28/01/2008 by admin.

The annual Fleetwood Beer Festival takes place this year over Valentine’s weekend, 14th, 15th and 16th February.  Programme notes for the Hart Brewery, as they will appear in the festival programme, are printed below:

THE HART BREWERY

                        Next year this busy and successful brewery will be celebrating its 15^th anniversary. Opened in 1994 in Preston it moved the following year to its current home in the stable block behind the historic Cartford Inn at Great Eccleston. Brewer, John Smith, with his immense enthusiasm, great sense of humour, but, above all, enormous talent as a brewer, is turning out beers that simply get better and better. Having a great local reputation, the beers are available in a dozen or so local pubs and clubs, but I find, on my travels around the country, his beers are very popular nationally as they become available through his system of arranging “swops” with other quality breweries. Fifteen years of working hard to fine tune and improve his regular beers has resulted in the brewery having a portfolio of top class, quality beers.

                        Most locals know of the unique way the brewery came into being, but the story bears repeating. Before 1994 John was an enthusiastic home brewer and the more his friends and neighbours tasted the beer the more popular became and gained a reputation. John needed to know whether his beer really was so good or was it just a case of people drinking it because it was free. By way of an experiment, he set up a small bar in his Preston garage and began to sell his beer, demand was so great that he needed to brew more and more of the stuff. Inevitably HM Customs and Excise heard about the venture and demanded their share in taxes. It led to John having to pay a huge fine and that seemed to be the end of his little enterprise. But there’s a twist in the tale, the Customs Officer prosecuting the case considered John’s beer to be so good that he sat down with him and came up with plans that would let the brewery continue on a “legitimate and properly commercial” basis and John could live his dream of becoming a professional brewer. It just so happened that the Customs Officer was a friend of Andrew Mellodew, legendary proprietor and landlord of the Cartford Hotel in Little Eccleston, beside the River Wyre. Andrew too had an ambition, which was to have a small micro-brewery on the grounds of his iconic pub that could service his pub and sell the surplus to the free-trade. An agreement over a beer and we had a happy ending, John was a brewer and Andrew had his brewery. That successful partnership continued until last year when Andrew decided to take a rest from the business and sold the business to Julie and Patrick Beaume, wisely and thankfully they have continued to support Hart brewery; it must be a terrific asset to the business to have an in-house brewery as an attraction. Speaking of Andrew Mellodew, I doubt if he’s finished with the real ale business, watch this space!

                        A number of Hart beers will be available at this festival, their beers are classy and of an unusually high quality. Try the award winning Ice Maiden, see why it was named “Lancashire’s Champion Beer.” Hart beers can often be found in local pubs including the branch “Pub of the Season” the Thatched House in Poulton-le-Fylde. To learn more about the brewery and to order the beers (incidentally they are now available in “take-home packs” from the brewery checkout the new web-site: www.hartbreweryltd.co.uk .

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02/01/2008 by admin.

The media has recently been full of warnings about global warming, carbon footprints and our changing world. One of the “in” things is bio-fuel we are being told how this will save the planet and is the answer to our fuel problems. That may or may not be true, but what it’s doing is seriously increasing the price of your pint. A year ago the price of barley, the grain used to make the malt which helps turn water into ber, was $400 a ton, the price today is $1020 a ton. Why? Because a large part of the barley crop has been sold to the manufacturers of bio-fuels (who receive huge grants form their governments to buy the stuff) the surplus barley is being fought over by brewers who are being forced to buy a limited quantity at a very high price. This is inevitably going to increase the price of your pint.

On New Years Eve I was speaking to the head brewer of one of Cumbria’s major breweries, he told me that they couldn’t possibly pass on the full increase in the cost of brewing to the public, it would become more expensive than drinkers would be prepared to pay. They are going to have to cut the amount of profit they make on their beer to keep those prices down. It isn’t only malt, hops have doubled, and more, in price and we all know about the petrol and deisel price increases. There has been much talk about 2008 being the year of the £4 pint, don’t think it couldn’t happen!

 So, how do you ensure that your favourite beer remains at a price you can afford? Buy locally, assuming you live in Lancashire keep supporting brewers like John Smith at Hart. The fact that his beers are top-notch almost goes without saying, but you don’t win titles like “Ice Maiden - Champion Beer of Lancashire” (judged in a blind tasting by CAMRA members against beers from every brewery within Lancashire’s historic boundaries and that includes Manchester and Liverpool). It is a local beer, John has pledged to absorb as much of the increse in costs as his business can stand, his increase to landlords should only put two to three pence on a pint of his beers. Because they are a local brewery there is very little in transport costs to be added. Even cheaper, contact the brewery to buy the polypins of beautiful, fresh, cask-conditioned beer.

More ramblings very soon.

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