Cains is brought to book by author’s hasty rewrite
WRITER Chris RoutIedge could have had the last word in his book about the history of Liverpool’s Cains Brewery.
Thankfully, it looks like he hasn’t – and Cains’ owners, the Dusanj brothers, made a surprise appearance yesterday to help publicise it and prove that they were still in place.
The book, Cains: The History of Liverpool In a Pint, had been completed in the summer and the final draft was with publishers Liverpool University Press when the credit crunch kicked in and the fate of the brewery in Stanhope Street, Toxteth, seemed balanced on a knife-edge.
It faced a winding-up order over an unpaid Customs bill and crucial talks between the owners the Dusanj brothers, Ajmail and Sudarghara, and the Bank of Scotland had collapsed. Its 150 years of brewing history in the city could have been given last orders, with Chris having to rewrite the book’s final chapter as a swansong rather than its original intent, as a celebration.
“It caused a lot of anxiety,” said the 40-year-old Yorkshire-born author now living in Aughton. “It’s extraordinary that a book covering 200 years of Liverpool’s history and its most famous brewer and brewery should be turned on its head by the events of one summer and become a major episode.”
The book incorporates the rise in tandem of Liverpool’s fortunes with that of Robert Cain, an Irish immigrant from County Cork who emigrated to the city as an 18-year-old in 1844.
He swiftly put his latent entrepreneurial skills to work in the brewing industry. He bought the Stanhope Street site in 1858, constructed the imposing redbrick building which replaced it in 1887, and by the turn of the century had built 200 Merseyside pubs including two of the country’s most architecturally famous, The Vines and The Philharmonic.
When the Dusanjs bought Cains in 2002, a similar success story seemed to be in progress and the brothers swept up a struggling business and turned it into an apparent winner with a flood of new beers and innovations.
But they overstretched their ambitions with last year’s reverse takeover of the 100-pub Honeycombe portfolio just before the credit crunch hit and the administrators were called in.
