A Eulogy for the Last Burton Union System
(Update: I added a note at the end of the post.) While I was traveling, London’s Morning Advertiser reported this melancholy news:
“[Carlsberg-owned] Marston’s Brewing Company has announced it is retiring the four remaining Union Sets at Marston’s Brewery in Burton-on-Trent, Staffordshire because using them as fermentation vessels is no longer viable, according to the company.”
This is sad, because any time an old type of brewing process passes into extinction, we lose a little bit of our collective memory. But the news should have been expected. Many people, not really understanding what a union set is, chalked this up to soulless corporate penny-pinching. Carlsberg didn’t help matters by turning to an AI-like corporate explanation. “We take great pride in the quality of our brews and by moving cask Pedigree to stainless-steel fermenters, we will be able to deliver consistent, strong quality for our customers and consumers going forwards.” Yet translated into normal-speak (“We’ve spent decades preserving this system at some cost even while it disappeared everywhere else, but given the realities of brewing today, we had to make the difficult decision to shift to a modern process”), this would have been both true and undeniable.
State of the Art Tech, Circa 1850
Brewing is a complex and expensive endeavor, and brewers have tried to make it easier for thousands of years. In the period from about 1775 until the dawn of the 20th century, no country was approaching the UK in terms of industrial innovation. They were light years ahead of everyone. What we understand as modern brewing was born there, and the rest of the world caught up only decades later.
Burton Upon Trent was a major engine of industrial brewing in Victorian England, and their massive breweries were the envy of the world. Breweries first installed steam engines in the 1770s, allowing them to grow to sizes unimaginable before automated power. The blossoming gigantism created its own problems, however. How do you handle all that beer now that steam power makes it possible? In fermentation, the prevailing system was incredibly labor-intensive. Here Martyn Cornell has a lovely piece describing the way beer burbled away in casks, requiring cellerman to come around with pitchers of wort and rope them off after they’d blown off. It was slow and laborious. Martyn was ostensibly writing about all the cats in the breweries then, which helped restrain the rodent population, and I have to imagine that wasn’t improving the beer.
Developed in Burton, the union system automated all of this. In a visit to Marstons’s five years ago, Martyn described the apparatus.
“After that first fermentation has built up speed, the yeasty wort is ‘dropped’ out of the initial vessels, leaving behind trub and other debris, and run into the troughs above the unions, before descending into the union casks, each one of which hold 162 gallons. There, in the dark, the Marston’s union yeast gets into its stride, multiplying furiously as it turns the sugars in the wort into alcohol and carbon dioxide. The yeast loves life in the unions, and it increases so fast it foams up out of the casks and into the troughs in – from some of the unions last Wednesday – a constant creamy pour. The beer the yeast carries with it then runs back into the casks, leaving the yeast behind.”
The union system was a form of early automation that itself was invented out of the need for efficiency. It took fewer brewers, improved sanitation, and produced more consistent, predictable beer. Whether it reduced the cat population is a mystery we may never solve. If I had a month to search through newspaper archives, I suspect I could fine articles from the time decrying this new, soulless form of brewing and the death of the skilled cellerman. Every hallowed anachronism today was the work of job-killing bean counters then. So it goes.
The National Brewery Centre, a museum of Burton brewing, had a union set I thought would preserve this heritage. The museum closed in 2022.
Obsolescence
One of the most charming outgrowths of brewhouse practices is the unscientific belief that they are indispensable to the beer’s character. I was amused to hear Jim Bicklein, the master brewer of the St Louis A-B plant, defend “beechwood aging” as a critical element in Budweiser’s flavor. (Narrator: it’s not.) So the question naturally arises—in transitioning away from the union system, will the flavor of Marston’s Pedigree (the only beer still made with them), change?
I am not quite arrogant enough to answer that question. (With age, wisdom.) But I will say that as an American besotted with the romance of Victorian English brewing, I was very excited to try Pedigree. I wondered if I would taste the oak, or perhaps some indescribable but unmistakable quality. That does happen sometimes. But no—it was an ordinary bitter, and not a particularly characterful one.
In 2011, Patrick and I toured Adnams brewery in Southwold, on the eastern shores of Suffolk. We’d just come from Greene King, which had made a multi-million pound decision to restore its worn brewhouse to its Victorian splendor. Adnams went the other direction: they installed what was to that point the most modern brewery I’d ever seen. Of course, they were very nervous that the beer would lose its character in the transition, and spent a lot of time working with the new kit to preserve the Adnams taste. What they didn’t change was fermentation, which they still conducted in open squares using their finicky two-strain yeast. That would have irrevocably altered the flavor.
Will anyone notice that Pedigree has changed once beer comes out from the modern system? I would be shocked to hear that was the case. Perhaps some enterprising blogger with conduct triangle tests of old Pedigree and new and see if the change is detectable. If it’s not, the real question for Carlsberg was whether it was worth the money to keep a museum brewery alive purely because it was neato. Up until 2024, when inflation, a war, Covid, Brexit, and changing consumer habits have bludgeoned old breweries, the answer was yes. The first time I peered through Marston’s window at the system you see in the top picture—I couldn’t swing a tour at the time—my immediate thought was: “Well this isn’t going to last long.” It lasted more than a decade, and took all those circumstances to finally change Marston’s thinking.
Things change in brewing. That may be beer’s sole iron law. Instead of curling my lip at Marston’s and their Nordic owners when I heard the news about the union system, I actually felt a sense of gratitude. Sadness, too, but mostly appreciation. Good on you for keeping it this long.
RIP
Clarification. Some folks have pointed out here and elsewhere that Firestone Walker has a union set. I didn’t mention it for a few reasons. For one, I wasn’t sure they still used it. It was used solely for a portion of their Double Barrel Ale production, a beer that isn’t as central to the line as it once was. It never was a true Burton set—and they always called it a modified version. Finally, while it was a cool little project, it’s not really the system I was describing above, which was an industrial process. Oh, one other difference: oak-fermented DBA does taste different, which is both part of the reason they went to the trouble, and also why it’s different.