Pubs are keen, brewers are cautious – but what of the drinkers?

With pub reopening set for this coming Saturday, I hope to enjoy a pint of cask beer before too much longer. But while I’m sure we all know someone desperate to hit the pubs as soon as they open, many of us and our friends will be more cautious – worried about safety, perhaps, or wondering what it’ll be like if we can only get served at a pre-booked table, or perhaps concerned whether unscrupulous owners will use distancing as an excuse to declare pubs ‘unviable’ and close them down.

So I was surprised during last week’s Brewers Lectures UK – actually a pair of online panel discussions – to realise just how split the two main chunks of the beer business are on reopening. In particular, while I knew the brewing side was cautious, I had not appreciated just how desperate many on the retail side are to open up again.

“On the retail side, everyone wants to get going – there’s such a big divide between the two industries,” said panel member Charlie McVeigh, perhaps best known for founding the Draft House chain and now the man behind Project Pint which campaigns to get ‘our pubs, clubs, bars and restaurants back, exactly like they were.’

And for all the uncertainty and fear around social distancing, contact tracing and so on, when I checked what publicans and others were posting on Facebook and Twitter it looked like quite a few others think the same way.

It’s understandable, I guess – even with staff furloughed for now, and with government grants, publicans have bills to pay. And while quite a few have switched to offering take-aways, it will not be replacing much of their previous turnover.

Then again, it’s not clear just how far this enthusiasm spreads beyond the retailers. For example, Project Pint’s online petition has been up for four weeks but still hasn’t reached its target of 2500 names.

And the brewers’ caution is understandable – they must now dump expired stock and buy new ingredients, for instance, even though many haven’t yet been able to pay their suppliers for the last lot of ingredients.

A trouble shared is a trouble halved

Those on the Lectures panel agreed that, in some ways, it’s been easier because everyone’s been affected. “The first thing we did was pause and talk to all our suppliers – there has been a huge amount of understanding,” said Wild Card’s head brewer Jaega Wise, while her counterpart at Northern Monk, Brian Dickson, added: “Everyone’s been in the same boat, they’ve been saying ‘We’ll make it work.’”

The challenge though is the transition back from that state of ‘all in it together’ to ‘business as normal’. As Adnams’ Fergus Fitzgerald put it, “Every supplier we talked to was amazing. But we are almost in the riskiest period now, because we have to start making stuff, buy ingredients, sell to pubs who don’t know how many people will walk in the door… Then it’s what we’ve already said we’ll buy for the next 12 months, such as hops, clearing out our hop stores, and so on.”

One thing seems certain from this combination of keenness and caution: I’ll be able to get that cask pint, but I’m not going to have the choice I’m used to – the cask ale supply chain is a bit too ‘fragile’ for that.

“We don’t know how many venues will be able to open, and there’s still the possibility of a second wave, so casks may have to wait,” said Brian, while Fergus explained that although Adnams is back in production, it’s aiming “to keep the range low. For our own pubs, they’ll probably open with two cask ales, not the regular five or six. It’s the usual rule – you try to sell it through in three days, so it’s start small and build up.”

Ah well, one or two good cask pints will be a lot better than none!

Pub reopening is on the horizon, but will it be a false dawn for the beer industry?

Whatever you might think about the State of the Pandemic, it looks like people are taking early-July seriously as a date for the pubs to reopen. Not only is there quite a bit of chatter on the likes of Twitter from companies eager to sell line-cleaning and other essential services, but I heard the other day that a friend of a friend who is area manager for a pub company has been told he is coming off furlough this week. I suppose by now that means tomorrow...

This all ties in with what I was hearing last week on a webinar on the topic of how Covid-19 is impacting the beer & pubs industry. It was hosted by Katie Wiles from CAMRA’s communications department and Neil Walker from SIBA, the small independent brewers association, and while real ale was a key topic, we discussed a whole lot more.

The first big problem is we don't actually have a date yet. The UK government has a 'roadmap' which suggests July 4th, but what the industry really needs is definitive notification. That's because it’s all very well the government saying pubs can reopen, but as usual the devil is in the detail – and detail is one of the many things that BoJo and the Clown Crew are not good at.

Not only do the pubs themselves need to get everything clean and so on, they also need to figure out what they’ll be allowed to do and sell. Will they need to shift to table service to stop people coming to the bar? How far apart will the tables need to be? Will they even be allowed to serve beer indoors or will it be gardens only? That’d be pretty crap for most town and city pubs!

And then there’s the question of whether they’ll actually have any beer to sell. Neil pointed out that, according to the SIBA survey I wrote about a few weeks ago, most small brewers have slowed or stopped production. They will need at least three weeks to get going again, and preferably four if we want fresh real ale, he estimated.

That’s because even those breweries that have stayed in production have mostly switched to “small-pack”, meaning bottles and cans that they can sell either through retailers – especially for the few fortunate enough to have strong supermarket connections – or for many of them, direct to their fans and neighbours via hastily-built webshops and the like.

Those unfortunate enough to have a lot of casks and kegs in stock have been stuffed. Some pubs and brewpubs have been selling take-away draught beer, but it will have been a tiny volume compared to their usual draught sales. Many brewers will have to scrap that stock or will have already poured it away.

Similarly, there is a lot of beer and cider in pub cellars – around 70 million pints of it, according to the BBPA (British Beer & Pub Association) – and most, if not all, of it will have gone out of date by July. Hence the launch by the BBPA last week of Return Your Beer, a website where pubs can sign up to register that they have destroyed spoilt drinks, which of course they have to do in a legal and environmentally-acceptable way. They’ll then the able to claim duty refunds from the brewers who in turn will be able to claim back what they’ve already paid to the taxman.

This is almost certainly going to be even more complicated and painful than it looks, and not just because of pouring all that beer down the drain, when most of it is probably still perfectly drinkable, whatever the best-before says! I’m thinking more of the admin and paperwork (even if it is digital these days) and of course how long it will take everyone to actually get their money back.

And anyway, this only covers the duty. I know we in the UK are royally ripped off on beer duty and tax so it should be quite a substantial refund, but still, there’s a lot more cost that goes into brewing beer. Will there be grants to pay for all the wasted ingredients? Anyway, it explains a lot of why my pub manager acquaintance is already being called back to work.

Who will actually reopen?

The next big question is how many of those pubs will actually reopen. Neil quoted a number of other studies, including one on business confidence, where only one in three pub operators predicted that all their pubs would reopen, and a BBPA report that up to 40% of pubs could close if they don’t get additional government support. Katie added that the government's business interruption loan scheme "is welcome but too slow to process, and around 20% of pubs can't access it because their rateable value is too high."

Then there was a hospitality industry poll that claimed most pubs can only handle a 10% drop in sales before becoming unprofitable. Requiring drinkers to stay 2m apart could therefore be pretty much a death sentence – although perhaps they’ll take a lesson from New Zealand, where as I understand it, if customers arrive as a group they are allowed to sit together.

And there’s the question of who will venture back to the pub. CAMRA’s research suggests that 60% of pubgoers are looking forward to a pint of cask beer once pubs reopen, but there’s also reports that others will avoid pubs, either because we've all been told to be fearful of being indoors with strangers, or simply because they've got used to drinking at home.

