Burton Weir Brewery No3 Ale Poster

What a foreign beer poster in a dedicated Australian Beer poster website!!? Foreign beer posters were produced in Australia by well known breweries as they had the lion’s share of the local beer sales. In the early 19th century beer produced locally were not consistent as a product. The brewers were always fighting the weather (hot or cold) and they had no understanding of wild yeasts blowing into their vats. That is why imported beer, especially refreshing lager and ale, was the desired tipple.

In September 1858 the South Australian Advertiser carried a small advertisement for “Marrian’s No 3 Burton Ale, in hhds [hogsheads]” from James Robin & Co of Grenfell Street. Thomas Marrian was a Sheffield brewer, whose business was then around 20 years old, and this is a doubly fascinating ad, since it is the oldest mention of a Burton Ale being brewed by someone outside Burton that I have been able to find, as well as more evidence of No 3 Burton being a popular style in Australia. This poster is advertising that beer.

Despite all the competition from other Burton brewers, Marrian’s maintained an export beer business to Australia until at least the 1890s: when Alfred Barnard visited the brewery in Sheffield in 1890 he tried “a sample of Australian beers four years old, which we found very delicious but far too strong for our Cockney taste.” Barnard commented that the brewery’s founder, Thomas Marrian, had built up “an extensive trade in the Colonies, where his beer gained a great reputation, and commanded the highest price in the market.” In confirmation, in 1879 the Illustrated Sydney News and New South Wales Agriculturalist and Grazier declared that Thomas Marrian and Company “has for about twenty five years been considerably the largest exporter of bulk beer to these colonies, in all parts of which the beer is well known and justly appreciated, as a proof of which it invariably commands the highest price in the different markets.”