Harvey's, Making Craft Beer Since 1820

The following biography is adapted from a new chapter that will appear in the second edition of the Beer Bible, due out in 2021.

A bird flying from Greenwich in London traveling due south would arrive in the cozy parish town of Lewes (pronounced like Lewis) a few miles before reaching the English Channel. The town is perfectly composed and quaint, an almost unbelievably accurate reflection of the American sense of English quintessence. At its heart, on the banks of the River Ouse, is a Victorian brewery that replicates these qualities in miniature: many have called it Britain’s prettiest brewery, and it’s very hard to find the argument against. Locals refer to it playfully as the “Lewes Cathedral.”

In Britain, where nearly 2,000 breweries have opened in the new millennium, old Victorian breweries are sometimes regarded more with a kind of nostalgic appreciation than respect. Harvey’s is one of the rare exceptions, a brewery making such good beer that even the fans of hazy American IPAs trek to Lewes for a pint of Sussex Best. A good reason for that is the man who inhabits the bright, cozy office on the second floor behind the nameplate reading Head Brewer.

Miles Jenner was raised in the brewery—literally. He grew up in an apartment connected to the brewery where his father occupied that same office. In fact, Miles is the fifth Jenner to brew professionally, and portraits of the generations hang on the walls of his childhood apartment—where he again resides and where he raised his own family. After training elsewhere, Jenner joined his father in 1980 and became head brewer in 1986. It is an incredible amount of brewing continuity, a character even few old breweries can match.

The evidence of this experience began before we even entered the building. As we started our tour, Jenner took me to a new well not yet in use and began describing the source of the water in what I learned was his typical eloquence. “Sixty feet below where we're standing, a vast, underground reservoir brings fresh, spring water off the South Downs. The rainfall that falls on the Downs to the north of the brewery—we’ll have a look from the top in a moment—takes about 30 years to filter through the chalk and clay picking up minerals en route.”

The concept of “craft” is easily the most disputed in beer, but its older meaning, from the Anglo-Saxon “cræft,” could have been invented to describe Harvey’s. In this definition, cræft is the knowledge that takes residence in the body after years or decades of practice. As we repeat the same task many times, we begin to develop mastery; our bodies, after a thousand repetitions, can complete the task on their own. This is the central point of cræft: the wisdom and skill live in the body of the craftsperson, not a machine. A true craftsperson knows a task at a deeper level, understanding it at the level of—well, of how thirty year-old water affects a beer, for example. The tour Jenner led me on was one of a master craftsman revealing his trade.

Ingredients and Equipment

From under the ground we hiked up, following the water, to the top of the brewery. The Victorians built their breweries in a tower arrangement so that once they got the water up to the top of the building, gravity would take it downward as it transformed into beer. Our first stop was malt storage, where Jenner became slightly apologetic. Whereas most American brewers would call a malthouse less than two hundred miles away “local,” Jenner considered this remote. There were none in Sussex—but, he added brightly, “Having said that, our local barleys are bought up by maltsters.”

The hops were another matter. Those came from no further than adjacent counties. “I brew from 40% Sussex and 40% Kent and 20% Surrey hops—and that roughly equates to the volume of beers we sell in our native and adjoining counties,” he said. The brewery only uses whole hops—for reasons that would become relevant when we got further on our tour—and bags for each variety were placed in wooden stalls with a chalkboard listing the type and provenance. Certain hops grew better in certain counties, and he discussed each as we moved along the stalls. Jenner didn’t just know the source county for his hops—he knew the farmers who grew them. We came to the stall for Fuggles, one of the two most classic English varieites. “And [in Surrey] they can grow Fuggles with impunity. I also have Sussex Fuggles, which are grown near Udimore by the Wheeler family.” Another stall contained a hop called Sussex, a rogue hop found growing in a field thirty miles east of the brewery. He stooped and pulled a handful out, doing a quick rubbing. The scent he compared to marmalade.

The brewery isn’t large, but it’s graciously appointed with artifacts from its history, including an old steam engine, which the brewers still ceremoniously fire up on Christmas Eve. The brewhouse itself appears to be an artifact, but looks sometimes deceive. There are multiple mash tuns and kettles. The older of the two tuns dates to 1926 and was acquired by the brewery in 1954, but one of the coppers (or brew kettles), though it looks like it might be a 19th-century vessel, was actually built in 1999 in Inverness, Scotland, to look like the one it replaced.

In the middle of the last century, most breweries relied on sugar to make their mild ales. I asked Jenner if they did so in theirs. “I do still use brewing sugars,” he said, agreeing that it was important to the character of that beer. There was a story behind that sugar, he said, pausing to tell the story. “Over the years, brewing caramels have become very different from what they had been. I found that they became far more astringent and less lush and less useful for brewing,” he said. This is a man who has tasted hundreds of batches of beer going back many decades; he notices small changes. “We asked a little, independent sugar refinery, ‘can you reproduce that?’ And they did. It’s actually produced from a recipe from the 1950s. It’s lovely.”