"The big thing we're concerned about is the change in consumer habits," Katie said. "As much as people say they want to go back to the pub, the longer this goes on the easier it will be for them to not go back to the pub." 

Breweries and cidermakers meanwhile face a triple-hit. As well as all that out-of-date product that must be dumped and the prospect of lower sales once business reopens, they’re not eligible for the same grants and business rates ‘holidays’ that pubs can get. Many have also furloughed their marketing teams, so getting sales moving again is likely to be rather bumpy. 

Free local deliveries are keeping connections alive 

There is a little bit of better news, in that quite a few breweries have managed to ramp up their direct sales. Katie also mentioned CAMRA’s online Brew2You service, which allows you to find local producers and retailers willing to deliver or sell for collection. It looks particularly useful if you want to find draught beer in polypins or minikegs.

I have my doubts how much of this direct-sale business is sustainable, however. A lot seems to be dependent on staff goodwill – people are doing stuff that they’d not normally put up with, such as free local deliveries, because they know they need to engage locals and keep the business moving during the crisis. Once the crisis (we hope!) winds down there’s going to be a lot of social debt to pay off, never mind all the financial debt.

All in all, while I’m really looking forward to my first cask beer in many weeks – assuming reopening does indeed happen – I am definitely NOT looking forward to seeing how the fallout from the crisis hits the beer business over the coming months.

Changing your Signature

It's all change at London's Signature Brew following an oversubscribed crowdfunding campaign last year - new brewery and taproom, new logo and cans, and even a few new brews - new to me, at least.

The launch party at the new site is taking place this weekend, and there’s lots of shiny stainless steel on show. Given the brewery's history of collaborating with bands to create one-off beers, of course there's quite a bit of live music too.

There’s already a Signature Taproom in Haggerston, London E8, so the new site’s drinking space is instead called The Brewer’s Bar. For this weekend’s launch there’s also tables and benches in the yard outside and on the open area in the brewery proper - I’m told these will also be out once the Brewer’s Bar is open regularly, which is set to be Friday/Saturday evenings and Saturday/Sunday afternoons. At this time of year, the open areas are a tad chilly, but the bar itself is enclosed and warm!

Inside the bar there’s various mementos on the wall of the brewery’s history and its musical collaborations, from its origins in 2012 when it contract-brewed, to 2015 when they got their own brewkit, which they outgrew within four years.

I had a chat with Chris, one of the assistant brewers, who filled me in on some of the changes. Although the actual ‘brew length’ hasn’t changed massively - the new brewkit is 32hl (20 barrels) where the older was 24hl - the new one is much more modern. In place of a manual two-vessel system, they now have a four-vessel system with lauter tun and whirlpool, so brewing is easier and faster.

Alongside a set of 32hl fermenters, they also now have six 120hl (75 barrel) fermenters for core beers such as Roadie, Backstage IPA and Studio Lager - big enough to get three brews into each. They’re currently brewing three days a week, two or three times a day. One of the advantages of upsizing your brewkit is quite simply that you can produce more beer in a shorter time and with less effort!

The venue is family-friendly, too!

As for the beers, as I discovered when I first met them they’re quality brews. Alongside the regulars I found an excellent 3% hoppy modern bitter - they badge this as a Table Beer, but to my mind it’s more of a Pale Ale ‘light’, a gorgeous Bretted lager (sadly a very limited production run), and a modernist Farmhouse/Saison.

Then there’s the collaboration they did for the recent Brewdog Collabfest, which aims to cram a cream tea, complete with cucumber sandwiches, Earl Grey, scones and raspberry jam, into a hazy IPA. It sounds ghastly, but it’s actually complex and fascinating. They also have a cask containing some of the very last of their original Anthology 10% Imperial Stout, now two years old and tasting quite gorgeous.

Technically the weekend event is ticket-only, but I’m told there should be room for some extra visitors if you’re looking for things to do tomorrow! It’s an easy walk from Blackhorse Road station. Also in the area are the Wild Card brewery, although sadly that’s not open tomorrow, and the intended site of Exale Brewing, which is the new project - again, crowdfunded - from the former Hale Brewing team. Ex-Hale, yeah…

Many thanks to the Signature crew for inviting me over - cheers!

UK brewery numbers may be declining again

That's the implication from the 2017 volume of The Brewery Manual, which aimed to survey all the working brewers in the UK.

Its researchers reckon there were 1544 "commercially operational national, regional and craft/micro brewers" in the UK last year. Of these, the vast majority - 1505 of them - were smaller producers that brewed less than 30,000 hectolitres (18,330 barrels).

They add that 60 breweries started operations during 2016. That's way down on the 100+ numbers recorded in each of the previous five years.

At the same time, there were 58 breweries that ceased operations and a few more that are still in business but are no longer brewing, which means that the total of working breweries has actually gone down since 2015.

Some observers have argued for a while now that the rapid growth in microbrewing was not sustainable, and that a period of 'rationalisation and consolidation' was on the way. Brewery Manual publisher Larry Nelson agreed, suggesting that "it could be the start of a slow contraction in brewery numbers.

"After years of rapid expansion in numbers the industry has been due for a correction," he continued. "The early numbers for 2017 openings suggest that this may be the start of a slowdown in new brewery growth.

"That isn’t necessarily a bad thing for craft. When the American craft brewing industry underwent a contraction in numbers at the end of the 1990s, demand for craft beer continued to rise year-on-year."

Going 'craft Irish' for St Patrick's Day

It's St Patrick's Day today, and while I don't especially approve of either cruelty to snakes, or evangelism, it seems an appropriate opportunity to write about Irish beer – and especially about the Irish beer that doesn't come from a huge and shiny brewery near the banks of the Liffey.

And yet, when I was invited to this year's Spirit of Sharing showcase of crafted Irish drinks at the Republic's embassy in London, the thing that struck me was that this time the brewers were just a small minority – just three of them*, far outnumbered by producers of spirits. It felt like a big change from last year, when microbreweries were the dominant presence.

Metal cans from Metalman

Interestingly, although the breweries taking part were outnumbered they had pride of place, being the first things visitors saw as they entered the event. I was delighted to see Metalman Brewing there – it’s one of Ireland’s oldest new-wave micros, having celebrated its sixth anniversary in production earlier this month – and to finally get a chance to chat in person with brewer and co-founder Gráinne Walsh. We’d spoken on the phone a couple of years ago when I was writing about microcanning, which Metalman was also the first in Ireland to adopt.

From one core product in cans back then – the pale ale that’s still its flagship – Metalman has now expanded to four core beers plus a range of seasonals, and thanks to ‘can’tinued innovation (which I plan to write more about soon) they are all canned. The other core lines are an amber IPA, a spiced wheat lager, and believe it or not, a smoked chili Porter! “It’s the slowest of the four, so we only brew it once a month,” admits Gráinne, “but yes, it’s core – we’re brave!”

