Hard water creates harsh coffee. Excessive minerals, especially calcium and magnesium, can make coffee taste bitter and chalky. Try filtered or bottled water with balanced mineral content. Water quality matters! Are you brewing with tap, filtered, or bottled? See my recommendation in the comments.

#coffee #brewing

#cloud #brewing best part of the sub-tropics #summer #storms #sky #photography

Stepped grinders are easier for beginners. They have preset click-stops for different brew methods, removing guesswork. Stepless grinders offer infinite adjustment but require more experimentation. 𝗕𝗲𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗿 𝗼𝗿 𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗵𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗮𝘀𝘁? 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗰𝗼𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗲 𝗷𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗻𝗲𝘆! Looking to get started on your grind? The best entry level grinder for your money is the Baratza Encore ESP, snag it here https://amzn.to/3MCMAeH #coffee #brewing

#FotoVorschlag 'Männersache, Frauending' / Men's business, women's business'

Bierbrauen war im Mittelalter eine typische Arbeit von Hausfrauen. Heute trägt ein echter Craft Bierbrauer Vollbart und Tatoos.

In the Middle Ages, brewing beer was typically a job for housewives. Today, a reall craft beer brewer has a full beard and tattoos.

#bierbrauen #craftbeer #brewing #homebrewing #hobbybrauen

Oublions un instant les manuels scolaires et leurs explications sages. Et si l’un des plus grands bouleversements de l’histoire humaine n’était pas né d’un calcul rationnel, mais d’un désir de partage, de rituel et d’ivresse légère? L’idée fait sourire, mais elle repose sur des indices archéologiques très sérieux.

#Préhistoire #Archéologie #Civilisation #Fermentation #Bière #brewing #Fermentation #beer #belgique #Allemagne #history #histoire #agriculture

https://mesplaisirs.com/et-si-lagriculture-etait-nee-pour-la-biere/

Coffee is 98% water. If your water tastes off, your coffee will too. This is the most overlooked variable in home brewing. Real talk: When's the last time you thought about your brew water? 💭

#coffee #water #brewing

Olds College craft brewing program suspension 'very disappointing' for Alberta brewers
Olds College is suspending its craft brewing program and will be closing its brewery later this year, pointing to decreased enrolment and the "downward trend" of the craft beer industry.
#education #brewing #Alberta
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/olds-college-brewery-craft-beverage-9.7069720?cmp=rss

Les 5 réglages qui rendent une IPA vraiment excellente

#beer #biere #IPA #brewing
https://youtube.com/watch?v=GMAVY3fLMUQ&si=OUHI9nYfad94Tohj

The thread about the Great Edinburgh Beer Duty Fraud: Boiling the Wort and Cooking the Books

It was 3AM on Christmas morning 1933 when – after a long and cold stakeout – not Santa but three agents of His Majesty’s Customs & Excise entered the renowned Bell’s Brewery on the Pleasance and caught the brewers in the act of working illicitly. They didn’t yet know it but the trio had just uncovered the UK’s largest ever duty fraud, one with a record that would not be broken for decades to come. So ended the Great Edinburgh Beer Duty Fraud, and so also begins its story.

A deliberate, systematic and wicked fraud, carried out with great cunning

Lord Aitchison, Lord Justice Clerk, summing up after the trial of the Fraud’s perpetrators

Edinburgh has a long association with the brewing trade and by the latter 19th century had come to totally dominate the Scottish industry; it one third of all breweries in the country (thirty-two); 45% of all men employed in the trade and produced over 80% of all beer by volume. This supplied not just the city or the Scottish market but England too (particularly the northeast) and all corners of the British Empire, in which it can be considered third only to Burton-on-Trent and London as a brewing centre. There were a number of reasons why this had come to be; the Lothians provided ample supplies of malting barley and coal; the Port of Leith’s provided ready access to east coast trade in Newcastle and London; but primarily it came down to water. The city sits atop a geological feature called the Charmed Circle, a fault giving esay access to both soft water well suited to old-fashioned Scotch Ales but also hard water, chemically similar to that of Burton-on-Trent, which was perfect for brewing the Pale Ales then much in vogue. This explains why so many breweries came to be concentrated in the south and east of the Old Town.

The decade of the 1880s was a time of rapid change in the industry and beer production in Scotland (and therefore mainly Edinburgh) almost doubled. Practices were modernising and commercial competition was increasing; the big players were getting bigger and the smaller and provincial operators were being squeezed out. It was a time of growing investment speculation around brewers with big names listing as limited companies on the stock exchange. One of the Edinburgh’s biggest, William McEwan & Co., floated in July 1889 with a capital of £1,000,000 (about £112 million in 2025). With average annual profits of £92k (£10.4 million in 2025) it offered investors a five percent dividend and provided a Return on Invested Capital (ROIC) of 9.2%.

But most of Edinburgh’s breweries were much smaller than McEwans and many were old and antiquated. And so later that same year four of those smaller, older breweries decided to seek strength in numbers with a merger and hop on the stock market bandwagon. The idea seemed sensible on paper, as the prospectus put it “material economies in the expenses should be effected, both of production and distribution“. Brian Glover, in “The Lost Beers & Breweries of Britain“, calls it however “an Alcoholic Haze of Ambition“! With a market capitalisation of £454k (£50.9 million in 2025) and an annual output of 110,000 barrels, the new Edinburgh United Breweries Ltd became the third largest brewer in Scotland (although still only half the size of the mighty McEwan’s).

The four weel kent names that were joining together were:

Robert Disher & Co., Edinburgh & Leith Brewery, Canongate. Formally known as The Edinburgh & Leith Brewing Co., an old established name from the 18th century. They were well known for a very strong ale, the in(famous) Disher’s Ten Guinea; The Burgundy of Scotland. The name refers to an old Scottish practice of naming beers after the nominal duty on a barrel, therefore equating to their strength. The usual range was from 40 shillings for weak beers up to 90 shillings for strong beers; at 210 shillings Ten Guinea was therefore over twice as strong again and would be close to 11% ABV. It was sold in wee heavy bottles but astonishingly also came on draught in pints; possibly the strongest draught beer that you could buy in the UK at that time?

