SIBA Journal Summer 2019

ISSUE 113 S UM M ER 2 0 1 9

BREAKING BOUNDARIES BLACK MALT BOTTLE SHARE’S ALEX SEWELL

CRAFT LEGEND

NEW BELGIUM’S KIM JORDAN

DOCUMENTING DIVERSITY NICCI PEET’S PHOTO PROJECT

BEYOND PRIDE

GUEST COLUMNIST LILY WAITE

MEET THE BREWER

HARVIESTOUN’S AMY COCKBURN

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CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE

EDITOR'S COMMENT

WORDS LILY WAITE PHOTOGRAPHY DOUGLAS BARCLAY

WELCOME

TO THE FIRST EVER EDITION OF THE SIBA JOURNAL DEDICATED TO CELEBRATING DIVERSITY IN BEER. When I started writing about beer and pubs back in the mid-1990s I was often struck by how few women, and even fewer people of colour and representatives from the LGBTQ community there were at industry events and gatherings.

I was quite frankly often the only woman in rooms predominantly filled with middle-aged white British men.

I am very happy to say that has changed. I look around at events like BeerX UK now and see people from a wide range of backgrounds, cultures and countries coming together to share their passion for beer and brewing. But I do feel we could be doing more to broaden the appeal of our great industry, and the amazing beers we produce, to a wider audience.

student that brewing was not for girls (see pages 19-25)! And not forgetting of course one of the founders of the US craft brewing scene, brewing legend Kim Jordan from New Belgium, who spoke to me about the challenges of growing her ground-breaking brewing empire (see pages 42-49).

We also feature a visual insight into the current diversity in the UK craft beer scene with an extract from photographer Nicci Peet’s project on diversity on pages 36-41, and examine the issues around LGBTQ representation in craft beer through the thoughts of our guest columnist Lily Waite on page 27.

I would love to hear your thoughts on the subject of diversity and some of the issues raised in this edition of the Journal, so do please drop me an email at caroline.nodder@siba.co.uk and let me know what you think.

In this issue of the Journal we explore some of the factors that are limiting diversity in beer, the reasons why many groups are still underrepresented on the workforce in breweries and in pubs and bars enjoying craft beers, and examine what breweries can do better to address this. We also meet and celebrate some of the pioneers who are leading the growth in diversity through their own work and ideas, and talk to them about their experiences and thoughts on the future.

Finally, I would like to congratulate James Calder on his recent appointment as the new SIBA CEO. James has headed up SIBA’s lobbying efforts over the last two years and significantly raised the organisation’s profile during that time, as well as being a guiding force behind the issues and content we cover within the pages of the Journal. I look forward very much to working with him in his new capacity and you can read about his initial plans in his first column as CEO on page 7.

Our cover star Alex Sewell is the founder of the Black Malt Bottle Share, which she launched in reaction to the fact that she didn’t see anyone like her enjoying the beers she loved (see pages 28-35). Alex still finds herself in a minority as a black woman in beer, and through her passion for darker ales she brings people from a wide range of backgrounds together for her events to encourage a better mix of people into the sector.

The Autumn issue is due out in October so do please keep those updates, news and views coming in to me at caroline.nodder@ siba.co.uk, and feel free to add me to your press release or media distribution lists to be included in our Supplier and Brewery News sections – the next deadline for submissions will be September 2nd.

Other strong female voices joining Alex in this issue include Amy Cockburn from Harviestoun, in our Meet the Brewer feature, who is now leading her team up in Scotland despite being told as a

Society of Independent Brewers PO Box 136, Ripon, North Yorkshire HG4 5WW Tel: 01765 640 441 www.siba.co.uk Email: riponoffice@siba.co.uk

Happy reading!

Caroline

CAROLINE NODDER EDITOR, SIBA JOURNAL caroline.nodder@siba.co.uk

Editor: Caroline Nodder (caroline.nodder@siba.co.uk) Published by: Media Alive Limited Produced on behalf of SIBA by: Media Alive Limited, 2nd Floor, The Red House, 119 Fore Street, Hertford, Hertfordshire SG14 1AX. T: 01992 505 810 Creative Director: Darren Kefford (darren@wearema.co.uk) Studio Manager: Jon Hardy (jon@wearema.co.uk) Advertising Manager: Claire Rooney (claire@wearema.co.uk) Managing Director: Dan Rooney (dan@wearema.co.uk)

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SIBA JOURNAL SUMMER 2019

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SUMM E R

CONTENTS

2019 ISSUE 113

MEET OUR NEW CEO

ASSURED SUCCESS

REVIVING TRUMAN’S

JAMES CALDER WRITES HIS FIRST COLUMN FOR THE JOURNAL

SIBA’S ASSURED INDEPENDENT BRITISH CRAFT BREWER SEAL

THE STORY BEHIND THE RELAUNCH OF A LEGEND

PAGE 7

PAGE 17

PAGES 52-59

NEWS 9-15 17 70-75 81-89 91-97

FEATURES

SIBA NEWS

19-25

SIBA CAMPAIGNS

28-35

All the news from SIBA HQ

The latest on the Assured scheme

REGIONAL BEER COMPETITIONS

The winning beers from the North East, South West and Wales & West competitions

SIBA BREWERS’ NEWS

The latest from our Brewing Members around the UK

SUPPLIER NEWS

News and views from SIBA’s Supplier Associate Members

COMMENT 7 27 36-41 69

CEO’S UPDATE

James Calder on taking over as SIBA CEO

GUEST COLUMNIST

Lily Waite talks about LGBTQ representation in the beer sector

DOCUMENTING DIVERSITY

Photographer Nicci Peet offers a visual insight into how the industry is embracing change

TECHNICAL FOCUS

Brewlab’s Dr Keith Thomas examines the use of seaweed in beer

42-49 51 52-59

MEET THE BREWER

We meet Amy Cockburn, Head Brewer at Harviestoun

THE BIG INTERVIEW

Black Malt Bottle Share’s founder Alex Sewell discusses the importance of diversity in beer

AROUND THE WORLD

We meet Kim Jordan from New Belgium to talk about her role in blazing a path for female brewers

BREWERS ASSOCIATION DIVERSITY INITIATIVES News from the US on their ground-breaking project to unlock diversity

BUSINESS PROFILE

We feature the revival of the historic Truman’s brewery

61-67

BUSINESS BACK OFFICE

76-79

GOLD MEMBERS

Advice on law, marketing, digital and regulation

Charles Faram & Co Ltd and Murphy & Son Ltd

98

GOLD & SILVER SPONSORS

101

MEET THE SIBA TEAM

102

SIBA CONTACTS

Listing of our key sponsors

Introducing two of SIBA’s team members

Contact details for key SIBA staff

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SIBA JOURNAL SUMMER 2019

5

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CEO’S UPDATE

A NOTE FROM THE NEW SIBA CEO For the past two years I’ve led SIBA’s campaigning on issues like The challenge before us is not insignificant. Small SBR, deposit return, the Pubs Code and the Portman Group code. independent brewers like you are facing huge pressures.

Every single time I’ve been in meetings like that I think, what On price, on competition, on access to market. You need to would a small brewer in Glasgow, Cardiff, Suffolk, Cheshire or any other place, say if they were here? What would you say if you innovate and deliver great beer, every time. Your business were stood in front of the Chancellor, if you had the chance? acumen needs to be as good as your brewing skills. My In those meeting rooms I’ve done my best to represent the voices message for all brewers out there, SIBA members or not, of all small independent brewers. And I’m determined to continue to do so. To build SIBA up, win the trust of all brewers and show is simple; SIBA exists to help. SIBA should be run for you, that SIBA is on your side. with you. We’re here to fight on your behalf, deliver real On a lighter note it’s humbling to be writing in the same pages benefits to your business and help sell your in this special diversity issue of the Journal amazing beer at a fair price. We’re on your alongside inspirational women like Lily, Nicci, Alex, Amy, Kim, Caroline (our Editor!) and others. side.

NOW IS THE TIME FOR Whilst we spend a lot of time focussing on the ALL SMALL INDEPENDENT SIBA has big challenges, too. It’s an organisation things we don’t like in the beer industry, it is that has had its ups and downs over recent nice, every now and again to put that to one side BREWERS TO RALLY, TO times. SIBA needs to be fit for purpose so it and celebrate the positive, progressive and good GET INVOLVED AND FOR is fighting for you on the issues that matter, things in beer. To think about how brewing and delivering genuine value and is an organisation SIBA TO WORK HARDER beer make a positive impact on so many people’s that all independent brewers can be proud of lives.

TO WIN EVERYONE being a part of. I’m lucky that the team within ROUND. Lastly, it’s been a bit of a whirlwind for me, the SIBA are passionate, dedicated and hardworking.

That’s a great thing for me to inherit, and I want to thank the team personally for everything you do. We couldn’t do it without you!

My view is we’re stronger as an industry if we work together.

We’ve spent a lot of time over the past few years arguing amongst ourselves about the definition of small, of craft and of what it means to be independent. SIBA has made some mistakes, too.

Now is the time for all small independent brewers to rally, to get involved and for SIBA to work harder to win everyone round. We have a lot more in common, and can achieve more if we work, and fight, together. Cask, keg, can and bottle; it doesn’t matter.

The important things are quality, independence and the people behind the beer.

last few weeks. It’s an honour, it’s a privilege but more than anything it’s a bit daunting to have been appointed Chief Executive of SIBA. It’s a huge responsibility. But I’m up for it. My door is open; invite me to come and see your brewery and let’s go for a pint. That’s how we begin to change things for the better.

Cheers!

James

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JAMES CALDER SIBA CEO james.calder@siba.co.uk

SIBA JOURNAL SUMMER 2019

7

SIBA CHAIRMAN'S COLUMN RUNNING A PROFESSIONAL BREWING BUSINESS IS NEVER EASY AND GETTING THE FUNDAMENTALS RIGHT IS VITAL TO SUCCESS

SIBA IS CHANGING As I write this column in mid-June, it feels like summer has been and gone. After a cracking Easter, cold and rain seems to be the dominant weather pattern in my part of Northern England! To use a meteorologist’s terminology, the weather is changeable.

And neatly that brings me to the subject of this column – SIBA is changing. As you will be aware the last three months have seen the departures of long serving Operations Director, Nick Stafford and Mike Benner, our Chief Executive, left us at the end of June to move on to a new role as Chief Executive of the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers. We wish both Nick and Mike every success in the future and thank them for their huge contribution to SIBA. Without their influential leadership SIBA would not be what it is today.

As you’ll also now be aware SIBA has announced the appointment of James Calder as our new Chief Executive and I’m delighted with his appointment.

James is an exciting choice to lead SIBA forwards. He brings energy, determination and new ideas. He has successfully led SIBA’s campaigning work over the last two years and he’s raised the political profile of SIBA immeasurably. I know he’ll work tirelessly on your behalf to address the myriad of issues and challenges that we small brewers face in our day to day lives.

We all know that life is not getting easier and, as I have touched on before, there is a huge gulf between the public perception of a healthy and vibrant beer

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SIBA JOURNAL SUMMER 2019

market and the harsh reality of stiff competition, regulatory pressures, limited access to market, and the predatory antics of Big Beer. Back to the weather analogy again - we are in the midst of a perfect storm.

Many independent brewers are finding life tough as evidenced by some recent closures. This is, I suppose, inevitable and arguably the work of normal market forces as it has been obvious for some time that unless the market for small brewery beer expands, there are, in some parts of the country, too many breweries to be sustainable. The harsh reality is that those unable to adapt to adverse headwinds will always struggle to survive. Running a professional brewing business is never easy and getting the fundamentals right is vital to success. Brewing great beer in tune with customer demands, being soundly financed, having a strategic vision and understanding your markets are all part of the essential business basics that, whilst not guaranteeing success, will considerably help achieve this.

