Chatsworth Gardeners Tap

The life of this blog is being extended once again. The strategem being used this time has come from that fact that we have visited a couple of interesting places recently and they had their own dedicated beers. So we thought it would be legitimate to include beers acquired from such places, provided of course the were proper beers, and interesting.

We went to the Chatsworth stately home, near Bakewell, over the weekend. When we were there, we discovered that there is a brewery on the estate, called the Peak Ales Brewery. It was opened in 2005 in converted formerly derelict farm buildings, with the aid of the DEFRA Rural Enterprises Fund and support from the Chatsworth settlement (who are the owners of the house).

When James Pain, the architect of Chatsworth, built the stables there in the 1760s a brewery was included. Beer was brewed for the main House and also for the staff, for whom it formed part of their wages until 1931. Rather than carry the barrels into the house cellar, a lead pipe was sunk from the brewhouse through the garden to the cellar. When ale had been brewed, it was piped directly into one of the huge oak barrels known as the Twelve Apostles, where the beer was aged, some barrels for several years. The barrels still exist today, but the wood has dried and shrunk and is thus no longer usable. In the 1950s it was decided to uproot the lead pipe for its salvage value. When tracing it through the Duke's greenhouse, it was discovered that the gargeners has tapped into it. Apparently the brewers tippid the wink to the gardeners when the ale was flowing down so they could 'borrow' a pint or two. Hence the name of this beer.

The beer itself is most acceptable. It is an inpressive copper coloured beer with a well balanced malt and hop flavour with bitterness present throughout. It is 5% ABV and is not bottle conditioned. All we know about the ingredients is that it contains water, malted barley, hops and yeast.