Robin, McMillan & Co., Summerhall Brewery. An old established firm first set up in 1705 and purchased from his successors in 1862 by Robert Robin and Robert McMillan who greatly expanded the business, increasing the workforce tenfold in twenty years. Like its stablemates in the new company it did much trade in northeast England, but also as far off as the West Indies.

David Nicolson & Sons, Palace Brewery, Abbeymount. A newcomer on the Edinburgh scene only built in 1865 and was also the smallest of the grouping. It was known for its Palace Pale Ale but it seems the brewery’s capacity greatly exceeded its output. It had been purchased in 1870 by a Canongate wine and spirit merchant, David Nicolson, whose wholesale business was included and expected to “yield large additional profits”.

George Ritchie & Sons, Bell’s Brewery, Pleasance. Established by John & Hugh Bell in the mid-18th century and purchased from their successors by George Ritchie in 1835, it was the largest in the group. Once known for an old-fashioned, dark and hoppy Scotch Ale called Black Cork, the recipe for this died along with its brewer early in the 19th century. They alone in the group seem to have had “tied houses” (i.e. they owned their own pubs) and did much trade across central Scotland and also in northeast England.

With combined average profits of £28.4k (£3.1 million in 2025) the Return on Invested Capital was 6.3%, significantly lower than McEwan’s and therefore a less sound financial bet. The prospectus talked up the “rapidly increasing” sales and great benefits to be wrought from amalgamation but the new company was also notably less efficient than McEwan’s by another measure – the latter was making twice the profits per unit of brewery space. The merger was a speculative venture driven by H. Osborne O’Hagan of the London Contract Corporation and the London brokerage of Messrs J. R. Ellerman, who between them were responsible for multiple brewery mergers and listings. It was mainly funded by English investors and three of the seven seats on the Board were initially allocated to English brewery directors, one assumes to keep one watchful eye over the English money and the other on the Scottish brewers.

The financial arrangements were somewhat unusual. £200,000 – 45% – of the company’s capital was not in shares but a type of secured loan known as a Mortgage Debenture. These paid a fixed 5% per annum interest and unlike the dividends on shares could not be reduced or stopped in lean times. They were good for investors but bad news for any company like Edinburgh United that found itself lumbered with a fixed £10,000 interest payment on them every year. The trustees for these debentures were The Commercial Union Brewery Investment Corporation, London; an investment trust formed the previous year by Ellerman. This trust did very well for itself out of such deals, appreciating in value by over 1,000 percent in just nine years. Ellerman would go on to become (probably) the richest man in England.

The whole deal was therefore a sophisticated piece of Victorian venture capitalism and one stacked in the interests of distant investors! Also unusual was the convoluted manner in which the breweries were acquired, purchased through an intermediary, Mr W. H. Dunn, at a higher price than he had paid for them; the £8,000 difference being his fee. Dunn handled all four sales in this manner from which his cumulative fees would equated to £3,600,000 in 2025, sucking valuable cash out of the new company before it even got going. This arrangement would very soon come back to haunt them.

Within eighteen months things had started to go wrong when it became apparent that the profits of the Palace Brewery had been overstated and it was actually loss-making. It had been acquired of of Mr Dunn for £28,500, a valuation based on its profitability and assets. In 1891 Edinburgh United decided to sue the brewery Trustee who had signed the sale to Dunn – James Alexander Molleson – for a reduction in this amount. The case started off badly when the first attempt was thrown out and Edinburgh United Breweries Ltd. v. Molleson did not come before Lord Kyllachy at the Court of Session until 1892. The judge found that because Edinburgh United had no contract with Molleson, only intermediary Dunn, they had no title to sue him. They also found that because Dunn had sold all interest to Edinburgh United he also had no title to sue. There was never any implication that Molleson was involved in mis-stating the profits or had reason to believe they were not accurate, but this fact did not come into it. The decision was appealed in 1894 but this failed and as a result £4868 17s 1d (c. £550k in 2025) was written off not to mention the fact they still had on their hands an unprofitable brewery. To this day it remains a case study in “Reduction impossible after sale to third party” in almost every textbook on Scottish contract law.

It wasn’t just the Palace Brewery that was causing the company problems. At its second AGM, the Chairman’s reported the financial position “was not so good as they could have wished” on account of their important north of England trade suffering badly due to the 1892 Durham Miners Strike. Further strikes in the next few years and an increase in beer duty further depressed trade, profits in 1893 were barely up on the pre-merger position at £29,385 12s. The Chairman remained optimistic however and told that year’s AGM that the transfer of most of the shares from English to Scottish investors was a sign of confidence in them. An alternative interpretation would be that the smart money was getting out…

A good year was finally had in 1895 with reported profits of £36,694 8s 9d (c. £4.2 million in 2025) and the directors were able to tell the AGM that they were “in as good a financial position as any brewery in the country“. The following year brought further cause for cheer with a gold medal award from the Exposition International of Liberal Arts etc. in Paris for the excellence of their beer and dividends of 8% being paid on the ordinary shares. But economic clouds were gathering on the horizon and after 1897 they would be repeatedly hit with increasing costs of labour, coal, rail transport, malt, hops and duty while all the time facing increased competition in the north of England. Profits would slide for eight consecutive years and dividend payments were repeatedly reduced. These tough trading conditions were not unique to them, it was a bad time all round for brewers, but the Chairman told the 1902 AGM that the company “as a policy” refused to follow the industry trend of lowering the quality of either the raw ingredients or the final product. Ironically they would later use a slogan “Rich In Name And Quality“, as they certainly didn’t find themselves rich in any other way!