SIBA can’t run your business for you but is there to help create a better and fairer market for independent brewers, campaign for a fairer duty system and bring influence from a smaller brewers’ perspective to Government that seeks through legislation to tackle society’s issues. A current example is the proposed Deposit Return Scheme for glass, cans and plastic containers.

Scotland is leading the way on this and the rest of the UK is likely to follow very quickly. Who would not support seemingly sensible measures to create a greener and more sustainable environment? Yet the potential impact on smaller businesses is huge if this is not fairly and properly implemented. SIBA is working hard behind the scenes to ensure that those who are legislating on this mitigate the disproportionate impact it will have on our members.

Another example of SIBA’s influence is with the Portman Group which has recently issued guidance on the number of alcohol units permitted in a “single use” container. The outcome, inevitably, is not perfect but would have been considerably worse without SIBA’s intervention pointing out that it is usually the smaller, more innovative, brewer who produces higher quality and strength products targeted at the premium end of the market and highly unlikely to be used for alcohol abuse.

At the time of writing this we have not heard from the Treasury about the outcome of their review of Small Breweries Relief. I’d like to thank all our members who participated in the HMRC survey – our understanding is that the number of smaller brewers responding was high and that the message that SBR is of fundamental importance to our members’ businesses has been received.

I am hopeful of a positive outcome.

This summer SIBA will launch the second wave of our cost benchmarking survey in which I hope you will all participate. It is another example of a member benefit – however, only those who take part will be able to share in the detailed report. Last year’s survey results also helped SIBA input valuable data to the SBR survey as we demonstrated to the Treasury that smaller brewers’ costs of production are significantly higher than claimed by those seeking to reduce SBR. I would urge you to spare the time to participate this year.

Finally, this issue celebrates the diversity and inclusivity of the UK’s independent brewing sector – our industry has much to be proud of as is demonstrated in the following pages.

Enjoy the summer!

Cheers

Ian

IAN FOZARD CHAIRMAN ian.fozard@siba.co.uk

SIBA NEWS

James Calder becomes SIBA Chief Executive

SIBA’s board has announced the appointment of James Calder as its new Chief Executive.

He officially took the role up on the 1st July, replacing Mike Benner who has left to become Chief Executive of the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers.

James, who was previously SIBA’s Head of Public Affairs and Communications brings significant campaign experience, new energy and a passion for the independent craft beer sector.

On his appointment James said: “I’m delighted to be appointed to lead SIBA. We all know it’s an increasingly challenging environment out there for the UK’s independent brewers. But there are

opportunities, too. Because of that it’s more important than ever that SIBA is working well, fighting for brewers on the issues that matter and delivering genuine benefits. I’m excited to take SIBA on the next step of its journey.”

Ian Fozard, SIBA’s Chairman, said: “James is an exciting choice as successor to Mike Benner as we embark on this new phase in the organisation. He will bring youth, energy and new ideas. James has successfully led SIBA’s campaigning work on issues like Small Breweries Relief, deposit return schemes for drinks containers and our engagement with industry stakeholders. He’s raised the political profile of SIBA immeasurably and

will bring a new perspective.”

James will be working closely with SIBA’s board, executive and senior management team to deliver a new commercial plan, build the staff team to deliver SIBA’s five strategic directions and bring a renewed focus on delivering genuine member benefits by fighting for small independent brewers.

Francis Patton, Chairman of the Executive and SIBA Commercial, said: “We have been impressed with how James has advanced quickly within SIBA and built positive relationships with many brewers and SIBA stakeholders. He’s a great asset to SIBA and we look forward to working with him.”

Nick Stafford steps down from his role at SIBA

Nick Stafford left his role as Operations Director for SIBA at the end of April after over 10 years as an employee and many more as an associate of the organisation.

SIBA Chairman Ian Fozard said: “Nick left his role as SIBA’s Operations Director at the end of April after over 10 years as an employee and a long-standing association with SIBA. I would like to thank Nick for his hard work and commitment to SIBA over the years.”

Until further notice please refer all correspondence for Nick Stafford to Sara Knox, Company Secretary at sara.knox@siba.co.uk.

Yeovil Ales and Palmers Brewery win gold in the South West notes of citrus fruit and sweeter peaches and apricots are provided by a well-crafted blend of pale malts and aromatic hops.

Guy Sheppard, SIBA Competitions Chairman, said: “The new outdoor venue for the event has proved a great success and the quality of the beers this year has been as high as ever – with some amazing cask, bottle and canned beers on show in the competition. I would like to congratulate all of the winners and in particular the overall Golds, which really are the best of the best craft beer from the South West.”

Darren Batten from Palmers Brewery said: “On our 225th birthday it’s thrilling to win the top gold for ‘Tally Ho’ at the SIBA South West beer competition. It’s a treat, I’m lost for words!”

As well as cask beers the competition also judges the best bottled and canned beers from across the region, in a variety of style categories.

“Tally Ho” by Palmers Brewery and “YPA”

by Yeovil Ales have taken home the two top spots in the SIBA South West Independent Beer Awards 2019. The awards took place prior to the famous Tuckers Maltings Beer Festival in Newton Abbot.

“Tally Ho” by Palmers Brewery was named overall Champion Cask beer at the

competition and is described as strong, complex and full of deep distinctive flavours with a rich fruit cake flavour. First brewed in the 1940s, this prize-winning dark strong old ale has a loyal following among real ale connoisseurs.

“YPA” by Yeovil Ales took home the overall Gold in the ‘Bottle & Can’ competition and is a smooth, fruity taste sensation. The

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Dr Declan Teare, Head Brewer at Yeovil Ales, said of his win: “Given the amazing quality of beers in the South West it’s incredible to be judged by our peers with YPA as the best bottled beer in the region.

Yeovil Pale Ale is our double IPA style, easy drinking beer and it’s one of our favourites!”

For the full list of winners see pages 70-71.

SIBA JOURNAL SUMMER 2019

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SIBA NEWS

SIBA successfully lobbies PCA on declared volumes In November the PCA published a consultation on "Accounting for duty paid on alcohol and volumes of unsaleable draught products". This consultation created a new requirement for PubCos to tell every tenant the declared saleable volume on every beer they sell, including tied products and guest products, like those provided by SIBA members through BeerFlex. This is intended to give tenants the best possible information when it comes to their rent assessments and is a fair move, in the interests of pub tenants.

However, this created a problem for BeerFlex brewers because we did not hold this information on each and every beer centrally.

If PubCos weren't able to provide this information to their tenants, then either they would be found in breach of the code, or they would stop buying SIBA members' beers. Neither of these options were suitable, so SIBA lobbied the PCA to make special arrangements for third party suppliers, like SIBA brewers.

The guidance now says: 1.5 The PCA recognises that POBs will be reliant on some information from third party suppliers to comply with this requirement and acknowledge that the disclosure by brewers of information on the volume on which duty has been paid is in the first instance a question of compliance with HMRC rules. Regulation 16 (in relation to Rent Proposals) and Regulation 20 of the Pubs Code (in relation to Rent Assessment Proposals) specifically provide that POBs are under a duty to provide their TPTs with the Schedule 2 information that is reasonably available to the POB. 1.6 The PCA will adopt a proportionate approach to compliance in accordance with its published enforcement guidance.

In particular, where a POB has taken reasonable steps to obtain the information required under Excise Notice 226 and the associated information on volumes from third party suppliers, and where those suppliers have failed to provide a POB with that relevant information, a Schedule

2 profit and loss forecast calculated without reference to this information is not non-compliant with this guidance for that reason. Reasonable steps includes POBs working with suppliers to help them to provide this information to limit the circumstances in which the information is not reasonably available.

Reasonable steps do not include delisting.

Footnote: 1 HMRC Excise Notice 226 requires brewers to make their customers aware of the volume on which duty has been paid ‘by a statement on the label, delivery note or price list and so on’.

Pubs Code Guidance under section 61 Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act 2015 This means that SIBA brewers can continue to have confidence and sell to PubCo tenants through Beerflex whilst we gather all the required information on declared saleable volumes.

If you haven't yet updated this field in Beerflex, we encourage you to do so immediately.

Portman Group Code update Members will be aware the Portman Group has issued a new code and new guidance which regulates the promotion, marketing and sale of alcoholic products. All SIBA members are automatic signatories to the Portman Group code.

Whilst we may not agree with every decision or new piece of guidance, self

regulation of the industry is preferable to legislation, driven by the Department of Health and the anti-alcohol/temperance movements. Self Regulation of the industry works, and is credible. The new code contains a number of useful and progressive updates including further protection for vulnerable people, appeals to emotion and the widely acknowledged

work led by SIBA’s Jaega Wise of Wild Card Brewery on causing offence/sexism within alcohol marketing and promotion.

All members should make themselves familiar with the new code and use the free advice service on new brands. See www.portmangroup.org.uk for more information.

Cullercoats Brewery and Ossett Brewery awarded best independent craft beers in the North East Cullercoats Brewery took home overall Gold in the cask beer competition with their ‘Polly Donkin Oatmeal Stout’, a rich, thick and creamy stout which proved a hit with the expert judges. Ossett Brewery won the overall gold in the bottle & can competition with ‘Alpaca’, an aromatic double dry-hopped IPA brewed under their new SALT Beer Factory brand.

Cullercoats Brewery in North Shields and Ossett Brewery in West Yorkshire have taken the two top spots in the SIBA North East Independent Beer Awards.

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SIBA JOURNAL SUMMER 2019

Accepting the top cask beer award for Cullercoats was Bill Scantlebury, Head brewer, who said: “This is the most important award for us to win as it’s judged by our peers. It’s a fantastic pat on the back from our fellow brewers and we’re very proud to win. It’s great to see a traditional beer like this winning against such varied competition too, with all of the amazing

beers in this competition it’s brilliant that a traditional British Oatmeal stout can win.”

Presenting the awards was SIBA’s Head of PR & Marketing Neil Walker, who said: “The quality of beer in this competition was astounding, with a real variety of styles including more modern New England style hazy IPA’s and fruited sour beers going head to head with traditional porters, stouts and barleywines in the final judging. I’d like to congratulate all of the winners and in particular Cullercoats and Ossett who took the overall top spots – winning these awards is a huge achievement and I wish you the best of luck at the National finals next year!”

For the full list of winners see pages 72-73.

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SIBA NEWS

Wetherspoons introduces SIBA'S FSQ to ensure quality National pub chain J D Wetherspoons has introduced SIBA’s own minimum quality control standard for all of its cask ‘real ale’ across the UK – in an effort to ensure punters get the perfect pint every time.

The ‘SIBA Food Safety and Quality Standard’ was put into place at the start of May, and any brewery supplying real ale to Wetherspoons must have the

quality standard in place, or an equivalent accreditation of equal weight.

“Real ale is unique to the UK and a huge part of our cultural heritage, in fact it’s the number one thing which tourists want to try when visiting the UK – a proper British pint in a real British pub – so it is great to see Wetherspoons putting quality first and adopting SIBA’s accreditation as their minimum standard,”

Struggling to locate missing containers? Check Spa Trak Log in to spa-trak.co.uk to see where your containers are in order to arrange collection. All possessing yards (except Kegwatch Clearing yards) can hold containers not bearing the SIBA orange label for a minimum of 28 days before requesting uplift by Kegwatch.

It is vital that brewers check Spa Trak weekly to ensure containers are collected before 28 days in order to avoid any unexpected uplift charges.

