Marston's plots Ashes summer

It was a day of biting cold at Lord's cricket ground in London last week, but through the vast windows of the Media Centre we could see that spring was on its way. The grass was being mown, the strips for the wickets cut and the stands given a lick of paint.

The cricket season is at hand: bats are being oiled and pads whitened. It will be a special season, for England and Australia will contest the Ashes once again. With memories of 2005 still fresh in every cricket lover's mind, we must hope for sunshine and success.

We had gathered at Lord's to hear Marston's plans for the Ashes series. The brewery is a major supporter of the summer game. Pedigree is the official beer of England cricket and the peerless Burton pale ale will slake the thirsts of supporters at every Test venue.

There will be massive support and promotions by Marston's for cricket this summer, as is reported in this edition of the MA. I was struck by the happy coincidence of the Ashes series clashing, like bat on ball, with the 175th anniversary of the founding of the Burton brewery.

The brewery was opened in 1834 by John Marston, a maltster in Burton-on-Trent, 20 years after Thomas Lord built his cricket ground in St John's Wood. Lord's is known the world over as the home of cricket, while Marston's is revered as the cathedral of brewing as a result of its famous "union rooms" where Pedigree is fermented.

It was good to hear at Lord's that Marston's is feeling bullish about the future. The brewery thinks that, sad though pub closures are, the trade will emerge leaner and fitter from the recession. The company is delighted that cask beer is holding its own and is even increasing market share by a few notches.

Pedigree is a special beer as a result of its method of production. Marston's could long ago have abandoned the wooden unions and replaced them with conventional modern fermenters but the company feels — rightly — that the character and flavour of its beer are determined by those vessels.

Burton-on-Trent is renowned as the capital of English brewing in the 19th century. It was there that pale ale and the stronger India Pale Ale were developed as a result of the remarkable water of the Trent Valley. The water is rich in such salts as gypsum and magnesium that bring out the full flavours of the malts and hops used in brewing.

There was such a clamour for pale ale in the 19th century that several large brewers from both London and north-west England rushed to Burton to make use of the Trent Valley water. John Marston, who merged his brewing interests with two other local brewers, Thompson and Evershed, moved to new premises in 1898, the Albion Brewery on the Shobnall Road that had been built by the London brewer Mann Crossman and Paulin.

Mann's was famous in London for its brown ales, produced with soft London water. Once scientists learned how to "Burtonise" water by adding the necessary salts, Burton became an expensive luxury for the likes of Mann's and it retreated back to the capital to make pale ale there.

But the outsiders left one legacy in Burton — the unions. It was a Liverpool brewer, Peter Walker, who is believed to have invented the system to help meet the consumer demand for crystal-clear beer. Glass was replacing pewter in pubs and drinkers were not happy with cloudy and murky beer: they were, to use a modern marketing term, "drinking with their eyes".

Producing clear beer was not easy as yeast could not be removed entirely during fermentation. Walker's genius was to take a medieval method of brewing used by monks and turn it on its head. Monks fermented beer in large wooden casks. Yeast activity drove the fermenting beer out of the bung holes of the vessels. The liquid was collected in buckets and returned to the casks, with some of the yeast kept back for future brews.

It was a messy and labour-intensive method. Walker turned it upside down. He placed troughs above large wooden casks and linked casks and troughs with swan-necked pipes. Fermentation drives the liquid up the pipes and into the troughs, where the yeast is retained while the liquid runs back into the casks. The Victorians said that casks, trough and pipes were "held in union" — hence the quaint name for the system.

The result is clear, inviting and naturally carbonated pale ale, a delight to the eyes as well as the mouth. Once, all the Burton brewers, including mighty Bass, Ind Coope and Worthington, used the unions, but they have fallen by the wayside and Marston's is the sole remaining user of the system.

All praise to Marston's for continuing with this magnificent example of brewing tradition and technology.

I shall enjoy of a few glasses of Pedigree this summer and wish our cricketers well. The beer will be

promoted with several slogans, including "England Has It" and "Batting for England".

There's a third slogan: "England has history, Australia has previous". I'm off to the Beer Expo in Melbourne next week, but I don't think I'll mention that slogan to my hosts.