By 1903 seemingly endless strikes and wage cuts had badly affected the spending power of the working class man (the key beer-drinking demographic), the Temperance movement was making great advances, new entertainments such as music halls and later cinemas were enticing people away from pubs and a Shilling increase on beer duty as a result of the Second Anglo-Boer War cost them £3,000 (£320k in 2025). The share dividends were now suspended entirely – but the interest on those debentures still had to be paid. Having never really grown since its inception, the company found itself greatly over-capitalised and with debenture interest absorbing what little remained of the gross profits. It was therefore decided in 1907 to start buying some of them back. More radical restructuring action had to be taken in 1910 by deciding to buy them back in their entirety and to reduce the share capital to just £110,000 – a three quarters reduction in total overall. A cost-cutting plan was implemented that saw the Summerhall Brewery closed and sold, later becoming the new home of the Royal (Dick’s) Veterinary College.

In 1912 the Chairman told the AGM that he had discussed a potential general price increase across the trade to ease the financial pressure but that this “seemed impossible” due over-supply and the ferocity of competition. But still the company remained wedded to not reducing the quality of the beer and instead invested in the plant at Bell’s Brewery to improve it. Sales in the first half of 1914 were promising but of course World War 1 intervened, precipitating a large slump in beer drinking, and the Exchequer upped the beer duty again. War brought the likelihood of a reduction in the quality, availability and affordability of ingredients and a scarcity of manpower as men went off to fight; in 1915 fifty employees joined up when Sir George McCrae of McCrae’s Battallion – the 16th Royal Scots – had a recruitment drive in the brewery.

In 1916 a Government economy drive saw the forced closure of the Dishers and Palace breweries. The reduction in capacity resulted in a struggle to meet customer demand but closing these inefficient facilities had the unintended upside of improving the overall financial position so much that the company was able to clear off much of the debenture debt and even pay a small dividend on the preference shares.

WW1 left behind a much reduced Edinburgh United Breweries. Of the 122 of its workforce who had joined up, eighteen were killed or missing and twenty-two invalided out. They made no move to re-open the mothballed breweries and instead used it as an opportunity for much-needed rationalisation. The maltings and cooperage of the Palace at Abbeymount were sold in 1919 and the remainder kept only as a hops store. In 1921 an attempt was made to sell the Disher’s to the city Corporation as part of a slum clearance scheme but before this could happen it burned down in a disastrous fire in April 1922 that caused £20,000-30,000 of damage. Instead it was sold to the neighbouring brewery of John Aitchison & Co. who demolished the remains to give themselves room to expand. In 1925 the Palace site was sold to the cinema pioneer F. R. Graham-Yooll who converted it into The Regent picture house.

This meant that the “united” breweries were that in name only now and were actually a single brewery; Bell’s at the Pleasance. In 1920 a £13,000 investment was been made to expand it further and the product range was slimmed down to a smaller number of lines. They concentrated on a core offering of Pale ales around 3% ABV for the domestic Scottish draught beer market, Brown or Scotch ales around 5% ABV for the north of England and their trademark Disher’s strong ales between 7.5-11.2% ABV.

The concerted effort to modernise kept the company in the black despite an increasingly adverse national economic situation and finally cleared off all its old debenture debt. And so it was in 1925, after four decades of near constant struggle, Edinburgh United Breweries could finally tell its AGM that it found itself on a solid financial footing. It must therefore have been with some good cheer that dividends of 5% on the preference and 10% on the ordinary shares were approved.

But any such optimism would have been severely misplaced as the economic situation was only going to get worse from now on. By mid-1926, with the General Strike recently failed and thousands of minders still unemployed, Edinburgh United Breweries was in financial crisis. In 1927 the Chairman told the Scottish Board of Health that Scottish brewers had lost 25 to 30% of their trade in just two years and most were now barely breaking even. His own share price over the 1920s reflected the dire situation; in 1920 preference shares were trading at 17s 6d but by 1929 they were going for only 7s 6d. He told his shareholders that fully two thirds of the company’s gross earnings were going to service beer duty – £5 a barrel in 1926 – and it was to duty that the company would turn to try and keep themselves in the black. They began the Great Edinburgh Beer Fraud to avoid paying it!

Several factors make this swindle quite exceptional.

• The scale of it;
• How long it would go undetected;
• That it was carried out under the very noses of the Excise;
• That the Excise would catch them at it but let them slip through their fingers;
• And that everyone in the entire brewery seemed to be in on it!

To perpetrate it they would exploit weaknesses in the duty regime; the Inland Revenue Act 1880 (also known as the Free Mash Tun Act). This legislation had changed duty to a system based on the volume of alcohol that it was estimated brewers had produced. At the time there was no reliable way to directly test for the alcohol, so instead officers of HM Commissioners of Excise would “dip” the wort (the sugary liquid that is fermented into beer) to measure its volume and would test its gravity: the sugar content. From these two values a reference table was used to calculate how much alcohol would result from fermentation and therefore how much duty was to be levied.

Two methods of fraud were employed. The first, which ran for longest and would be responsible for two thirds of the value, was known as Abstraction of Wort. In the brewery the wort was produced in a vessel known as the mash tun from water and fermented barley. It was run through a series of processes until it reached the fermentation vessels where yeast would be added and it would be fermented into beer. By abstracting (removing) some of this wort between the mash tun and the fermentation vessel, the brewer so reduced the volume that the Exciseman would read when making his “dip” and therefore the amount of duty he would levy. This was achieved by simply siphoning quantities into boxes or barrels which would be hidden elsewhere in the brewery; sometimes literally under piles of sacks in the corner, only to add them to the fermenting vessels later once the Exciseman had finished.

This was of course prohibited by law but there were insufficient controls in place to prevent it should the brewer choose to act dishonestly. Edinburgh United were able to exploit the fact that Excisemen were regular and predictable in their visits and not familiar enough with the brewing process to be able to spot, by eye, when the contents of a vessel had been tampered with. The deception was completed by falsifying entries in the Brewing Journal, a statutory record of all brewing activities. In theory, this book had to be kept in the brewing plant at all times and be on display and available to the Excise at all times. Not having the journal available at any time was in itself an offence carrying a fine of £100. Edinburgh United however kept the actual details of each brew in a secret book and would write-up the official record with fraudulent entries to appear as if all was in order. They successfully got away with this from mid-1926 all the way through to August 1932 during which period it was calculated they had done it 231 times and avoided duty of £22,049 as a result (about £1.3 million in 2025).