Part of this expansion is down to a bigger brewkit, which they finally got up and running about 18 months ago. The problem for Irish craft brewers, and the reason some are looking to the export market, is that the growth in domestic demand isn’t keeping up with the growth in supply – and there are still new contract brands and new breweries setting up, says Gráinne. That’s not too bad for her company – she notes that they didn’t expand the brewhouse so that they could scale their production linearly, instead it was because they were having to brew way too often and inefficiently on the old kit.

As well as the pale ale, she’d brought along their spiced wheat lager Equinox, which is a tasty refreshing brew, dry-sweet with lightly citrus notes, plus two of the current seasonals, Ginger and Sgt Pepper. Ginger does what it says on the tin – a warming ginger note over a slightly dusty blond ale – while Sgt Pepper is a lightly funky farmhouse Saison with well judged notes of sage and white pepper.

Kinnegar's Libby Carton

The other two brewers both describe themselves as making farmhouse beers, although Donegal’s Kinnegar Brewing is in the process of expanding from its current farm-based 10hl kit to a new 35hl brewhouse located in the nearby town. Kinnegar’s Libby Carton had a very impressive array of bottles in front of her: all seven of their core beers, plus four of the specials that she and her other half, American brewer Rick, do “when we have the time and capacity.”

Black Rye IPA is a new one on me

Their bottled beers are all unfiltered, unpasteurised and naturally carbonated, although Libby says they’re not bottle-conditioned as such. “We do have draught lines as well,” she adds, “but it’s difficult because you have to keep that line supplied – with the same beer, too! We’re lucky in a way that we started with packaged beer.” Of those I tried, the regulars were all good, as long as you don’t mind a slight haze. The standouts were all from the specials range, though, especially the peppery and spicy-fruity Swingletree, which is a strong Saison, a rich foreign stout called Flying Saucer, and my personal favourite, Black Bucket, a beautifully complex black rye IPA.

Although they’re waiting for the new brewhouse for their main export push, which will feature 330ml bottles replacing the current 500mls, you can find Kinnegar beers on tap all over the UK this weekend as they’re St Patrick’s Day guests in the Brewdog bars, the Rake, the Tate Modern bar, and several others – see their blog for a list.

Last but far from least was Brehon Brewhouse – Seamus McMahon reckons he is the only dairy farmer in the country who also has a brewery on his farm. He says he’s into brewing partly to boost the local economy – the brewery employs five people and uses locally grown malt too, while the waste can go for animal feed. “We’ve doubled the size of the brewery since we set up in 2014, and will double again this year,” he says, adding that he’s in 50 pubs around the area as well as several supermarket groups.

He has a fairly typical range for an Irish micro – a blonde ale, a red, an IPA and slightly unusually, both a porter and a stout, though he didn’t have the porter with him. The ones I tried were all good examples of their styles, with the Ulster Black Oatmeal Stout standing out as very pleasant and quaffable. What’s an Ulster beer doing at the Irish Embassy, you ask? Well, the historical Ulster is nine counties, only six of which are now part of the UK. Both Brehon and Kinnegar are therefore technically Ulster breweries, even though they’re in the Republic.

As I said, it was however spirits that dominated – mostly whiskey of course, but also poitín (aka potcheen, which is basically unaged whiskey), plus 'craft' vodka and gin. Irish whiskey’s presence you’d understand – it’s reportedly the fastest growing spirit in the world – but vodka and gin? Not only are they currently hip, especially gin, but they don't need time, unlike Irish whiskey which by law must be matured at least three years before it can be sold. So if you are starting a distillery, white spirits are good to get you going while you wait for your whiskey to come of age.

One change from last year was that more of the spirits producers seemed to actually be distilling now, although as most only set up their stills within the last two years, few had their own whiskey yet. Instead, they typically get started by buying already-aged whiskey in bulk, then ageing it some more and blending it for resale.

The other was just how many new faces there were. Most of the participants – and all the breweries – were new from last year. This may be deliberate by the organisers at Bord Bia (the Irish Food Board), as the event's role is as a venue for producers who're not yet exporting to the UK. All in all, an excellent event by Bord Bia: my thanks go to them, and of course to the ambassador Dan Mulhall, for being such good hosts.


*Well, three and a half – Dingle Distillery, which was there with its whiskeys, is an offshoot of the Porterhouse brewery and pub group, so it had some Porterhouse bottles on its embassy table. This is also why the London Porterhouse this week was advertising a Dingle whiskey tasting.

Family fun at Fuller's

Photo: Fuller's

We've been to the annual Open Day at Fuller's a few times now, and they've all been good fun. "Dray" rides - actually a passenger cart, but drawn by real, huge, dray horses - and craft activities in the Hock Cellar for the kids, plus brewery tours and beer for the grown-ups, and live music and a BBQ for everyone. What's not to like?!

One year they even had a fire engine in attendance, for the kids to sit in and try on helmets, etc - at least until it and the crew got called away... This year there's also a 10k Fun Run that same morning.

Anyway, it's on Saturday 3rd September from 11am to 4pm. I hope I don't need to explain where! But if I do, check out the Open Day website linked above. :)

Beers of Brabant

As a historian I’d been well aware of Brabant as one of the major Duchies of medieval Europe, but apart from occasionally noticing the name on “Welcome to...” road signs while whizzing through the Low Countries, I have to confess I’d not really been aware of its modern existence. Until this week, that is, when VisitBrabant invited me and several other beer writers & bloggers to, well, visit Brabant and discover its beer.

While you might not have connected the two before, it turns out Brabant – which includes Eindhoven, Breda and Tilburg, as well as its ‘capital’ of De Bosch – has a long brewing heritage. From our base at the aptly-named Hotel Central in Den Bosch (aka s’Hertogenbosch, which means the Duke’s Forest), we first sallied out to Koningshoeven Abbey, the home of La Trappe, one of the original Trappist breweries. More on that in a later post. Keen cyclist Nathalie from VisitBrabant then lead us on an hour-long bike ride to the village of Oirschot – it’s a great country for cycling, being relatively flat and having plenty of dedicated cyclepaths, and luckily we had great weather.

Kroon memorabilia

Oirschot was formerly home to Kroon, one of the few regional Dutch brewers to survive the massive waves of consolidation during the 20th century. It was finally bought in the 90s and closed in 2000 – oddly enough it was a victim of its new parent Brouwerij Bavaria subsequently also linking up with La Trappe and not needing the Kroon brewery any more.

Then two years ago, a new brewery called Brouwerij Vandeoirsprong opened on the Kroon site, aiming to combine traditional styles with a bit of new-wave pizazz. We liked the Vandeoirsprong taproom, and from what I hear so do the locals, flocking at weekends to what’s now the village’s only brewery – it of course had over a dozen before the closures of the late 1800s. Why did they close? Newly fashionable Pils, in large part – if you had no cool caves nearby, the shift to lager beers required significant investment in refrigeration equipment. As elsewhere, many smaller breweries could not afford this and closed or sold up, a process exacerbated by the large brewers wanting to expand by consolidation and acquisition.

Vandeoirsprong taproom

Anyway, the taproom is in the old bottling hall and has an industrial chic, all white tiles and concrete. There is also a brewery museum with the old Kroon brewkit and all sorts of other gear and memorabilia, it’s only labelled in Dutch for now but I think that will change. The beer garden too is littered – oops, I mean decorated! – with old brewing gear such as wort coolers.

