Extremely rare Reg Drury commemorative ale for his retirement. A true Collectors item. Fullers produced this commemorative ale when Reg was retiring. It was an extremely limited run and very rare. Please read the collected info below if you do not know who Reg was and what he meant to the brewing world.
May he rest in Pease.
Reg Drury, who has died aged 76, was a passionate supporter of cask beer. His painstaking work as head brewer at Fuller’s in Chiswick, West London, from the 1970s ensured that it was rare to be served a poor pint of the brewery’s beer.
Reg was a great leader of Fuller’s brewing and operations team for 40 years and retired from his position as Brewing Director in 1999.
It’s a truism in the world of brewing and pubs that one glass of cask beer that’s sour and cloudy will put drinkers off for life and lead them into the cold embrace of Eurofizz. Reg was aware of the problem when he arrived at Fuller’s in the late 1950s. He’d trained at the acclaimed school of brewing at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. He knew not only how to brew beer of all types and styles but was skilled also in maintaining the consistency and quality of the end product. .
It was difficult to achieve consistency at Fuller’s at the time. Brewing had been going on at the site for some 350 years, with the partnership of Fuller, Smith & Turner dating from 1845. Cask beer was produced in open square fermenters, some of which were more than 100 years old and leaked. Finding a clear and tasty pint of Fuller’s cask ale in a pub was something of a gamble. .
This was the dread age of such national keg beers as Watneys Red, Double Diamond and Worthington E. The directors of Fuller’s toyed with the idea of going over entirely to keg and lager production, and in 1976 installed modern, enclosed conical fermenters to make these types of beer. .
It was widely believed in the industry at the time that cask beer couldn’t be brewed in conicals because top-fermenting ale yeast would mutate into bottom-fermenting lager yeast, settling at the base of the vessels. Reg Drury was determined to save Fuller’s cask beers. Along with Charles Wells in Bedford, which had also installed conicals, Reg analysed the new vessels and came to the conclusion that if you adjusted temperatures and regularly used fresh batches of ale yeast it would be perfectly possible to produce cask beer in them. .
I will ship in hard plastic case to protect it.
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