Abstraction stopped abruptly on 24th August 1932 when the brewery was caught in the act! Performing an early morning inspection Excise Officer William Cochrane, their usual visitor, found the brewer siphoning the wort from the Copper (the huge kettle in which the wort was boiled with hops to flavour and sterlise it) and into barrels in the cellar. This of course was strictly prohibited and the brewer fobbed him off with excuses about quality control. Cochrane next found that the Brewing Journal was absent only for it to miraculously re-appear with all its entries present and correct. On testing the mash tun he noticed the sugar levels were suspiciously high and found a boy in the yard brushing a “frothy, beery liquid” which he suspected to be the remains of a brew down a drain, even though the Journal stated that brewing had yet to commence.

Cochrane suspected foul play and wrote this in a memo to his superior, the Surveyor, that in his opinion it was “fraud“. The Surveyor wasn’t satisfied either and escalated the matter up to the Collector, R. D. Ryall, the most senior Exciseman in Edinburgh. Ryall passed the matter to Head Office in London, who went so far as to agree with the men in Edinburgh only to inexplicably take legal advice not to follow up and prosecute. Rather, they decided the best course of action was a warning shot to “really put the fear of God into their head brewer” – Collector Ryall was ordered to have a good chat with the brewery Chairman, ask him if he wouldn’t mind awfully making sure that the head brewer was “behaving properly” and issue his company a paltry £50 fine. With this slap on the wrist, London considered the case closed, filed it away and forgot about it.

The Commissioners direct you to add that the Chairman will appreciate that in the event of any further irregularities in the future they would feel very great difficulty in withholding a public prosecution.

Letter from London to the Collector of Excise in Edinburgh, November 1932 (86948/1932)

By this time Edinburgh United Breweries’ financial circumstances meant that fraud was all that was keeping them in the black and so they had to find another method to continue it. They did not have to look far as they already possessed one! In April 1931 they had started to carry out Run Brews, conducting a brew entirely in secret and off the record from beginning to end. This began due to the effect ever greater Abstraction of Wort was having on the beer; it made it overly “fresh” and the customers were complaining. For a company known for the quality of its beer, and which publicly prided itself on it to the point of allowing it to impact their profitability, there was therefore a bitter irony that they had chosen a path to maintain the quality which had ended up reducing it anyway.

Run Brews required more coordination and subterfuge to carry out but once again they were able to get away with them – 56 times – because of the predictable behaviour of The Excise. A brewery was required by law to give twenty-four hours notice, in writing, that they intended to brew. Edinburgh United knew that if they didn’t give the notice the Excise never turned up to check that they weren’t indeed brewing. They also knew that in Edinburgh they never, ever, inspected breweries between Saturday lunch time and Monday mornings. They thus had a 36 hour window in which they were completely unmonitored, sufficient to conclude the parts of the Brew that they couldn’t otherwise hide from The Excise. Once again their true brewing activities were covered up with falsified entries in the Brewing Journal.

The swindle was back on and once again the authorities were blissfully ignorant about it. This would remain the case until December 6th 1933 when a man called Peter Sinclair, until recently the head cellarman at Bell’s Brewery for eleven years, stepped into the Excise Office at 3 South Bridge and asked to speak to Officer Cochrane. Much aggrieved at the loss of his livelihood, he spilled the beans about the goings on in his former workplace.

Sinclair’s claim report made its way into the Collector’s in-tray a few days later. Except this wasn’t Collector Ryall, who had recently retired, this was Collector Hugh. R. M. Pollard, an altogether more proactive and industrious man. He brought Sinclair in for an interview during which the man shared a notebook containing records of six and a half years of illicit brewing. From this notebook it was estimated the totality of the fraud might amount to “about £3,500” (about £219k in 2025). Little did they know this was only the tip of the iceberg. The cellarman produced another colleague – Joseph Tudor – who had recently been laid off as witness to corroborate his story. This man had been a watchman and part of his duties included identifying any known Excisemen or unknown visitors to the Brewery at which point he pressed a hidden button that would sound a buzzer in the Head Brewer’s office to make him aware. This bought enough time to clear up anything that shouldn’t be happening and to amend the Brewing Journal as necessary. Signed and witnessed statements from both were taken on the spot, lest the brewery get wind of their disloyalty and try and buy them off, and they agreed to find out when the next Run Brew was to happen.

Pollard took charge of the case personally. In the meantime Officer Cochrane continued his scheduled inspection routine and was directed to keep an eye out but to ask no questions and do nothing that might show he had suspicions. Sinclair came through with a tip-off which was how the three Excisemen came to be outside Bell’s Brewery at 3AM on Christmas morning 1933. On Friday 22nd December, Officer Cochrane made his usual visit to Bell’s Brewery and inspected the Brewing Journal, finding no notice to brew entered in it. Pollard picked a trusted Officer – a man called McLachlan – who would be unknown to the Brewery and had him watch the gate from Saturday 23rd. He and Cochrane joined him at 11PM but saw no signs of suspicious activity. The trio entered the brewery at 3:30AM, finding it deserted. They inspected the Brewing Journal, found it was was still blank for that day and left. The watch was kept up until the following evening when the three assembled again at 11PM and waited again. At 3AM it was the metallic sound of a Mash Tun lid clanging within the brewery followed by the unmistakable warm, sweet, malty smell of boiling wort that confirmed to them that an illicit brew was on. And so was the sting!

Heading straight for the Fermenting Room, they found brewing in progress and the workmen unconcerned by their sudden appearance. Directed to inspect the Brewing Journal they found it correctly made out with entries for 23rd December, but having secretly inspected it early the previous morning when it had been blank, they knew that it had been falsely backdated. Making a search of the Head Brewer’s office they found his private brewing journal which, when compared to the the official version, contained multiple discrepancies that confirmed many brews had taken place “off the record“. Realising he had a damning black book in his possession, Pollard decided to take it back to 3 South Bridge for a closer inspection, even though he was without a Warrant to do so.

