Watney's brewery in London

I don't know about the revival of that brand but I know the bloggers and authors Boak and Bailey have written about red barrel in the past , they might well have covered the revival of it.

 

It's new people who have bought and relaunched the brand.

 

I'd love to see Whatney's Red Barrel brought back, it used to be one of my favorite beers when I was younger, but I doubt now that I'd remember exactly what it tasted like.

Would I be tasting the same thing? Probably not. A recipe does not a beer make, there are a lot more specifics that go into it (equipment, the brewer's hand, process, specifics of ingredients, etc.).

At that point, if the beer is just a copy of what it once was, what's the point of reviving the brand? Because of the name? If it's not exactly the same beer who cares? Especially now that there are new breweries springing up left and right.

A final example, if I may, to clarify what I'm thinking of. At some point some years ago Boston Beer Co. (I believe, correct me if I'm wrong) bought the rights to Whitbread and started producing it in the United States. To my tastebuds it didn't taste anything like the original. The label was the same but that was about it. So what was the point? Were they just buying existing art and a name that once had a following because that was easier and cheaper than creating a new brand? They should have just come up with their own brand rather than dusting the cobwebs off of it only to drag it through the mud. How disrespectful is that? I hated to see the brand disappear but I'd rather have it dead and gone but respected in memory than brought back to life like some Frankenstein monster pieced together from bits of information here and there, not really recreating the original, but rather some hideous beast.

 

@NeroFiddled
Did you grow up in the US or GB?

I’m too young for Whatney’s Red Barrel, but it’s synonymous with poor 1970’s beer for a generation of British drinkers.

 

Cat Asylum, a brewery owned by a school friend of mine, brewed the early 1960s recipe of Red Barrel last year. It was a really nice supping Bitter. But it was served on cask, unlike the original which was filtered and pasteurised to hell. Me and my two sons polished off a firkin in a weekend.

 

In the US @jonb5; I guess they'd started shipping it over here as a last resort, perhaps at the request of a distributor who thought they could do something with whatever was cheap from across the pond - BUT it was a great alternative for us as we were basically drinking golden colored swill at that point and anything was better.

 

Boston Beer Co. (as well as The Lion) brewed Whitbread and Mackeson Stout "under license" by Whitbread - which by then was owned by Interbrew (pre-InBev) - for their US importer, Royal (as shown below, sometimes the breweries used "Royal" as the 'dba' name on the US label).

(ABOVE - COLA address info and 3 examples from US Mackeson labels).

In theory, at least, Interbrew/Whitbread was ultimately responsible for their branded-beers being brewed in the US, depending, I suppose, on how "strictly" those brewmasters really supervised the operation. "Yeah, yeah - whatever. When did you mail that check?"

(I once called BBC about a few different things, including their version of Mackeson which disappeared after the AB-InBev deal - and they claimed they never brewed the beers, even as I was looking at the TTB COLA ).

The Whitbread brands has previously been imported from the UK by "All Brands Importers" in the 1980s and then by "Royal Class Import/Export" a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hudepohl-Schoenling Brewing Co. created in the 1990s (they also had import rights for Hofbrauhaus Munchen).

A few years after BBC bought the last H-S brewery in Cincinnati in 1996, Hudepohl-Schoenling sold off its brands (which had been being brewed for them by BBC) and import rights, with the latter going to a new firm, Royal Imports, owned by an ex-Heileman exec, Randy Hull. (The H-S domestic brands went to Snyder Int'l, owner of Cleveland's Crooked River and later of the Wild Goose/Blue Ridge brewery in MD now owned by Flying Dog. Snyder later went bankrupt.)

Watney's was being exported to the US as early as the 1960s - Schlitz (the #2 US brewer) was apparently involved in importing it at one point. By the 1970s and '80s, their US (western) importer was the well-known "Wisdom Imports" - which also imported Carta Blanca & Bohemia from Mexico, Asahi, Swan (Australia), Germany's Holsten and a number of other brands, and also acted as a "master distributor" for Anchor Brewing Co. outside it's home market. In the east it was imported by the "Traditional Beer Importing Co." (NJ) which was somewhat infamous from bringing it in in 2 liter plastic bottles.

I can never remember exactly which UK bottled ale* it was, but I always think it was Watney's Red Barrel labels in the US that read "contains potassium bisulfate" (or some other common wine preservative). I'd never seen such a warning label on a beer before.

* Coulda been Courage or Whitbread, I guess.