The North Brink Brewery, on the north bank of the River Nene in Wisbech, was established in 1795 and purchased six years later by William Watson and Abraham Usill. Both owners recognised the importance of acquiring public houses that would sell the produce of the brewery instead of brewing their own and eventually raised the number of tied houses to forty. In 1836, Phillips, Tibbitts and Phillips took over, but the partnership failed and the Phillips family continued alone until 1877. In 1878, it was purchased by the Elgood family. After it was bought by the Elgood family, the building was renovated in the Georgian style and most of it is still in use today. It was one of the first classic Georgian breweries outside London. Nigel and Anne Elgood's three daughters, Belinda Sutton, Jennifer Everall and Claire Simpson, are the fifth generation of the family to run the business. In the First World War, the brewery was fire-bombed by a Zeppelin, and the shell of the bomb can still be viewed in the brewery museum. In the Second World War, some of the metal vats and tuns were melted down, but the brewery retained its 17th-century Eagle Foundry liquor vat. The brewery was listed as Grade II in 1983. In the brewery gardens there is a landscaped mound, on top of which stands Brewery House. This mound is the outside of the original cold store for the beer. In the First and Second World Wars the cellar doubled as an air-raid shelter. Today the cellar is unused, but the entrance is still visible from the current cold store. The gardens, which contain 200-year-old trees, a lake and a maze, are promoted by the Campaign to Protect Rural England.
Elgood Flag Porter is based on a traditional 19th century British recipe using yeast that was salvaged from containers or barrels in a ship that sank in the English Channel in 1825. In 1988, several bottles of the brew were obtained from the sunken ship in the Channel. They were still in their original containers, with their wood stoppers and wax seals intact. When opened, the beer were said to taste like wet boots according to brewer and microbiologist, Dr Keith Thomas. Upon examining the beer under a microscope, he found a small percentage of the yeast was still alive. He spent months growing this yeast and brewed a porter using an 1850 recipe.
