Vaux Breweries, A Personal Recollection

In its day,Vaux Breweries Ltd in Sunderland was a medium sized brewery, just like the city’s football team, never quite at the top tier.

This is giving it a disservice because if you look at it in today’s industry it would be one of the largest. It was quite a complex brewery which would astound many of today’s younger brewers at its sheer size and diversity.

The company was founded by Cuthbert Vaux perhaps in 1806 and had grown by acquisition over the years when I started at Vaux in 1979 as a Shift or Junior Brewer. The industry was at its zenith with many of its businesses fully integrated. As an example, Vaux site in Sunderland had a drum maltings and went all the way through to its own storage depots and transport fleet. It was the largest of five breweries in the Vaux Group consisting of the Yorkshire breweries of Wards and Darley’s, together with Edinburgh’s Thomas Usher & Son Ltd and the recently closed Lorimer & Clark Ltd (Caledonian) Brewery.

The business not only suppled its 1000 plus pubs but a large free trade consisting of working men’s and sports clubs. It also owned Swallow Hotels, a soft drinks division and a wine merchant.

Pre Margaret Thatcher and the Beer Orders, the Industry was completely different. Most of the beer left the brewery in tank delivered to clubs in tanker vehicles and kept at the licenced premises in their own 5 or 2.5-barrel tanks. Tank beer was filtered, low carbonated beer which was unpasteurised; the intention was to consume the beer quickly and thus maintain quality. The amount of beer drunk was vast. As an example, the Working Mans club near where I lived would have two 60-barrel tanker deliveries per week. It was famous for emptying a 5-barrel tank of beer in 15 minutes at one Christmas session aided using multiple metered dispense machines in several bars. It helped that most of their members drank Lorimer’s Scotch Ale. The pattern of brewing requirements varied also. There was the obvious Christmas peak but there was also a zenith during the summer. The heavy industry in the region would take the same two weeks holiday, usually at the end of July. This was called Shipyard Fortnight where some men would spend most of their time drinking. There was influx of people at the holiday resorts before packaged Spanish holidays took over.

With the demise of heavy industry this faded away. It was replaced by another peak centred around Christmas. The buying power of the supermarkets increased; fuelled by home purchases and the increased ownership of cars. This enabled people to buy beer in the form of cans and transport it to their homes for consumption. Tesco was a major customer of Vaux who would order vast amounts of beer to sell nationally at discount over the Christmas period. This meant that the Christmas brewing campaign started in August where any spare brewing and canning slot would be utilised up to the festive season. Cans of beer were then stored in various local warehouses ready for the deluge of supply to the stores.

Vaux was so large that the company briefings were held at the Sunderland Empire, the largest theatre in the region and ideally placed being a stone’s throw from the head office and brewery. I distinctly remembered, at one such briefing, the MD, Frank Nicholson, saying that it took 30 vehicles of beer to the supermarkets to match the same profit from one to our pubs. The size of the brewery at today’s standards was huge, it brewed up to 500,000 barrels a year in the full range of packages. The packaging lines consisted of a returnable bottling line housed in the old Avenue Theatre where Sir Henry Irving appeared in one of his last performances. This, in time, was converted into a non-returnable glass line.

Cask beer was originally housed below the fermentation room but was moved to the old keg area above ground. The keg line was updated during this time and a 1000 cpm can line was put in a purpose-built packaging hall which also had its own PET bottling line. The packaging hall was built on former company houses which I saw just being demolished in 1979.

We brewed three times a day with two 7.5 tonne mash tuns which produced 720 barrels of beer. The brewhouse staff worked three shifts and five days per week with a Saturday held in reserve for extra brews as well as cleaning. It took eight to nine skilled workers to achieve this. Three 120brl coppers would be used to boil the wort, and a hop back conveniently placed so a truck parked below could collect the spent hops. This brewhouse was eventually mothballed and replaced by a second-hand brewhouse obtained from Carlsberg in Copenhagen.

The brewery had a contract to brew Tuborg Lager at the time so the plant was free but Vaux had to spend over £1m to remove, transport and reassemble it. This was housed in the old maltings. It brewed 360-barrels, six times a day (no change in capacity) in a Steinecker plant. It consisted of an asymmetrical mash filter and kettle together with a lauter tun. Uniquely it used hot wort filtration using perlite as the filter medium. Effluent was removed to the tidal River Wear!! Brewing evolved to contract brewed lagers to supply the pubs as well as the increase in small-pack products.

