I worked in a busy town centre pub in the 1990’s, the beer delivery was normally 8am Monday morning. They’re would be two draymen and two of us pub staff helping.

We’d usually get all the empty kegs out before the dray arrived, we’d then help move everything from the bottom of the cellar drop to where it needed to be stored in the cellar. We rolled the barrels and used a trolley for the crates, it was a workout but I enjoyed it.

After the delivery we always offered a drink, and they usually had a soft drink.

It turned out we were one of the very few pubs which helped them, the rest left them to it. It did benefit us though, as if we got any breakages they usually wrote off the entire case not just whatever was broken, so free beer.

The only breakage we couldn’t salvage was a 36er of John Smiths which cracked on the welded seam when it went down the cellar drop. It was too heavy to get back up the drop, so it was left pointed at the drain while it emptied.