Titchfield Castle, well maybe?

4 Comments

• AlastairW

  28 January, 2016
  at 9:52 am

  This is the gatehouse of Titchfield Abbey near Fareham. You can see it from the A27 Titchfield bypass. It was founded in the C13th niot by monks but by a strange order of austere priests. Henry VIII closed it and sold it as a mansion. Most was demolished in the 1700s but the casselated gatehouse remained.
  John Fielder’s little brewery was at the far end of the high street from the abbey and whilst founded in the 1740s only came into the Fielder family in the 1850s. It was taken over by the dreaded Whitbread in 1961 for its 12 pubs and, guess what? Yes, it was closed and later demolished for trendy housing. Whitbread and the “suit brigade” have a lot to answer for. It is possible that 1 or 2 of its beers might just be ressurected by a micro this year, but they weren’t the most memorable strong beers in the world.
• AlastairW

  28 January, 2016
  at 10:19 am

  Re my comment about Fielders somewhat weak beers, the stout mentioned on the centre label had an original specific gravity at the time of 1035.4 degrees and a final of 1010.8 at bottling in the late 50s giving it an alcohol strength of approx 3%. Brickwoods, just down the road and brewers of possibly the second worst beers in Christendom, own Admiral stout was even lower in the alcohol stakes although it was a richer beer in texture (that is if you could get past the flavour), and Gales (its other neighbour) brewed an even weaker concoction. Ena Sharples certainly would certainly not have got intoxicated before she burst on that stuff.
• Dale Adams

  31 January, 2016
  at 8:47 am

  Great info Alastair! The current revival of low or no alcohol beers had nothing on those guys!
  Cheers
  Dale
• Charles Ellis

  1 December, 2016
  at 4:26 pm

  As a child I lived next door to the brewery, at 2 Coach Hill, Titchfield, and can still remember well the smell on ‘brewing’ days as it used to waft over the wall into our garden – Tuesdays and Thursdays if my memory is correct. Unfortunately I was never old enough to have tasted the beers as I was 11 when the brewery closed in 1961. There was a tiny pub inside the brewery, the Brewery Tap, where my father occasionally went to fill up a jug with beer when he had a friend or two round or if he fancied a pint with his dinner. Talking a few years ago to John Fielder, the son of owner at the time of its sale, I do remember him telling me that the brewing followed “the Burton method”. As a non-expert in these matters, I don’t know what this means – perhaps someone can enlighten me? I do remember though remember drinking Brickwoods which, as you rightly say Alastair, was pretty awful beer and no loss at all when it disappeared.