If I’ve one caveat about Vandeoirsprong, it’s that they might be trying to produce and sell too many beers too soon. I think they had eight of their own on tap, and while the Hop-Wit and OPA were pretty clean and tasty, some of the others seemed a little rough around the edges and needed work. But it is only their first full season in operation, their brewer is still learning, and I’m sure they will all improve.

The third brewery of the day was back in Den Bosch. Stadsbrouwerij van Kollenburg t’Kolleke is the house-brewery at Cafe Bar le Duc. It’s now the only brewery in the old city, although there is a large Heineken factory on the outskirts – again, there would have been dozens in the Middle Ages. Brewer/co-owner Jan van Kollenburg sells around 80% of his production sells through his bar, with the rest being a mix of bottled off-sales, and supplies to others bars around town of a new beer called Jheronimus, produced to mark the 500th anniversary of the death of eponymous local artist Hieronymus Bosch.

Shiny shiny at t'Kolleke

Bar le Duc has the look of a classic old cafe, all brown wood and beery memorabilia. As well as an excellent local food menu and Jan’s beers on tap, it also has guest beers and a bottle list – the primary focus for both being the Low Countries with just a few outliers, such as the one American Trappist beer and a beer each from Spain and Germany. The house beers were variable, but the intriguingly herbal Blond and the Dubbel with liquorice were both pretty good, as was the Jheronimus.

Den Bosch looks like a really good city for beer bars - as well as Le Duc there's several more in the old city, including to my surprise a bar belonging to top English brewery Thornbridge. Maybe that's why all the other bars around have little or no British beers!

Technically we’re in North Brabant, the only quarter of the old Duchy that stayed in the Netherlands when Belgium split off in 1830 – the actual history is more complex, this is the simple version! The other Brabants are even more beery, in particular Flemish Brabant which contains several well-known abbey breweries (eg. Affligem, Grimbergen) and whose capital of Leuven is the home of Stella Artois. Nathalie mentioned that as well as the touring cycle routes on her side of the border, there is a Trappist cycle route that visits the Belgian Trappists as well as La Trappe. Now there’s a good way to build up a thirst!

Caveat: we all paid for the tour ourselves, however we were at the same time the guests of VisitBrabant who booked the beer tastings and covered our hotel stay. 

When is a brewery not a brewery?

Brewing kit at Ubrew

London now has 101 breweries, according to recent figures. Except that it doesn’t – talking to CAMRA folk in the know*, their estimate is that at least 10 to 15 of the brewing companies are actually nomad brewers**, who brew batches from time to time at one of three or four sites where you can go along and rent a commercial-grade brewkit. The best known of these ‘open source breweries’ is Ubrew in Bermondsey.

Then there’s another half a dozen that are ‘resting’ for whatever reason, and a few more where you have two brewers sharing a brewkit. This all means that the total of actual physical breweries is probably still in the 75-80 region.

That means it has pretty much stabilised in the last couple of years. There have been a few closures, but they’ve been more or less matched by new openings – often with the latter using the brewing kit sold off by the former.

The nomad issue echoes a conversation I had at London Drinker Beer Festival with a couple of brewers from more established (and here I mean a few years, not 100 years!) breweries. As one of them noted, “Ubrew is messing up the market. The beers are still good, but it confuses things because people are saying they’re a new brewery when they’re actually using Ubrew.”

Sour grapes, or are the nomad brewers genuinely sowing confusion in the market? Their beers certainly look the part, but does actually owning the brewkit make a difference to the quality?



*London CAMRA (of which I'm a member) tracks its local brewing closely, even though a lot of it isn’t real ale. It’s partly for completeness and partly because even breweries that mostly do keg beer often also do bottle-conditioned beers and cask-conditioned specials.

**Nomad has become popular as the least potentially-offensive of the available terms. ‘Gypsy’ as preferred by the likes of Mikkeller, is regarded by many as pejorative, and ‘cuckoo’ has unpleasant connotations – would you put up with a cuckoo brewer in your brewery if you knew they were planning to elbow your own chicks over the edge of the nest?

Exploring Belgian beer beyond the abbeys

With several British companies already offering subscribers a monthly box of new bottled beers, you might think there isn’t much room in the market here for yet another monthly beer box. Belgibeer’s Dario Ceccarelli thinks otherwise though, and having built up his business across mainland Europe, he has just opened a UK office as well.

The difference is that other beer clubs might focus on British brewers, say, or try to do a world’s-best type of thing that’s great for new explorers but probably won’t impress aficionados (“A bottle of Orval/Vedett IPA/Flensburger Gold? Mr Ambassador, you’re spoiling us!”). However, each monthly Belgibeer box contains only beers from a single brewery – and as its name implies, all the breweries are Belgian.

Dario opens a box of beer...

“With its similar culture, France is our biggest market now, but the UK is our next target,” said Dario when I met him over a glass of Piraat Triple Hop at the opening of the London office. He added, “We want to broaden people’s expectations beyond abbeys – we work with ‘the other’ Belgian brewers.”

He said that even though many drinkers – and most Belgians – think they know Belgian beer, they don’t really. That’s due to the market dominance of AB-Inbev (Stella, Jupiler, Leffe, Hoegaarden...) and to a lesser extent Heineken (Maes, Grimbergen, Affligem...), which means that pretty much anywhere you go in Belgium, you will see the same macrobrews on the menu. Yet the country has hundreds of good small brewers, almost all of them little known abroad. Some produce only traditional Belgian styles, a few focus on international craft styles, and many brew the best of both worlds.

The volume he’s able to buy means that these brewers will sometimes do specials for him, for example packaging a beer that’s normally only in 70cl bottles in smaller ones instead. Also in the box you get a Belgibeer magazine profiling the brewery and introducing the beers – they visit each brewery they work with. It’s trilingual (English, French and Dutch) and is both slightly cute and a bit politically incorrect, in a way that suggests Belgium must be fortunate enough to lack a bunch of humourless drinks-nannies like the Portman Group.

As well as subscribing for regular deliveries, you can buy one-off cases and a range of ‘extras’, ranging from branded glasses to bottles of Westvleteren 8 and 12. Dario noted that beer boxes have become a popular gift item – he said that in France 80% of Belgibeer’s clients are women, with many of them buying the boxes as gifts through a gift-box website.

If I have a minor reservation, it is that other beer clubs typically send eight (or 12) different bottles. Like most smaller brewers though, Belgian breweries produce a relatively modest range of beers at any one time, so each Belgibeer box only contains four different brews (two bottles of each). Still, the aim is to have each box as internally varied as possible, and the breweries chosen are often little known outside their provinces, never mind outside Belgium.

For example, I’d not heard before of some of the breweries featured recently, such as Brasserie de Cazeau and Brasserie Sainte Hélène, both in Wallonia. Others I’d heard of but barely sampled, such as Vicaris and De Dochter van de Korenaar. One recent box was from van Steenberge, and while I’d had the regular Piraat 10.5 before, the box’s other three beers were new to me – including the excellent Triple Hop and the Gulden Draak 9000 Quad.

