threadinburgh.scot
The thread about the Great Edinburgh Beer Duty Fraud: Boiling the Wort and Cooking the Books
It was 3AM on Christmas morning 1933 when - after a long and cold stakeout - not Santa but three agents of His Majesty's Customs & Excise entered the renowned Bell's Brewery on the Pleasance and caught the brewers in the act of working illicitly. They didn't yet know it but the trio had just uncovered the UK's largest ever duty fraud, one with a record that would not be broken for decades to come. So ended the Great Edinburgh Beer Duty Fraud. And so also begins its story, the story of a company set up by Victorian venture capitalists in "An Alcoholic Haze of Ambition" and which had to struggle through 40 years of economic hardship only to decide that criminality was a course of action preferable to watering down their famously strong beer.
