A 500-year-old brewery is selling off its vats, pumps and bottling lines at auction as its billionaire Singaporean owner prepares to turn the site into luxury flats.

The Mortlake brewery in south-west London began brewing beer for the local monastery in 1487 and is thought to be among the oldest continuously operating businesses in Britain.

The site, including millions of pounds of brewing equipment, was sold for £158m last year by global drinks firm ABInBev to developer Reselton, part of the property empire of Kwek Leng Beng.

It is to be turned into a luxury riverside residential development stretching along 200 metres of the Thames at Richmond.

Auctioneer Eddisons, which is managing the sale, said it expects a number of global brewing firms to compete for equipment including 2,000-litre brewing vats, malt blowers and bottling lines.

The equipment was usedto produce brands such as Budweiser and Michelob at a rate of 60,000 bottles an hour until it halted production last year.

ABInBev had first earmarked the brewery for closure in 2009 as it sought savings after its creation via the merger of InBev and Anheuser-Busch.

Before its modern incarnation churning out beers for the mass market, the Mortlake brewery boasted a long and colourful history at the heart of the development of British brewing.



From its 15th-century monastic beginnings, the brewery did not grow into a commercial business until the 18th century with the advent of steam-driven machinery.

In the 19th century, it brewed beer to be delivered to British troops in India and the Crimea, before being bought at the end of the century by the Watney family.

The Watney brewery that grew out of this acquisition went on to produce Red Barrel, one of the best known beers of the 1960s and 70s, with the site renamed the Stag brewery.

Watneys briefly rebranded its famous beer “Red” in an attempt to appeal to young leftwing protesters against the Vietnam war.

The rebrand, which ultimately failed, was backed by advertising campaigns featuring lookalikes of Fidel Castro, Mao Zedong and Nikita Khrushchev quaffing ale.

In its modern incarnation, under the ownership of ABInBev since 1991, the brewery operated using modern brewing equipment manufactured by firms such as Steinecker and Siemens.

Eddisons said it was accepting bids for individual pieces of equipment or for all of the brewery’s assets, which ABInBev left behind when it sold the site.

The auction will take place in January, wiping away the last traces of Mortlake’s association with beer.

Because Mortlake’s did not start commercial operations until 200 years after it came into existence, it is not considered the UK’s oldest brewery.

That honour goes to Shepherd Neame, founded in 1698 in Kent, although the 318-year-old brewery is still a spring chicken compared with the Weihenstephan brewery in Germany, which began making beer in 1040.