This timescale should also allow sufficient time for queries to be raised with possessing yards who may be holding containers which have potentially been collected from trading accounts in error. Containers uplifted after 28 days (not bearing a SIBA orange label) are recharged to brewers by NCRNet.

said Ian Fozard, SIBA Chairman.

Wetherspoon chief executive John Hutson said: “The quality of the beer we serve in our pubs is of the utmost importance to us. Our pubs receive checks from Cask Marque to ensure this is the case and that will continue. The addition of SIBA’s quality control system further highlights our commitment to real ale served in our pubs.”

SIBA comments on Scottish Government announcement on DRS Commenting on the Scottish Government announcement, made

by Environment Secretary Roseanna Cunningham, on introducing Deposit Return Schemes for drinks containers in Scotland, James Calder, SIBA’s new CEO, said: “Whilst craft brewers are keen to do their bit for the environment, this announcement is worrying for small independent brewers who sell beer in Scotland. The costs placed on small businesses like craft brewers will harm them disproportionately compared to global brewers who can act on a huge scale.”

James went on to say: “It is good news however that the Scottish Government have listened to the concerns of brewers and exempted pubs, taprooms and restaurants who sell bottles and cans for consumption on site.”

Details of the announcement can be found here: www.gov.scot/news/deposit-return-scheme/

For log in details please email admin@kegwatch.co.uk.

Coffee and Welsh Cake? Duo of stouts named the best independent craft beers in Wales & West

St Anne’s Brewery and Glamorgan Brewing Co have taken home the two top awards in SIBA’s Wales & West Independent Beer Awards, winning the “cask” and “bottle & can” competitions respectively – one with a coffee stout and one with a Welsh Cake Stout.

The awards are run prior to the opening of the popular SIBA Ludlow Beer Festival at Ludlow Castle and judge the best independent craft beers across a variety of style categories before overall ‘Gold Champions’ are selected in the separate ‘Cask’ and ‘Bottle & Can’ competitions.

It was ‘Iron and Fire’ by St Anne’s Brewery which took home the Overall Gold in the cask beer competition. Featuring fresh ground coffee, it’s a collaboration brew with a local artisanal coffee roasters, giving extra zip to this traditional stout. Chris Yeomans, Head Brewer at St Anne’s Brewery was there to collect the award, and said: “I’m absolutely blown away, I genuinely wasn’t expecting to win anything and we’ll all be celebrating back at the brewery. This stout was a collaboration with a local coffee roasters and they’ll be over the moon as well – I can’t wait to tell them!”

‘Welsh Cake Stout’ by Glamorgan brewery is a take on the Welsh classic with all of the flavours of the tea-time cake, wrapped up in a smooth, rich stout. Gavin Parsons, Regional Sales Manager for Glamorgan Brewery accepted the award on behalf of the team, saying: “Absolutely overwhelmed with this achievement – this goes down to all the hardwork of the brewery team. Just incredible, absolutely fantastic to win and the team will be so proud of this. What we tried to do with this beer is do something

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which represents Wales, which for us is Welsh Cake, it seems to have gone down really well with people – and beer judges!”

For the full list of winners see pages 74-75.

Attended a recent beer competition? Tag yourself in our photos on Facebook!

Wherever possible we upload all of the competition photos to our Facebook page so why not take a look and then tag you or your colleagues in the photos? /SocietyOfIndependentBrewers

Also check out our Instagram!

We try to give a behind-the-scenes look of events via our Instagram, as well as sharing some of the best photos of our members' beers featuring the Assured Independent British Craft Brewer logo. /societyofindependentbrewers

SIBA JOURNAL SUMMER 2019

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CONTRACT PACKAGING WE ARE COMMITTED TO PROVIDING FLEXIBLE AND HIGH QUALITY PACKAGING SOLUTIONS TO THE BREWING INDUSTRY. We can cater to requirements for can, keg, bottle and cask in volumes from 30hl to 240hl and our dual canning and bottling line has the ability to run 8000 bottles or 12,000 cans per hour with PakTech can carriers also available.

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SIBA NEWS

SIBA’s Head Office has moved!

For general post please continue to send to our PO BOX address which remains unchanged:

PO BOX 136, Ripon, North Yorkshire, HG4 5WW

The address for deliveries only to SIBA has changed to: SIBA, Unit 4, The Old Laundry, Fishergreen, Ripon, North Yorkshire HG4 1NL. Our telephone number remains the same: 01765 640441 Please update your records to reflect our new delivery address and direct all future deliveries to the new address found above.

SIBA Taste of Champions - Sales & Promotion for SIBA Award Winners A number of leading retailers both in the on and off trade have shown an interest in stocking SIBA award winning beers in order to keep their range fresh, by featuring an ongoing stream of great beers which complement their existing range.

National Competition held at BeerX UK 2019 who are actively trading on BeerFlex and are accredited to SIBA FSQ standard or equivalent, may be contacted to request completion of a questionnaire regarding your capability to supply as well as prices for your winning beers.

Current and potential customers who visited BeerX UK in March have since made contact with the SIBA Commercial team to discuss how the SIBA award winning brewers could be an opportunity for Brewers to sell their beers in wider distribution.

Retailers will then make a final selection from national/regional winners across Gold Silver and Bronze. Dependant on the customer's requirements the final selection and criteria for their listings will be at their sole discretion.

Over the coming weeks and months, award winning brewers from either Regional Competitions 2018/2019 or the

All beers will carry the SIBA Assured Independent British Craft Brewer logo and may be asked to partake in PR activity.

SIBA has taken the view this provides a great opportunity for SIBA brewers to raise the profile of their business and products, promoting their skills as British independent brewers in producing some of the best tasting award winning beers across the UK.

Are you a SIBA Award Winner?

If you are currently trading on BeerFlex and have recently won an award then the SIBA Commercial Team may shortly contact you directly.

If you have recently won an award, but are not currently trading on Beerflex and are interested in this new Taste of Champions initiative, then please drop the Commercial Team a line on riponoffice@siba.co.uk

Eight things brewers need to do to prepare for a no deal Brexit The UK is now set to leave the European Union on the 31st October 2019. At the time of writing the Conservative party is in the process of electing a new leader, and a new Prime Minister. Despite the delay to Brexit there is still a good chance the UK will leave the EU later this year without a deal, or leave with a ‘managed’ no deal.

There are eight things all brewers should be doing now to prepare which you can access via the SIBA website at: www.siba.co.uk/ along with links to further advice and guidance.

Free Beer Marketing For Breweries!

Cask Marque’s ‘CaskFinder’ app offers breweries a free marketing opportunity to promote their beers in all different formats, and not just cask, to more than 60,000 beer consumers every month. This is relevant for all breweries but especially those who are smaller and have limited marketing spend.

The CaskFinder app is one of the most important beer apps on the today’s market.

It helps consumers to find out more about different beers and breweries and to make an informed choice at the bar.

Despite hundreds of breweries engaging with the app on a day to day basis, the app offers far more opportunity than many breweries are utilising. More than 10,000 beers are hosted on the app and are all scored out of 18 for the amount of the information stored and displayed. These scores are not promoted outside of Cask

Marque but it is their mission to enhance the data on each beer towards the perfect 18. This will benefit both the brewer and consumer.

Paul Nunny, Cask Marque’s CEO, said: “It is great to see so many breweries engaging with the CaskFinder app. However not all breweries are using it to its full potential.

Only 10% of the beers score 10 or more out of 18 for the data fields on offer. The app is very simple to update and should be included in a brewery’s day to day marketing plan. Cask Marque want to make sure both the breweries and the consumer are benefitting from our fantastic app.”

If you do not already have a CaskFinder account set up, then all you need to do is email ali@cask-marque.co.uk for your unique password to be able to check and enter your brewery’s information.

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INDEPENDENCE IS BIGGER THAN CRAFT

SIBA CAMPAIGNS

Neil Walker, SIBA Head of PR & Marketing, offers an update on the SIBA Assured Independent Craft Brewer initiative and the importance of highlighting SIBA members’ beers to the consumer…

Craft beer has officially hit the mainstream, with supermarkets across the UK dedicating unprecedented amounts of shelf-space – not to mention time and money via social media and traditional marketing campaigns - to promoting beer from small craft breweries.

The big retailers are realising that having a great beer offering might just swing the decision of the weekly shopper into choosing them over a rival, and as such are supporting beer from smaller producers in a way we haven’t seen before.

But importantly we’re seeing consumers be braver in their choices and mainstream retailers in both the on and off-trade are responding to this. From hazy New England style Pale Ales, to Milkshake IPAs and fruited sour beers – the choice has never been better and people expect craft beer to offer them something interesting and exciting.

The challenge for us as small independent craft brewers isn’t getting people interested in our beers – the demand is there – it is ensuring that when people reach for a craft beer they get the real thing. A beer from a genuine independent craft brewer.

Independent is the important word here as it is something which can be checked and qualified, whereas one of the issues many brewers have with the word ‘craft’ is that it can be used and abused by larger or even global brewers.

Hearteningly the SIBA Craft Beer Report (SCBR) earlier this year showed that when consumers think of craft beer they think first “Made by a small brewer” (43%), next “Made by an independent brewer” (42%) and way down the line in, dead last place, they think “Made by a global brewer” (2%).

This clearly shows that if consumers knew the likes of Maltsmiths, Blue Moon, Hop House 13 were made by a Global Brewer they would not consider them a craft beer.

Sam McMeekin, the Co-Founder of Gipsy Hill Brewery, said consumer education was key to getting the message out there on what independent means: “For this [campaign] to have real impact we need consumers to really understand what independence means. There just isn’t

Roosters Brewery have adopted the Independent Craft Brewer seal ‘in order to help consumers distinguish between a beer that's the real deal and one that's brewed by a large corporation’

the understanding out there and that needs to change. Anything we can do to raise awareness about independent craft breweries is something we are on board with, but until there is a real understanding of what independence means and why it's important, then our impact on the public is going to be limited.”

As well as supplying independent bottle shops with a diverse range of beers, Rooster's also has national listings in Waitrose, M&S, Sainsburys and Morrisons, and will be using the seal on cans from next month.

"As a small, family-owned brewery that's

remained 100% independent since being established over 25 years ago, we've taken the decision to include the SIBA Assured logo on our cans in order to help consumers distinguish between a beer that's the real deal and one that's brewed by a large corporation and presented, with the use of smoke and mirrors, as being something it isn't. Provenance has proven a key driver in the growth of smaller breweries over the past decade, so the use of the logo will help consumers to identify us as a genuinely independent brewery and reassure them that, by buying our beers, they're helping to support a small business," Tom Fozard, Rooster's Commercial Director.

The SIBA Craft Beer Report showed that 30% of SIBA members are now using the Assured Independent British Craft Brewer seal on their bottles and cans. We’re aiming to get this figure to over 50% by 2020 – a big ask but something that I think is achievable and will give everyone involved a huge advantage over big beer rivals.

With the majority of members actively using the seal we can start to get real traction in on and off-trade retailers, pushing for signage and other marketing highlighting independent brewers on the shelves.

Speaking to the Guardian as part of the preview of the Craft Beer Report Greg Pilley, managing director of Stroud Brewery in Gloucestershire, said protection was required for “authentic, artisanal” brewers to avoid them losing out to big companies adopting the trappings of craft beer to woo consumers seeking authenticity. “If 98% of people think craft is about a small, independent, quality product, then how can a global brewery get away with using that term?” he said.

If you are a SIBA Member brewery not currently using the seal then you can access the files via the Toolbox or by emailing me on neil.walker@siba.co.uk. Equally if you are already using the seal and would like us to help promote your photos via social media then drop me a line and I’ll be happy to share it with the World!

