Joseph Holt is a brewer of beer, founded in 1849 and remaining in the same family for six generations. The company is based in Manchester and owns 127 pubs in Greater Manchester and the North West. Its beers and lagers are supplied to over 500 locations nationally.
Brewery
Joseph Holt have brewed on their site in the Cheetham area, to the north of Manchester city centre, since 1860. Ale and lager malts are now delivered in bulk loads and stored in silos while speciality malts continue to be delivered in sacks. Between 15 and 500 barrels can be brewed per day. and a hopback is still in use, along with traditional whole leaf hops, to collect and clarify wort after boiling. All ales are top fermented in enclosed square fermenters using the historic Joseph Holt yeast strain, while lagers are fermented and conditioned in modern cylindroconical vessels. Joseph Holt have their own borehole on the brewery site to abstract brewing liquor and are one of only a handful of brewers in the UK still to rack into 36 gallon casks, as well as hogsheads, the largest barrelsize, carrying 432 pints and weighing roughly when full.
History
Joseph Holt, the son of a weaver, was born in 1813 in Unsworth, a textile village near Bury. He worked as a carter at Harrison's Strangeways Brewery. In 1849 he married Catherine Parry, who helped finance a small brewery behind a pub on Oak Street, Manchester. In 1860, he purchased the brewery site on Empire Street, Cheetham. His reputation in Manchester endures; in 2007, readers of the Manchester Evening News voted him "People's Champion" in the "Greatest ever Business Leaders" awards. In 1882, by which time he had established a chain of 20 public houses, Joseph passed control of the brewery to his son Edward. Edward Holt was later knighted, served as Lord Mayor of Manchester from 1907 to 1909 and was made a baronet in 1916. He died in 1928 and the company passed to his son, Edward; it is still in the hands of the same family. For more than thirty years, Peter Kershaw, a former rackets and real tennis champion and a notoriously economical man, was chairman of the brewery. His son, Richard Kershaw, the great grandson of the founder, joined him on the board in 1980 and, since the death of his father in 2000, is the chief executive.
Charitable work
The company has a long-standing relationship with the Christie Hospital and the Holt Radium Institute in Manchester. This dates back to Sir Edward Holt, the great-grandfather of the current Chief Executive who founded the Holt Radium Institute in 1914. In 2018 Joseph Holt received the British Beer and Pub Association’s Heart of the Community award for the third year in a row, following campaigns to raise money for the Christie and Maggie's Centre. In 2017 the All Party Parliamentary Beer Group awarded Joseph Holt the National Pub Aid award for their support to the community.
