Operations
Wadworths still use traditional shire horses to deliver their casked ale to local pubs in Devizes. The radius of the operation is roughly 5 miles square; beyond the 5 mile radius, motor vehicles are used. The ale can be delivered in metal or wooden barrels.
The brewery owns four horses which are stabled at the brewery and the horses receive 2 weeks' holiday every year in a nearby village. As well as delivering ale, the horses also compete in shows and events throughout the country. The sight of the shire horses is well known in Devizes and has become a defining image for the town. They are featured often in local press and have featured in many programmes such as Countryfile.
Wadworth is one of only four breweries in the UK that still use horses to deliver ale, one of four that has an in-house cooper and the last brewery whose in-house master cooper makes nothing but barrels.
Wadworth recently unveiled a state-of-the-art interactive Visitor Centre and gift shop at the brewery. Tours of the brewery can be taken and include a tutored tasting of the Wadworth range as well as cooperage demonstrations and visits to the shire horses and sign-writing shop (subject to availability).
Read more about this topic: Wadworth Brewery
Famous quotes containing the word operations:
“Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)
“A sociosphere of contact, control, persuasion and dissuasion, of exhibitions of inhibitions in massive or homeopathic doses...: this is obscenity. All structures turned inside out and exhibited, all operations rendered visible. In America this goes all the way from the bewildering network of aerial telephone and electric wires ... to the concrete multiplication of all the bodily functions in the home, the litany of ingredients on the tiniest can of food, the exhibition of income or IQ.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“There is a patent office at the seat of government of the universe, whose managers are as much interested in the dispersion of seeds as anybody at Washington can be, and their operations are infinitely more extensive and regular.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)