popular, though others such as the popular porter were
making them good money.

producing a brighter and cleaner tasting product - adding
proof that Ward’s products were unadulterated. This was
an adventurous concept but theirs was an age of forward
thinking. New ways of working and new ways of life
abounded. The mobility of the rural population was also
increasing with the building of new roads and the coming of
the railways it simply made travel more desirable and the
carrying of goods easier for all, which allowed many
industries, including the brewery to tap into untried and
widespread markets.

Even at this early stage most of their beers used sugar
to maximise the alcohol content and keep nitrogen in the
beer which contributed to its clarity. Sugar as a malt
substitute was now becoming a commonplace ingredient in
most brewer’s list of raw materials though curiously its
popularity by brewers had led to hefty taxes whilst at the
same time, a tax on malt had been abolished.

 Their cask ale was generously hopped and as it had
been brewed with sugar it took on a high alcohol content.
This quickly found favour with the beer drinking public.
XXXX Strong Ale continued to be made well into the 1950s.
It was certainly the outstandingly popular beer in the area
with an average original gravity of 1056. From this moment
on, the Wards must have realised that they had a
triumphant success on their hands.

Improved transportation and communications, such as
the  emergence  of  a  reliable  letter  system,  opened
communities out to wider influences and new experiences;
the next decade was to see great development in the Ward’s
fortunes. In 1888 rapidly increased trading required the
building of a large scale brewery, which stood just a few
hundred yards from the original.

Part of this many-windowed red-brick edifice was given
over to a yeast room and it is here, thanks to advanced
microscopy techniques, Ward’s began to experiment with
notoriously temperamental top fermenting yeast strains. It
was Pasteur who had established beyond doubt that yeast
was a living plant and that only active cells can bring about
alcoholic fermentation; it was this process that was so vital
to the brewery and testimony to this can be seen in copies
of Ward’s early brewing books.

By 1886, after considerable refining and perfecting of
their products, the brewery installed a bottling plant,
which when it went into production that year was churning
out 300 bottles of beer a day.

company of Whitbread to hand-bottle its own beers on a
commercial basis. Success had a marked effect on the

business  as  it  began  to  capture  the  all-important
nationwide market for its products. Twelve months after
the line was installed the company was inundated with
orders for their beers and the work to get orders out on
time was unstinting.

At each stage of the yeast growth, the head brewer
would rigorously check and control a series of filtering,
cooling and dilutions, reheating and acidity testing with the
aim of producing yeast that had the perfect characteristics
to brew beer with. Ironically Ward’s continued to buy-in
most of their yeasts possibly as their experiments were
often haphazard and erratic. A note made by David Ward
inside one of firm’s brewing books says ‘Pitching yeast.
Very few cells formulated and several dead cells.’ Then
asks in exasperation: ‘Do something Mr Brewer. Head
Brewer tried to clean up lab. I ask, hopeless.’ Why the

 The early installation of the Worsnam engineered
bottling line was on a trial basis, and several modifications
to it had to be made as the demand for Ward’s beers
doubled. Later that year the beer was chilled and filtered to
avoid secondary fermentation in the bottle as it passed
through a revolutionary Carlson and Seitz cold-filter
process. This had the benefit of cleaning the beer and