Extract from The Changing Face Of Warminster by Wilfred Middlebrook, published in 1971:
The Guinness Barley Research Station.
Another business, discreetly hidden behind palatial dwellings on the south side of Boreham Road, until 1968, was the Guinness Barley Research Station, now transferred to Codford. Lord Iveagh, writing in 1959, about field testing, malting and brewery trials, recalled that in 1945 Guinness took over from Dr. Beaven’s trustees his Warminster nursery, with the intention of carrying on the work and tradition that had become associated with the name of Dr. E.S. Beaven.
Some of the earliest British work on induced mutations in barley breeding was done at Warminster, as part of the continuing effort to combine agriculturally desirable characters and brewing quality in the same barley.
The Warminster research station was equipped to malt the produce on these trials on any desired scale with malts that could be brewed in a miniature brewery. From the earliest days of field trials of barley it had been objected that hand-planted crops, grown under cages to protect them from birds, could not compare favourably with normal agricultural practice. Here at Warminster, a full-scale combine drill was adapted to drill small quantities seed in small-scale trials, which were protected by an electrical bird-scaring device. The name of this unique enterprise is now perpetuated by a new housing project called Barley Close.