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SIBA JOURNAL SUMMER 2019

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MEET THE BREWER

AMY COCKBURN, HARVIESTOUN BREWERY BREWER'S CV: rn, Amy Cockbu ewery Harviestoun Br

stilling, c Brewing & Di 2005 – 2008 Bs burgh, iversity, Edin Heriot Watt Un Scotland at Work placement Scotland, 2006 – 2007 – h, rg bu in Ed ery, Caledonian Brew by n (then owned and Harviestou Caledonian) , Harviestoun sistant Brewer As 15 20 – 08 20 re, Scotland Clackmannanshi Brewery, Alva, stoun Brewer, Harvie ad He t en es Pr Scotland 2015 – kmannanshire, ac Cl , va Al y, Brewer

Brewing was in the blood for Amy Cockburn when she started looking into career opportunities after graduating school in 2005. Her Grandad, Dad and Uncle were all keen homebrewers and she had been around the process from a young age. But after looking into what her passion for science could lead to and discovering the well-respected Heriot Watt course in brewing and distilling, it was a throwaway comment from one of her group at school, who suggested brewing was no place for a girl, that sparked the drive to make this her chosen field. She was accepted to Heriot Watt for the Bsc course and after a work placement at Harviestoun, then owned by Caledonian, between her third and fourth years she was approached on graduation to join Harviestoun full time on the brewing team. Working her way up from assistant to Head Brewer in 2015 she has made the role her own, and is now looking ahead to a period of expansion at the brewery, as it looks to increase capacity from the current 25,000hl to 40,000hl over the next few years. The SIBA Journal’s Editor Caroline Nodder caught up with Amy to find out more about her career so far and what her thoughts are on the current market…

Continued on page 21

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MEET THE BREWER

I SAW THE BREWING AND DISTILLING COURSE. I JOKINGLY SAID TO THE GROUP AT SCHOOL I WAS GOING TO DO THAT, AND ONE OF THE GUYS SAID, ‘OH YOU CAN’T DO THAT, YOU’RE FEMALE’, BASICALLY! SO I THOUGHT, ‘I’LL SHOW YOU!’, AND I DID!

Having had to postpone our initial interview while Amy was grappling with what she jokingly refers to as ‘some pretty lively casks’, she has dried off in time for us to catch up the following week on a sunny morning in early June. In her early life Amy was no stranger to beer and the brewing process, with her Grandad making both beer and wine on kits at home and her Dad and Uncle also homebrewing beer. So perhaps it was this that inspired her early love of science and scientific processes, something she very much focused on at school.

“I always enjoyed the science subjects, biology and later chemistry, and I knew it was that field I wanted to go into. But the thought of being 24/7 in a lab didn’t really appeal, so when I was leaving school I started looking around at what I could do. Then I saw the brewing and distilling course. I jokingly said to the group at school I was going to do that, and one of the guys said, ‘Oh you can’t do that, you’re female’, basically! So I thought, ‘I’ll show you!’, and I did!”

Determined not to be put off by gender stereotypes, Amy applied and was immediately accepted to do the Bsc course at Heriot Watt, a four year grounding in brewing and distilling that mixed her love of science with the pleasingly practical application she was looking for.

“Although brewing has always been in my family, I hadn’t really considered it as a career before that. But I thought the Heriot Watt course was great because you could do the science side but also have a

practical side to it as well,” she adds, and it was not long before she had started on the path that would subsequently lead her to Harviestoun.

“Between my third and fourth year I actually did a placement with Harviestoun, who at the time were owned by Caledonian. So I split my time between Caledonian and Harviestoun which was really good because Caledonian had more laboratory facilities than Harviestoun but Harviestoun just let me loose to do the brewing. So it was two very different sides of it. Then it just so happened that when I was graduating from my fourth year the brewer at Harviestoun left. And our Master Brewer Stuart Cail phoned me and asked if I was looking for a job. So it fell into place for me.”

Her talent having evidently been noted during the work placement, Amy was thrown straight into the deep end on a very small team at Harviestoun, which cemented in her a love of the brewing process and the hop forward beers Harviestoun was becoming famous for.

She continues: “When I joined I was pretty much the only brewer, and we were brewing around three or four times a week, but as the years progressed it has gradually got a lot busier and I have got a lot more involved in planning the beer production schedules and naturally progressed up to Head Brewer from there.”

From small beginnings, the team has grown alongside an expansion in production, with nine in the brewing team

now including five trained brewers, headed up by Master Brewer and well-known industry figure Stuart Cail. The brewery produced around 25,000hl in 2018 with plans to eventually make that 40,000hl.

But the ethos around quality has not changed since Amy started.

As Amy puts it: “For us it is always flavour driven, premium quality products we try to produce. We don’t compromise on flavour or quality for cost. We focus on keeping our products at a certain benchmark.

We want to be the brewery that when people see our name they know they are going to get a good quality beer from us.

And we are starting to develop a lab on site so we can be in more control over quality ourselves rather than relying on packagers.”

Harviestoun has also expanded from its cask ale roots and now does 40% of its beers in keg, 40% in bottle and only around 15% in cask. The remaining 5% is now in can, which is a new venture for the brewery and an area that looks set to grow.

“Most of our beers are quite hop driven,” says Amy. “They are hop forward and the beers are built to showcase the hops. That appeals to my taste and how I like to brew, they are the kind of beers I like to drink so I enjoy brewing them.”

The best sellers are Schiehallion, a 4.8% craft lager, and Bitter and Twisted, a 4.2% Golden Ale, and the brewery now distributes widely nationally and also internationally, with export to Europe, America, Canada, Australia and most

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MEET THE BREWER

recently China which is an area of huge potential.

After 11 years at the brewery, originally joining at a time when only a few female brewers were prominent on the scene, I ask Amy if she has perceived a change in the way women are perceived in the sector.

“Personally, for the goals I want to achieve, I have been very lucky and the team around me here has supported me completely, so I have never found it an issue in terms of what my gender is, but I can see how some people will come up against that,” she says. “I have personally not had any of those barriers here, and I definitely think now it is better than it has ever been. When I started out there were not a lot of women in the industry, and there were only a few names that you knew, but definitely now there are more and more that have come to the forefront.

There are female-run breweries and a lot of places that have all-female brew teams which is great. I think we are in a much better position than we were 10 years ago.”

She does, however, feel there is still work to be done in terms of moving away from male-focussed marketing, broadening it to appeal to everyone regardless of gender or background.

“I do think it is quite a tricky subject, because I have always had the view that it doesn’t really matter what gender you are, if my beers are good then it shouldn’t matter who brews or drinks them,” she adds. “For me it seems that we need to stop promoting beers to either male or female drinkers and just have a rounded campaign so it doesn’t matter if you’re male or female it appeals to people who like good quality beer. The marketing in the past has been focused on male drinkers but it has got much better and people are more aware which is good.

It is a very fine line though. There has been and there still is some sexist beer

marketing out there, but it can swing too far the other way and take all the humour out of it. It can put people off the industry because they are becoming too focused on that. I think it needs to become inclusive for everybody and not targeting one particular group.”

designed to make the beer as enjoyable as possible, and that is how it should be done. Here, the barstaff just pick up a glass and serve it without thinking, so there does need to be a lot more education around that as well. It goes back to it being about the experience.”

As she does several times during our interview, Amy looks to Continental beer culture as a reference, in particular Belgium which is a big inspiration to her, both in terms of their retail methods, but also their beers themselves which we will come onto later.

The retail experience certainly lags behind that in some other major markets, although Amy has seen it grow and mature significantly during her time at Harviestoun. She says: “The brewing sector has changed massively. It has become a lot more difficult for us to get our beers out there and get them seen because it is a much more crowded marketplace.

But I do think it is good for the drinker, because you get a much better variety out there now and it is more widely available, especially with more products going into cans now and how easily accessible they are. I also think you have seen a shift in the flavours people are using, and they have become a lot more experimental. It is about playing with different ingredients and opening up the flavour potential that is there.”

“Belgium’s culture is always amazing to me, because families can sit in cafes and there will be beer, but the kids will be there too, and it is just a nice relaxed atmosphere. It is not the same here and that is what needs to change,” she explains. “The culture and the way we perceive how we drink beer shouldn’t be all about ‘lager louts’ and how much you drink, it should be about drinking beer because you enjoy it, you enjoy its flavour, not just for the after effects of having drunk it.”

In this respect, Amy and the team at Harviestoun have been working to encourage beer and food matching, and the beers are very often designed with a flavour profile that lends itself to pairing with food.

“With our products a lot of them are designed to be enjoyed with food, we do pairings with them and that is something we highly promote. I think that is really important and more of it needs to be done. We need to see more restaurants, cafes and bars doing that and promoting it as they would a wine, pairing with different foods and making that experience happen.” And she is also keen to see more creativity when it comes to the way beer is served here in the UK. “In Belgium they have a different glass for almost every beer, and that glass is

This experimental movement within UK craft beer quite obviously excites Amy, and appeals to her scientific roots, and she is looking forward to launching a number of new products to market in the next few months, in a year that has already seen significant innovation.

“One of the big challenges we’ve been tackling for a while is non-alcoholic beer,” says Amy. “It is a project we have been working on for two or three years now and we have just packaged our first run, so hopefully we should have one coming out in the next few months. We had to do a lot of experimenting and trialing lots of different methods of doing it to find out which one was going to work for us and on our kit.

It has taken us a while! We are getting a lot of requests for it, and our sales people have been building interest in it so we have people crying out for it now. We take it very seriously and we have put a lot of

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MEET THE BREWER

effort into making sure when we do it is to our standards and to our quality. We have also been trialing a 2.3% beer and if that works that should be going out to market soon as well. No alcohol is one area you can’t ignore, and it is not going away. And the low alcohol fits with how people are becoming more health conscious as well.

We have no plans to go towards gluten free or organic, but we are working towards making all our products vegan friendly, and then trying to get them all accredited.”

One of the trends which has been less positive in the market has been the continuing decline of cask ale, and that is one of the reasons for Harviestoun’s move into a broader range of packaging formats. Amy feels the route cause of the decline in cask lies with quality at dispense, something the team at the brewery has been addressing: “We love cask here as it is in our roots, and we’d love to see that market grow again in the right way. The big problem is that a lot of pubs don’t know how to look after it, and it only takes one bad pint. If that is the first time you try cask and it is not a good pint you will not go back to it. And 99% of the time that is not the brewer’s fault, it is the way the pub has handled it. But a lot of work is going in to that and hopefully if the brewer is working with the pubs their beer is going into to get that right then it will change things.”

MIDDLE OF PUBLICATION

While Harviestoun’s site has not yet allowed for a brewery tap, they now have a pub in London, The Hour Glass in South Kensington, which they took on at the start of the year, but with no other direct routes to market it has been very important to address quality with their stockists.

“What we have done in the last year is trained all our delivery and sales staff in cellar management by putting them through courses, so we look at it as them being a first point of contact for us. If there is an issue, customers can come to us and speak to us and we can try and solve it without having to call in another party.

It is something was constantly talk about here at the brewery and we try to work as closely as possible with as many outlets as

we can, but you’re obviously not going to get them all. There should be some kind of training in cellar management in place for people who run pubs and bars that is compulsory to do, so they fully understand how to look after the beers and the drinks that they have on.”

WE LOVE CASK HERE AS IT IS IN OUR ROOTS, AND WE’D LOVE TO SEE THAT MARKET GROW AGAIN IN THE RIGHT WAY. Next year will see a significant investment in the brewery site as well, to enable production to move up to the next level and areas like export to expand.

“This year is about doing all the ground work so we know exactly what we want to put in next year,” says Amy. “We have the space here so we would remain on the existing site but expand the brewery.