Belgibeer’s UK pricing depends how long you subscribe for, fitting in with the competition at around £3 a bottle. That’s pretty good for delivered beer, especially when quite a bit of it is over 6% – and much of it is likely to be unavailable anywhere else in the UK.

How beer could rival Scotch for Highland affections

As described in my previous post, a few months ago I spent an evening meeting brewers from the Scottish Highlands, learning about the market challenges they face – and tasting some of their beers.

Cairngorm Brewery will already be familiar to many both north and south of the border, partly because of the array of awards on its wall, most of them for its Trade Winds golden ale and its gorgeous Black Gold stout, but also because it has participated in several of JD Wetherspoon’s national real ale festivals. As many brewers will admit, while there’s no financial profit for them in these festivals, they're a great publicity boost.

Supplying real ale across the country is a major task, said Cairngorm's Merlin Sandbach, not least because it means having 400 or 500 casks to fill. Two factors make it practicable – one is that Wetherspoon has its own distribution centres, and the other is that you can now rent casks for one-way use, with the rental company recovering and cleaning them afterwards.

As well as its mainstays, at this festival Cairngorm was offering its bottled Highland IPA. This was an interesting Scottish take on an old friend, with lots of toasty caramel adding to the citrus hops, herbal bitterness and malt that you’d expect.

Confusingly, there were two new microbrewers present from the Speyside area – Speyside Craft Brewery, and Spey Valley Brewery. “We do cask, kegs and bottles. That was a no-brainer, there was no reason to limit ourselves,” said Speyside’s Seb Jones. “It's predominantly a local market, we do definitely get seasonal influences though,” with local craft beer proving popular with the many summer visitors to the area.

A former home-brewer, he joined the oil & gas industry “but didn't enjoy it much, so I moved back. The brewery took 18 months of planning and fund-raising. It was just me at the start, now there's six of us, including a head brewer.” He added, “The beer range is what I want to drink – how else can you be passionate about it?” How else indeed!

I tasted his Findhorn IPA and Bottlenose Bitter – both were good, the former having notes of bitter orange and burnt caramel while the latter, named for the dolphins that live nearby in the Moray Firth (I've seen them), was dry-sweet and lightly bitter.

Of course, beer isn’t what the Speyside area is best known for, so it wasn’t too surprising to learn that the founder of Spey Valley Brewery, David MacDonald, originally worked in the whisky business as a distiller at Cardhu (now part of Diageo). Of course, every whisky distillery is also a brewery, although they don’t make this obvious, because fermented but unhopped ale is what they distill.

He initially put together a 200 litre brewkit more as a hobby, but was looking to expand when he met local farmer and hotelier Innes MacPherson, now his partner in Spey Valley. “He wanted a 10-barrel plant,” said Innes. “The window of [craft beer] opportunity was closing fast though, and when we priced it a 20-barrel was as cheap, and the opportunity meant capacity was needed.” So David has retired from Diageo and gone into brewing full-time. His smoky and berryish Spey Stout is a tasty mainstay, but I also tried the eponymous David’s Not So Bitter, a well-balanced light bitter.

To add a little more confusion, Spey Valley, via its floral and crisp Sunshine on Keith blond ale – although I see they’re now more fashionably calling it a Session IPA – also overlapped with the next brewer along, Keith Brewery. A little name-sharing shouldn’t surprise though, given that Keith is one of the main towns on Speyside (and is home to Strathisla, reputedly the oldest distillery in Scotland).

The Keith Brewery name is just a year old and its labelling is both tasteful and amusing. Everything is named Something Keith, for example, such as its barleywine (actually a Strong Scotch Ale) being Sir Keith and its lager being Larger Keith. Its brewkit is older and has ‘history’ though – it was formerly operated by Brewmeister, a poorly-executed attempt to out-do Brewdog in the shock and outrage stakes. Brewmeister’s clownish claims to have brewed the world’s strongest beer were ridiculed and largely disproved, and new investors took over.

“Almost everyone involved with Brewmeister has gone,” said Keith assistant brewer Alex Saramaskos – the only exception looks to be Tony Kotronis, the head brewer recruited right at the end of the Brewmeister era to be a new broom and clean things up. “It's the same brewkit but there's also lots of new stuff, such as new cooling gear.”

Alex was pouring Sir Keith and Stout Keith. Both were excellent, with the barleywine carrying its warming 10% ABV very smoothly. The stout, which is dosed with five litres of cold brewed coffee (from 5kg of coffee beans) per 2000-litre brew, was unsurprisingly coffee-roasty with a burnt bitterness and pleasing hints of old wine and tart currants.

Wooha Brewing’s founder Heather MacDonald was the only brewster present, and despite a name that’s about as Scottish as you can get, is originally from America. A microbiologist by training, she learnt to brew commercially (meaning consistently!) as a way to start up a business as her children grew up. “I brewed wherever people would let me, and at home for recipe development,” she explained. “I have a lab background so I'm very much into record keeping.”

Her 10-barrel brewery has now been in production for a year. She started with four 10-barrel fermenters but when we spoke she had just ordered a 20 as well. Her beers are a hoppy lager that is unusually full-bodied – perhaps because it is lagered for five weeks, an easy-drinking porter, a wheat ale and an IPA.

The wheat in particular I liked as a hoppy twist on the Ur-Weisse style, although Heather says “We don't call our Wheat Ale a Hefeweizen – it's fermented at 18C because I didn't want banana and cloves,” while the IPA seemed more like a hopped-up Strong Scotch than a traditional IPA. All four showed Heather’s desire to explore flavour in its entirety. As she said, “I want it to be about the whole beer, not just bitterness.”

They've rebranded since then!

Last but not least, I stopped to chat with George Wotherspoon from the Loch Ness Brewery – besides Cairngorm, this was the only other brewery here that I already knew of, from meeting (and enjoying) their cask ales in London.

As well as a core range of four, they do a wide range of seasonal beers, many of them available in both bottle and cask – and some cask-only. For sampling he'd brought along bottles of HoppyNess, a hop-dank and bitter-sweet pale ale which I see they've now rebranded as an American IPA, and LochNess, a malty Scotch ale that made me think more of a brown Porter.

Overall, it was really interesting to see how responses to the craft beer opportunity can differ, yet all reflect a shared heritage – in this case, centuries of Scottish and British brewing. And of course there wasn't a bad beer in the bunch!

Beer is a welcome taste of the Highlands

The news that Scottish brewers have done well at the SIBA BeerX 2016 trade conference and festival in Sheffield, taking 25% of the gold medals despite being less than 10% of the UK’s brewery population, reminds me that it’s an area I’ve been meaning to write about for some time – ever since meeting half a dozen interesting brewers from the Highlands & Islands area a few months ago, in fact.

Beer, beer, beer...

We met at a special one-day Highlands Craft Beer & Cider festival run in London’s Covent Garden on behalf of Highlands Islands & Enterprise (HIE), which is the local economic and community development agency. As well as six breweries and a cidery, it featured excellent Scottish cheese and the inevitable – but very welcome, as far as I’m concerned! – haggis, and pulled in well over 300 visitors during just a few hours.

