“Bottle of Broon, please,” I said, smiling nervously to the barman, hoping he wouldn't ask for my (clearly fake) ID. He didn't seem bothered I was dressed as a cowgirl.

I was 17 and on my first night out in my hometown, Newcastle upon Tyne, when I first tried the fabled Newcastle Brown Ale.

To locals it’s known as “Broon” or “ah bottle ah dog” (pronounced “derg”)—lovingly named after the saying “I’m off to walk the dog,” which naturally meant “I’m off to the boozer,” instead. To everyone else in the UK who felt a fool for attempting to imitate the Geordie dialect (trust me, you can’t) it was a bottle of “Newkie”.

The pub I was in was my dad's favourite—Newcastle’s former Union Rooms, in a renovated French chateau-style building. The listed building dates back to 1877 and was home to Newcastle’s Union Club. You couldn’t walk 10 yards of the swirling yellow-and-burgundy-carpeted local without being stopped by one of my dad’s friends, telling you they hadn’t seen you since you were “this high,” and gesturing with an outstretched palm.

Bottles of Newcastle Brown Ale were as abundant as the portraits of white men—former members of the gentlemen’s club—on the pub’s walls. Its iconic 550ml bottles, at 4.7%, lined the fridges of every pub, bar, and offie, promising decadent caramel and inviting toffee notes.

For a teenager who survived on jugs of cherry woo-woos, it was horrible. It was bitter and malty, it was like rocket fuel—but it was ours. It was my city’s bread and butter.

The iconic bright blue star on the bottle, each point representing a founding Newcastle brewery and brandishing the shadows of Newcastle’s famous landscape, were proudly displayed on Newcastle United Football Club’s striped kits. You couldn’t go into any pub without seeing a soggy Newcastle Brown Ale beer mat, coaster, or memorabilia. It was ingrained into our culture, both working, and drinking.

I even remember being young and being able to see the towering chimneys of the Federation Brewery in Gateshead as I shopped with my mam—not knowing how controversial it was at the time...

But, for a beer that turns 95 years old in 2022, there’s no denying that Broon has a history as messy as your bank account on a Sunday morning.

***

Brewed in 1927 after the nation saw a rise in demand for bottled beer thanks to World War I, and launched the same year that Newcastle United won their last league title, the beer is a prime example of my hometown’s industrious history and heritage.

It was primed and sold for the mining community and working class, even though it was an accident as its third-generation brewer, Lieutenant Colonel James Herbert Porter, attempted to recreate Bass ale. Despite the brewer’s self-admitted failures, the national press called it “The One and Only.”

“My Mam and Granda worked at the factory,” a member of the bar staff at Newcastle Brewing told me on a recent trip back home (I live in London now, for my sins). He revealed that I was the “fourth or fifth person” that day to ask for its Ouseburn Brown Ale since the brewery had sold out of the beer that evening—mostly to tourists, I expect.

And after recently seeing Wylam’s homage to the brown, Painting the Toon Broon, at Hackney Brewery’s Walthamstow taproom—a whopping 300 miles away from the brewery itself—I knew Wylam, situated in Newcastle’s former Palace of Arts, would have its own stories to tell.

““It was bitter and malty, it was like rocket fuel—but it was ours.””

“My earliest memories of Newcastle Brown Ale vary greatly,’ Ben Wilkinson, Wylam’s head brewer tells me. “The most prominent being that of stepping off the bus with my Grandmother on visits to Newcastle city centre as a very young boy and instantly being intoxicated by the almost warm, sweet, malty aromatics that seemed to fill the air.”

“‘That’s the Broon on the boil,’ I was told when asked,” he adds, before telling me how, even now, the iconic Brown Ale bottle and label seemed to be “imprinted” in his mind “from as far back as I can remember.”

Painting the Toon Broon is a “figgy and decadent” 11.3% imperial maple brown ale. Think Jamaican gingerbread, stewed plums and maple syrup—with a perfectly balanced English kettle hop bitterness. Sounds better than Broon already.

“I recall my dad bringing me home some Newcastle Brown Ale beer mats from the pub to add to my collection, holding them under my nose and inhaling the dampened, candied whiff of stale beer and tobacco,” he says.

He also remembers sitting with his Grandad by the fire at his house in Wylam, sneaking him “a wee snifter of Broon from his bottle into a tiny glass with a wink and the sound advice of ‘don’t tell yah Gran mind.’”

Aged 16, Ben worked as a ‘pot boy’ in the shadows of The Newcastle Breweries’ original building in the renowned Newcastle pub, The Strawberry. Ben visited the original Tyne Brewery and tried “a very rare scoop of Newcastle Brown Ale,” sparking his love affair with all things beer and brewing.

“My inspiration as a brewer that has channelled me into brewing brown ale as a beer style (I’ve brewed three variants in my time) was obviously my locality and regional heritage at the heart of the style, Tyne and Wear,” he says. “It means a lot to be in a position to be able to take a heritage style and have the confidence and finesse within my brew team to pump it up to such excessive heights.”

Ben’s masterpiece is one of few brown and dark ales still proudly brewed in the North East, with plenty of breweries following suit, including Firebrick Brewery, Newcastle Brewing, Tyne Bank Brewery with its own Northern Porter, and Sunderland’s Maxim Brewery, to name but a few.

Maxim Brewery, still known as the “Mackem brewery” for (controversially) sponsoring Sunderland’s football team, claims to be home to the only original recipe brown ale brewed in the North East, Double Maxim.

Mark Anderson, Maxim’s managing director who “does a bit of everything in the brewery,” told me that its own 4.7% brown ale has always been its most popular beer—and still is today, with sales only growing.

