Brewer Bill King saw his family's 100-year-old business torn apart after it was taken over in an aggressive buy-out.

He watched the towering chimneys of the old King and Barnes Brewery in Bishopric, Horsham, pulled down to make way for a housing development.

Now, 18 months after the brewery closed, he says he's finally putting the dark days behind him and making a comeback with a new brewery.

King and Barnes closed down in July 2000. After a century of doing business the Barnes family had died out and the King family shareholding had dropped below 50 per cent, leaving the way open for a hostile takeover.

Bill, 41, said: "It's a great shame because the brewery was profitable. It was very unfair and very sad.

"I try to avoid driving past because it is terrible to see, but I suppose it is the way of the world. Nothing lasts forever."

The origins of King and Barnes date back to about 1850 when James King, Bill's great-great-grandfather, started the brewery. It was originally called King and Son, then King and Sons as more family members joined.

James came from Abingdon, near Oxford. He was a maltster who sold malt to the brewers in Horsham. The story says there was a bad debt and for payment he acquired the brewery.

In the early 1900s King and Barnes combined. Both were local families which had breweries and about 30 pubs around Horsham. The new brewery was set up in the Bishopric in 1906.

Bill said: "It ran from the early 1900s up until the mid-Fifties, when effectively the male side of the Barnes family died out so the management ended up in the hands of the Kings."

When the brewery closed Bill had a clause in his redundancy contract which stopped him being involved with running a brewery for a year.

For the next 12 months he tried his hand at different things, including working in a large factory brewery on 12-hour shifts.

But the idea of running his own business kept coming back and, 18 months after King and Barnes closed, he set up his new brewery, W J King and Co in Foundry Lane, Horsham.

The new plant is a lot smaller and Bill is just producing two beers: Red River and Horsham Best Bitter. He also hopes to produce a few seasonal brands.

He said: "After a year or so of a really horrid time I was fully disillusioned with brewing but after six months of deciding what I wanted to do, it was clear brewing was in my blood.

"My wife and I decided it would be nice to go back into brewing so we set up a new enterprise. Having had enough of shareholders and bankers, we wanted to start fairly small without an estate of pubs."

Like his father before him, Bill grew up on the brewery.

He said: "For the first 16 years we lived in the brewer's flat in the Bishopric. I then went off to university.

"In those days there weren't all the health and safety worries and in the holidays I was always running around in the brewery getting in the way.

"It was a great place to live. My dad was a brewer so I used to go round with him and learnt quite a lot before I trained.

"I have been at it all my life. Even as a child at King and Barnes in the summer I would do something like going out on the lorries.

"It was a lovely industry to be in and there were so many characters but it has just got bigger and bigger and pretty soulless. It is the independent family brewers who are keeping it going."

The new King brewery is now running to capacity and has already exceeded Bill's expectations, although he has worked hard to get there.

His father, who is now in his 70s, is no longer involved in the day-to-day running but is still keen to know what is going on.

There are four members of staff. Bill does the brewing, his wife the paperwork. A young lad carries out the deliveries and there is an experienced former colleague from King and Barnes.

Bill said: "I think by the time we get to Easter I want another member of staff to give me time to look for pubs. We have a five-year plan in which we would like to own five or six of our own pubs.

"Brewing is quite physically demanding. We have to start the process off mixing up the ground malt and water and finishing off with the cask process.

"It is enjoyable because we know that every pint that goes out the door is something I have created. It is a combination of choosing the right malts and the right hops.

"When you are brewing on a small scale it makes no sense to buy anything other than the best. I sort of design the recipes to be different from the old King and Barnes but this area likes bitter, hoppy beers so there are similarities."

Bill has three children, Edward, 12, Elizabeth, nine, and Richard, five. He hopes one day to be able to leave them the brewery but after his experience in the industry he is wary of encouraging them.

He added: "We have certainly learned our lessons on how a family business is run and it would be nice to have six generations."

Bill says he has discovered there is life after King and Barnes and although much of what he does is rooted in history, he is not averse to taking on new ideas and technology to push his company on in the 21st Century.

He recently launched a web site at www.kingfamilybrewers.co.uk to promote the beers and was surprised when it received more than 4,000 hits in a month.

The new brewery is far from the scale of the old King and Barnes.

Bill is restrained about his plans for the future, but he is determined to make a success of it and ensure the King name remains a fixture in the pubs of Sussex for many years to come.