsburyâs and Asda like everywhere else, trying to buy a bottle of White Shield. We failed.
The weather turned, and Midlands greyness lands hard on someone who lives on the south coast, so we went back to Derby. The Flowerpot was a genuine pleasure, their own beers, an impressive dispense system and live music handled properly. Simon had been raving about Marbleâs Summer Marble and he was right, it was an excellent pint. None of which was getting us any closer to Burton IPA, so we walked to the other end of town to a Marstonâs pub to try Old Empire on its home turf.
The pub turned out to be a treasure, apparently around 1830, a set of cottages bolted together. The Old Empire was in good nick and tasty. I will admit a soft spot for the canned version, particularly on a bank when I am fishing.
Back at Simonâs we opened the insurance policy I had driven up with: Golden Hop, Moor JJJ IPA, Southern Tier Cuvee One, Pliny the Elder and the Burton Bridge Empire. You would expect that lot to end with ceilings spinning. Instead, two went down the drain. Cuvee One is oaked to the point of parody and aromatic well past eleven. Pliny made Simon stop talking, which is the highest compliment available. The Empire was infected and past its best, which stung, because we had bought it at the brewery that morning.
The oak question nagged at me all evening. The style guidelines say oak is inappropriate in English IPA. I struggle with that. Put beer anywhere near wood for any length of time, even the relatively short haul to India, and something will happen. Not heavy oak, not an eighties Chardonnay, but a woodiness sitting behind the hops and the malt. Low aroma Hungarian oak would still have given something. I even wonder about fermentation of the wood sugars. There is at least one American brewer using beech in fermentation, though for nucleation rather than flavour, which is a different argument. I am not going to relitigate what did or did not happen inside those barrels, but the idea that they contributed nothing seems unlikely to me.
Late in the evening I found a tweet from someone in Coorsâ press office telling me where I could get White Shield. Kind of them, but by then we were not going, and it was never what the trip was about. The point was to find out what an ordinary person could find. The museum, incidentally, was shut. I still have never been inside it.
Most of what we actually talked about that day was not beer. It was the people of Burton. Whole breweries lost their markets, closed, and put people out of work. We hear endlessly about miners and car workers in the history books and almost never about brewery workers. That must have left a serious mark on the townâs economy, its confidence and its sense of itself, and I suspect it is still working through it. Those walls in the Coopers Tavern are not nostalgia. They are an obituary that nobody outside the town has read. There have been efforts to revive the heritage. They came too early, and whoever organised them forgot to tell the town.
The next day I set off south, went north, and arrived at Sheffield with some confusion, my sat nav having died and my sense of direction being what it is. Since I was up there anyway I aimed at Manchester, on the strength of that Summer Marble. The A616 is a genuinely lovely road, and somewhere along it a sign for a trout fishery appeared. Five hours on a bank holiday Monday, into a headwind, on a put and take water, produced a few faint tugs and no fish. Then I moved round to the windward bank, which almost nobody else was prepared to fish, and twenty minutes later the cool box was full. The fly I finished with was the one I started with, which tells you how long it had been since I last went.
Then a text from Kelly Ryan: are you in the area for the brewery opening, we are at the pub now. Fifty minutes later I was at the Coach and Horses with a half of Thornbridge Seaforth in front of me. An English IPA. The first half went very quickly. Kelly and Mark Tranter of Dark Star joined the table and we talked about modern British hops and the strange and wonderful things Kelly had been rubbing with Charles Faram.
We went to the home of the style and found almost nothing of it. We found it instead sixty miles away, made by a brewery founded in 2005, in Seaforth and in Halcyon. A place can own a styleâs history and lose its present entirely, and I am not sure Burton has noticed.
I drove home wondering why I had not simply spent the weekend on the beach. But it was fun. Thanks for the idea, Pete.
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In Memoriam: Simon H. Johnson, 1970â2013
Simon, the Reluctant Scooper, died unexpectedly on 21 May 2013. He was one of the most insightful, witty and human voices in British beer writing, and he was my friend. He is the reason this trip happened. He directed, whilst drove us around Burton, talked about brewery workers while I was still thinking about hops, and made me fish a windward bank I would have walked past. The beer community lost someone irreplaceable, and I lost someone I cannot replace either.
His wife Rebecca confirmed his passing on his X account. Friends and family organised the Scoopathon, a fundraising event in his honour, and Derby County FC paid their respects. Tributes appeared across the beer blogging world, including a particularly warm one on I Might Have a Glass of Beer, which captured what most of us already knew: that Simonâs brilliantly undogmatic, generous approach to beer and to people was something the rest of us were still trying to learn. The Golden Pints awards, which Simon co-created with Mark Dredge and Andy Mogg, carry his name in their annual best beer twitterer category. I often think, what would Simon do.
