Samson
When I was a nipper I worked in a pub in South Shields called The Steamboat. We sold beers from Vaux. Although Sunderland's major brewery closed in 1999, the city now boasts a micro - The Maxim Brewery - that's reproducing the old beers. I've already tried a cask version of Double Maxim, a brown ale, here at The Gunmakers. Today we're selling Samson, a 4% session bitter that was Vaux's best selling beer.
There's a connection between The Gunmakers and the name of this brewery: Sir Hiram Maxim, an American-Jewish inventor, developed the first machine gun in a workshop just a couple of hundred yards from the pub. (It's long been assumed that the pub was named specifically after his achievement, but I think not - census records reveal that 13 Eyre Street Hill was a rifle maker's workshop in the 1840s). Up in Sunderland, Vaux first brewed Double Maxim after Ernest, a member of the family, headed a machine gun detachment in the Boer War.
4 comments:
Maxim's beers haven't been particularly well received in the North East, and the few I've had have been pretty average (at best) or putrid. The Steamboat, on the other hand, is going from strength to strength, and was the Sunderland and South Tyneside CAMRA pub of the year 2009, and runner up in the North East Region competition.
I used to like a drop of Samson - they used to serve it in the Princess Louise back in the mid to late 80s (along with Wards, Darley Thorne and bottles of Double Maxim) when I worked near by and was an almost daily regular.
@ Eddie Rowles - now those were the days. Many a lunchtime spent in there spoofing for sandwiches with about 1lb of meat in them.
Used to like Sunderland Draught Bitter way back a long time ago.
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