Beermat of the Week

Ryburn Brewery

Last week's post about Kitchen Brewery seems to have stirred a few memories. This time we're off to West Yorkshire again to have a look at Ryburn Brewery.

Ryburn started life in 1990 with a two-barrel kit located in an old dyeworks on Mill House Lane in Sowerby Bridge.  A project by owner-brewer Harold Coburn, brewing stopped in the summer of 1991 following problems with the boilers. It seems that the head brewer of Clarke at Wakefield came to the rescue and it was all up and running again by July of that year.

Brewing had been fairly intermittent until then - however in 1992 they started supplying house beers to the Stanley Arms in Stockport. In its day this was a famous free house with owner Mike Belsham traveling the country to obtain new and unusual beers. The beers supplied to the pub included two (two!) house milds - Stanley's Mild (3.5%) and Ollie's Mild (5.5%) as well as other beers from the regular Ryburn range, including the notably hoppy and bitter Ryedale Bitter.  One year Mike bought the entire brew length of the licorice-laden Xmas Porter (which, I can report, was lush).  I was a regular at the Stanley Arms and tried many of these beers - they were invariably good, well-made brews. A list of the beers can be found here.

In 1993 the brewery re-equipped with a bigger 10-barrel plant and also acquired its first (and ultimately only) tied house, the Ram's Head in Sowerby Bridge, a former Websters pub. 

All seemed to be looking good. Two years later the brewery moved to Owenshaw Mill, Old Cawsey (which is near Sowerby Bridge) and doubled capacity again to 20 barrels. In 1996 some 40 barrels a week were being brewed but then it all seemed to go into reverse.

After a brief two-three year flowering, the Stanley Arms entered a period of long decline and it finally closed in February 1996, although the connection with Ryburn had ceased some time before then. In 1997 the brewery downsized and relocated again to the cellars of the Ram's Head. It then seemed to fade from view although when researching this piece I was surprised to see that brewing didn't actually stop until 2010. It last appears in the 2010 Good Beer Guide which tells us:

Some business is done with the local free trade but the main market for the brewery's products is via wholesalers, chiefly J D Wetherspoon.

The Ram's Head is also closed - the WhatPub website tells us that its license was suspended in January 2009 which, oddly, predates the cessation of brewing by a year.  As you can see here the pub has been turned into a house.

I have to say, I do recall Ryburn beers with a great deal of affection and writing this post brought back many happy memories.

The Stanley Arms was something of a legend at its peak. It was really the first multi-beer free house in Stockport and stood out for the sheer variety of beers that passed through it. Its slow decline seems to have started with an in-house beer festival which Mike Belsham planned to be the biggest of its type ever staged. He probably achieved that with a huge multi-tiered stillage that occupied an entire wall of the pub.  Trouble was, he had so much beer that it was impossible to get enough people in the pub to drink it before it went off.

The Owenshaw Mill was subsequently home to the Owenshaw Mill Brewery, which operated from 2011 to 2015. Who knew?