PINtPRESSEssay2 November 2026 · Beer history · Folklore

Voice of the Fire

The bonfire is a Victorian revival, the brewery has stood beside the river since 1838, and the town once boycotted a pub for taking its beer away.

On the fifth in Lewes, six of the town’s seven bonfire societies put their processions through a town of nearly seventeen thousand people, and dozens more come in from across Sussex to march with them. The seventh is a juvenile society, and it holds its own night in October. The shops board their windows, the railway station has been known to shut, and the district council asks people not to travel in for it. It is a procession of flaming torches and crosses through a county town.

A few minutes’ walk from where they pass, Harvey’s have been brewing in Lewes since about 1820 and on the Ouse since 1838. Every November they make Bonfire Boy, 5.8%, and on the fifth it is poured within sight of the thing it is named after.

Three nights in seven days, and not one of them is as old as it says. This is the second of three.

Seventeen martyrs and a Pope

Seventeen Protestants were burned here between 1555 and 1557, under Mary I. They died in the High Street in front of the Star Inn, and tradition holds that ten of them were held beforehand in the inn’s undercroft. Lewes Town Hall, built in 1893, stands on the Star’s site, and the undercroft is still down there. The seventeen burning crosses carried through the streets on 5 November are for them, and they go past the spot. The seventeen are in Foxe. The cellar is tradition.

The Pope is the other matter. Lewes has burned an effigy of Paul V since the middle of the nineteenth century, for reasons with nothing to do with 1605: it began as a response to the Oxford Movement and to prominent Englishmen going over to Rome, a Victorian argument conducted in seventeenth-century dress. The historian Jeremy Goring, whose Burn, Holy Fire! covers religion in Lewes since the Reformation, makes the point that Paul V was a peaceable man who simply happened to hold the office in 1605, and cannot be held responsible for the plot.

Lewes was burning popes long before Paul V, mind. Lewes Borough’s own history has processions here in 1679, after the Titus Oates affair. The celebrations waned after that, though not to nothing: a diary records a fire on Gallows Bank in 1813. From the 1820s the Bonfire Boys started them up again with tar barrels, got rowdier every year, and by 1847 the same history has them going for the special constables, the Metropolitan Police sent down from London, and the Riot Act read from the steps of County Hall. The Bonfire Boys revived and reshaped the celebrations, which took on their most famous ritual in the nineteenth century, in answer to an argument nobody was having in 1605.

Bridge Wharf, 1838

The Harveys were selling wine into Lewes in the 1790s and began brewing around 1820 in Bear Yard. They bought the Bridge Wharf site in 1838 and have been there ever since, in a Victorian tower brewery that the processions walk past. Greg Dickinson, writing in the Telegraph in November 2024, calls it Lewes Cathedral, and tells anyone who wants to see all the processions to stand on Cliffe High Street near the bridge, which is where it stands.

That tower is still working, and this autumn it produced something out of its own past. In 2019 the beer historian Ron Pattinson found a brewing journal in the East Sussex archives, catalogued under Beard’s, the Lewes brewery that closed in 1984, but written in Harvey’s name. It is believed to have belonged to Henry John Barrett, who trained at Harvey’s under his father, the brewery’s third head brewer, and took the journal with him when he moved to Beard’s. Harvey’s brewed one of the recipes in the same tower and put it out on 26 October as Lost Brew No.156, a 7.7% strong ale from 1890. Head brewer Peter Yarlett says the journal holds five more recipes, which Harvey’s hopes to brew.

Bonfire Boy is younger than almost anything else here. By the brewery’s own account it was first brewed as Firecracker, to commemorate what they call the gallant work of the fire brigade during a fire at the brewery in July 1996, and became the beer they make each year for the bonfire boys and belles of Lewes. Nor is the name exclusive: seven beers in our catalogue carry Bonfire in the title, two of them Bonfire Boy, this one and an India export porter from a Polish brewery called Browar Monsters. And the bonfire you can smell in the Sussex one is an impression rather than an ingredient.

The 9:56 from York

The yeast is a Yorkshire import, and it arrived at this time of year. By Harvey’s own account, their supplier the British Pure Yeast Company stopped trading, and an analytical chemist paying a social call pointed the head brewer, Anthony Jenner, at the Tadcaster Brewery Company instead. In October 1957 the 9:56pm passenger train from York came in with a consignment of yeast, which went into that day’s brew. Jenner’s verdict was that it had settled down to the Sussex air.

It is still the house strain. The beer poured on the fifth is fermented by something that came south by steam train seventy years ago next autumn. In May 2026 it went across town, when Harvey’s and Beak brewed Spring at Beak’s brewery with a blend of both their yeasts.

The Lewes Arms boycott

In December 2006 Greene King took Harvey’s Best off at the Lewes Arms. The regulars picketed their own pub, a petition went round, the mayor and the town’s MP objected, and the loss of trade was reported at something like ninety per cent. The boycott ran into a fifth month. Greene King put the beer back in April 2007 and sold the pub to Fuller’s the year after. We wunt be druv, as Sussex has it and Harvey’s print on their own page.

It is not a souvenir beer. In the days before this year’s fifth, Bonfire Boy has been on cask at the John Harvey Tavern, the Rights of Man and the Gardeners Arms, and in bottle at the Black Horse, four of the fourteen Lewes pubs we hold, and Harvey’s of one kind or another is in the recorded tap history of twelve of them. Every beer in the John Harvey Tavern’s list is a Harvey’s, from Dark Mild at 3.0% through Sussex Best and Armada to Bonfire Boy, with Lost Brew No.156 on cask on the thirty-first. The Black Horse carries Bonfire Boy and little else of theirs, which is a different pattern from a tied house.

The Dorset on Malling Street, a Harvey’s house and, by the brewery’s own count, the Cliffe society’s headquarters for a hundred and sixty years, has ten Harvey’s in its recorded history, the less obvious ones among them, Lewes Castle Brown and Olympia, though a tap history is what has been seen rather than what is on tonight. Cliffe are the society that kept the banner the others gave up and still burn Paul V.

And the Lewes Arms is a Harvey’s pub again in the only way that counts. Sussex Best, the beer they picketed for, was on there in October and Old Ale in September, nineteen years after the town stopped drinking there to get the first of them back. Tap lists move, so on the fifth itself the only honest answer is to open the app and look.

Guy Fawkes Bitter, York

Elsewhere the name travels and the beer does not. Fawkes was a York man, and the Guy Fawkes Inn on High Petergate trades on standing by his birthplace. Its house beer is Guy Fawkes Bitter at 3.6%, and the brewery on it is Joshua Tetley & Son. CAMRA, which has it among the pub’s regulars, files it as Tetley Bitter under another name. Put a different name on that pump and nothing in the glass would change.

Bonfire Boy could not belong anywhere else. Harvey’s list it on cask for November, and the brewery shop sells it in 500ml bottles all year round. Plenty of breweries put out a bonfire beer because the calendar says so.

On the fifth, the processions go past Harvey’s gates.

PINtPOINT tracks Bonfire Boy and shows where drinkers have recently logged it.