As an insight into the Scottish beer scene today, layered on top of reading the likes of Ron Pattinson on the history of Scottish brewing, it was fascinating. For instance, talking to Merlin Sandbach of Aviemore’s Cairngorm Brewery confirmed my understanding that Scottish brewing consolidated in the mid-20th century even more than English brewing did, leaving great swathes of the country with no real ale and little choice of keg beer.

Merlin noted that as one of the elders of Scottish craft brewing – it is 15 years old now – Cairngorm has taken the opportunity to work with some of the newcomers to mutual profit. “We have invested in our own bottling plant and we contract-bottle for others, so they become customers rather than competitors,” he said, adding that “We're working with Highlands & Islands CAMRA too. We have worked to bring back cask, we also do craft keg.”

It is hard work though, according to George Wotherspoon of Drumnadrochit’s Loch Ness Brewery. “Scotland still has a very young craft beer market, [new brewers are] still trying to pitch lager drinkers who will only take a risk on golden beer,” he said. On the plus side, there is plenty of heritage for craft producers of all sorts to build on, and nowhere is that as true as Loch Ness. “One thing we do not have to explain is the brand,” he laughed. “About a million tourists come through our village every year.”

Like most of these breweries, Loch Ness does cask ale for beer festivals, but bottled beer is the mainstay for all of them. That’s partly down to the peculiarities of the local market, with so much of the on-trade being both tied and keg-only, but it’s also because even where there is interest in cask ale, there isn’t always the knowledge and skill to look after it. Plus it needs turnover, because even properly-kept cask beer is good for at most a week once tapped.

Heather & sales manager Alan of Wooha

“We have our own bottling line, and while we do own 24 casks for local beer festivals and the like, everything else we do is bottled and bottle-conditioned,” said Heather MacDonald of Wooha Brewing Company. “I've been to too many pubs with badly-kept cask beer. There's no way I'm putting all that energy into brewing and having it go to waste. I had one publican ask for cask beer and say he knew how to look after it and make it last three weeks!”

“We do a little keg, the rest is all bottles plus some casks for local festivals,” agreed Alex Saramaskos of Keith Brewery. “In my immediate region, everyone is tied to Tennents, Carlsberg, etc. But a bit further away we can find free outlets – we have to go 60-plus miles out. Some delis and cafés are very interested too, for example in Aberlour where the tourist market is.”

The other opportunity for the new brewers, just as it was for Scottish brewers in the 1800s, is to export outside the region, both abroad and to the rest of the UK. Scotland’s bonnie image helps as much here as it does with the seasonal visitors: “The export market is absolutely key,” said Spey Valley Brewery’s Innes MacPherson. “We also have a canning line in mind in three or four years – there's plenty of bottling capacity around.”

Some have targeted exports from the get-go – Wooha already has its own bottling and pallet racking lines, for instance. It even spent last December selling at a Christmas market in France! “Our aim is to export 65% by the end of our second trading year,” said Heather MacDonald. But most are not big enough to do it alone, according to HIE development manager Caroline McLellan, hence events such as the Covent Garden one to raise awareness and build contacts. “London and the South-east are really key markets for our area,” she said. “So now I'm trying to get people working together, collaborating to get scale.”

Of course this is just a snapshot of Scottish brewing today, and most importantly it excludes the major population centres of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. Scotland as a whole now has well over 100 breweries according to SIBA, which on a per-person basis is about twice as many as London has. I think it bodes very well for the future though. In particular I hope that as well as seeing more Scots beer south of the border, we will also see the Scottish pub & bar trade open up to beer variety pretty rapidly, just as it has in other similarly-sized European countries.

More on the breweries and beers at the Highlands & Islands festival in my next blog post...

A-very impressive brewery tour

Part 3 of my Boulder breweries and brewpubs tour back in October last year. Part 2 is here.

A recent reminder that the new brewery site at Avery Brewing Co in Boulder, Colorado, is about to celebrate its first anniversary reminded me that I really ought to get on with writing about my visit there last Autumn.

The building is very impressive – partly because it was designed to be, but also because of the sheer scale and ambition of it. From Avery's cramped former home in a row of industrial units downtown, the plan was to think big. Its new flagship is still on an industrial estate, but this one is set in rolling lawns in the suburbs.

That's a lot of taps

It's not just a brewery, too – as well as a large bar or taproom with dozens of beers on draught, there is an artisanal restaurant and a giftshop selling beers and Avery-branded merchandise. On top of that, the whole thing has been designed with visitors in mind, as well as brewers. There are overhead viewing gantries in the brewhouse, and large glass windows onto many of the other workspaces, such as the barrel-ageing storeroom.

You can wander around by yourself (the visitor areas are separated off from the actual working space of course) or join one of the free daily guided tours – I did the latter. I have to admit I was a bit surprised when our guide reminded us that the brewery was already 21 years old in 2014, when 15-odd years of continued growth meant that they simply had to move somewhere bigger. “Our plan called for $45 million, the bank laughed us out, but we got $28 million,” he said.

The new building opened in February 2015. They decided to move the old brewkit over, which meant no brewing while that happened, plus they installed lots more shiny stainless steel gear. “Our German engineers said our hopback was too large,” laughed our guide. “But we have a 102 IBU* beer – the hopback was not big enough!” Its standard brewlength is now 100 hectolitres, or about 80 barrels, while its biggest fermenters (the outdoor ones you can see in the photo above) hold 800hl each.

They now have 30 different beers on draught at a time, plus many specials and seasonals. They vary from an Imperial (strong) lager that takes 57 days to ferment and mature, through a wide range of IPAs and spiced and fruit beers, to Hog Heaven, the 9.2% double-hopped Barleywine that fired Avery's growth in the late 1990s. Then there's all the barrel-aged (BA) beers: Avery has a huge programme pulling in used barrels from all over – from wineries, whisk(e)y distillers, rum, Madeira, tequila and more.

The BA facility is very impressive, with racks of slumbering barrels and forklifts to move them around. There's no foeders yet – those are the big wooden vats used in producing Belgian Lambics – but this could change!

A lot of blending goes on between BA beers to produce the desired results. Avery is also working on a series of wine-beer hybrids, some using wine yeast to ferment beer. Mostly though it uses the barrels either to flavour beers directly or to create sour and wild ales by adding bacteria and wild yeasts; these then live in the wood and produce fascinating flavours by working on sugars in the beer that normally wouldn't be fermentable.

The centrifuge refuge from above

Talking of which, the brewery has its own quality assurance and yeast propagation labs – indeed, it claims it has one of the best lab facilities anywhere in the world for a brewery of its size, with six microbiologists, chemists and analysts on staff.

On top of that, when I visited they were waiting for their new canning line to arrive. Their existing top-of-the-range microcanning line from Cask of Canada could do 50 to 60 cans a minute, but the new German line can run at over 300 cans a minute when needed. On top of that, there's keg and bottling lines of course, and for filtering beer before packaging there's a big centrifuge – this lives in its own strongroom, in case of accidents!

