Gartside Quaife

Dr Magnus Quaife with his beer, Old Thomas Bell

 

A painter and art lecturer has helped to revive a popular Manchester beer and, with inspiration from the public, designed the labels.

Dr Magnus Quaife researched and recreated a new version of Old Tom, a popular beer once brewed by Gartside Brewery, in Ashton-under-Lyne.

The project was commissioned by the Portland Basin Museum in Ashton-under-Lyne, where Magnus held public participation art workshops to help with the label design.

Magnus, a lecturer at the Manchester School of Art, had been inspired by an Old Tom beer bottle in a display cabinet behind the bar in the museum’s replica pub.

He said: “Discovering how important the brewery was to the local area — it was huge and just down the road from the museum in Pottinger Street — and the fact there wasn’t lots in the museum about the brewery other than a few old bottles, I thought it would be interesting to uncover a bit more about that, if possible, but I wondered if I could find out what the story was with the Old Tom.

“The idea was to try to find the Gartside’s recipe and to try to recreate that and bottle it and produced it as a limited edition work of art.

‘Great quality ale’

“One of the great things that came out of the workshops to help design a label was that quite a few of the grandparents and a couple of the older teachers who came remembered Gartside’s Brewery and the beer very fondly as a great quality ale.”

The quest for the original recipe was fruitless, however. Magnus said: “I discovered a story — I don’t know true it is — that in 1968 when Bass took the company over, Gartside’s head brewer was so frustrated with the new management that he walked out with the recipe book, which would make a lot of sense because very soon after taking over, Bass turned Gartside’s brewery — one of the most technologically advanced, large-scale breweries in the country — into just a bottling plant for Bass beer.”

The new beer was brewed at Millstone Brewery, at Mossley, near Oldham, and has been named Old Thomas Bell, after Gartside Brewery’s head horse keeper.

Magnus said: “The idea with the bottles is: do you open the bottle and drink the art and you’re left with nothing or do you keep it intact and you’ve got a work of art but never get to taste the beer? There’s 300 limited edition bottles and so there’s 300 dilemmas for people.”

But he said a few bottles had been opened for “scientific purposes”, adding: “It’s a golden brown colour, rich, and very full bodied, and not like a lot of fashionable ales because it’s neither pale nor particularly hoppy and it’s got an awful lot of malt and it’s brewed with sugar as it’s sweet. It’s a great winter warmer.”

Gartside Millstone Brewery

Dr Magnus Quaife with Jon Hunt, of Millstone Brewery