The fermentation room worked 24/7 including all bank holidays and so had about 10 people. This over-time was scaled back with reduced hours over the weekend. Each brew would fill six 120-barrel fermenters or one 1,000 barrel conical fermenter. It took a great deal of skill to fill each fermenter to obtain the correct gravity. Duty at the time was paid on the volume collected in carefully gauged vessels and the original gravity (OG) was measured by saccharometer to the nearest 0.1 of a degree. This was recorded in a special book housed in the excise office and the volume collected with the OG in pen. Any mistakes had to be crossed out and initialled. The excise officer could and did check what you recorded at any time. This book each month was used to calculate the excise duty. When I calculated the duty return in the 1980s the sum owed was over £1,000,000 per month, an astronomical and somewhat unreal figure for me to comprehend. There were 36 open stainless-steel vessels on two floors and seven 1,000-barrel conical fermenters which over a period was increased to 20.

Maturation space consisted of 22,000 barrels in 55 various sized vessels. The hours of work here were two eight-hour shifts with overtime to cope with the frequent issues with filtration. This capacity was increased as the production output ratio changed from a large pack to a small pack. Two 240 barrel and hour Seitz Orion plate and frame filters with a Seitz Sirius polishing filter for beer recovery. In addition there was a Schenk PVPP filter for small pack shelf-life enhancement. You were allowed under Customs and Excise rules a 6% loss against your collection figures, so any beer recovered was significant. With the advent of duty at the gate, the removal of 6% loss improved quality greatly as there were many dubious practices to minimise the losses. As a fact until much later in my career I never made a mild, it was manufactured from recovered beer coloured with caramel!

Initially the management style mimicked the army. In the manufacturing arm we had a group production director who looked after all sites. Vaux had a head brewer, a second brewer and two/three senior brewers. One looked after brewing and fermentation whilst the others oversaw packaging. An extra senior brewer was added to look after kegging and cask beer. The brewery had four junior or shift brewers who worked three-shift system five days a week with each of the four covering weekends with a brief to attend twice a day to monitor fermentations. Once in the morning and other in the early evening. Quite often you managed to get tickets for the football so could sandwich the match between visits with a few pints hosting the Saturday morning brewery tour to deaden the pain of watching the Black Cats.

It was customary for the workforce to address you as ‘Mr’ and you had to wear a collar and tie with a white coat. The brewery was run by a whole series of foreman together with his deputy called a chargehand. Each of the departments of brewhouse, fermentation, conditioning and packaging had a foreman. The foremen had the use of a bar which they frequented at 10 am. This was useful as if you wanted to speak to them, you could always catch them over a drink. The brewers had their own sample room which was initially the shift brewer’s office but as the brewery was developed it was in a discrete area hidden away in the filtration block. It even had its own toilet.

As a junior brewer the sample room was a useful place to be as you often got to know the outside suppliers as well as picking up the brewery gossip.

To keep the brewery running the engineers had a series of qualified people and often as not came from the merchant marine industry. A large industry at that time in the area. The brewery work was a way for them to avoid the long periods absence from their family. I would enjoy their stories of a life at sea. Vaux had a chief engineer, a brewery and packaging engineer as well as a project engineer. To support them were a whole series of fitters and electricians. Given the nature of the heavy industry, they were very adept and I would be amazed at the variety of difficult work they undertook. There was a friendly animosity between the brewers and the engineers over broken plant.

The laboratory changed from a few employees in the back of the fermentation room to a purpose-built laboratory and given the contract brewing for foreign multinationals, it eventually morphed into a state of the art analytical, microbiological and sensory laboratories with highly qualified managers. Quality systems were eventually enhanced to be the first brewery to achieve ISO 9001 standard.

All the pub and club cellar equipment was serviced by its own employees. These people as well as its transport employees would eventually be replaced by outside companies but one of the benefits of these people is that they acted as feedback on what was really going on in the pubs and clubs.

These are just a few of the people who make up the brewery production. Many other functions were covered in house which enabled a complex brewery to function. My reflection of my time at Vaux was one of constant challenges but with work colleagues who were second to none with a wide range of skills and experience. It was sad that it came to an end like many breweries before and since. It was for me a real education at the onset of my career with a range of colleagues to consult.

So, what of the site today? After 20 years of dereliction, the old site is finally taking shape and will spearhead the future of Sunderland city centre. When it closed, the site was initially going to be a Tesco superstore, but the council rejected this and the site remained an empty eyesore.

Finally, investment was found and various developments ensued. First was the new City Hall followed by other office space now taken up by many including Just Eat. There is a state of art NHS eye hospital in development, due to open in 2026. Just recently, a pedestrian footbridge linking Keel Square which includes a statue of an iconic Vaux dray. It is near the Minster and to that other place of worship, Sunderland AFC’s, The Stadium of Light. No doubt this will open the north side of the river to further development as well as easy access from travel hubs to the stadium. The walk from Keel Square to the bridge is inlaid with every ship built on the Wear. Afterall, in its heyday, the Wear was once the largest shipbuilding river in the world. Personally, after the sadness of the closure of the historic brewery and the loss of employment it is very heartening to see that the site is key to regeneration of the city.

Brian Yorston

Vaux Breweries, A Personal Recollection

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