CITYMAKING SOURS ACCESSIBLE

Last year, 2022, was a year of change, a year of growth and a year of evolution for Vault City. There were new faces, new beers, collabs, supermarket listings and also its taproom and smokehouse popping up on Portobello High Street. They brewed some of their new favourite beers and even released one of their top-rated beers of all time. With that they had the bar set for 2023, something they’ve already well hit.

“It’s a testament to the team that we came into this year off the back of a global pandemic, seeing production double, the quality of the beer increasing all the time and having a huge number of projects completed successfully. It was a remarkable 2022 for us,” says Steven Smith-Hay, co-founder of Vault City.

During that time the brewery released more than 65 beers: from sessions to mid and “high vaultage” sours. They experimented with a lot of pastry/dessert sours in 2022, a style which they had only dabbled with before, and found themselves going back to basics with some of their final releases, focusing in on the humble fruited sour beer for which they’ve always been known. They also collaborated with nearly 40 breweries last year, with 20 brews completed at the Edinburgh brewery and 19 away from home: including their first ever international collaborations. The return of travel, post-Covid, meant more collabs abroad, finding themselves at 27 festivals around the world, with them even brewing a festival exclusive – just 300 litres of 999g/L Strawberry Banana Vanilla Crunch, a nod to their 999g/L series using the legal maximum amount of fruit while still calling it a beer.

And while the team has grown to more than 20, the business also adopted a four-day week operating from 8am to 5.30pm Monday to Thursday, with the working week reduced from 40 hours a week to 35, a new working schedule that was phased in over eight months from April 2021.

But following a whirlwind 2022, and as we near the mid-point of this year, Smith-Hay and the brewery haven’t rested on their laurels - far from it. And that’s involved major equipment investments across the board.

“Coming into 2022, we noticed that we had problems with capacity, problems with packaging and also problems with the level of losses that we were seeing. As a result, the main goal for last year was to invest in projects to see that side of the business improve,” he explains. “So we’ve doubled capacity. We installed 10 75 hectoliter FVs specially designed by Willis European to fit the space that we’ve got. They are approximately one metre wide and very tall and also two 150 hectoliter FVs. In doing so, that allowed us to come into this year with excess capacity.”

Smith-Hay adds: “The losses we were seeing in our beer were pretty high given that we are very fruit-forward usually adding 200g p/l of whatever fruit we are using. These losses were somewhere in the high 20s coming into the year. But with the addition of our new decanter centrifuge, we’re hoping to reduce that down below 10 and hopefully sub 5% losses, all while not impacting the flavour profile of the beer.”

And on the packaging front, Vault City were one of the first UK customers to invest in The CP10 from Micro Can Canning Machines. The system is a twin lane 10-head innovative counter pressure filling and seaming machine with the ability to change can size at the turn of a wheel and the flexibility to fill products of various carbonation levels the CP10 offers more versatility for the operator. The twin lane setup allows the operator to run lanes independently. This was complemented by a UK-first end-to-end packaging solution from Dutch business Zomerdijk Engineering.

These investments have been integral in increasing the efficiency of the brewery’s small pack operation, all-important in getting their beers to market, which have increasingly involved listings in various supermarket chains.

“Supermarkets have been key to our journey. We were one of the first companies, after breweries such as North Brewing and Northern Monk, that probably came as a surprise for supermarket entry. I was acutely aware of the impact that could have had on the brand,” he says. “But we went in with a very honest and open attitude. We explained to people that COVID taught us a lot of very hard lessons that we almost couldn’t have recovered from.

“The big one was that as you grow overheads you need to have dependability and with supermarkets we’ve got that. So currently in Tesco and Morrisons there are beers that you can’t find outside of supermarkets in can format. And we do also have another couple of supermarket contracts lined up this year, too.

“I think it’s a great thing for consumers where they can go into a supermarket and pick a beer off the shelf at a reasonable price point and hopefully start their beer journey. I think something like Tripled Fruited Mango from Tesco or Peach and Passionfruit Bellini from Morrisons - these are beers that people can easily pick up, and have relatable flavours. They will then hopefully enjoy sour beer and look at where they can get more. Be that visiting a bottle shop to either pick up more Vault City or the other amazing UK sour breweries.” of Vault City, while recent supermarket listings have given the brewery increased stability in a challenging market. But regardless of where you’re buying those beers, the goal for Smith-Hay and the team is to provide a quality enjoyable product and to also make sour beers more accessible for all.

He explains: “The name itself doesn’t do ourselves any favours. I don’t think the term ‘sour beer’ has the greatest connotations to people who don’t understand what the category is all about. I think, for us, we’re trying to flip the beer journey on its head. You tend to see people starting off with your IPAs and Pale Ales, maybe moving onto Stouts and they pick up a Saison and go ‘What’s this?

“You then often move onto appreciating Sours in the form of Lambic, Gueze and Berliner Weisse. Typically, that would be reserved for craft beer aficionados and probably at the end of your craft beer journey. But what we’re trying to do is to open up that category and be a lot more accessible to allow people to approach craft beer from the other side. So you’re trying Sour beers as your first drink. I believe that our beer can be more accessible than Pale Ales and IPAs. It can be something like Strawberry Sundae tasting like strawberries and cream or Cloudy Lemonade tasting like the lemonade you make at home.

“I think what has been really key to our growth is that accessibility and that it also does what it says on the tin. There’s nothing worse than you try a beer that says it tastes like chocolate, marshmallows and honeycomb and it just tastes of sadness. So we’re really keen to make sure that our beers do exactly what they say.”

While Vault City calls itself a brewer of modern sour beer, Smith-Hay also feels that such descriptors don’t tell the full story when it comes to the beers they produce.