We then came to a hopback, a vessel common in old English breweries. This was where the whole hops came into play. It’s a simple process that uses the hop matter as a filter. Jenner described it. “The whole lot is dropped, the hops and the worts, to the hopback below. It stands for ten minutes, and then we circulate for ten minutes round and round. You get a good, compact bed of hops. It takes about five minutes for them to come bright.” The wort happened to be circulating at the time, and it was bright and sparkling.

The Unusual Yeasts

Of the various ingredients and techniques that define Harvey’s, the most important is the yeast, which is one of the most interesting in the world. Up until the 1950s, it was common for the big Burton breweries to sell their excess yeast to a broker, who would in turn sell it to smaller breweries—which was Harvey’s practice. In 1956, their broker went out of business and they had to find a new source of yeast. They couldn’t find the original source and eventually settled on a strain from a Yorkshire.

It has served them well for decades, but bubbling away in open fermenters caused an unusual evolution. “It was a single strain yeast and it’s now mutated into two different strains—but with identical DNA,” he told me. “They slide in and out of proportion; it doesn’t seem to make much odds which way they go. It’s exactly the same yeast cell, it just [has] slightly different characteristics. It doesn’t seem to affect it whether it’s 90/10 in one direction or the other. It’s normally around a 40/60, 45/55 balance.” They crop it at the brewery and have never needed to culture it. Jenner seemed to regard it as perfectly reliable despite all this and added, “It’s settled down to the Sussex air.”

MILES JENNER ON SUSSEX BEST BITTER\ “The beer was first produced in 1955. It has moreish quality to it, there’s a good hop balance, there’s a residual sweetness, there’s almost [an involuntary] reaction to go back for another sip. You have that very strong sensory perception of it--it’s a dough-like quality the yeast gives it on occasion, the Yorkshire yeast. There were occasions when I drink it and I think, 'well that’s how it tasted always.’ I can drink a beer and just out of the blue I’ll be back fifty years. ”

Even more remarkable: there’s actually a third strain, one they didn’t discover until they started making their now-famous Imperial Stout in the late 1990s. Jenner brewed the beer and put it in special corked bottles. The corks were an uncommon treatment, but he’d been bottling beer for twenty years without incident. “Then, to my horror, I saw the samples in my office slowly expanding, with the cork rising up through the foil and eventually hitting the roof like an exploding champagne bottle.” The unexpected event revealed to them that a third strain, which they learned was Debaryomyces hansenii, lived happily and invisibly among the other two. It is a wild strain that kicks in “after the brewery yeast is knackered and has completely given up.” It takes a long time to rouse itself—six months—but eventually it creates a second fermentation, kicking the strength up from 7.5% to 9%. The Imperial Stout would have been a special beer in any case, but now the slightly acidic, complex character this yeast creates makes it unique in the beer world.

Living Tradition

We concluded our tour in his gracious office, looking like a professor’s with drifts of papers and books and certificates on the wall. As we chatted and I ruminated on the things I’d just seen, he made an observation. “People talk about craft brewing and I always feel that you can’t get much more hands-on than we are at Harvey’s. We don’t have silos, we’re bringing in sacks by hand, wheeling them in,” he said. “Quite honestly, if we wanted to be a far more profitable company, I could build a brewery in our back yard that would do everything with six men and we’d press buttons and off we’d go.”

This is certainly a choice many breweries have made. The best ones even spend weeks or months fiddling with the brewhouse to make sure the beer tastes enough like it did to please the customers. It is easier and makes the company more profitable. But there is no clearer act of transferring the knowledge from the brewer to the brewery than deciding to have computers make one’s beer. The use of a newly-discovered hop, the slightly unpleasant tang of the wrong brewing sugar, the character of water that has trickled through certain loam—these things a computer can’t know. Beer made at a computerized brewery isn’t necessarily worse, but it is less human.

That became clear when we retired to the John Harvey, a nearby pub, for lunch. Speaking of the flagship bitter, Sussex Best, which was first produced in 1955, Jenner was able to recall a lifetime of experience. “There are occasions when I drink it and I think, ‘well that’s how it tasted always.’ You have that very strong sensory perception of it—it’s a dough-like quality the yeast gives it on occasion, the Yorkshire yeast. I can drink a beer and just out of the blue I’ll be back fifty years. Like all living products, it depends on the age you drink it at, the storage, everything else.”

The knowledge of the beer is not confined to the brewing process—it lives in the memory and experience of the Jenners who have made if for generations. The beers at Harvey’s, like those at a few other Victorian-era English breweries still making beer the old way, are more than an act of craft—they are part of a living tradition embodied by cræft. And it’s why people still stream into the Lewes Cathedral each year.

BreweriesJeff AlworthMarch 10, 20201 Comment