The Smell That Holds a Town Together

Walking past McMullen & Sons in Hertford, and the long work of making beer, buildings, and belonging

I was walking, not driving, which matters.

The dog had already decided the pace. That particular Hertford walk, looping back through the centre, past Old Cross and down towards Cowbridge, is familiar enough that your attention softens. You stop noticing the road. The buildings become backdrop. The town feels settled into itself.

And then the smell arrives.

Not beer, not exactly. Something warmer and grain-heavy. Sweet in a way that is not sugary. It stops you mid-step, or at least it slows you, makes you look up rather than down. Brewing has a smell that does not ask permission. It spreads. It announces itself gently but firmly, a reminder that something is being made rather than merely displayed.

I followed it without thinking, the way people always have. And there it was. The McMullen & Sons brewery, rising with a kind of industrial confidence that feels almost surprising in the centre of a market town. Red brick, tall windows, unapologetically functional. A building that does not attempt charm, but earns it anyway through purpose.

It is easy to forget that towns like Hertford still have working hearts. This one does not hide. It breathes.

That smell stayed with me long after the walk ended, and it became the thread I pulled when I began to look properly at what this place has been, and what it still is.

McMullen & Sons was founded in 1827, at a moment when Hertford, like many English towns, was learning how to drink in an organised way. Brewing was not new, but the idea of a permanent, scaled operation rooted in a single family was still forming. Peter McMullen established the brewery at a time when beer was both sustenance and social glue, safer than water and essential to daily life.

The town then was very different. Hertford supported several breweries through the nineteenth century. Competition was local and fierce, shaped by proximity rather than branding. What distinguished McMullen’s early on was not flamboyance, but steadiness. The brewery adapted, expanded, and learned how to survive in a crowded field without losing its footing.

Like many breweries of the period, McMullen’s moved as it grew. Early operations were based in more confined premises, including sites around Railway Street and Mill Bridge. These shifts were not signs of instability, but of ambition. Brewing requires space, water, and access. As Hertford changed, so did the brewery’s footprint, gradually settling into the area around Old Cross and Cowbridge where it still stands today.

What is striking when you trace this history is how closely the brewery’s movements follow the town’s own development. This was never a brewery imposed on Hertford. It grew with it, adjusted to it, and helped define its working geography.

By the mid nineteenth century, McMullen’s had begun to do something that would prove decisive. It invested not only in beer, but in places to drink it. The acquisition of pubs was not a lifestyle gesture. It was survival. Owning outlets protected the brewery from market swings and allowed beer to remain local in the truest sense. Made here, drunk here, served in rooms that belonged to the same system of work.

This model, the managed pub estate, is now familiar. At the time, it was pragmatic and quietly radical. It tied brewing to hospitality in a way that made both more resilient.

One beer in particular threads through this story with unusual persistence. AK. First brewed in the 1830s, it has survived almost unchanged while tastes, fashions, and entire industries have come and gone. It is not remarkable because it is old. It is remarkable because it never needed to reinvent itself loudly. It did what it was supposed to do and kept doing it.

That continuity matters more than people realise. In a culture obsessed with novelty, longevity becomes its own form of expertise.

The brewery building itself tells a similar story. This is not a decorative structure. It was built to work, to hold weight, heat, liquid, and time. Parts of the site are formally recognised for their architectural and historic significance, not because they are ornate, but because they represent a particular moment in industrial confidence. Brewing was once a visible sign of civic health. You wanted your brewery to look capable.

Walking past it, you feel that confidence still. It looms without apology, a reminder that not everything in a town centre has to flatter the eye. Some things simply need to endure.

The smell returns again and again as you circle it. Warm mash in the morning. Something sharper later in the day. It changes, but it never disappears. It becomes a way of knowing where you are without checking a sign.

By the twentieth century, the British brewing industry began to consolidate aggressively. Small and medium sized breweries disappeared, absorbed or shuttered as national brands tightened their grip. McMullen’s survived this period not through spectacle, but through restraint. It remained family owned. It continued to invest in pubs. It resisted the urge to overextend.

That choice now reads as foresight.

Today, McMullen & Sons operates a substantial managed pub estate, stretching beyond Hertfordshire into London and surrounding counties. The scale is modern, but the philosophy is recognisable. Beer remains tied to place. Pubs are not franchises in name only, but part of a system that values consistency and control over explosive growth.

The brewery itself remains in Hertford. That fact alone is remarkable. Many companies of similar age long ago abandoned their original towns for logistics parks and anonymous estates. McMullen’s stayed. It accepted the complications of being central, visible, sometimes inconvenient. In return, it retained something harder to quantify.

Belonging.

That belonging is not sentimental. It is practical. The brewery employs people. It buys supplies. It maintains a daily rhythm that anchors part of the town’s economy. When the smell drifts through Hertford, it is not nostalgia. It is labour.

What fascinates me most is how little the brewery asks to be noticed. There is no need to mythologise it. Its history is long enough to speak for itself. Its presence is solid enough to be felt rather than explained.

Walking away that day, dog tugging slightly, I realised that the smell had done its work. It had stopped me, made me look, and then led me into a story that was already there, waiting.

McMullen & Sons is not a monument. It is not a museum. It is a working inheritance. Nearly two centuries of brewing have taught it when to change and when to hold. That is a rare skill, whether you are making beer or holding a town together.

Some places announce their importance with plaques and performances. Others reveal it quietly, in the air, if you are walking slowly enough to notice.