J.W. Lees Brewery. John Lees, a retired cotton manufacturer, bought land in Middleton Junction in 1828 and built his Greengate Brewery in what was then a rural area of Lancashire. It’s now part of Greater Manchester and the brewery prospered as factories with a thirsty army of workers sprang up around it. John’s grandson, John William, took over the company, enlarged the brewery in 1876, and renamed it J.W. Lees. Its admirers ever since have called the brewery “John Willie Lees.” John William was prominent in both brewing and civil society, twice being elected mayor of Middleton. When William, Simon, Christina, and Michael Lees-Jones joined the company in the 1990s, they became the sixth generation of the family to run the brewery.

The company, which owns 170 pubs in Greater Manchester and north Wales, is fiercely traditional and concentrates on cask-conditioned ales. The range includes Mild, Bitter, a summer beer called Scorcher, and Coronation Street, named after a long-running TV soap opera set in nearby Salford, where much of the action takes place in the fictional Rovers’ Return pub.

J.W. Lees is best known for two strong ales. Moonraker (7.5%, bottle and cask) takes its name from a 19th-century tale concerning a group of farm laborers who, after a night on the ale, were returning home and thought the reflection of the moon in a pond was a truckle of Lancashire cheese. They tried to rake the moon from the pond but only succeeded in falling in.

Harvest Ale (11.5% in bottle) is a barley wine brewed every autumn with freshly harvested Maris Otter barley and East Kent Goldings hops. The beer is conditioned in the brewery and released in time for Christmas. It is filtered and pasteurized but ages very well for many years, with bottles from the late 1980s only now starting to peak. It is among the finest examples of the old British barely wine style. In recent years, the brewery has released versions of Harvest Ale that have been matured in casks that have held sherry, port, whiskey, and Calvados.