He spent the best part of Christmas and Boxing Day going through the book line-by-line, cross-referencing it with the official duty records and Sinclair’s notebook. He must have been horrified at the scale of the illicit activities this uncovered; Sinclair’s notebook was accurate but just the tip of the iceberg. There were 18 illegal Run Brews in 1933 alone, almost one a fortnight. For the rest of the year Pollard officially absented himself from the office, but was secretly at work there with his staff briefed to diplomatically rebuff the efforts of the brewery to get the Head Brewer’s book – taken without a warrant – back. This was a calculated gamble; Pollard knew he really shouldn’t have the book but also knew that the brewery were in the dark as to how much he really knew. He suspected that they would eventually give up trying to get it back lest their persistence drew too much attention to it. This proved correct and indeed they gave up. Unsurprisingly the Chairman of Edinburgh United Breweries, himself a Solicitor to the Supreme Court, proved reluctant to voluntarily release the rest of the company’s books for inspection. Pollard therefore returned to Bell’s Brewery on January 11th with a Detective Inspector of Police in tow and removed them under warrant as evidence.

The Excise engaged Professor William Annan, Emeritus Chair of Accounting at Edinburgh University, as an expert witness to establish the true scale of the deception. Annan’s forensic accounting would calculate that £51,901 17s 3d in unpaid duty going back to June 1926 was owed (c. £3.2 million in 2025). He also provided evidence that the brewery:

• purchased more brewing malt that were ever entered as being consumed in the brewing books and sold more beer than they had paid duty on;
• paid dividends amounting to £17,894 (£1.1 million in 2025) which would not have been possible from the legitimate earnings alone;
• avoided, as a result of the fraud, trading losses in the 1931 financial year of £4,410, in 1932 of £4,848 and in 1933 of £6,817.

On February 19th 1934 an immediate demand for full payment of all the avoided duty was issued. When the company could not pay its its assets were placed in distraint (all the brewing materials, equipment and beer stocks were seized). Even the Managing Director’s Rolls Royce was taken, although it was soon returned with an apology when it was found out his wife (who out shopping in it at the time) was the legal owner.

On the 21st, the brewery’s Board of Directors issued a statement denying any knowledge of wrongdoing and that they were applying for a voluntary winding-up order because they could not make the duty payment. The story was now picked up by the press and adorned the headlines from Edinburgh to London and from Liverpool to Belfast.

The court appointed John M. Geoghagan as liquidator, who faced the immediate problem that with all the company’s brewing assets and stocks in distraint, he could neither carry on business nor liquidate! Fortunately he was able to persuade the courts to turn these back over to him and he restarted brewing, putting some men back in work (for now) and thereby reducing the outstanding debt by £20,000 and getting shareholders back 10s 8d in the pound.

After a number of delays and false starts the case finally came to trial in the High Court before the Lord Justice-Clerk (the second senior-most judge in Scotland) on March 5th 1935. On trial were the Managing Director William Lawrie and the Head Brewer John Archibald Clark, accused of defrauding Customs & Excise of £31,291 (the balance minus what been recovered by the liquidator). Other more junior members of staff avoided standing alongside them by turning King’s evidence. The indictment related to evading duty on 40,104 bulk gallons of beer; over 320 thousand pints!

Over eight days the prosecution called a total of 71 witnesses including Professor Annan as their principal expert. Head Brewer Clark made a statement implicating Lawrie as the head of the fraud but did not testify in his own defence and the only witness called on his behalf was his wife. Numerous subordinates testified against him that he had told them the scheme “would help the company. It would also keep us in our jobs“. Managing Director Lawrie had already given Pollard a statement that “if there had been any irregularities they must have been entirely the action of the Head Brewer” and flat out denied any involvement in – or knowledge of – fraud. He maintained his ignorance throughout the trial, trying to portray himself as being uninvolved with the day-to-day running of the brewery and having no actual understanding of the process. His case foundered on the testimony of Clark’s wife about numerous secretive, phone calls to the house from Lawrie on Saturday nights about which her husband was evasive and of assistant brewer David Smith, who told the court he was paid £5 bonus per illicit brew and that he would be given a key to retrieve the Black Book from the Managing Director’s desk where it was usually kept. His damning was completed by the company’s bookkeeper who was keen to testify that Lawrie “took an active supervision in the business” and that he had highlighted irregularities in the accounts to him on numerous occasions which were always rebuffed with “I’ll speak to Mr Clark“.

The court was told that because Managing Director Lawrie held 1,318 and Head Brewer Clark 820 shares in the company they had financially benefited from the scheme as a result of the dividends payments made. In addition Lawrie had earned £1,000 in “fees” during the period on top of his annual salary. Presented with overwhelming evidence as to the men’s guilt, they were found guilty and Lawrie was sentenced to 21 months and Clark to 12 months imprisonment. Clark accepted this, meaning he lost his 28s a week war pension for having lost his right hand and forearm, but Lawrie maintained his innocence and appealed. This was rejected on the grounds there was clear evidence provided that he had been made aware of the irregularities in his company and that there had been “ample and sufficient reason for the jury to reach the verdict they did.”

Customs & Excise were thoroughly humiliated for their part in having allowed the Great Edinburgh Beer Fraud to go on for so long under their very noses, just an 8 minute walk from the Collector’s office, and for having been “within an ace of discovering [it]” in 1932. Internal reaction was swift. Collector Pollard briefed every Officer in Edinburgh on the details and set them to thoroughly inspecting every single other brewery in the city for any signs of further chicanery. Although he defended the honesty and integrity of his men, he also concluded that there was “a lack of observation, imagination, energy, and initiative” on their part which had contributed to failing to detect the fraud. His predecessor, the recently retired Collector Ryall, had part of his pension clawed back; the local Surveyor, Dowswell, was forcibly retired on a reduced pension; Officer Cochrane reportedly spent the rest of his working career sidelined to a beer warehouse; others Officers found their prospects for pay rises and career advancement severely limited. In retrospect, these punishments were perhaps overly harsh and unfair, all three men had explicitly used the word “fraud” in reference to detecting the Abstraction of Wort in 1932 and had escalated it to London, only for London to decide a slap on the wrist be the end of it. Perhaps London had a vested interest in making scapegoats of these men to protect their own reputations… Hugh Pollard retired in 1943 after 42 years of service to take up a position in the Ministry of Fuel and Power. He was awarded the OBE in 1951 and died in Edinburgh in 1963, aged 82.

