Sid Tetley? Doug Heineken? No, our weak lager correspondent Angus Young bets he drinks something else entirely.
When a young man arrived at the harbour in Hull to start a journey to the New World in May 1818 he could not have imagined the legacy he was about to create. Thomas Carling was just 21-years-old when he travelled to Hull from his family home in Etton, near Beverley. The son of a farm labourer was about to board a ship berthed on the River Hull to embark on a new life far from his rural East Riding roots.
The end of the Napoleonic Wars three years earlier had triggered a deep economic depression in Britain’s agricultural sector, prompting many farm workers into extreme poverty. Whether this led to his decision to leave his home to seek his fortune is unknown but Thomas duly arrived in Canada a month later and eventually settled near a township called London in the province of Ontario.
It’s likely he already had an eye on starting his own farming venture as land in Canada was regularly advertised for sale in British newspapers of the day and he soon acquired the rights to 100 acres of land. His main task was to clear trees on his land and build a cabin to live in and this frontier lifestyle was underlined when he married Margaret Routledge, the daughter of another settler family, in 1820. The pair were married by a magistrate as there was no Church of England minister in the area and they were the first non-native couple to tie the knot in the new township.
After moving into the town of London itself, Thomas gradually moved away from farming to develop a long-time passion for brewing. Until then he had just brewed ale for friends and family as well as a ‘payment’ for neighbours who helped clear felled trees with their oxen. Legend has it that he relied on a recipe passed down by his father who also brewed his own beer back in Etton.
His first brewery was a basic affair consisting of just two copper kettles, a grinding mill turned by a horse and six men working the mashing tubs which were used to heat a mix of barley and water to break down the starch in the gain into sugars. However, the end product proved popular. One of Thomas’ main customers was a British military garrison where troops were entitled to six pints a day. He also sold his beer on the streets from a wheelbarrow.
Around 1850 his two sons William and John entered the business but Thomas was still involved 25 years later to oversee the construction of a new brewery. Such was the demand, the new building cost quarter of a million dollars and was six-storeys tall. By now, horse power had been replaced by steam power.
Thomas died in 1880, aged 82, but his sons ensured the family name became cemented in brewing history when they launched the Carling Black Label brand. The Carling family eventually relinquished involvement in the business in the early 1930s and it subsequently underwent several different ownerships. Thanks to the Black Label brand, the Carling name survived all these changes and the brand was introduced into the UK in the early 1950s.
Today the owners are American-Canadian brewing giants Molson Coors but Carling Black Label is now brewed in the UK at Burton on Trent. In a twist which Thomas would have probably appreciated, some of the 70 UK growers who supply 20,000 tonnes of barley to the Burton brewery every year are based in his native East Riding.
A plaque commemorating Thomas can be found in Etton Village Hall. It was installed in 2000 in a special ceremony attended by six members of the Carling family from Canada.