Northumbria was once awash with the smell of brewing ginger beer. Bill Knott meets the man who revived Fentimans Fearless Fermentations 50 years on. Photographs by Noel Murphy.
"Lemonade? Lemonade? Interview a man in Newcastle who makes soft drinks?" I thought I was losing my touch: this must be the journalistic equivalent of being stuck in a dry dock.
Actually, I have drunk a fair amount of lemonade over the years, mostly stuck in the family Escort in a pub car park, squabbling with my brother over a bag of cheese-and-onion crisps as the rain lashed down. Since then, I have always thought of it as a mixer, like tonic water. I didn't realise you could drink the stuff neat. But then I had never met Eldon Robson, sole proprietor of Fentimans, which produces a range of what the firm describes as 'adult soft drinks'. The phrase conjures up images of those lager cans featuring pictures of scantily-clad women; in fact, the three drinks (Ginger Beer, Victorian Lemonade, and Seville Orange Jigger) come in old-fashioned brown beer bottles with crown caps and look remarkably as though they contain alcohol.
Which, in fact, they do, although at no more than 0.5 per cent abv, your bladder would probably explode before you became even remotely merry on the stuff. The alcohol, however, is crucial to the flavour: all Fentimans drinks are brewed, pasteurised and bottled in much the same way as, for example, Newcastle Brown Ale, another favourite Northumbrian tipple.
I met Eldon Robson in the boardroom of his wife's Newcastle firm of solicitors, among the graceful, solid stone buildings in Grey Street, buildings from which the city's traditional industries of coal, steel and shipbuilding were once administered. There is precious little heavy industry left now, but the city is far from derelict as a result. The entrepreneurs have arrived - Phileas Fogg snacks, in the old steel town of Consett, was an early example - and the city exudes a comfortable, confident, forward-looking feeling, rather like Leeds to the south and Edinburgh to the north.
Eldon Robson is one such entrepreneur. If the livery of the bottles and the history of the brewery led me to expect a wizened old eccentric with a rather Methodist taste in refreshment, I was wrong. Eldon arrived in a business-like black suit and denim shirt, looking considerably younger than his 49 years and toting a mobile phone. He had spent the morning with marketing men, and seemed highly enthused by the ideas they had run up his flagpole; like many pioneers with a strong belief in his product, he is having to adapt to the ways of modern business, but he seems to be coping pretty well, and there is an evangelical glint in his eye.
Fentimans' heritage, however, is not merely a marketing illusion. The company has its roots in a deal that took place in 1900 between Thomas Fentiman - Eldon's great-grandfather - and a fellow tradesman, at Cleckheaton, in Yorkshire. As security for a loan, the tradesman offered Fentiman a recipe for botanically brewed ginger beer. The loan was never repaid, and the company was founded.
After 60 years of successful trading, the company ran into problems. Sales of the Grey Hens - the stone jars in which the ginger beer was sold door-to-door - slumped as the supermarkets started to dominate the soft-drinks business. The company closed, and the old Gateshead brewery fell into disrepair. All that now remains is the original mosaic of the company logo: a dog called Fearless, winner of the obedience prize at Cruft's two years running, and now emblazoned on every bottle of Fentimans drinks.
Eldon remembers the old brewery from his childhood, especially its smell. "It was like an Aladdin's cave, full of bubbling copper vessels, and the smells were lovely. The locals in Stockport, where we brew now, wondered what was going on when they started smelling ginger instead of hops and malt, but they�re getting used to it."
The demise of the original Fentimans in the Sixties meant that going into the family business was never really an option for Eldon. Instead, he ran a village pub in County Durham, which did good business but was a little quiet for his taste. "After that, I did all sorts of things: a laundry business, even felling trees to clear sites for open-cast mining. Then I decided to ask Gran if I could set up the business again."
She gave her blessing, and Eldon started his new career in manufacturing. "I was as green as grass: I knew very little about manufacturing and nothing about marketing. I took a couple of old recipes to a consultant chemist and asked "Can you recreate these?" He said yes, and, after a few stabs, we got it right. Plenty of people on Tyneside remember how it used to taste, which was a good test."
Five years later, production is booming, and Eldon concentrates on refining his original products and developing new ideas. He still signs off every batch himself ('you can't rely on samples in a lab') and spends a lot of time tinkering with new flavours.
All three drinks are based on the original ginger-beer recipe, which, as he showed me by bashing a lump of the stuff on his wife's boardroom table, is, in turn, based on Chinese ginger root. The 'botanicals' include yarrow, speedwell and juniper, all with various medicinal properties but barely detectable in the flavour. "There are no artificial nasties in our drinks: what we're after is a three-dimensional flavour, not just flavoured sugar syrup and carbonated water. That's why the drinks are cloudy: we deliberately leave a sediment in the bottle."
Armed with a few samples, I returned south and tried them out. The Ginger Beer is the best I've tasted: not over-sweet, and with a really good pungent hit of ginger, combined with a trace of chilli for an extra bite. The Victorian Lemonade is certainly a lot better than the stuff from the pub car park, but, for me, the real star is the Seville Orange Jigger. Its slightly bitter tang comes from Seville orange oil, and its luminously bright colour from mandarin juice, but what I liked about it most was pouring it three parts to one with Campari, over lots of crushed ice. The flavours in the two drinks merge brilliantly, as, slowly, do the colours. I was right: it is a mixer. A Northumbrian Sunrise? I don't see why not.
Eldon Robson tests the batches of lemonade, ginger beer and orange jigger himself to ensure that quality is maintained. Fortunately, many people on Tyneside could remember how the original drinks tasted, which was useful when he was recreating the recipes