As part of the investment we would like to have a brewery tap and we would like to be able to have people to the site, which at the moment we just don’t have the right facilities to do.”

The team is also in the process of completing a rebrand and with the rebrand has increased the can portfolio and introduced two new lagers, a 4% and a 4.3% lager. Amy describes the rebrand as an evolution rather than a complete redesign: “The label imagery has changed enough to show a significant difference but still mean that people who are our drinkers know us recognise us. It has just made it a bit more modern and up to date.”

As well as the rebrand and exciting expansion project for the brewery, Amy is always on the look out for inspiration for new beers in what is happening in the wider market.

“The market is quite exciting in general at the moment,” she enthuses. “With the number of experimental beers coming

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through and opening up the flavour profiles for people to try. It has actually taken me quite a while to get into sour beers, but I am really coming round to them and there are some really interesting ones out there.

We keep looking at how we might do them here, so that is another challenge to add to the list!”

On a recent study tour to German with the IBD, Amy also saw close hand the process of brewing a wheat beer, something not yet in the Harviestoun portfolio, and she is keen to expand her barrel aging range, which includes award-winning Old Engine Oil which is aged in whisky casks. She is also very happy to see renewed interest in her beloved Belgian beers within the brewing fraternity. “Probably the new world hop styles went to the extreme, and people have rebelled a bit against that which is maybe why you are now seeing some of the more fruity beers coming through, people using more fruit and herbs, and swinging more towards the barrel aged beers and sours and the Belgian and German styles are creeping back in which is great. It gives such a diversity in the market for people to try.”

There is also a lot of great beer coming out of her native Scotland, of course, and she quotes some of the key players when I ask her who she admires in the current market.

“Fyne Ales do really good beers, Loch Lomond is doing some great stuff and doing really well when it comes to competitions, but I like so many it is so hard to pick just one,” she laughs, although when pushed she selects one of her very own Harviestoun ales as her go to (“This sounds like I have been told to say it, but honestly [Harviestoun’s] Bitter and Twisted is my go to beer!") before admitting that the beers she seeks out to savour, when she can find them, are from a little farther away.

“My absolute favourites are Belgian beers and I will always go for them if I find them when I am out and about – I look out for Cantillon, Zot, Rochefort, those are the ones I always aim for as they are so different with such interesting flavours.”

SIBA JOURNAL SUMMER 2019

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GUEST COLUMNIST

BEYOND PRIDE Lily Waite, Founder of The Queer Brewing Project, urges everyone to look beyond the annual Pride festival when it comes to stamping out prejudice and improving representation from the LGBTQ community within the beer sector….

“Ask any queer person in the beer world if we still face prejudice, and the answer will, at least from my experience, invariably be the same. Despite LGBTQ issues in the beer world (alongside other issues such as race) forming part of a growing broader conversation surrounding diversity and inclusion, there’s still a long way to go.

When asked if that prejudice comes from within the beer world or beyond, I often struggle to distinguish between the two - whilst our industry is perhaps more progressive and inclusive than some others at a glance, we cannot ignore that we live in an intolerant society.

“Society is still riddled with homophobia and transphobia, and so it still exists in the beer industry,” says Libby Bradshaw, owner of The Twelve Taps in Whitstable.

“We don't operate in a vacuum.” What we can do, however, is to accept that inevitability, challenge it, and then lead by example - beer has the potential and reach to affect social change, if done right.

In order to move on from conversations within an echo chamber - which diversity and inclusion conversations can often be - we need to both increase visibility of queer people, and visibly signpost that this industry is as supportive and progressive as it says.

We need allies to take up the weight of countering prejudice and intolerance. We need more people taking responsibility for the wellbeing of LGBTQ people in this industry, and taking more action. Whilst not every venue or event might be able to rejig their current toilets to accommodate a gender-neutral one, everyone can, at the very least, offer very basic training and support around LGBTQ issues. Whether that’s a chat over a pint at the end of a brewday, making a statement that homo-, bi-, queer-, or transphobia will not be tolerated, or offering official training to staff on how to deal with intolerance, simple steps can be taken to reduce abuse and unpleasant encounters. Beyond conversations, there are substantial steps

that can be taken, ones that don’t require a huge amount of effort, either.

The other main issue LGBTQ people face is a lack of representation: aside from vodka brands daubing bottles in rainbow colours for Pride month (we exist throughout the year - why not celebrate us at other times, too?), and Heineken pitting a trans woman against a transphobe for the sake of ‘debate’ in a poorly thoughtout advert, the drinks industry has a poor track record of positive representation. This representation, though, must reach a point where it’s not initiated purely by LGBTQ people.

“I would like to see more queer people being represented and celebrated publicly. I would also like to see beer folk - whether they're brewers, bars or journalists - actively stand up and call-out homophobia/transphobia when they see it,” says Bradshaw. “It can't just be the responsibility of the minority LGBTQ folk to educate - we have enough to do.”

Society is still riddled with homophobia and transphobia, and so it still exists in the beer industry.

Libby Bradshaw, owner of The Twelve Taps in Whitstable

In Sheffield, the wonderful ‘Out and About’ organisation does exactly what so many events in Pride month fail to do; it works to make LGBTQ people in the beer world feel comfortable and welcome in venues throughout the year.

Co-founder Michael Deakin believes that this is key to greater acceptance: “Overall queer people need to be made to feel accepted in this community, the more queer people feel accepted then the more people will get involved and the more loud queer voices we'll have, which ultimately is the key to forcing change in the industry.”

Though, with my knuckles firmly tapping wood, I feel we’re getting closer to that point. With more vocal and prominent queer people in the beer industry, such as Jenn Merrick, Emma Inch, and Michael Deakin in the UK, and Ren Navarro, Dr. J Nikol Jackson-Beckham, and Robin LeBlanc in the US and Canada, providing such positive role models, the industry is looking, from

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the outside, less like a straight, cis, white boys’ club. So, too, from the inside: more is being done to make room for and support queer folk. The response to my initiative, The Queer Brewing Project, and the number of breweries who want to collaborate, is one example of a willingness to do good, and to do better.

Hackney Brewery, based in East London, have just released the second brew of their now-annual beer Unicorn Rodeo.

An LGBTQ-focused beer, without being ostensibly tied into Pride (an issue of its own), and proceeds from this beer are this year being donated to Switchboard, a charity helping LGBTQ people for over 45 years. An excellent example of how to do good for the queer community with beer, the beer is not another rebrand of a product with a rainbow flag; consideration, care, and effort has gone into making a stand, and a financial contribution to a worthwhile cause.

Ideas such as these are key to showing that queer people are welcome unconditionally: when our acceptance is so often tied to an advert, a finger snap, or the month of June, it can feel as though once Pride is over, broader society says to us ‘you’ve had your fun, you’ve had your parade. Now back out of sight with you’. We have to, both in wider society and in the beer world, challenge the notion that queer visibility is to be restricted in any way: if straight people can be visible year-round, why should we make do with one month?

“Normalising the presence of queer people (and not just at Pride) in all aspects of the industry as essentially non-issues would go a really long way,” says JacksonBeckham. Through more action, and more space being both taken up by queer people and given by straight and cis people, we can continue that process of normalisation, and, ultimately, get to a point where these conversations are a thing of the past.”

Lily Waite is a writer, artist, and photographer whose work shines a spotlight on issues surrounding feminism, diversity, and identity within beer culture and beyond, as well as on the unique stories of brewers, makers, and producers.

In February 2019, Lily founded The Queer Brewing Project, a non-profit collaborative beer initiative with the purposes of raising awareness of queer people and issues in the brewing world and beyond, and raising money for worthwhile and important LGBTQ charities.

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THE BIG INTERVIEW

THE

BIG

INTERVIEW ALEXANDRA SEWELL, FOUNDER OF THE BLACK MALT BOTTLE SHARE CLUB

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SIBA JOURNAL SUMMER 2019

Alex Sewell’s passion for the beer industry stemmed from an early career working in pubs and bars, but her ‘Eureka!’ moment didn’t happen until six years ago when she got a job behind the bar at BrewDog in London’s then craft beer capital Shoreditch and began to understand the breadth of styles and flavours you could enjoy within the beer category. The spark was lit, and Alex quickly found her niche in darker beers and porters which appealed to her existing love of smoky malt whiskies and bourbons. But there was something wrong with this picture. Alex found herself almost exclusively in the minority as a black female beer lover, and when attending bottle clubs or even working behind the bar, it was rare for her to see anyone from a similar background to herself in her customers or fellow enthusiasts. She found this lack of diversity in beer frustrating, and, determined to broaden the appeal for the beers she loved to as wide an audience as she could, she launched The Black Malt Bottle Share Club. A like-minded group of beer enthusiasts from a whole spectrum of different backgrounds, who gather regularly to share their own new discoveries in the dark ale category. It is quite different from other bottle clubs in its membership mix, and aimed at bringing a diverse group of people together through the power of beer. Needless to say it has been a roaring success, and Alex now gets invited to run tastings across the UK, as well as hosting talks on beer and speaking out on ways to improve the diversity of the beer audience.

Caroline Nodder, the SIBA Journal’s Editor, met up with Alex at craft beer world favourite the Rake in London’s Borough Market to hear more about her story and her thoughts on further improving diversity in beer…

THE BIG INTERVIEW

How did you come to be so passionate about beer and what led to you founding Black Malt?

“My personal journey is that I started working in bars about 15 years ago now.

I always had a vague interest in alcohol, and how it was made, but I never really had that ‘Eureka!’ moment until I started working at BrewDog in Shoreditch about six years ago. I took one look at their brightly-lit taplist with all the puns and the quips about the beers and I just thought ‘Wow! Is this all beer?’. It was really intriguing to me, I wanted to try everything they had got and the atmosphere was trendy, the staff were exuberant. My beer horizons had been broadened in such a way that I knew that there was always going to be much to learn. I worked there for about a year before I wanted to branch out, and it wasn’t until much later when I was working for the Bottle Shop in Bermondsey, which has now sadly closed down, that I had an idea for Black Malt, simply because the customers I was serving didn’t really understand dark beer. They kept making excuses for not trying the dark beer that was on tap (too strong, too heavy etc), yet were more than willing to drink a half pint of a double or triple IPA which is equally as strong. I wanted to understand the thought process behind their decisions, and I wanted to do justice to the brewers because it was good stuff they were brewing, and it isn’t just for drinking in the winter or if you want something stronger. So I decided to set up Dark Malt to celebrate dark beer in all its forms. I knew there were people out there

that had these 750ml bottles of rare stouts hiding away, waiting to come out, and to be shared, so I put two and two together and set up a bottle share. Bottle shares are quite prevalent in the beer world but they can be quite geeky, and it is generally just a group of people round a table getting drunk, essentially, and ticking off beers online.

I WANTED TO SHOWCASE WHAT THE INDUSTRY IS ABOUT WITHOUT BEING TOO GEEKY ABOUT IT OR BEING TOO HOMOGENOUS. I didn’t really like that atmosphere, and I wanted to do justice to it and respect the tradition but I wanted to branch out and involve all kinds of different people in it.

I never saw anyone like myself walking into bars, let alone tasting the beers, so I decided to run meet the brewer events and talks with different breweries that were doing community projects, brewers that were just starting out as well as established brewers, and have musicians and poets there and all sorts of other entertainment to take it away from just being about drinking a lot of beer. Basically I wanted to showcase what the industry is about without being too geeky about it or being too homogenous.”

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How does the Black Malt Bottle Share Club work and what are your aims for it?

“It has been running for about a year now.

