Harvey’s Sussex Best
Harvey’s Sussex Best is pretty much the house bitter at The Retreat; it is served nearly all year and is our most popular beer. A superbly balanced bitter with a prominent hop character.
Using a blend of four local hops, water filtered through the Sussex Downs over 30 years, and Harvey’s unique 60-year-old yeast strain, Harvey’s Best Bitter is the embodiment of Sussex.
ALC 4.0% VOL
Harvey’s Brewery – Our Virtual Brewery Tour
Presented by Miles Jenner, Head Brewer and Joint Managing Director of Harvey’s Brewery.
Transcription of the video above.
Welcome to the South Down Brewery in Lewes. Founded in 1838 by a local family called the Hillmans. And you can see the structure of the brewery the grains dock with its graceful arch, above which the mash tun stood, above that where you see the glass panels was the old reservoir of the brewery fed by a 60-foot artesian well. To my left the old loading dock and behind me the glorious entrance to the brewery.
In 1893 the Hillman family sold their brewery to one Thomas Manning. He acquired Dashwood’s Brewery at East Grinstead, the Dolphin Brewery at Cuckfield and the Bear Brewery at Lewes and he founded the South Down and East Grinstead Breweries. One hundred years ago to this year he sold the brewery to Tamplin’s in Brighton, large regional brewers, and the South Down Brewery ceased brewing.
It’s exactly 500 yards as the crow flies from the South Down Brewery to the Bridgewolf Brewery in Lewes. Welcome to Harvey’s.
Harvey’s started brewing on the site in 1838, the same year as the South Down Brewery was established. The difference is that we have been brewing on this site ever since.
In 1881 the original brewery was redeveloped by William Bradford, a very famous brewery architect, who built the Victorian gothic brewing tower to my left. You will see the graceful arch of the spent grains dock, above which stands the mash tun, and above that the tower looms to the reservoir at the top of the brewery.
Behind me stands an equally impressive entrance. But what is really impressive about this entrance is that behind it stands a traditional, functional, working brewer. More than that, it is Grade II listed building. I refer to it as a heritage site. Let’s go and have a look.
Here we are at the top of the brewery tower alongside the reservoir. Rainfall on the Downs to the north of the brewery takes 30 years to permeate through the chalk and finishes up in our aquifer below. We pump via our artesian well to the top of the brewery and our fresh spring water enters the system. In fact, I think it’s about to enter now.
Well, here we are in the malt room. And you won’t see any bulk silos outside a Grade II listed building. We are entirely sack malt and normally this room would be pretty full. With the current Covid crisis we are trying to create as much space as possible so that our few staff can operate safely. And, this is about enough malt for Monday’s brewing.
And here we are in the hop store. Now, it’s our proud boast that we brew from 40% Sussex, 40% Kent and 20% Surrey hops, and that roughly equates with the volume of our beers that we sell in our native and adjoining counties.
Traditional aroma hops: Goldings, Fuggles, Progress, Rambling Cross. Why go anywhere else for hops when you have the finest hop growers in the world. The aroma is exceptional. Now I know this is a virtual brewery tour, but if you could smell these hops they would blow you away.
The other thing about the hop, in its leaf form, it forms a most marvellous filter bed on the hop back, and through that bed of boiled hops, we leave behind the trub the protein and clarify our works. It’s an age-old traditional system of brewing, but often tradition brings quality.
The mash tun floor: above me, you can see the grist case which holds the crushed malt that we’ve milled ready for the day’s brewing. And a little bit further over is the hot liquor tank holding our brewing water. On the day of brewing, we drop the two by gravity and mix them together to form the mash, the first part of the brewing day.
Now this mash tun was made in 1926 and we acquired it second-hand in 1954 from Page & Overton’s Brewery in Croydon. We’ve been brewing in it ever since.
The worts flow from the mash tun to the copper. And, this is a copper copper. Many coppers today are made of stainless steel, but we replaced our original Victorian copper with an identical model made for us in Scotland. The works and the hops are boiled together, and they’re boiled with steam. Steam circulating through an internal calandria within the vessel the vapour of boiling goes up the stack and the sweet aroma of hops lingers over Lewes.
