Brewery Heritage launches with The National Archives

We are pleased to launch our new website for The National Brewery Heritage Trust : Brewery Heritage with The National Archives Discovery Search.

This September 2025 we’ve launched the latest project in our long standing relationship with NBHT: Brewery Heritage.
We’ve been running the Brewery Archives, our CollectionsBase WordPress search interface of Archive and Museum collection data, that is managed and updated through an Access To Memory (AtoM) installation that we also run for the Trust, for the past six years.

This summer, in conjunction with the National Lottery Heritage Fund bid towards the redevelopment of Bass House in Burton upon Trent, the Trust asked us to redevelop the Archives website into a more focused, simpler design. Working with Cudos design, we have built a new front end CollectionsBase search with an integrated federated search of The National Archives Discovery API.

The National Archives are on board with this exciting development, as we are using their Manage Your Collection community archive project to provide cataloguing for the partner brewing companies. We are piloting the cataloguing, with integrated IIIF image presentation of brewing companies’ digitised materials, with Green King, St Austell Brewery and Shepherd Neame. We already have a number of smaller brewing companies ready for phase two. We are also trialling AI augmented thesaurus support for the federated National Archives Discovery search.

This project is generating huge interest in the industry, with a lot of support for its vision of becoming the central, large scale community archive of the history of brewing in the UK.