It is a monthly bottle share, and we don’t have ‘members’ as such, it is based on very casual meet up sessions, and usually I keep it to around 20 people per meet up. The premise is really simple; bring a bottle or two of any dark beer, from Russian imperial stouts to black IPAs, and gather together to share, discuss and meet other enthusiasts. Hopefully they engage in conversation about the lifestyle behind beer, being a fan of dark beers specifically, talking about beer in general.

I ran them monthly at the Bottle Shop for about seven or eight months and then moved on to all sorts of other places. I have done them in different breweries and bottle shops around London and now I am branching out further across the UK. I have done one at Northern Monk in Leeds and am about to do one in Nottingham.

It has gone from being about dark beer specifically and celebrating the ingredients that go into it and the people that make it, to this element of diversity and inclusion.

That came about quite organically because I am a black person in the industry and probably one of the only ones working in bars and talking to customers about beer. People don’t often get to see a face like mine doing that so they find it really quite surprising. The people I was inviting to talk were people who were not of the homogenous community in beer – they weren’t typically white and they weren’t typically male.”

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THE BIG INTERVIEW

I’M IN AWE OF HUMAN BEHAVIOUR, AND WORKING BEHIND A BAR HAS GIVEN ME A UNIQUE INSIGHT INTO THE PATTERNS OF PEOPLE’S BEHAVIOUR AROUND BEER. You also work in a craft beer bar. What perspective has that given you when it comes to beer consumers, brewers and diversity?

“I’m currently a supervisor in London at the Mikkeller bar, working for a brewery that I endlessly admire, where I am in the thick of the activity that goes into running a beer establishment. I’m in awe of human behaviour, and working behind a bar has given me a unique insight into the patterns of people’s behaviour around beer. Mostly women when they come to the bar don’t really want to try the heavier beers and maybe have a pre-conceived notion of what they should be having.

Usually if they are with a man they let that man take over and do the ordering, or they ask for something fruity or go for wine. And I think, is that because they like that? Or is it because that’s what they have been told throughout their life that they like? Whereas I heard on a radio podcast about beer that in fact women are more likely to have a heightened sense of bitterness when it comes to beers, so I do try and encourage them to have the dark beers, have the session IPAs. Also from a health standpoint people seem to think that lager or beer is full of calories which is not necessarily the case. Beer can also be vegan. And I think the lack of discussion around the styles of beer and the types of beer you can get is really lacking, for women especially. For people of different cultures however I don’t know if it is upbringing, or lack of funds, or what. Beer is expensive and advocating a craft beer lifestyle is potentially bank breaking. But I do think mostly it is down to stereotypes.

I have had people say to me that they thought they weren’t even allowed to go into a certain craft beer bar because they saw only white people in there! That really stuck with me and shocked me and it pushed me on to be that face that they see behind the bar. If I got one person who looked like me coming in and trying the beers that would be wonderful. Certainly more and more people are trying different types of beer than when I started in the industry but at the crux of it, it takes a while for people to know what they really want from a beer. They think they want the hazy, juicy, tropical East Coast IPA but when they fancy trying a sour beer, it blows their mind. And that discovery of a beer can happen in any combination of small ‘Eureka!’ moments.”

Are beer retailers doing enough to encourage a more diverse customer base for craft beer? What more could they be doing?

“I think it’s a two way street. Businesses have a responsibility to get as many people as possible trying their beer. I think you can run a diversity programme to get more different kinds of people talking about beer and introducing different people to beer, but at the crux of it it is about inviting more people in. Marketing is a massive thing and the label you put on the beer matters. Marketing is getting better, certainly I don’t see as much sexist marketing in the craft beer sector now.

But there is an older generation who have grown up with a certain type of stereotype of women and of people in general, so they haven’t grown out of certain behaviours.”

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What do you think is preventing more women and people of colour getting involved with craft beer?

“Genuinely, there is still a lack of information and wider range of marketing techniques from breweries, and jobs that focus on beer, in bringing them to wider audiences. The blame doesn’t necessarily lie with them, but if the aim of their business is to get as many people involved in drinking their beer as possible, it would be advantageous to make sure you’re attracting and speaking to all kinds of people. I remember doing Catford Beer Festival and I had all my marketing on the table and all my beers on the table and I just thought well why is this not happening enough? Why is there not more basic information out there about beer?

Also using certain words, like ‘hoppy’, I don’t think most people understand what ‘hoppy’ means. It can be really off-putting and daunting for someone who is looking to try new things but can’t really access the language and they think it is a secret club they are not part of. I think also a good way to access beer is through food and on your own time as well. If someone gives you a gift of beer for example. It does work both ways, the consumer has to have the drive to go out and visit all these bottle shops and bars, and there is more advertising now for craft beer bars and bottle shops, and that encourages people to go out and explore.”

Continued on page 33 SIBA JOURNAL SUMMER 2019

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THE BIG INTERVIEW IT’S ADVANTAGEOUS TO CONNECT WITH PEOPLE FROM ALL BACKGROUNDS THAT CAN HONESTLY BRING SOMETHING TO THE TABLE.

The UK lags behind other markets – most notably the USA and Spain – when it comes to female beer drinkers. Why do you think this is?

“Woman were the ones who brewed beer originally, but I think it became a male dominated world because it is a capitalist venture.

But although there is a lot of discussion surrounding women getting into drinking beer, it mostly boils down to the sharing of knowledge regarding beer. The USA are breaking boundaries in this regard and we take quite a lot from them so I think we can learn from that. When I first got into beer, in my world beer was lager, it was full of calories and it was only served in pints and drunk by men. This was a big turn-off. A lot of alcohol is gendered in the UK, wine is seen as a female thing and beer is seen as a male thing in this country and I don’t know how it is seen in the USA but I think maybe they have transcended those gender separations. I think the responsibility lies with both the consumer and the retailer/brewer. In this country we do have a culture where alcohol is just a gateway to getting drunk, and we don’t treat alcohol with any respect. The glassware and serve size is also important. Obviously I work for Mikkeller and the Scandi portions of beer tend to come in 2/3 pint or 1/3 pint serves and I think in the craft beer sector now in the UK they do have such a wide range of glassware so I think that is important.”

There is a notable lack of people of colour within brewing in the UK. Why do you think that is and what can be done to address it?

“There has been little insight into why the beer scene is devoid of a mix of cultures but I think that certain socioeconomic factors come into it. The production of beer has changed hands over the millennia so much so that there are now a number of reasons.

Beer is expensive. People care more about their health than ever before, a lot of people just don’t know that beer can be for them.

It’s easier to talk about sexism than it is about race. It’s a touchy subject that most people would rather not acknowledge let alone address. Getting rid of internalised bias and assumptions on stereotypes is probably the first step. If someone like me comes and asks to help out on a brew day or a managerial position in

your bottle shop/bar, treat them as you would anyone else. I also think branding is extremely important when it comes to getting more people of colour into the beer world. The breweries that are currently creating eye-catching, on-trend and diverse artwork are Left Handed Giant and Burning Sky; it goes without saying that branding not involving images of people is probably a good route to go too. In order to change the status quo, aside from working on internal biases and the somewhat arduous pursuit of trying to figure out the “science” behind diversity and inclusion, breweries have a responsibility to hire people on enthusiasm, determination and love for learning rather than nepotism or mirror-image recruiting. It’s advantageous to connect with people from all backgrounds that can honestly bring something to the table.

These are my suggestions on how tangible change can happen in real time.”

Are other markets worldwide doing more/better on the issue of diversity? If so which ones and what lessons can we learn?

“I think the USA is killing it with diversity. There are a lot more black people drinking beer that I have discovered just looking at Instagram than there are in the UK so there definitely is more to be done. I haven’t asked them why or how they got into beer, but I should, because I feel it could give us an insight into why it is not happening here. I think people here like to keep quiet about issues with racism and sexism, they don’t really like to talk about it, and keep a stiff upper lip about it, thinking it will solve itself, thinking they should come forward themselves and solve it. But it is a symbiotic thing. Both brewers and consumers need to work together to talk about opportunities. I have done lots of work with Crowns & Hops who are a duo from California who got funding from BrewDog to open their own taproom which is focussed on getting all sorts of people through their door to try their beers and talk about beer. I am wondering why that is not happening more here.”

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THEY FOCUS ON EMPLOYING AND CELEBRATING AN EXPANDING COMMUNITY OF PEOPLE FROM MARGINALISED BACKGROUNDS TO BE AS MUCH OF THE PART OF THE INDUSTRY AS ANYONE ELSE.

THE BIG INTERVIEW

What trends in beer currently excite you?

“It’s always interesting when a brewery takes on the challenge of bringing a long lost beer style back from the dead. I really like Gruit's, and Kentucky Common Beer which I discovered recently which is a long lost style from the prohibition era and Gose's which was a really ancient style. Even bitters, new style bitters are coming into play now which I really like. I don’t think people are branching out as much as they could in dark beers. It actually costs more to brew a dark beer, than a lighter style, which is to do with the malt content, and of course they are seasonal as well. People tend to drink them in the winter so they don’t sell as well in the summer so people are not experimenting with them as much at the moment.”

How can organisations like SIBA be more effective at promoting diversity?

“I know the US Brewers Association has a diversity programme and has looked into the science of it and done some work on internal bias when recruiting people of colour.

I think looking into the issues around putting a more diverse range of people into jobs in the brewing sector in the UK is the key for us too. We do need to teach brewers and make them aware that just choosing to recruit people from the craft beer bubble, people who look like themselves, is not the right thing to do.”

Which brewers worldwide are currently on your ‘watch list’ and why?

“I have always said that Pohala in Estonia do some great beers, they are one of the most prolific brewers of dark beers.

And Puhaste also from Estonia, not far from Pohala. Those are my absolute favourites. I really need to go and visit! One of the best dark beers I have ever had from a UK brewer was an Imperial Stout from Burnt Mill, it was absolutely gorgeous.”

Who do you most admire in the craft beer arena and why?

“Melissa Cole, who was one of the first people I met when I was starting out, has done some great things and I have done quite a few talks for her too. Lily Waite as well. There are also some great brewing enterprises such as People Like Us (which is supported by Mikkeller) in Denmark, Ignition Brewing based in Lewisham, Mothership and Earth Station, based in London, the latter founded by Jenn Merrick. All of these breweries are legitimate in their own right and focus on, not just great beer, but employing and celebrating an expanding community of people from marginalised backgrounds to be as much of the part of the industry as anyone else.”

What is your favourite beer and where would you most like to drink it?

“It would have to be anything from Pohala, if I had their beers on a desert island I’d be set for life. I also love Imperial Porters and the best place to drink a beer like that is in a cosy pub by a roaring fire!”

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DOCUMENTING DIVERSITY

DIVERSITY IN THE

BEER INDUSTRY

Nicci Peet is a freelance photographer based in Bristol. Her work looks at issues within the beer industry, primarily diversity and equality. She has worked with national and international publications and breweries. She recently launched a new photography project to document diversity within the beer industry, and here, she shares her thoughts on the issue alongside some of the images she has taken as part of the project.

“If you're here you probably know I've just launched a new documentary project photographing diversity of people working in the UK beer industry predominantly women (cisgender, trans, women of colour). Over the past couple of years there has been a lot of talk and debate around sexism and inclusivity in the beer industry. You might have seen some of these discussions happen on social media or on panels at beer festivals. The discourse isn’t always nice but that seems unfortunately to be the world we live in.

Being a photographer I wanted to broach this issue from a different perspective.

We live in an ever increasingly visual society. Whether that's scrolling on a phone or staring at a screen, a lot of the information we take in is visual.