Like many brewers today, Avery's also working to reduce its environmental footprint. It's working with a neighbour company, New Sky Energy, on carbon dioxide scrubbing technology, with the aim of turning its surplus CO2 – and fermentation produces a lot of this – into useful soda ash. Spent water is treated to regulate its pH, and spent grain goes to local farmers as animal feed – brewers were afraid that the US government's FDA (Food & Drug Administration) would block the latter, but this seems to have been sorted out now.

Back to the bar...

After a fascinating and enjoyable tour, I wrapped up my visit by returning to the Avery taproom for a tasting flight covering a good spread of its products (I'd already has a pint of Old Jube, the winter ale). Oddly, the only one that didn't impress was White Rascal, the Witbier that they make quite a lot of. The others – including Semplice, a farmhouse ale with Lemondrop hops, a passionfruit Witbier called Liliko’i Kepolo, and a SMaSH (single malt, single hop) pale ale with Galaxy hops – more than made up for it though!

If you're in the area, they're having an anniversary party next Tuesday, February 16th. I wish I could be there!

*International Bittering Units – a seriously bitter IPA might hit 65 or 75 IBU. 

Apologies to our excellent tour guide, whose name has totally vanished from my notes! :(

Win a brewery

If it's happened before, I've not heard of it - a kindly engineering company has donated a complete 100-litre brewery (they call it a microbrewery, I'd call it a nanobrewery) to be raffled for charity.

The donor is Elite Stainless Fabrications of Swindon, which makes brewing kit of all shapes and sizes, and the charity is Swindon Women's Aid which despite the name says it provides support to all victims of domestic abuse, regardless of gender or orientation.

Tickets are £5 each and can be bought online or by phone - I've bought mine. I'm not sure where I'll put my brewery, but it looks like a nice piece of kit!

Two years of Fourpure

It's amazing how much can happen in two years. A helpless newborn baby can turn into a determined, highly mobile and stroppy toddler, and a vast-seeming industrial unit with a shiny new brewkit looking very small and slightly lost at the back can turn into something so chock-full of stuff that it needs almost triple the floorspace.

Image used with permission of totalales.co.uk"

So when we turned up for an open-Saturday that was also both a party to mark Fourpure's second anniversary – not of its set-up, but of its first brew – and a launch for two new beers, the available space for guests was a mite crowded. It was also raining outside, which on the one hand forced everyone indoors but on the other presumably persuaded some people to stay at home and avoid adding to the crush.

Fortunately, everyone was in a good mood, even the toddler. And there's no passing traffic because Fourpure's at the back of an industrial estate where everything else is shut on at the weekend, so our only worries when she escaped outside were the puddles.

The two new beers were Southern Latitude, a fruity and bitter 4.7% 'South Pacific pale ale' with Australian hops, and Northern Latitude, a gorgeous Scandinavian-inspired 6.4% Rye IPA, dry-bitter and warming, full of toasted toffee and pine resin notes – Fourpure has quite a decent export business to Scandinavia now, incidentally.

Sumac Wheat

Among the others on the bar that were new to me were Morning Star, which was an excellent full-bodied, roasty and chocolatey 7.1% Imperial Porter (historically that'd be a Stout, but never mind!), Red Rye Session IPA which was 4% and cloudy, but had lovely pine aromas and a crisp dry-sweet body, and a 5.2% wheat ale using the Middle Eastern spice Sumac. This Sumac Wheat was an unattractive murky tan colour with equally unappealing sour yeasty aromas, but thankfully it tasted much better that it looked and smelled, balancing a dry earthy bitterness with light fruity sweetness.

As well as my first sight of the reorganised brewery bar, which now has 16 taps, giving them 10 for regulars and six for experimental brews, the visit was my first chance to see one of those experimental brews in production. Alongside the main 35hl (20 barrels, stretched a little) brewkit, Fourpure has a 1hl (100litre) pilot kit, which by the look of it is made from steel kegs, and this is where those extra six beers come from.

The live brew

For the open day, brewers Nick and JT were at work in front of the crowd, live-brewing an IPA using the new Lemondrop hop variety. These experimental brews are their chance to try out new ideas and of course to test different hop and malt varieties. “Our core range is very much 'to style', so this is our chance to be a bit more exclusive,” explained JT – in between helping explain to the toddler's elder brother how beer is made and letting him investigate its ingredients and the spent malt...

JT added that the pilot kit had also produced Milky Mohican, an unusual Chai beer that I'd just tried from the bar. Essentially they'd brewed this with torrified wheat for a milky texture, then tried blending in varying amounts of cold-brewed Chai spiced tea, before settling on a 10% addition for public release. (Annoyingly, all the photos I took of the live-brew have totally vanished, so this one's nicked off Fourpure's Twitter feed!)

He also ran through the expansion plans. Fourpure's taking over another similarly-sized industrial unit nearby for processing and packaging, so the bright tanks and canning line will move there. A large railway arch will also be taken on, as both a distribution centre and a cold-store for lagering.

More interesting for aficionados is that a wall of wooden barrels will fill the brewery space freed up by moving out the packaging stores. Barrel-ageing of beer is immensely fashionable and is also key to producing certain styles such as Lambics and Bretted beers, but as JT noted, it is not a short-term thing – they expect it will take four years to work out which are the best barrels and for those to develop the right microflora inside.

Surfing the Zeitgeist
So what has enabled Fourpure to grow so fast? One thing seems to have been having investors with deep enough pockets. That allowed them to go straight for a decent-sized brewkit, then as sales ramped up all they needed to add was more fermenters and more packaging capacity. JT noted that most of the tanks are now 70hl and take two brews to fill, while the biggest – used for beers that need a decent lagering time – takes a stonking four brews.

I suspect another thing was the way they focused first on getting a few well-made beers in volume into the sort of venues that wanted “craft” but couldn't handle cask ale, such as bars and restaurants, then swiftly pivoted to a broader range of short-run beers once the market opened up. The ability to can without having to do 100,000 at a time – Fourpure was the very first UK brewery to buy its own microcanning line – also widened the distribution opportunities.

Two years ago I was predicting that Fourpure would become a straightforward supplier of crafty beer styles to a local mainstream market, as the craft-keg equivalent of a old-fashioned regional cask brewer perhaps. It has certainly achieved that – the other day I spotted several of its taps in an outdoor kiosk by London's South Bank Centre, for example.

Yet it has also evolved alongside the craft beer market, becoming something rather more innovative – just like some of those regionals have, I suppose. It's similar to the solid yet adaptive business plans that seem to have served other start-ups well, for example Windsor & Eton and Truman's. What shall we call it – surfing the zeitgeist?

Public omnibuses, in the land of the car? Yes – and A-very fine beer too!

Part 2 of my touring Boulder's breweries and brewpubs, back in October. Part 1 is here.

I think I must have visited Boulder's Avery Brewing Company 10 years ago on a pre-festival breweries tour ahead of the Great American Beer Festival. My memory's a bit vague, but I have a recollection of a typical “microbrewery in an large garage” type of set-up in a generic industrial unit. If I remember rightly, what made it different from the others we visited was it did sour and barrel-aged beers at a time when those were far from fashionable.

An hour or two before the hordes descend...