“It's still our biggest beer brand by far both in cask and bottle, and it's still the most popular,” Mark says. “When people do a taste test against Newcastle Brown Ale, Double Maxim wins hands down. It’s much less rougher, and more smooth and sweet.” He also claims that the microbrewery’s two former Newcastle Brown Ale brewers prefer it, too.

Today’s Double Maxim follows the same recipe that dates back to its first brews in 1901, and is brewed to the same standards as when it was first brewed by historic Sunderland-based Vaux Brewery—a major employer for the city—and Wards, located in Sheffield, but acquired by Vaux in the seventies.

Maxim Brewery—made up of ex-employees from both—bought the original recipe for Double Maxim back in 1999 when its original breweries were shut down after being acquired by former brewery and hotel-chain Whitbread in efforts to take the breweries’ classic range of ales down south. “It was important to us emotionally to purchase some of the beer brands and keep them going.” Mark tells me.“Especially with its heritage as we didn’t want city slickers to get them and let them disappear.”

Sold in most supermarkets, Mark told me how proud he is to continue the heritage of brewing both old, and new beers. “Brown ale was a working man’s club beer for older people,” he says—adding that while people have been moving on to IPAs and hoppier beers, drinkers are still seeking out traditional beers for that trip down memory lane.

Except, despite the rise in demand for a beer once associated with miners and heavy industry, Newcastle Brown Ale at present is sadly as murky as Broon on the boil.

***

“Newkie” was brewed by Tyne Breweries from its successful launch in 1927, a site Newcastle Breweries occupied since 1890—with brewing dating back four decades. In 1960, Newcastle Breweries merged with Edinburgh-based Scottish Brewer [now known as Scottish & Newcastle], becoming a flagship bevvy alongside McEwan’s Export and Younger’s Tartan Special. By 1997, the brand claimed it was the most popular alcoholic beverage in both pubs and offies countrywide—now popular with students.

Apparently, it was such a hit with students in the nineties that, in 1993, a bottle of Broon stood as a presidential candidate in student union elections at Southampton University, coming fourth.

Wylam’s Ben Wilkinson tells me that “it just never seemed the same not having that comforting aroma following you around the city centre,” after Scottish & Newcastle closed the doors of the Tyne Brewery back in 2004. He referred to it as “the nail in the coffin” for the beer. Back then, I was 11 and had missed the heady heights of yeast in the air, feeling like I’ve missed out on a vital part of my heritage.

The brewing of Broon was controversially moved to the Federation Brewery site in Gateshead after the closure of Tyne Brewery—brewed instead by the consolidated Newcastle Federation Breweries. Newcastle United and English football legend Sir Bobby Robson had the honour of pressing the plunger to demolish the old landmark site in 2005.

To rub salt into the wound, bottling of Newcastle Brown soon moved to John Smith’s brewery in Tadcaster, Yorkshire (unsurprisingly enough more controversial to hardy Geordies who claimed they’d boycott the beer) before Scottish & Newcastle was acquired by Dutch multinational Heineken in 2008.

Still, the brand was determined to align the beer with its roots, brewing themed special editions with footballer Alan Shearer, and local band Maxïmo Park.

However, despite success with Americans in the early noughties (Clint Eastwood was rumoured to be a fan) by 2010, dwindling UK sales meant that the full production line of Broon was moved from its hometown, to Yorkshire—ultimately losing its Protected Geographical brand status as Broon was no longer brewed in the Toon.

““It’s important as a brewer to carry on honouring the heritage of not only brown ale but also any historic regional beer that has carved its way into our social history and heritage.””

— Ben Wilkinson, Wylam Brewery

And so the cracks in the bottle began to deepen, as the beer drifted further from its roots. In 2015, Heineken announced that the caramel colouring—a staple in the recipe since the beer was first brewed nearly nine decades earlier—was being replaced by dark malts.

Today, Newcastle Brown Ale is brewed nearly 500 miles away from its hometown in the Netherlands—with an entirely different version of the beer brewed by Heineken-owned Lagunitas Brewery at its Chicago facility.

While still sold as Newcastle Brown Ale, Lagunitas’ “makeover” is brewed with a totally different recipe, including American Centennial and Chinook hops, as well as the brewery’s house “British-style” yeast—and now, “Newkie Brown” is in the top five of America’s favourite beers, with a brand new look and taste.

“It doesn’t make it the same, and it’s a shame,” Mark tells me. “But that’s how things move on.”

The beer has now become a joke back home, a travesty. A victim of its own success that has been transformed beyond recognition—proving that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. But despite the bitter taste left by losing a legend in the North East, with bottles gathering dust on the shelves of Newcastle offies, the hardy heritage of my hometown lives on through determined, independent breweries sparking a resurgence in brown ale.

“I feel it is very important as a brewer to carry on honouring the heritage of not only brown ale but also any historic regional beer that has carved its way into our social history and heritage,” Ben says. “It’s essential that these heritage styles continue ongoing as they are a huge part of what we are all doing now and to see them fall by the wayside would be a travesty, to say the least.”

Though Newcastle Brown Ale was the Broon dog that walked so that others could run, I can’t help but smile when I see it in the wild. To me, brown ale is home in a bottle. A reminder of my teenage innocence and what I left behind; the comforts, family and friends waiting for me back in my hometown.

“To us, it’s important that people drink [Brown] and say, ‘it’s just like how I remember,’’’ Mark at Maxim Brewery adds. “We’ve even had 20-year-olds come into pubs saying: ‘I remember my dad drinking that!’ That memory is important to us.”