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Off the pitch at Edgar Street, one of the most interesting items of news this week is that, at last, proper beer is now being served at Legends, the Hereford United club house.
Butty Bach, perhaps Herefordshires best known real ale, is available in bottles. That should encourage more supporters to use the facility.
Butty is a brew from the Wye Valley Brewery, which is located at Stoke Lacy. The chairman of the company is Peter Amor. He has recently been interviewed by Matthew Moggridge about the business and the beer. Below is a (slightly adapted) part of that interview.
After many years working in the brewing industry, including stints at both Guinness and Bulmers, Peter moved to the small village of Canon Pyon and rented some outbuildings of a pub, the Nag’s Head. While brewing his own beer behind the pub, an opportunity arose for Peter to buy his own pub, the run down Lamb Hotel in Hereford. He took on what he called a very strange Whitbread lease, but was permitted to brew and sell his own beer and the rest he bought from Whitbread.
"That was 23 years ago and I spent the next few years developing the pub. It was renamed The Barrels and it remains very successful," he said, prompting the question why?
"Real ale and hard work," said Peter, adding that the pub does not sell food, unless you count crisps and peanuts as food. He learnt how to run a pub ‘on the job’ and still loves it today. "It’s the only pub mentioned in the Lonely Planet Guide as a must to visit," Peter said.
The first big milestone in the history of the Wye Valley Brewery was the Monopolies & Mergers Commission Report on the beer supply situation in the UK. Without delving too much into the nitty gritty of the outcome, one major stipulation, that of pubs being allowed to offer a guest beer, turned Wye Valley Brewery’s five-barrel plant into 20 barrels and witnessed the appointment of John Gardner as sales manager. He is still with the company today.
"What happened was that you had the major brewers, like Bass, taking full page ads in the national press for draught Bass. There was a whole new interest in traditional ale and it just developed from there. ‘Developed’ being the operative word. The Wye Valley Brewery grew quickly and was soon a disruptive influence on the pub. The converted stables had outlived their usefulness and it was time to move premises."
As luck would have it, somebody Peter worked alongside at Bulmer’s dropped by and suggested he looked at premises once owned by Symond’s Cider in Stoke Lacey, 10 miles North East of Hereford. It was a huge site occupying something like nine acres of land but, through a bit of financial wizardry involving his pension, Peter did a deal with Bulmer’s that suited them both and took on the site.
"It was an enormous financial gamble. We were brewing at that point around about 120 barrels per week from the outhouse of a 220-year old pub and, quite correctly, the environmental health were breathing down our necks. We had to move anyway."
Peter’s son Vernon had left university and wanted to be involved in the business. Peter arranged for him to undertake a brewing pupilage under Ken Don, who, at the time was the head brewer at Young & Co in Wandsworth. “This involved, apart from the practicalities of brewing, also the ethos of care and quality, the whole thing,” he said.
Vernon Amor is now the managing director of Wye Valley Brewery and shares his father’s passion for beer.
While taking on the new Stoke Lacey premises was an enormous financial gamble for Wye Valley, there was some relief from the Government in the form of the Small Brewers Relief Package which, while frowned upon by some of the larger brewers, has been a Godsend to companies like Wye Valley Brewery.
So, there was Wye Valley: horrendously overdrawn at the bank having made a large capital investment on the new Stoke Lacey brewery (where it remains today); there was grant money involved as Peter had moved into a rural area and had taken on a huge site with all the costs that go with it. But it wasn’t long before he could start repaying his debts and start reinvesting.
New plant meant that maintenance and cleaning were a doddle and the whole operation became much more professional. Now, seven years later, Wye Valley Brewery has 460 barrels of fermentation capacity and is doing a lot of double brewing (80 barrels per day) most of the time.
Wye Valley now owns and runs its own bottling plant. It used to rely upon Thwaites who, said Peter, was doing a great job, but they were getting busy and sending a tanker load of beer up to Lancashire wasn’t particularly efficient or ecologically-minded, so it kind of made sense for Peter to do it himself. Thwaites gave Wye Valley plenty of notice and space was not an issue at Stoke Lacey.
The new bottling plant went in only two weeks prior to this interview and Peter says that bottling is a whole new discipline. Staffing has gone up from 12 to 29 and Wye Valley Brewery employs Jimmy Swan, the former head brewer of Dorset-based Hall & Woodhouse, famed for its Badger Ale.
Peter is no longer ‘hands on’. He leaves that honour to Vernon, his son, who is managing director. Peter’s passion is running pubs. He still runs The Barrels, pictured, in Hereford but bought another pub, The Rose & Lion, 12 years ago in Bromyard – on the Stoke Lacey to Bromyard Road – and, more recently, a pub in Malvern, The Morgan, which pays homage to the Morgan sports car, which is still built in Malvern.
As for the smoking ban, which now seems like ancient history in the scheme of things, Peter offered his customers at The Barrels an outdoor smoking area which was comfortable, clean and warm.
"I’ll never have doormen on the door," he said. "My wife Fran and I are a presence, the pub is my house, you work to my rules and if you don’t like them, you’re out. There’s no drugs and no fighting," he said.
Peter has invested in the The Barrels. The toilets have been improved, he has invested in the cellar, the back yard, the decking, hanging baskets, air con, there are multiple rooms so that people can do different things, such as watch the football, the rugby, play pool. There is one room with a big screen television.
"It’s the way you have to go, it’s back to basics. It’s a public house, an ordinary house licenced to sell drink. It depends on the pub, we’re an urban pub with chimney pots around us. Lots of country pubs do a very good wet trade only, just crisps and nuts. Humanity is a social beast. They want to talk and be sociable and the pub provides that focus," he said.
In brand terms, the aforementioned Butty Bach is Wye Valley Brewery’s flagship brand. It was originally brewed for the Cardiff Beer Festival where it was voted Champion Beer for two years on the trot. There are obvious Welsh connotations.
"It’s what the south Wales miners called their pit ponies, ‘my little friend’. It’s not a stout, it’s a medium brown beer. Our other big seller is Hereford Pale Ale, which is a light, lager-coloured beer. I’ve always been an admirer of proper Boddington’s and wanted to brew something to compete with cider and lager. You can’t serve it cold, but it’s a very light ale," he said.
There was a bit of a to do over Wye Valley’s Dorothy Goodbody, a golden beer with an abv of 4.2 per cent. The beer’s label features an illustration of a woman in a shortish skirt. Peter explained how the Portman Group had implied that there was some suggestion in the artwork that the woman was not wearing any underwear. It was a storm in a teacup or, as the Sun might have put it, a storm in a D-cup, and nothing had to be changed.
Dorothy Goodbody is available both in bottles and cask and there are different varieties of beer under the same label. A Dorothy Goodbody stout won National Champion at the CAMRA Winter Beer Festival in 2008 and there is a Golden ale too, said Peter, adding that Butty Bach is also bottled. The brewery also produces a range of one-offs, such as its current Summer Stinger and Bulls Up, which celebrated Hereford United's return to the Football League.
All seems rosy for Wye Valley Brewery and, for Peter, it is all very straightforward: you produce a quality product, you work hard and you will get a good return.
The full interview was originally published in Club Mirror's June 2009 issue.