Once we’ve boiled, we drop the entire contents to the hop back below, and there the hops settle out and form a filter bed through which we will clarify the sugars and leave behind the trub and the protein.
Before we move on to the next stage, someone I want you to meet. Here is our old steam engine that went into the brewery in 1881. Now we haven’t used it in earnest since the 1960s, and I think most breweries would probably have taken it out and put in something far more useful. But why desert an old friend?
And here’s the hop back in which the filtration takes place through the bed of spent hops and our worts are clarified.
Now we’re on the ground floor of the brewery and it’s seen a bit of drama in its days. At a time of Covid where we’re dealing with pestilence, we might reflect back for a moment on the other disasters that we’ve had, both fire and flood. And in 2000 the level of flood water from the River Ouse was at this height; good job I can swim.
From the hop back the hot worts are pumped up for cooling through our paraflows, and there are a series of 89 stainless steel plates in parallel. On one side of the plates we run the boiling hot sugars in one direction, on the other side of the plates we run our cold well water in the other direction. The worts are cooled down and taken to the fermenting room, the resultant hot liquor is taken upstairs to the hot liquor tanks for the next day’s brewing.
The fermenting room. The worts flow from the coolers down to our fermenting vessels where we pitch in our yeast and fermentation commences. And you can see that they are traditional open fermenters. You can see on the sides of the vessel where the yeast grew up during fermentation. That’s been skimmed off and put into cold store for the next week’s brewing. What’s happening now is the formation of the finishing head which will protect the finished product from airborne bacteria during the cooling process.
At the end of each brewing day, the duty brewer writes up the brew, the raw materials and the breakdown of the brew. And we’ve been doing this in longhand for rather a long time, in fact, we’ve got records going back to the 1830s.
Our yeast has skimmed into these wagons, and then transferred to our cold store and kept for the following weeks brewing. We first acquired the yeast in 1957, so we’ve been storing it from week to week for over 60 years. Now everyone talks about a fingerprint on Harvey’s beer, something that is very immediately discernible within the character of that beer and that is very largely down to the yeast. The yeast has never been captured we’ve simply pitched it into one brew, skimmed it off and put it into the next brew the following week. We estimate that over three thousand generations of yeast passed through our tundra in that time.
Here we are in the cold room where we have our yeast stored from this morning’s brew, and this is destined for next week’s brew.
I asked my tutor once why we give the yeast a rest for a week and he said, “Well boy, in the unlikely event of you doing the London Marathon, supposing you managed to come in, I slapped you on the back and said that was good, go off and do it again. What would you say?’ Not very much.
Following fermentation, the resultant beer is cooled down and exactly seven days from the day on which the brew was mashed the resultant beer is put into cask on our racking tackle. From there it goes to our warehouse and is kept under temperature control until it is dispatched to the pubs.
We’ve been bottling at Harvey’s for over a century. The difference between Harvey’s and other UK brewers is that we are still using returnable bottles. People talk about a deposit system; well we’ve never abandoned it. And each bottle we reckon we fill between six to eight times.
At the beginning of lockdown, we were brewing at 4% of our normal production levels. We brewed every three weeks so that we could maintain our yeast strain, and we bottled the beer in the intervening period. This largely went to home deliveries, to off-licenses and to pubs. And without this [bottling] facility we wouldn’t have been doing very much at all. Needless to say, the support we enjoyed from those areas of our business was astounding.
Well, we’re coming to the end of our virtual brewery tour and would it wasn’t a virtual tour because it would be great if you were here to have a pint with me.
Normally after a brewery tour, we chew the cud and talk about various aspects of brewing. And talking of chewing the cud, I haven’t mentioned our by-products: all our spent grains go to Plumpton Agricultural College and are fed to their dairy herd, and our spent hops go to local organic market gardens and allotments.
People ask why we brew on a site like this – we’re a listed building, we’re labour intensive, we’re bringing in sack malt, we have all the problems of effluent disposal, we’re landlocked, we’re river locked, and we have to maintain a good quality of brewing water. Why do we do it when it would be much easier to go and build a brewery on another site? Well, the answer is, this [the beer] it’s worth fighting for.