Part of the diversity problem in the beer industry is the lack of visual representation of the diverse range of women who work in the industry. And that is why I set out to photograph as many different women (cisgender, trans, women of colour) actively working in the industry. When I say women working in the industry I don’t just mean brewers. If you have a passion for beer there are so many different routes into the industry. Not everyone is a maker and with this project I wanted people to see a variety of roles - marketing, bar managers, farmers, writers, festival organisers - we have so many people that make this industry tick.

If you see someone that looks like you at a beer festival or drinking in a pub or bar you’re more likely to feel welcome there.

The same goes for seeing people that look like you working in a perceived male dominated industry. And this is what the project is really about.

With recent discussions the industry has moved in the right direction, with diversity panels popping up at beer festivals and even dedicated festivals like Fem.Ale, Women On Tap and Siris Beer Festival there is more to be done. By no means do I want to undermine the importance of these festivals, panels and talks, they are incredible. But it does sometimes feel as though they are echo chambers. If there’s a diversity panel happening at a beer festival that only discusses the importance of diversity it's more than likely the attendants are there because they have a vested interest.

Continued on page 39

Anja Madhvani, Beer Writer and Sales & Marketing Assistant at Ilkley Brewery

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Alex Sewell, Founder of the Black Malt Bottle Share Club

DOCUMENTING DIVERSITY

IWCBD – International Women’s Collaboration Brew Day took place on March 8th this year

Sophie de-Ronde, Head Brewer at Burnt Mill Brewery

WITH THIS PROJECT I WANTED PEOPLE TO SEE A VARIETY OF ROLES - MARKETING, BAR MANAGERS, FARMERS, WRITERS, FESTIVAL ORGANISERS - WE HAVE SO MANY PEOPLE THAT MAKE THIS INDUSTRY TICK.

Marverine Cole, aka Beer Beauty Journalist

Doreen Barber, Community Engagement Lead at Cloudwater

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DOCUMENTING DIVERSITY Much like if you’re at a panel about hops: you’re probably there because you’re interested in hops. Festivals and events holding discussion panels or hosting speakers need to be more aware of the make-up of those panels or hosts. Normalising a varied workforce and talking to those who don’t fit the craft beer male white trope about things other than the lack of diversity, or what it’s like to be a woman in a male dominated industry is the next real step for the industry to take.

Outside of industry events breweries and companies need to be more aware about what they put out on social media. Going back to see people like yourself at a beer festival the same rule applies for social media. Seeing someone like yourself portrayed in imagery from breweries as you scroll on Instagram, or Facebook or whatever, will make you feel more included and welcome. These companies may be completely accepting but it doesn’t always translate to what a company shows to the world. A little awareness goes a long way.

Melissa Cole, Beer Writer and Author

Continued on page 41

WE LIVE IN AN EVER INCREASINGLY VISUAL SOCIETY. WHETHER THAT'S SCROLLING ON A PHONE OR STARING AT A SCREEN, A LOT OF THE INFORMATION WE TAKE IN IS VISUAL.

Jaega Wise, Head Brewer at Wild Card Brewery

Jane Barnes, Founder of Mothership brewery

Miranda Hudson, Co-Owner at Duration Brewing

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DOCUMENTING DIVERSITY Although this project’s focus is on the diverse women that work in the industry I would also like to leave you with the thought that this is a bigger problem that transcends just women. It includes the LGBTQIA+ community as well as people of colour. If you want to find out more and follow some other people that are doing great things towards equality, diversity and acceptance in the industry I implore you to follow and support: Lily Waite and her Queer Brewing Project, Mothership Beer, Queer Beer, Beer Kulture and Crowns & Hops. They’re just for starters but I hope they help you get lost down a pretty empowering rabbit hole."

Lily Waite, Founder of The Queer Brewing Project

PART OF THE DIVERSITY PROBLEM IN THE BEER INDUSTRY IS THE LACK OF VISUAL REPRESENTATION OF THE DIVERSE RANGE OF WOMEN WHO WORK IN THE INDUSTRY.

Emma Inch, Radio Host at Ferment Radio

Nikki, Manager at the Crown & Kettle

Kiki Roberts, Brewery Manager at Fierce & Noble

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AROUND THE WORLD

D N U

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USA

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FORT COLLINS, COLORADO,

Kim Jordan, the co-founder and now Chair of iconic US brewery New Belgian is a legendary figure in craft beer circles worldwide, having created from scratch what is now the fourth largest craft brewery in the whole USA. The venture was the original brainchild of Kim and her then husband Jeff Lebesch, a keen home brewer, and was started in an extension built onto their house back in 1991, when the craft beer scene in the States was still in its infancy. The founding principle upon which New Belgium was built, to be a force for good, has remained, and the business stays true to its promises on sustainability and is now 100% owned by its 700 odd employees through an Employee Stock Ownership Scheme. At the time Kim founded the company she was in a minority of female brewers in the US and worldwide, and while the balance of the sexes has improved she still believes there is work to do. Caroline Nodder, the SIBA Journal’s Editor, spoke to Kim about her near 30 year journey in the craft beer world and to hear her thoughts on the current market and its challenges…

What first sparked your passion for beer?

“My then husband Jeff Lebesch and I had decided we’d start a brewery after we got married. Jeff was a home brewer, and beer was always my drink of choice, but he had been putting together this notion in his head since before I met him so the impetus to start New Belgium did come from Jeff. Then in addition to that I liked beer, I was newly married, and I did not want to say to my brand new husband that he couldn’t do this thing that he really wanted to do. So we built an addition onto our house and started the brewery in the basement after taking out a second mortgage on our home. I was a social worker, and it turns out that social work is a really good degree for general systems thinking.

Certainly its good for thinking about how you put together a community of people to work well together and build systems to support that.”

What were your goals for the business?

“Before Jeff and I first made any beer we went on a hike, a very social-worky thing! And we sat down to iron out what was important to us as we started to grow this baby company. And we had four things, which were: to produce world class beer, to promote beer culture and the responsible enjoyment of beer, to be environmental stewards, and to have fun. And you’ll notice there is nothing in there about our customers or our co-workers and I honestly think at that point that we didn’t have any co-workers or customers so it sounds stupid but it really didn’t occur to us!”

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AROUND THE WORLD

Brewery Basics NAME: NEW BELGIUM FOUNDED: 1991 LOCATION: FORT COLLINS, COLORADO, USA OWNER(S): FOUNDED BY KIM JORDAN AND JEFF LEBESCH AND NOW 100% EMPLOYEE-OWNED NUMBER OF STAFF: 703 (2018) KEY BEER BRANDS: FAT TIRE AMBER ALE (5.2% ABV), MOUNTAIN TIME PILSNER (4.4% ABV) AND VOODOO RANGER IPA (7% ABV) ANNUAL PRODUCTION: 844,937 US BREWERS BARRELS SOLD (2018) KEY EXPORT MARKETS: BRAZIL, FINLAND, CANADA, SWEDEN, NORWAY, SOUTH KOREA, JAPAN, AND AUSTRALIA

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AROUND THE WORLD

What is the ethos behind New Belgium and your beers?

What do you do differently at New Belgium?

“Since the start we have developed it more and we now have 10 core values that are on our website.” [See below]

“Let’s start with the beer side. Just by naming ourselves the New Belgium Brewing Company we really gave ourselves permission to brew a really wide variety of beers. And I honestly think at the time we didn’t understand how fundamental that would be to our approach to brewing. We started our wood-aged and barrel programme in 1997 so that was way before sour beers and wood-aged were a thing. And we had a lot of people who would just say ‘this beer is really weird!’. But we are now not only well-known for but well regarded for our wood-aged and sour beer programme. We made our first saison in 1997 as well, so I would say we just have a breadth of portfolio that especially for a brewery of our age and size is unmatched in the US craft brewing movement. We also had a really big commitment to environmental stewardship. We have invested $20million in processed water treatment which allows us to recover the nutrients in processed water which can be turned into methane that can be turned into thermal and electrical energy. That was a programme we put in in the late ‘90s or early 2000s. We are also 100% employee owned and we have been practicing what we call ‘high involvement culture’ so that is open book management – all of our co-workers know where the money goes, and we have a deep expectation that people participate in the strategic planning for the company. That, not just in brewing but in business more broadly, is a pretty innovative way of operating a business.”

NEW BELGIUM’S PURPOSE AND CORE VALUES AND BELIEFS New Belgium Brewing Purpose Statement To manifest our love and talent by crafting our customers' favourite brands and proving business can be a force for good.

Company Core Values and Beliefs 1. Remembering that we are incredibly lucky to create something fine that enhances people's lives while surpassing our consumers' expectations.

2. Producing world-class beers.

3. Promoting beer culture and the responsible enjoyment of beer.

4. Kindling social, environmental and cultural change as a business role model.

5. Environmental stewardship: Honoring nature at every turn of the business.

6. Cultivating potential through learning, high involvement culture, and the pursuit of opportunities.

7. Balancing the myriad needs of the company, our coworkers and their families.

8. Trusting each other and committing to authentic relationships and communications.

9. Continuous, innovative quality and efficiency improvements.

10. Having fun.

You were ahead of the curve when you launched New Belgium, did you expect the US craft beer market to expand as it has?

“No. And we have doubled in size in terms of the number of brewers even in the last four years. We started in 1991, and there was a fairly big pick-up of breweries in the late 1990s and then again in the mid-2000s. But then it really exploded in the late 2000s again. The business model has also changed. So it used to be you were either a brewpub or you were a packaging brewer. And maybe you were a brewpub that had found someone to package for you, or you had a separate brewery that did larger amounts of beer that you packaged. But now there is a whole model of people who have tasting rooms, and they don’t necessarily sell their beer, at least in any significant levels, in the off-premise. They sell almost all of it in their tasting rooms. And in the US a lot of craft beer drinkers will end up going to a brewery tasting room, which might just be a little appendage to their warehouse brewery. And one of the things that the statistics would say is that there is a lot of beer being drunk in these tasting rooms, and those numbers are not really counted very accurately because it is one off private businesses, but it has really changed the business model in a lot of ways.”

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Do you feel there is enough female representation in the craft beer business?

“No I don’t. I would say Odells also started in Fort Collins around the same time so there were two breweries within a half a mile of each other where women were a significant part of upper management, so that may have made it seem more normal to us. But generally speaking I think we have seen an explosion of women in the last maybe four years, but it has been a more recent phenomenon and I am sure that if you look at the raw numbers it is still not equitable.”

Did you ever come across any barriers in business as a female brewery owner?

“You can imagine I get asked a version of this question quite a lot, and what I generally say is that I think gender bias is pervasive and subtle. People who are doing things that range from jawdropping to minor in many cases don’t even realise they are doing them. Which doesn’t make it ok, but I know a lot of guys who are perfectly lovely human beings who do things where you think ‘Wow! Really??’. But I also think, especially earlier, some of that bias was that craft brewing was unusual but also counter cultural and it was done by hipsters with tattoos everywhere so that made it seem more questionable for people.”

Is there any advice you can give to women wanting to build a career in brewing?

“Make sure you love this industry, that you love all that goes into making beer. There are two lanes, one is a sub specialty that could be anything from biochemistry to finance, and one is actually brewing and then more broadly there is starting your own brewery. Brewing is in a lot of ways a blue collar endeavor. You need to really love that about it because there is a lot of cleaning, and a lot of heavy lifting and late nights finishing up a batch of beer, and that makes it very different from something like tech.

The other thing about brewing is that you can out-source it locally, you could have someone else make your beer, but it is not like other industries where you can get someone to package your beer in China, it doesn’t work that way.”

The US market has a much better proportion of female beer drinkers than the UK. Do you have a view on why this is and how the UK can learn from US brewers?

