Geoff Mumford obituary

Geoff Mumford, who has died aged 82, was a pioneer of the craft beer movement, co-founding the independent Burton Bridge Brewery in 1982, which helped lead to a revival in pale ale in the UK.

With his business partner, Bruce Wilkinson, Burton Bridge was launched under the noses of such giant Burton brewers as Bass, Allied and Marston’s.

They produced their first beer, Bridge Bitter, the same year. “We’d seen the cheap ingredients used at Romford [where the pair had worked previously for Ind Coope] and we wanted none of that,” Geoff said. They bought Maris Otter malting barley and “the finest hops money could buy”.

One of their earliest beers, Golden Delicious, made as a summer special for a pub group, Midsummer Inns, caused such interest that it became a permanent part of the range and was one of the first of the new wave of golden ales.

Their portfolio grew to include Festival Ale, Top Dog Stout, Porter and Stairway to Heaven bitter, which were delivered to pubs throughout the Midlands and via wholesalers across the UK.

View image in fullscreen

Born in Alfreton, Derbyshire, Geoff was the son of Doris (nee Renshaw) and Reginald Mumford, who worked in local collieries. Geoff went to Mortimer Wilson school in the town, then trained as an engineer. He married Jenny Winstanley, a physiotherapist, in 1970 and they had a son and a daughter.

He worked for Rolls-Royce in Portsmouth in the 1960s before joining the brewing industry in 1969 as an engineer with Tetley in Leeds. In 1961 Tetley had become part of the national Allied Breweries group that included Ind Coope, with plants in Burton, and Romford in Essex.

Geoff transferred to Burton in 1972, then Romford in 1977, where he became engineering manager. There he met Bruce, a technical manager, and they became close friends.

“Bruce and I were heads of our departments at Romford and we could see the writing on the wall,” Geoff told me in 2016. “Allied had closed Ansells in Birmingham and Romford was treated as the Siberia of brewing, so we decided to jump ship.”

They set about opening their own brewery, going on a small business training course. Visiting Burton one day, Geoff saw a For Sale sign on the Fox & Goose pub while driving across the Trent. “It had plenty of room at the back for a brewery,” he said. They bought the pub, renamed it the Bridge Inn and installed their brewing kit.

Geoff was critical at the time of many modern interpretations of India Pale Ale that he said owed too much to over-hopped American versions. In 1996 he and Bruce designed a bottled Empire Pale Ale in the true Burton style. The beer was conditioned in the brewery for six months to replicate the length of a journey by sailing ship to India in the 19th century, and was then bottled with live yeast. It won a gold medal in a competition staged by the Guardian in association with Camra, the Campaign for Real Ale.

The pair restored another Burton tradition when they brewed Draught Burton Ale in 2015. A beer of that name was first brewed in the late 1970s by Allied using the Ind Coope name. Geoff and Bruce had suggested turning a strong bottled beer, Double Diamond Export, into a cask version. The draught beer was in such demand from consumers that it helped boost the real ale revival started by Camra in 1971. When Allied Breweries was wound up and became Carlsberg Tetley, production of Burton Ale was moved to Tetley in Leeds, and then phased out.

Encouraged by local Camra branches, Geoff and Bruce brewed their version of the beer for the Burton Beer festival in 2015. It proved so popular that it became a permanent part of the range.

When I asked Geoff if he was worried Carlsberg might sue Burton Bridge, he chuckled and said: “It’s draught, it’s ale and it’s brewed in Burton – so it’s Draught Burton Ale.”

By 2016, exhausted by the hard slog of running pubs – the pair bought four morein Burton , though they were sold a few years ago in an attempt to reduce their workload – and a brewery, Geoff and Bruce decided to retire. However, they were determined to sell only to people who shared their vision of good beer. This finally came in the shape of the Heritage Brewery, which had been forced to look for a new site when the National Brewery Centre in Burton, where it was based, closed in 2022.

Heritage has moved to Burton Bridge and says it will honour Geoff’s memory by continuing to brew his beers.

Jenny died in 2014. Geoff is survived by his daughter, Catherine, and son, Tim.