Anyway, somewhere along the line they got my email address and have been dutifully sending me their monthly newsletter for pretty much an entire decade. I almost unsubscribed a couple of times, but then a few weeks ago I was glad I hadn't done, because they invited me (and presumably a few hundred others) to a launch party and a free pint of this year's 8.3% Old Jubilation winter ale. And for the first time in a decade it was going to be while I was not only on the right continent, but in the right town!

So after a bit of breakfast, it was into town to find the bus station. Yes, pretty much every US city I've been to has a viable public transport system – if you're willing to put in the effort needed to figure out how it works in terms of fares, stops, etc. It helped a little that Boulder comes under the Denver Regional Transportation District (RTD), and I'd used Denver buses in the past, but really it wasn't that hard to scope out the routes on Google Maps, check the RTD website for timings, and so on.

So there I was just after lunch, waiting for bus 205 with coins in hand – the ticket machines don't give change. Sure, the bus carried a little age, but it was clean and comfortable, and like many other bus companies they've adopted the system of giving a recorded announcement ahead of each stop. (When London Transport did this, they found it greatly increased travellers' confidence, and no wonder!)

When I got off and headed into the industrial estate that Avery moved back in February this year, I was over an hour early though. That's because in the process of checking the route I'd found a second brewery resident there that I'd never heard of before, and where Avery didn't open until 3pm, this one opened at 2…

Asher Brewing Company's main claim to fame is that when it opened in 2009 it was the first all-organic brewery in Colorado – I presume there's been others since then. Tucked away among workshops and offices, the taproom was cool and bright, with at least half a dozen beers on draught. It was an unusual mix of a clean space with cheerful service and a sense of activist grunge. I liked it, but I can see it wouldn't be to everyone's taste.

The beers were certainly well made, the best being the Green Bullet IPA which had a nice balance of chewy dry-sweet malt and aromatic hoppy bitterness. The others I tried – I had a flight of six tasters, including a properly (but not overly) bitter Kölsch and a chewy Double IPA – were almost as good. The one exception was a slightly insipid and over-gassy brown ale.

From there it was a short walk back to Avery, where there was already a small crowd on the terrace outside the bar. As I walked up, I had to marvel a little at the purpose-built structure in front of me – it combines brewery, packaging plant, barrel ageing stores, restaurant, bar, shop and of course offices, and it's hard to imagine that it had only been in operation for eight months.

My pint of Old Jube

The bar was already getting busy, even though it was the middle of Monday afternoon, but I was able to get a seat at the bar. The gimmick for the Old Jube launch was you had to wear a sweater to claim your pint – it being sunny and pretty warm outside of course – and there were several on view besides mine. I wouldn't normally start an afternoon session with an eight percenter, but hey, needs must… I just had time to enjoy the rich and lightly toasty brew, with its hints of toffee, cola and apple, before heading upstairs to join one of the regular free brewery tours. More on that in the next post in this series….

Looking for common ground in Belgian brewing

The legendary Saison brewery

If all I'd attended while I was in Belgium was the first day of the European Beer Writers Conference, I might have imagined that there was not much alternative to the industrial beers of AB-InBev apart from the die-hard traditionalists of the Belgian Family Brewers association.

Fortunately, talking to some of the brewers on the pre- and post-conference tours, and also at the beerex on the conference's second day, a different picture emerged. It also became clear just why the BFB members are so fiercely pro-heritage and against the likes of gypsy and contract brewers – they are the last two dozen proud survivors of a long tradition that once included hundreds of family breweries. As in every other European country, the others all closed down and/or sold out to the macrobrewers, most likely because a younger generation of the owning family preferred a new Porsche to some hard work.

The tours introduced us to Lambic breweries, for instance. Some old enough to join the BFB with its 50-year age minimum, and others mere striplings in comparison yet already leaders in their art (more on these in a later post). Meanwhile, meeting newer brewers at the beerex gave another view of a vibrant and youthful brewing culture, as did visiting Beer Project Brussels to see its nearly-complete new 10hl brewkit.

Kristof Vandenbussche

One of those at the beerex was Fort Lapin, a new yet traditionally focused brewery from Bruges/Brugge. As an aside, visitors tend to think of Bruges as a beer city, yet Fort Lapin is now one of just two commercial breweries operating there, the other being De Halve Maan (The Half Moon). That's the scale of how much brewing Belgium has lost over the decades.

Being only four years old or thereabouts, Fort Lapin is definitely not eligible to join BFB. Formerly a keen home-brewer, owner Kristof Vandenbussche is a heating engineer by trade, and he was able to use his technical skills to build most of the brewkit himself, using old dairy tanks and even doing his own welding. As a result, he estimates that the 10hl brewery cost him perhaps €100,000 over the years, the biggest expense being the bottling line. That might look a lot, but is less than 20% of what the Brussels Beer Project has invested in its all-new brewery and bottling line.

Another aside: one of the problems Belgian brewers face is that, perhaps driven by price competition among the macrobrewers, people expect beer to be cheap. As a result, Kristof noted that he earned more last year from the 4000 people who paid to visit his brewery than he did from selling beer.

He brews seasonals and specials, plus three standards of Belgian brewing as his regulars: Dubbel, Tripel and Quadrupel, all of them spiced and the Dubbel being amber from hibiscus flowers, rather than the more usual brown.

BPB shopfront

Beer Project Brussels is quite a different kettle of wort. Its beers are much more in the modern fusion vein, so for example there's one that crosses a Tripel with a Bavarian-style Hefeweizen, a Belgian IPA brewed with bread Sumerian-style, and a Belgian twist on Black IPA. The beer recipes were crowd-sourced via social networking, with founders Olivier de Brauwere and Sébastien Morvan contract-brewing at Brouwerij Anders in Limburg.

They also part-funded their new pilot brewery in central Brussels via crowdfunding, with more than 1200 people contributing €160 each, for which they are each due to receive 12 beers a year for the rest of their lives. (That looks like a pretty good deal to me – maybe 10% to 15% return on investment. I assume it excludes shipping though!)

It's bigger on the inside!

The result is something like a Tardis – when I visited BPB's address at the scruffier end of Antoine Dansaert Straat last week I found a dusty unassuming shopfront. Behind this, they were at work building a small shop and tasting room, but walk deeper in and the whole place opens up into a big 500 square metre workspace, lined with bare brick walls and fitted with a shiny new Braukon 10hl brewkit. Since I visited, photos on Facebook show that the first 10hl fermenters have arrived, as has a bottling line capable of filling 1500 bottles an hour.

So far, so micro. But as I mentioned, this is only intended as a pilot brewery – the most successful of the new recipes will go to Brouwerij Anders for full-scale brewing.

The two strands of non-macro Belgian brewing could almost exist in different worlds. In one of the sessions, a Family Brewers speaker mentioned that on average it took their members 1.2 years to introduce a new beer – that's 14 months, though I think several of them are rather faster now! By comparison, the Beer Project plans to create (they prefer the term co-create, as they'll use input from social networks) 20 new beers each year.

The consequence? The BFB speaker added that “family brewers really think things through and think of the next generation.” In contrast, the younger breweries are happy to do short-run specials and one-offs – you could argue that they prioritise the drinkers, on the basis that if they're happy the company will do well. It's an old, old chasm, and one which both sides will need to bridge.