The brewhouse

Originally built in 1864, our busy brewhouse produces lagers and ales for Shepherd Neames’ portfolio of more than 280 pubs and hotels throughout the South East as well as bottled beers for retail, and beers brewed under license such as the premium Thai lager, Singha.

On your way through, you’ll see state-of-the-art brewing equipment like our stainless steel mash tuns, installed in 2016 and painstakingly clad in the wood from their forebears - mash tuns dating from 1914 and 1916 that had been, until their replacement, the oldest mash tuns being used commercially in the United Kingdom.

In the Millennium Brewhouse, a section of the building renovated in 2000, you will find our lauter tun - a tun made specifically for speeding the process of working with our more delicate lager wort - as well as our coppers (kettles crucial for the hopping process) and a revolutionary PDX wort heating system that helps us to reduce the amount of steam used for boiling our wort by about 40%.

The room also features two gorgeous stained glass windows created by local craftspeople to depict key themes and events from Shepherd Neame’s history. Speaking of history, our malt mill, used daily to grind our malted barley to grist, has been hard at work in the brewhouse since 1920, when it was acquired secondhand. It was actually built back in 1887 and is still going strong today!

Next stop, the steam engines.