“It almost needs its own entire set of BJCP guidelines. People talk about sour beer simply as sour beer but we talk about it framed as ‘Are we making a tropical beer? Are we making a Pastry beer? Are we making something berryforward?’. Take our collaboration with

Bruichladdich Distillery last year. We took a sour beer base with lemon verbena and we aged it in classic Bruichladdich barrels,” he says. “There’s such a wide spread available to us, such a broad palette that we can paint from. It almost does need its own definition, its own categories.

“It’s also quite funny to see to see people pointing at it and getting up in-arms about what we’re doing. Telling us that it isn’t beer and it’s all terrible. These people need to take a look at themselves and realise what they’re getting angry at. There’s a place in the world for Landlord and Oakham Citra and there’s a place in the world for Cookie Dough Dreamcake.”

Starting out in 2018, Vault City has always been focused on exploration. At the heart of their beers is the brewery’s house culture and mixed fermentation base beer paired with real fruit ingredients. And they use literal tonnes of it in their recipes. And they’ve come a long way since Smith-Hay was brewing at home. Formative weeks and months that presented their own hurdles to overcome.

He recalls: “Homebrewing for me started I think around about 2011, using kit from the Morley Home Brew Centre. I picked up a Woodforde’s Wherry, and by the time that had finished fermenting I think I had another four buckets on the go. I started off trying to clone beers at the time such as Punk IPA and Innis and Gunn Rum Cask.

I made a SMASH beer, single malt, single hop. I didn’t understand single malt that well and used all black malt. That was horrendous, goes without saying! From there I progressed through to Grainfather 70 litre batches and I installed eight beer taps in my kitchen. It got to the stage where I was unable to give away the amount of beer that I wanted to produce.”

So the next obvious step was to start commercial brewery….

“HMRC came around for a visit to see the kitchen, and to see the cellar. They saw the spare room, which was a Customs and Excise warehouse. ‘This is a bit strange, but we heard you wanted to start a brewery so we needed to have a look,’ they said.

“Environmental Health came around to make me install an automatic door closer on the kitchen door so the cat couldn’t get in when we were brewing. I also had to install a sign on my bedroom door saying ‘Customs and Excise WarehouseDo not enter if you have any cigarettes in your pocket or if you’re drinking a beer’. And things would soon escalate from there.

“We installed a 400 litre, three-vessel kit. I was a jumped-up homebrewer, which I still am. Though I still haven’t brewed properly on the equipment here, unfortunately. The kit was very much cobbled together, poor efficiency. But you know what, we made good beer,” he recalls. “It was fermented in the cellar in 200 litre batches, so a typical 400 litre batch was split two ways. Bottled by hand using the beer taps in the kitchen which was a long process. It would take all day to do 40 cases, all bottled-conditioned in my spare room. I don’t think I could afford to keep the temperature that high during the current times!”

Smith-Hay adds: “And then we would jump about Edinburgh delivering it by hand. We quickly got recognition as being someone to watch. We landed at Beavertown’s Extravaganza festival and did all the craft beer festivals in the UK. There was an obvious demand and that was the point in which we had to ask ourselves do we continue this as a hobby or do we throw ourselves into a sour-only brewery. At the time that was just not a thing. There was no sort of brewery that had taken the all-sour route.”

“We looked at it and decided to give it a bash and that’s when we’d make the move to Dundee where 71 Brewing took us in. We took up home in their warehouse, using 500sqm space to fit in four 40HL FVs, two Meheen lines and some storage, too. That’s when we started building the brewery from the inside-out. Once we moved here to Portobello one of the last additions was actually the brew kit because we had everything else!”

Come January 2021, the team brewed their first beer at their current Portobello site. It’s a 5,000sqft site, moving from the four 40HL FVs at 71 Brewing to its 10 75s and the two 150s. Kit that makes the facility feel smaller with each capacity addition. “We now need another site to continue growth,” he muses. And further growth is unsurprisingly high on the agenda for Vault City as we move through this year. Smith-Hay is excited about the months ahead but he’s also mindful of the challenges the industry faces as a whole.

“Success in 2023 for a lot of people will be still existing. It’s a bleak landscape at the moment for a lot of breweries. So we’ve got a plan to get through,” he explains. “We talked earlier about the investment we’ve just put in. We’ve got a great accountant and the with the increase in energy costs, increase in staffing, increase in hire-purchase costs, loan repayments, they gave me an eye watering number that we need to hit every month to stay alive.”

Smith-Hay adds: “So a lot of the end of last year was spent trying to plan for the year ahead. That looks like a big growth in export, big growth in on-trade and we will continue sending out our rotational lines out to bars and bottle shops as that’s still our bread and butter, alongside growing our presence in supermarkets.

“The shift towards four packs and supermarkets can’t be missed. The single cans on shelves are shrinking and shrinking while four packs are the future for supermarket sales. I know it’s not in my best interests to say this but I feel like when we task ourselves with making beer to a budget, we actually tend to make some of the best beer that we’ve made. Some of my personal favourite beers that we’ve made are our two core beers, Strawberry Sundae and Cloudy Lemonade. In my opinion these are exceptional beers and I can say that now because I have no longer have a hand in making stuff anymore…”

Increased presence in supermarkets all leads in to the brewery forecasting tripledigit growth again in 2023. But it’s not all about growth, either.

“We want to continue to ensure that we’ve got all of our costs captured and making sure that we try and be as good an employer as possible. We’ve got a lot of staff members to look after now. We need to make sure that the business is rock solid, and also that they’re taking a fair wage. I feel we are doing that.”