London undertook a “root and branch” nationwide review of the work and responsibility of Collectors and issued a long series of amendments to operating instructions to strengthen the controls around assessing beer duty.

The object aimed at is the prevention or detection of irregularity or calculated fraud by brewers, through visits made more frequently at unexpected times by the surveying officers.

Board of Customs & Excise circular to Collectors, 1934

These controls lasted until 1993 when the Beer Regulations 1993 act introduced “end product duty“, charging based on the actual measured alcohol content of the final product rather than the century-old system based on extrapolating it from the sugar content of the wort.

And at Bell’s Brewery, brewing ceased for the final time after over a century of operation in March 1935 when the liquidator laid off all but two watchmen. Over the next few months anything that wasn’t physically nailed down was auctioned off anything and the tied houses, brands and goodwill were sold to another Edinburgh brewer, John Jeffrey & Co. of the New Heriot Brewery in Roseburn, who would continue to brew Disher’s Strong Ale using the same label design as the old Ten Guinea Ale until the 1960s.

The buildings of Bell’s Brewery were sold, a covenant of the transaction preventing the site from ever being used for brewing in the future – the Excise were clearly bloody-minded to make sure the place never darkened their door again! It was in turn sold to Dr J. Donald Pollock OBE and gifted to Edinburgh University in 1937 as a future site for a sports and athletics training centre, one it retains to this day. Sinclair, the whistleblower without whom the case may never have been successfully exposed and tried, was officially unrewarded for his efforts and remained unemployed; no Edinburgh brewer would have taken him on as so much as a toilet cleaner. A later Collector allegedly tried to represent on his behalf for a reward on his behalf, but a watchman’s job was all that was offered and it was turned down in disgust.

If you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site – including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget to find further stories to bring you – by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

These threads © 2017-2025, Andy Arthur.

NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

It’s an uncharacteristically cool and overcast day. This special release #HazyIPA (#KereruRogueWerks) that I am #brewing @kererubrewing is a dream of hot dry days in late February.

I wish I weren’t pulling 6-day weeks, but that’s how it is for now.

Tipsy Tribe Brewery & Distillery: behind a garage door in Koekelberg you'll find the alcoholic—but tasty—results of Daniel and Aylin's labour of love!
#Beers #Brewing #Distilling #Koekelberg #Brussels

https://BeersBites.Brussels/tipsy-tribe/

#Yerba arrived, and some differences in #brewing instructions 😂
Original: nutritional values are for 50g per 200ml of water (at least somewhat implying that's what you'll use). Fill container in 2/3-3/4, pour 1/4 of cold water, let it sit for 2 minutes, then pour 3/4 of 80°C water.
German sticker: use 12g for 1L of 90°C water.

#tea

A definitive example of "small-batch craft #brewing" comes to an end...

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2510789-man-whose-gut-made-its-own-alcohol-gets-relief-from-faecal-transplant/

The thread about 150 years of brewery openings in Edinburgh and what became of them all

In December 2019, the Edinburgh Evening News ran an article about a new brewery planned for the city which it claimed “will be the first major brewery to be built in Edinburgh for 150 years.” (and also the biggest).

By my count (luckily, I keep a handy spreadsheet of such things for such counting eventualities) there were actually fifteen major breweries built in Edinburgh in the last 150 years and a good number of these were larger. So let’s take a closer look at them.

Starting us off at number 15 is the Caledonian Brewery – universally known as The Caley – it was opened by Lorimer & Clark 150 years ago (at the time of first writing) in 1869 in Shandon. This was one of the first Edinburgh brewers taken over by an English firm, Vaux, in 1947, who closed it in 1985. It reopened soon after in a management buyout and was one of the pioneers of the real ale revival locally. It was still going strong currently under threat of closure closed by then owners Heineken in 2022 and will likely be sold off for housing.

At number 14, G. & J. Machlachlan’s Castle Brewery opened in the Grassmarket in 1875, some 144 years ago. It relocated out to Craigmillar in 1901 as the New Castle Brewery (not to be confused with the Newcastle Brewery!). The Grassmarket site was sold in 1913 and was used as a mines rescue and research station by a consortium of Lothians mining companies. It is now part of the site of George Heriot’s School.

A non-mover at number 13, Jeffrey’s opened the New Heriot Brewery at Roseburn in 1880. This replaced a facility in the Grassmarket along from the Castle which was known, unsurprisingly, as the Heriot Brewery and took its name from that nearby school (see picture). Brewing took place at Roseburn until 1992, by which time it was an outpost of Glaswegian lager manufacturer Tennent Caledonian. Coincidentally the Grassmarket brewery was built on top of the Crawley Pipe which brought water into the town. That little brown wooden door you can see to the left of the gateway gives access to the conduit in which the pipe runs.

Holding steady at number 12, brothers Thomas & James Bernard opened the New Edinburgh Brewery on Robertson Avenue in Gorgie in 1888. For obvious reasons the firm used a St. Bernard dog as its mascot and logo (a Saint that has a local connection too), except with a bottle of their beer around its neck instead of a flask of brandy. They were bought up by the industry giant Scottish Brewers in 1960 who shut them down in order to reduce the competition and industry over-capacity.

At 11, the Edinburgh United Breweries of 1889. This company consolidated the existing smaller brewers of David Nicolsons; Robin, McMillans; Dishers and George Ritchies. The Robin, McMillans site at the Summerhall was demolished to make way for the new buildings of the Royal Dick Veterinary School, Dishers’ facilities were sold to rivals Aitchisons, and brewing was consolidated at Nicolson’s Palace Brewery at Abbeyhill and Ritchie’s Bell’s Brewery at the Pleasance. EUB’s remaining assets were acquired by Jeffrey’s in 1935 after what was (at that point) the UK’s largest tax duty scandal; the firm had been brewing off the record out of hours for years and avoiding taxation.

