'I've flown the flag for brewing in Wolverhampton': Brewery owner talks about honouring a city's beer legacy

The two breweries were at the forefront of everything brewing in Wolverhampton, but their legacy has become historic since the closure of Springfield in 1991 and Banks’s last year.

With their names consigned to history, the search has been on for new names to step up and not only honour that legacy, but also create their own, with plenty of people talking about the creation of Springbanks Brewery in the Heath Town area of the city.

While the excitement has continues to grow over the creation of Springbanks Brewery and the use of the Burton Union Brewing System, one brewer has been quietly working on creating his own legacy over the last decade and producing high quality beers.

James McCann has, since 2013, been the force behind Newbridge Brewery, an independent brewery based in Bilston and producing a core range of pale and dark beers from a set of matching Grundy Teddington cellar storage tanks which date back to the late 60’s and early 70’s.

Mr McCann said he had got into beer making around 20 years ago when he started home brewing and realised how interested he was in the process.

He said: “I wanted to be doing it every week, so I wouldn’t be able to drink everything I was making, so I was giving away the beer and I kind of realised that I wanted to do something a bit bigger.

“I started to get in touch with other micro breweries and brewing with them as and when I could and then, in 2012, one of them was about to close down and asked if I wanted to buy it.

“I didn’t at the time, for various reasons, but it inspired me to put something together myself and I bought some old, second-hand tanks and planned to renovate them over five years, but it all came together a lot quicker and, by 2013, I was up and running.”

Mr McCann said he had been experimenting with different beers for years, with his successful Indian Empire IPA still made to a recipe from his early days brewing.

He said he had never used a home brew kit, but had built a brewery in the garage of his home in Newbridge, which is where the name of the brewery comes from, and worked from there until he said he realised it was getting too big, so searched for and found his current premises in Bilston.

He said the brewery was still a hobby which he did outside of his normal work, but spoke about how the Newbridge brand had built up over time.

He said: “I’d class it as a hobby business and while it’s a fully commercial operation and the cask ale all goes into pubs, it’s not been run aggressively with a view of making a fortune.

“Almost all of it is sold locally, so the growth has been mainly local, although I do sell a bit into the distribution chain, such as dealing with Black Country Ales on a regular basis as they’ve got a big portfolio of pubs around the Black Country, so they’ve helped me grow.

“The most significant thing over the past few years has been my involvement with Hail to the Ale Micropub, because the owner Gary Morton had retired from brewing, so I became the featured brewer in their pub and I also brew his recipes as my own, so they’re permanently featured there.

“More recently, I have also been brewing house beers for Penn Bowling Club called Around the Green and for Perfect Ale, Cask and Keg in Wolverhampton called Pack Pale Ale.

“I’m still enjoying it and typically brew at weekends, so it doesn’t get in the way of other things that I’m doing, so I brew once a week and will work to have another one planned.”

Mr McCann said the feedback around his beers had been very positive over the years and said he was regularly selling several barrels a week to the three pubs he supplies beer to.

He also said that while he wished the people behind Springbanks the best of luck, he said he hoped that people wouldn’t forget about Newbridge Brewery and the work he had done over the last decade.

He said: “Fair play to Springbanks, they’re putting a lot of investment into what they’re doing at the moment and making a big deal of advertising themselves, so I wish them the best of luck.

“I just don’t want people to forget that I’m here, because I’ve been doing this on a much more modest scale than what they are trying to do and I don’t want people to forget that.

“At one point, for quite a while, I was actually the only brewer left in Wolverhampton after Banks’s closed down, because there were several independents around when I started, but they’ve all closed down for one reason or another, so I was left as the only person flying the brewing flag in Wolverhampton for quite a while.”