Once more for the Union: From Burton to Bakewell, a piece of brewing history is saved
Brewer & Distiller International
It is June 2024. Six months ago we thought we’d lost the Burton Unions for ever. But now, in the Peak District, six silent and silky streams of yeast foam pour from gleaming swan neck pipes into a trough of krausen. A Union set is fermenting again.
These pipes are just the very top of a curious contraption dredged from a Victorian brewer’s fever dream: a mad concoction of casks, pipes and troughs that sends fermenting yeast on a Heath-Robinson hootenanny and, at scale, must have driven armies of coopers to wonder whether a life at sea plugging leaks for the Royal Navy might not be better after all.