Sneaking in at number 10, the Craigmillar No. 1 Brewery was opened in 1891 by the firm of William Murray & Co. Murrays were an old, established brewer in the town of Jedburgh at the Caledonian Brewery but Mr Murray and his Wife died on the same evening on Wednesday 6th January 1886 leaving no living partner to take the firm on. The business was sold and its new owners relocated it to just outside the (then) city boundary at Craigmillar in 1890, where transport links were good, as was the water, and land was plentiful. This was the first brewer to locate to what would become a hotspot of this industry in this district. This operation was bought by United Breweries in 1960 and closed in 1963 by which time they were United Caledonian.

Holding steady at number 9, Drybrough’s were one of the bigger Edinburgh brewers. They were long established on the North Back of the Canongate but followed the lead of Murrays and joined them in the Craigmillar suburb in 1892 at the Duddingston Brewery. They were bought out by the firm of Watney Mann in 1965 as the big English brewers moved north of the border to expand into the Scottish market and were closed by Allied Lyons in 1987. Most of the brewery buildings remain here, in various uses as workshops, storage and offices .

A new entrant at 8, Daniel Bernard was a son of the T. & J. Bernard family, but fell out with the other partners in that business in 1889 in an acrimonious dispute that ended up in him leaving the firm and taking them to court. He set himself up in business in the Canongate as Bernards Ltd, and moved to a site in the Damhead area of Gorgie in 1893 where there were some good wells, just down the road from the family’s New Edinburgh site. When Daniel died in 1901, there was nobody to take it over. It was used for a while as a distillery before pharmaceutical company T. & H. Smith of Canonmills moved there in stages between 1904-1908. It is still in use for those purposes by their successor company.

At number 7, Pattisons were a big new name in the Leith whisky distilling, blending and bottling industry. Formed from the dairy of Pattison, Elder & Co., they were also the sole Scottish agent for St. Anne’s Well beer from Barnstable in Exeter and decided to enter the brewing market for themselves. This they did in 1896 at Craigmillar, the third such operation in the district. They were known for lavish spending on facilities, advertising and their directors personal lives. But their empire was built too quickly and built on sand; sand sitting atop a huge financial bubble which collapsed in spectacular stile 1899, bringing down much of the Scotch whisky industry with it. The Pattison brothers ended up in court for mixing cheap grain whisky with malt and passing it off as mature malt to increase their profits and ended up in jail. Their brewery assets were taken over by Robert Deuchar, a name now associated with Edinburgh brewing but actually from the northeast of England. Deuchars were closed by Scottish & Newcastle in 1961.

Up one at 6, Somerville’s joined the growing brewing suburb at Craigmillar in 1897 when they opened the North British Brewery. Messrs. John Somerville & Co. were an established wine and spirits merchant on Quality Street in Leith who amalgamated with Blyth & Cameron, a company formed that same year by business partners of Somerville to build the new brewery at Craigmillar. The consolidated firm was known as John Somerville & Co. Ltd. Neighbouring Murray’s took it over as the Craigmillar No. 2 in 1922 and when United Breweries took over Murrays in 1960 they quickly shut it down.

We’re in the top 5 territory now. Robert Deuchar (whose name would later be given to that pioneer India Pale Ale of the 1980s real ale revival in Edinburgh) built their own premises at Craigmillar in 1899 to complement those they had recently taken over from Pattisons. Deuchar is an old Scottish family name from Lauderdale in the Borders, but their brewery was established in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1888. They made the move up the railway to Edinburgh when they bought Pattisons and would transfer all their brewing operations north in 1920, but kept their tied public houses in the northeast of England. They were bought by Newcastle Brewery in 1954 and closed by that firm’s successor, Scottish & Newcastle, in 1961.

Straight in at number 4; T. Y. Paterson & Co. opened the Pentland Brewery, the smallest of the Craigmillar breweries, in 1898. Thomas Yule Paterson was a brewer and maltster established in Glasgow’s Bridgeton in 1884 who decided to move to Edinburgh when the advantages of the Craigmillar location became obvious. They were bought out by Edinburgh brewer Aitkens in 1936 and the site was used for other purposes thereafter. Only the gates remain now.

Another entry for Maclachlans in at 3. They moved from the Grassmarket to Duddingston (a bigger site, a more modern brewery and a rail connection beckoned) in 1901 at the New Castle Brewery. In 1960 the company were bought by Glasgow’s Tennent’s, a move which made sense as Maclachlan’s main market was in that city (as was their head office). But this was a period of rapid industry consolidation and Tennent’s in turn was in turn taken over by London’s Charrington United in 1963. A further reorganisation took place, with Charrington merging their Scottish subsidiaries – United Caledonian – with Tennent’s to form Tennent Caledonian. But it did not end there; in 1967 Charrington merged with Bass of Burton-upon-Trent to form Bass Charrington, under whose ownership the New Castle was shut down, Edinburgh operations of Tennent Caledonian were instead concentrated at Jeffrey’s former New Heriot Brewery in Roseburn

At number 2, W. & J. Raeburn were the last to open a brewery at Craigmillar, in 1901. Raeburn’s Brewery relocated from Merchant Street off the Cowgate in the Old Town where they had brewed since 1863. They were bought over by Robert (not William!) Youngers in 1913. They in turn sold it to the Brewer’s Food Supply Company of Fountainbridge in 1919, formed by a syndicate of Edinburgh brewers. They turned it over to dry waste brewers malt, enriched with surplus yeast, for use as cattle and poultry feed. The Inland Revenue took exception to the missed tax potential of turning a waste product into a commodity and took them to court, but lost. The War Office requisitioned the site over in 1939 to produce industrial yeast. It was returned to the BFSC and later found its way into the Scotish & Newcastle empire and the site seems to have closed around 1975.

