Shepherd Neame - Britain's Oldest Brewer - Faversham, UK - Iconic Factories on Waymarking.com

Shepherd Neame is an English independent regional brewery founded in 1698 in Faversham, Kent. Although evidence has been uncovered showing brewing has taken place continuously on the current site since at least 1573. It is the oldest brewer in Great Britain and has been family-owned since 1864. The brewery produces a range of cask ales and filtered beers. Production is around 281,000 brewers' barrels a year. It owns 3470 pubs, predominantly in Kent, London and South East England. The company exports to more than 35 countries including Sweden, Italy, Brazil and Canada.

The family of Neame were relative latecomers in the overall development of the Shepherd Neame Brewery but, as substantial property owners in the district, Charles Neame of Harefield Court and John Neame of Selling Court were acknowledged to be among the most valuable hop growers in East Kent. Theo Barker explains in the official account of the Brewery, that it all began with a Captain Richard Marsh who in 1678 is recorded in the Faversham Wardmote Books as contributing by far the largest of the ‘Brewers Fines’ made at that date.

Shepherd Neame as such is reported as having been established in 1698, in an advertisement of the Kentish Gazette for the 11 April 1865. Richard Marsh lived until 1727 when his Brewery was bequeathed to his widow, and then to his daughter, who sold the property on to Samuel Shepherd around 1741. Samuel Shepherd was from Deal, Kent. He had an interest in malting when he moved to Faversham around 1730 and had established himself as a Brewer of Malt by 1734. Shepherd expanded on his interest, through acquiring a number of public houses, but it was his son, Julius Shepherd, who extended this trend still further upon his inheritance of the Brewery in 1770, when the company held four such outlets. In 1789, he set about modernising the process of malt grinding and pumping, which had been previously worked with the employment of horses, by introducing what was reputed to be the first steam engine (Boulton and Watt) to be used for this purpose outside of London, and was then able to describe his business as the Faversham Steam Brewery.


The Spanish Galleon Tavern in Greenwich
Henry, his second son, born in 1780, continued the family tradition, and raised his son of the same name into the business. It was this Henry Shepherd (1816~77) who was to be the last of the Shepherds actively involved in the Company. The death of Henry senior at the age of eighty-two occurred in 1862 and although his own son was not a businessman of the same determination, the firm’s expansion continued adequately with John Mares, who had come to the financial assistance of the Shepherd Brewery during the recession of the mid-1840s and continued as the impetus behind Shepherd and Mares until Percy Beale Neame joined the Brewery in 1864. Mares had seen the potential of the Brewery’s growth with the arrival of the long delayed railway service in 1858. He pressed the firm to actively prepare for such growth. Horse-drawn drays were used to carry the Brewery’s ales throughout Kent, and malts were imported by barge at Faversham Creek at its own wharf which was also used as the means to deliver its product to London, until the 1850s when steamboats were beginning to prove more expeditious to the task. The railways soon even outpaced and replaced the steamboats.

Mares' unexpected death at the age of 45 in 1864 placed Percy Neame, at the age of twenty-eight, as the stronger partner with Henry Shepherd, and with the challenge left to him in Mares' successful expansion programme he brought the Faversham Brewery well into the Neame family's dominion.

Shepherd Neame have embraced 21st century brewing techniques, for instance they use PDX Reactor Technology to heat wort rather than the traditional method of a heating using a calandria, this has led to a reduction in energy consumption of 50%.

The brewery itself is located very near to Faversham town centre, and it is possible to smell the brewing processes regularly in the town and surrounding streets.

Shepherd Neame holds the title of Britain’s oldest brewer, and has been making beer at its historic site in the market town of Faversham, Kent, for more than 500 years. It still uses traditional methods and 100% natural ingredients to create a portfolio of award-winning classic ales, contemporary beers and internationally celebrated lagers. Every beer is brewed with chalk-filtered mineral water from the brewery’s own artesian well, deep below the brewery, and 93% of the hops used in its beers are grown in Kent. Centuries of brewing experience have been passed down to the current team of brewers, who still use many traditional methods, including handcrafting beer in the UK’s last remaining unlined solid oak mash tuns.

Product manufactured here: A wide range of ales and lagers most famous is the Spitfire ale Address: 17 Court Street Faversham, United Kingdom ME13 7AX Web Page: [Web Link]

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