Horse-drawn dray to deliver ales to Northampton town centre pubs '˜for first time in 100 years' as part of beer festival

Beer has been continuously produced in the county ever since Pickering Phipps opened his Northampton brewery on a parcel of land with a riverside wharf at the bottom of Bridge Street in 1817.

Phipps brewed there until May 1974 as Carlsberg gradually took over from them from late 1972 onwards.

“Everyone knows shoes in Northamptonshire, but they don’t know food and drink,” said the festival’s organiser Alaric Neville of Phipps NBC.

“Microbrewing started in Northamptonshire and it is one of my hobbyhorses to tell people about Bill Urquhart and Litchborough brewery.

“And we do that every year at the beer festival and gradually people ar picking up on the fact its our contribution to culture and the world, because microbrewing has become a ‘thing’ all over the world.”

Bill Urquhart founded the world’s first microbrewery in Litchborough in 1974 as a result of the gap left in the local beer market after Phipps demise.