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