oxpete
First Team Sub
May 29, 2012, 4:04 PM
Posts: 1106
Location: Oxford
Team(s): Kidlington, Abingdon Town.
Post #9 of 21
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Hate Fullers with a passion and as for still being allowed to call HSB HSB is beyond me. Bring back Gales Brewery - Nothing less than murder The present Fullers-made HSB doesn't even come close. A beer simply cannot be reproduced accurately in a different brewery.
Exactly. The Horndean Brewery (where HSB was originally made by Gales) took water from its own well dug into the chalk of the South Downs, and the properties that water gives the beer could never be reproduced at Fullers brewery. Horndean-brewed HSB was always remarkably sweet and didn't form any sort of frothy head on top (and was admittedly an aquired taste for some), while modern day Fullers-brewed HSB isn't as sweet and always seems served with froth. Fullers HSB is certainly a decent pint, approachable and much more of a crowd-pleaser, but its such a sanitised version of the original without enough character. Some would say its good that HSB is now much more widely available around the country than it could ever be under Gales (indeed, its in the pub across the road from where I live in Oxford), but its lost much of its personality in that jump.
When Fullers bought Gales in 2005 the brewery certainly was in a run-down state, but Fullers seemed to have little intention of keeping it open as they quickly started making redundancies, closed the brewery within months, but kept the names of the beers. Whatever the financial/structural condition of the Gales business Fullers bought, there is no denying that the watersource at Horndean could/can still make very high quality beer, so why waste it? From an accountants point of view, the beer names could well have been the most (or only?) valuable thing left, but if HSB has changed that much, should they have been allowed to keep using the name HSB? (Without wanting to open a particularly well-labelled can of worms, its alittle like a certain Buckinghamshire football club we all know of!  )
Incidentally, Gales HSB (we're talking pre-Fullers here) was one of those beers that was always deemed 'not to travel well' (I remember finding it in a couple of pubs in Ryde, and maybe very occasionally as far north as Newbury). Is/was there any truth in certain beers not travelling well outside of a certain area? As a student in the eighties, I loved Brains SA but it was only available in two pubs in Swansea, the 'Sketty Arms' and 'Adam & Eve', whereas now its in pubs all over the place (again, not tasting quite the same, and I suspect in my student days it was a Swansea/Cardiff thing that made it hard to find).
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