And no surprises and still at no. 1, for the umpteenth year in a row since 1973, Scottish & Newcastle built the then ultra-modern Fountain Brewery in that year to replace the older William McEwan brewery of the same name on the other side of the road. S&N dominated the Scottish brewing scene and, along with the big English brewer, bought it up bit by bit then slowly tried to kill it. They very nearly almost did.

The graph below charts the rise and fall of the brewing industry in Edinburgh – note there would have been many more brewers operating prior to 1800, but small concerns rather than on an industrial scale. Treat the earlier end of the timeline with caution therefore. It can be seen that by numbers alone, the 1890s were the peak but there was a long, slow decline thereafter, with things falling off a cliff after the 1950s.

It’s worth noting too that many of these were, even by the standard of the day, relatively small concerns and overall production would actually have increased into the 1960s even though numbers were dropping due to modernisation of the larger breweries on the periphery of the city and closure of older, smaller, less-efficient city-centre sites.

If you look in the right places, it’s not hard to find the evidence of many of those old breweries not already covered in this post. Alexander Melvin’s at the Boroughloch Brewery has surviving outer walls and buildings, with tenement flats long ago built within its courtyard. If you get a chance to see it, the former brewery office off of Boroughloch Lane has a cracking Melvin’s frosted glass window still in place.

Robert Younger , one of the three Youngers of Scottish brewing, brewed at St. Ann’s in Abbeyhill. Their brewery site was converted into sheltered housing, with some of the original buildings preserved. Look out for the RY monogram above the former office door on Abbeyhill.

Archibald Campbell, Hope & King were an ancient name in brewing and distilling, they brewed at the Argyle Brewery off of Chambers Street, but which was at one time Argyle Square. They were one of the last old surviving city centre brewers when they were closed in 1970 by their new English owners, Whitebread. Many of the buildings have now been incorporated into the University of Edinburgh.

Someone later built the King’s Theatre on top of it, but Taylor, Macleod & Co. brewed on the old site of Drumdryan House at the Drumdryan Brewery, an old placename that you can still find in a neighbouring street. Drumdryan comes from the Gaelic – Druim drioghion – a ridge covered in thorn bushes, describing the local topography at one time. Interestingly the nearby street Thorniebauk comes from Scots and means exactly the same, also called Brierybauk at one time.

Steel, Coulson & Co. brewed at the Croft-an-Righ Brewery at Abbeyhill, next door to Robert Younger’s at St. Ann’s. Croft-an-Righ, named for the adjacent old house, at first glance seems an ovbvious Gaelic name meaning “King’s field” but is actually romantic corruption of an older Scots name, Croft Angry – with a possible German root. Some of the buildings were preserved and are in use by Historic Environment Scotland as workshops. These are called St. Ann’s, despite note being on the St. Ann’s brewery site, as St. Ann’s Yards is an even older placename for this area.

Charles Blair started brewing in the Canongate around 1886 at a site known as the Craigwell and within a few years it was rebuilt and expanded into a model Victorian brewery; the Craigend Brewery. In 1898, Blair combined with his relatives James and Charles Blair who brewerd in Parkhead in Glasgow and with James Gordon, a wine merchant in that city, to form Gordon & Blair Ltd. The firm was taken over by local firm Mackay’s in 1955 and closed before 1963 when the latter were bought by Watney Mann. It was used as a cash & carry warehouse before being sympathtically convereted into flats in 1986.

Thomas Carmichael’s Balmoral Brewery was on what is now Calton Road but was then the North Back of Canongate. This place appears to have always struggled financially (apparently due to water supply problems) and the site was used principally for its maltings or sublet to other brewers before being bought by Charles Blair in 1895 for use as the maltings for the Craigwell over the road.

And lastly, until recently you could still see the ground storey of the Calton Hill Brewery on Calton Road in use as a rental car garage. The brewery went through a variety of ownerships, apparently founded in the first half of the 19th century by John Muir & sons before it too was taken over by Charles Blair in around 1890 to be incorporated with the Craigwell. The remains were demolished around 2019 to be replaced by student flats.

In terms of numbers and production, Edinburgh was second only to Burton-on-Trent as the Empire’s second city of brewing. Most cities had breweries but to serve their local market, Edinburgh was notable as serving not just the whole country but also world. The McEwan’s logo, before the recognisable Laughing Cavalier, was a self-confident declaration of the Globe being supported by the strong hand of the Union Flag and the Royal Standard. This was as a result of the importance to McEwan’s business of export and military sales.

Long story short. Don’t let your local paper fool you into believing things about the history of brewing in Edinburgh!

Footnote. My personal ambivalence towards S&N is sincere; I believe they were a good company who lost their way and lost sight of what they did, and tried to grow fat by eating themselves; in the end nothing much was left worth mourning. I also have absolutely nothing against Innis & Gunn. Personally I think their beers taste of a mix of soap and marshmallows, but I also really like Tennent’s lager so I’m no authority on the matter of what “good beer” tastes like.

If you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site – including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget to find further stories to bring you – by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

These threads © 2017-2025, Andy Arthur.

NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

From green seed to liquid gold. ☕️✨

Coffee is more than just a drink—it’s a complex chemical transformation. From the roast to the bloom, every step is a ritual of energy and pause. Chemistry truly becomes comfort in every cup.

How do you take your coffee? 🥛🖤

#Coffee #Brewing #Science #MorningRitual #CoffeeLovers

How brewer's yeast can be utilised to produce "lab-grown meat"

https://phys.org/news/2026-01-pint-plate-scientists-brew-meat.html

#beer #brewing #food #yeast

Bottling day!

Cider #PNW #Brewing

RE: https://mstdn.social/@compoundchem/115831646700830170

As a home brewer this finally provided me with the answer on how alcohol free beer is made.

In short: don't go that way, if you don't or can't drink alcohol, skip beer, but don't start drinking this chemically and physically modified gore that doesn't taste like real beer in any way.

#beer #Brewing #Homebrew #alcohol #alcoholfree