The founder, David John, owned iron and tinplate works around Llanelli when, in the mid-1830's, he bought the King's Head opposite his home in the village of Felinfoel. This was no ordinary pub but an important coaching inn with its own blacksmith's shop to service the horses. It also had a more worrying feature. Alongside the building, which stuck out into the road, was a toll gate.

In the late 1830's, this was like a red rag to an angry bull. The Rebecca rioters, the hard pressed tenant farmers who bitterly resented the road charges on their wagons and animals, were rampaging through Carmarthenshire, destroying toll gates. Feeling was running high against the authorities. David John decided to abandon the king and renamed his tavern the Union Inn.

Like most pubs of the time, it brewed its own beer. This proved popular and soon his Felinfoel ale was being sold to other houses. Then, as demand increased, he erected a larger brewery in 1878 opposite the pub in the grounds of his house, Pantglas. The imposing stone brewery was erected on his orchard, right up against the road.

The premises became a focal point of the community, employing about fifty people. A villager later recalled:

"Nearly every family kept a pig in their garden. When the butcher was booked to kill a pig in the back yard, large cans of hot water were carried from the brewery to scrape and clean the pig. Some people living in the vicinity even carried hot water for their weekly washing. Ladders were borrowed, tools sharpened, any excuse to go into the brewery for a drink.

On brewing day, farmers from the surrounding area came for the 'sog', the spent grains from the mash tun, to feed their animals. 'The yards and road outside were crowded with the farmers' carts, waiting their turn to be served.' The narrow road came to be known as Farmers Row.

Felinfoel Brewery was actually built astride the River Lliedi, which still runs through the premise today, and in whose waters hundreds were baptised by the Revd Benjamin Humphreys during the dramatic days of the great religious revival of 1905.

The village's second religion, rugby, was also closely connected with the local brew. Many famous matches were played on the recreation ground and then fiercely argued about afterwards in the Union Inn, once the headquarters of the Felinfoel club.

The old pub, a notorious bottleneck on the road through the village, was finally demolished in 1962 to widen the highway. It was said to be so close to the brewery opposite, that when the Union Inn's outbuildings were used by the company as a carpenters' shop, traffic was forced to draw to a halt when the men had to saw up planks.

Gradually the brewery built up trade throughout the old counties of Carmarthen, Cardigan and Pembroke, buying pubs as they became available. When David John retired from his business interests, his sons David and Martin took over the running of the brewery, with Llewellyn John looking after the Gorse tinplate works in nearby Dafen. The brewery was registered as a private company in 1906, and in addition produced mineral waters under the Trebuan Spring label, the water being piped from a source above the village.

The family also had mining interests, and in 1908 these almost undermined the brewery. Sinking a well at the brewery to find an additional supply of water, workmen struck a two-foot thick seam of coal, some 12 yards below the surface. But, after due consideration, the John family decided not to work the seam, as it would interfere/face with the brewery buildings.

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