Bobby's golden rule

Yvonne Neame is getting used to having a stranger around the house. He answers to the name of Bobby and they've been married for a decade or two, but she claims she hasn't seen him in years.

Now, after half a century at the helm of Kent family brewer Shepherd Neame, Bobby has stepped down as chairman and takes on the new role of president. It gives him a bit more leisure time, but he maintains: "Yvonne says I still can't go home for lunch."

So he had lunch with me instead - in a Shep's pub, of course - and reminisced about his long life in brewing and the tumultuous changes he has seen in the industry. He started at Shepherd Neame in 1956, joining a Faversham brewery that had been in production since 1698. That's the official date, though a discovery this month by archivist John Owen showed that the brewery actually dates from as long ago as 1573.

Brewing and pubs had just about recovered from the Second World War by the mid-1950s and they were gearing up for changes that would see the introduction of keg beer and lager, the development for the first time of national brewers, and massive investment in pubs to enable them to offer better facilities to a new generation of customers.

Robert Neame - Bobby to all - has a deserved reputation as one of the great innovators of British brewing. His skills were honed at an early age. He studied science at Harrow, then toured Europe and Scandinavia where he worked for such cutting-edge breweries as Carlsberg and Tuborg in Denmark, Pripps in Sweden, and Holsten and Paulaner in Germany. He finished his grand tour at Hurlimann in Switzerland, where he forged a relationship that was to have an important impact at Shepherd Neame in later years.

Workingmen's background

Back home, the pace of change was slow at first. "It was nearly all draught beer at the brewery, between 70% and 80% of production," Bobby recalls. "We brewed mild but it wasn't such a big brand as it was in London. Pale Ale (PA) was our major beer, accounting for 40% of trade."

It's difficult to believe that Sheps, with a modern pub estate of close to 400 and free trade throughout the country, relied heavily on supplying workingmen's and service clubs in Kent, London and Essex in the 1950s.

"It was big business," Bobby says. "Dartford had heavy industry in those days and had lots of clubs. Chatham had its dockyards and the Royal Engineers were based in the Medway towns. Ashford was a rail repair town, ferries were the only way to get to France and had a big workforce in Dover and Folkestone, and there were coalmines in Kent.

"Clubs were between 50-60% of our business. The brewery had developed along the London to Ramsgate railway line. From 1890 we had supplied some clubs with puncheons of ale - double hogsheads that held 108 gallons. Some clubs took 30 barrels of PA a week.

"During the war we were given a special dispensation by the government to supply beer to clubs and pubs in south Essex, including the Victoria and Tilbury docks, Ford at Dagenham and Southend-on-Sea."

The pace of change was forced by the decline of heavy industry and the arrival of national brewers such as Watneys and Whitbread. Watneys, with its now infamous Red Barrel, turned brewing on its head with the introduction of keg beer - chilled, filtered, pasteurised and pressurised.

"Watneys did terrible damage," Bobby says. "At the same time, Whitbread mopped up most of the 20 breweries in Kent. There were 400 to 500 breweries in the country in 1955 before the big brewers started to buy them. Shepherd Neame was very small at the time. We brewed around 35,000 barrels a year. We had to break out to survive."

Bobby was doing many jobs in the brewery. He brewed once or twice a week and helped with book-keeping, but all the while was honing his ideas to keep the company moving, growing and successful.

"When I started, brewing was more of an art than a science," he says. "As a result of the war, many people who took over breweries were not trained in business and couldn't meet the challenge of the times. Many breweries were run down and nobody bothered to invest in them."

He admits that Shep's beer at the time was inconsistent but the board was opposed to introducing keg. Bobby recognised that people were short of sugar in their diet as a result of the war and rationing, and were switching from bitter to such sweeter beers as mild and then to keg and finally to the first types of lager.

Investment in pubs

Bobby persuaded the board - his father Jasper was the chairman - to give him a budget of £1,000 to produce limited amounts of primitive keg beer for the club trade. He used the money to buy kegs and a tin bath in which he pasteurised the beer, two kegs at a time.

He argued the case for a substantial investment in pubs to bring them up to acceptable modern standards. "We started to put central heating into our pubs and the result was that people demanded cooler beer."

He says the reason Sheps has survived and flourished where others have fallen by the wayside is because the company has never accepted the perceived wisdom of the

time. While other brewers made weak lager beer - pastiches of the real thing - Bobby,

using his vast experience of proper European brewing, opted to produce a beer with the

correct heritage and strength. "We were the first British brewery to make a strong lager when we introduced Hurlimann in 1968," Bobby says. "Trumans were going to take it but they switched to Tuborg. I knew lager would become important but it had to be in the 4.5% to 5% range. We have specialised since the late 1960s in proper lagers and today we have Asahi, Holsten, Kingfisher and Oranjeboom as well as Hurlimann."

In the 1980s £300,000 was invested in lager capacity but Shepherd Neame didn't neglect its traditional draught beers. In 1971 Bobby became chairman and chief executive of the company and he spent money overhauling the brewery and its brands. He built the reputation of such cask ales as Master Brew Bitter and Best Bitter, coinciding with the launch of the Campaign for Real Ale (Camra) and the revival in the fortunes of cask beer.

Enormous amounts were spent on overhauling the tied estate, £600,000 was invested in 1986 alone, to improve facilities, including modern kitchens and accommodation. Bedrooms became an important part of the brewery's business, as Kent is the first and last stop for many people leaving or arriving in England through the Kent ports or Ashford International station.

"We also had to stop the concentration of pubs in the hands of the new national brewers," he says. "One of my first acts as chairman was to buy 32 pubs from Whitbread. In 1990 we spent £5.85m buying 33 pubs from Allied-Lyons, the most expensive purchase in the company's history."

Feisty political animal

Bobby Neame is renowned as a feisty political animal. He was Tory leader of Kent County Council in the 1980s and Deputy Lieutenant of the county in the 1990s. He brought his political skills to bear on the Monopolies Commission report into the brewing industry in 1989 and the resulting Beer Orders that saw the introduction of guest beers and the rapid disengagement by the national brewers from owning pubs.

"The Beer Orders distorted the market," he says. "They undermined the financial structure of breweries and the nationals were forced to sell their properties."

There were other battles to fight in the 1990s. The open market policy introduced by the European Union in 1993 saw the rise of "booze cruises" as British drinkers rushed to France and Belgium to pick up cheap beer. Shepherd Neame was at the sharp end, with the bulk of the company's trade in Kent, close to the ports. Trade slumped disastrously in Shep's pubs and some wondered whether the brewery could survive.

Bobby devised a survival strategy based on developing strong brands that would appeal to the national free trade. He had launched a premium ale, Spitfire, in 1990 to mark the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Britain - fought in the skies above Kent - and to raise money for the RA