“I think the reason it has worked in the US is that in part breweries were started by iconoclastic entrepreneurs, and we all sort of intuitively knew that the way we wanted to talk about beer was with food, pairing the taste of it, to experiment with lots of different flavours. Whereas the big brewers in the US really focused on beer and traditional sports and I don’t think women are super excited about that necessarily, or they don’t relate to that

as much. So we were able to talk with beer drinkers in a way that was both interesting and current for the time. And with the food movement being also so strong at the time that combination really helped.”

What current challenges do you face as a brewer in the US market?

“Certainly competition is one of them. As a larger craft brewer, the local phenomenon makes it hard to have a close connection to our customers. There is always someone smaller and more local.”

What does sustainability look like at New Belgium?

“I have always felt like it is a continuous practice. It is not a case that you can say ‘Ok we’ve done these things, and now we are done’. We are always looking at our supply chain to see what we can do to both help our suppliers and see how we can source in a way that is more sustainable than the last time we looked at it.

We have an internal, essentially, tax that we charge ourselves for renewable energy so we make sure we are always investing in new renewable energy.”

How is New Belgium reacting to changes in drinking culture among millennials and generation Z? “I think in the US market not only are younger drinkers drinking less beer but drinking higher quality beer, you can see they are also drinking more cocktails, and functional wellness is a big thing. Have you also heard of this new phenomenon ‘sober curious’? It is an interesting phrase. These are people who, I think marijuana has had a big effect over here, and they are going to eat a gummy rather than go out drinking. With functional fitness as well there is kombucha now and herb based drinks, shrubs in cocktails, so not only is there a huge craft beer boom there is a huge craft drinks boom. We don’t do a no-alcohol beer yet but we are looking at it. We have actually studied no-alcohol pretty significantly so I feel we have some understanding of what we need to do. My sense is that it is a bigger deal in Europe right now than it is in the US but we will see what happens.”

What is your view of the UK beer market?

“I don’t know what the trends are in terms of craft beer growing or not growing, but seeing breweries popping up I think you have had a version of the craft beer explosion we have had. I also get the sense when I go to a pub in London it seems like there are a significant number of women drinking beer there now.”

How do you see the brewing sector in the US evolving over the next five to 10 years?

“One thing I am fairly certain of is that we are going to have more craft brewers that are owned by major brewers. I think we have a slug of people who have all been in this industry for somewhere

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AROUND THE WORLD

between 15 and 30 years, and they are all asking themselves ‘What is the end game for me and how do I get out of this?’. And I don’t mean that in a pejorative way, there is a natural ebb and flow to things and anyone who has been running a business for 20 or 30 years is going to be saying ‘OK what next?’. I also think there will be a lot of breweries where the end game is that they just shut the doors. That will either be because their quality is not great and their customers have stopped being interested. Or maybe it is not even quality as much as brand, they are not seen as hip enough or relevant enough in their market. Then the other thing will be essentially that we are all continuing to figure out how to be responsive to our customers. Are our customers going to want us to be significantly brewing non-alcoholic beers? What is going to happen in the US with CBD and beer? Will brewers figure out how to get into cannabis while also holding a Federal Brewers Licence?

The whole drinks area will I think continue to change. Kombucha will continue to grow, but there are only so many kombuchas you are going to want to drink in a day because they are all fairly distinctive. I think with the whole phenomenon of socialising it will be really interesting to see how that evolves in the social media and technology culture that we live it.”

What’s new at New Belgium for 2019?

“We are making this really interesting beer with a brewery in Mexico City, called Mural Agua Fresca. It is pink and 4.2% and 110 calories and delicious and it goes well with Mexican cuisine.

We are trying to do things that are interesting and innovative. We always hope that we are going to find the key to unlocking an entry level sour, because we do have so much capability there, and we have tried a few different ways but not hit the right combination yet.

So we continue to innovate on beer, and look at the marketplace and our competitors and think about what the big idea is there for the next few years. A couple of years ago we had a period of time when things were a little uneven for us in terms of our management structure and I think we have done a really good job in the last year and a half in really getting solid there and focused and that is in large part down to Steve Fechheimer [New Belgium’s CEO] and his crew.”

Who do you most admire in the brewing sector worldwide, and why?

“There are a lot of them. In no particular order, I think Michel Moortgat and the people at Duvel are doing really interesting things. I am always intrigued by older breweries, Michel is second or third generation I think, and they have done a really good job of having an interesting brand. Especially in Europe I find that unique.

European brands tend to be more about heritage. In the UK I think all of the work Logan Plant [founder of Beavertown] has done has been interesting and fun. Then in the US I think there are a lot of people who are doing interesting things that I admire, some of them larger, some of them smaller, some of them more specialising in specific areas like sours - The Rare Barrel has done a nice job.

I have so many friends in this industry from all of these years it would be hard to list just a couple of them!”

What are your three favourite beers worldwide?

“Certainly Fat Tire [New Belgium] holds a special place in my heart. I didn’t drink it for a long time very often, and I have been drinking it lately fairly regularly and I have really enjoyed it because it is well balanced and has a nice set of characteristics that play off one another. From someone else’s brewery, I tend to like hoppy beers, so there are a few classics there I always love. I was just at Russian River this weekend with Natalie Cilurzo [Co-owner of Russian River] who of course is another person in the industry I admire, and Pliny the Elder is a classic IPA. The third one would probably be an Orval or a Duvel, different on the spectrum but both of them really interesting interpretations and classics in their own right.”

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BREWERS ASSOCIATION DIVERSITY INITIATIVES

©Brewers Association

The Brewers Association in the US has been working on a range of initiatives to promote and celebrate greater diversity among both the brewing community and craft beer drinkers. Here are a few of their most recent projects…

BREWERS ASSOCIATION PROMOTES DIVERSITY & INCLUSIVITY

Promoting diversity and inclusion with the American craft brewing industry is a key area of focus for the Brewers Association, the not-for-profit trade association dedicated to small and independent American craft brewers, and it recently announced the recipients of its first-ever diversity and inclusion event grants.

Bob Pease, CEO/President of the Brewers Association, said: “The opportunity to inspire festival organisers to reach a broad and diverse group of festival attendees is our goal and by helping to support these varied type of events we can foster growth and stimulate a cultural shift towards beer. We are proud to support such events and to continue this programme in future years.”

Out of 51 applicants, six events were awarded a total of $20,000 by the Brewers Association Diversity Committee and will support local and regional events that foster and promote a diverse and inclusive craft beer community.

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They include: • Great Lakes Brewing Co, Cleveland, OH, 11th July 2019; an employment fair for craft breweries • HeART and Soul Brew Fest, Richmond, VA, 27th July 2019; bringing a new audience to craft beer through urban music, urban art, craft beer and soul food • FreshFest Beer Festival, Pittsburgh, PA, 9-11th August 2019; the nation’s first black brew fest • Beers With(out) Beards, Brooklyn, NY, 10th August 2019; elevating the position of women in the beer industry • Suave Fest, Denver, CO, 14th September 2019; growing the awareness of Latino influence in the craft beer industry • Craft Beer Employment Fair, Boston, MA, Autumn 2019; focusing on increasing awareness of diversity and inclusion and presenting employment opportunities

Recognising the need for increased inclusion both at the beer lover and brewery level, the Brewers Association has created programmes designed to cultivate conversation and action around diversity and inclusivity in craft beer.

Since 2017 the Brewers Association has invested in increasing diversity and inclusivity within the craft brewing community beginning with the establishment of its Diversity Committee to bring a more diverse group of brewers and beer lovers into the craft brewing community. Also in 2017, the Brewers Association’s Advertising and Marketing code was updated to help brewers maintain high standards and act responsibly.

Other highlights include: 1) The appointment of the Brewers Association’s first ever Diversity Ambassador, Dr J Nikol Jackson-Beckham.

Her role is to travel the country visiting state guild and craft brewing communities talking about best practices for diversifying both customer bases and staff and to listening to challenges in this area.

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©Brewers Association Brewers Association’s first ever Diversity Ambassador, Dr J Nikol Jackson-Beckham

2) The publication of a new collection of best practice guides that lay the groundwork for addressing, creating and managing a diversity and inclusion programme.

Authored by Dr J Nikol Jackson-Beckham they are designed to help businesses with everything from addressing why diversity matters and what it means to them, to setting up a framework to assess the success of a diversity and inclusion programme.

Pease added: “The Brewers Association will continue to take proactive steps to advance the brewing community’s path of diversity and inclusivity. Craft beer is made by, and for, everyone.”

Find out more at www.brewersassociation.org

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BUSINESS PROFILE

BRINGING TRUMAN’S BACK Most small independent craft brewers spend quite some time before launch making sure their story, their heritage and their provenance, meets the exacting standards of the discerning modern beer drinker. You have to create an interesting story to make it in this competitive market, so it was from quite a unique place that James Morgan found himself entering the market back in 2010.

James had been working as a graduate with shipping giant Maersk, but, seeking something smaller where he could make more of an impact and with a great love of craft beer, he ended up leaving to set up a beer import business with a colleague. This was going well, right up until the markets crashed and the country went into recession in 2007. With the pound now weakened so badly, his import business model was all but destroyed and James went back to the drawing board from his office, which happened to be just around the corner from the iconic old Truman’s Brewery in London’s Brick Lane. James knew of Truman’s beers and pubs from his younger days, and the idea struck him to take on the rights to the historic brand and bring this particular beer phoenix back from the ashes. While giving Truman’s the 21st century credentials it needs to succeed in the current market, James has resurrected what was a beer behemoth in the mid part of the last century, so what a story he now has to tell! Caroline Nodder travelled to the new Truman’s Brewery, in sight of the former Olympic Stadium in London’s Hackney Wick, to meet James and hear all about it…

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Brewery Basics NAME: TRUMAN’S BEER FOUNDED: 2010 LOCATION: HACKNEY WICK, LONDON OWNER(S): JAMES MORGAN (WITH INVESTORS) CAPACITY: 25,000HL STAFF: 38 (INCLUDING RETAIL) KEY BEERS: RUNNER AMBER ALE (4% ABV), SWIFT GOLDEN ALE (3.9% ABV), ZEPHYR PALE ALE (4.4% ABV) AND LAZARUS VERY PALE ALE (4.2% ABV) PRODUCTION(HL) AND SPLIT (CASK, KEG, SMALL PACK): 22,000HL TO 23,000HL ANNUALLY. 60% KEG, 35% CASK 5% SMALL PACK KEY EXPORT MARKETS: SMALL AMOUNTS TO FRANCE AND SWEDEN

Tell me a bit about your background and the background to the business.

“I came out of Uni not really knowing what I wanted to do, and I ended up going into the graduate scheme at a big shipping firm, Maersk. That was a great scheme but I guess at the end of it I came out thinking my talents were better suited to a small company rather than a large one. Maersk has about 150,000 people and is vast, and consequently very process driven, and there’s not much chance to make any impact. So I started a small business with another guy who was also on the scheme. We had a lightbulb moment in a pub, both of us really liked beer and they say do something you love, so we started importing beer in 2002/2003 and that went moderately well. We were both very young and very green but at the time we would be importing beers from Belgium or Germany, buying other beers from James Clay, and at that time we were one of the few people in London who you would be able to get a decent craft range from. So that is where I saw the opportunity. I started to learn a lot more about beer and it was a great experience. But then in 2007 when the crash happened and sterling devalued against the Euro 20% in six months we knew our customers weren’t going to take a 20% price increase so we were almost wiped out. We sold a small part of the business to LWC in Manchester and the rest we closed. All the time this was going on we had an office right off Brick Lane.

So we spent a lot of time in and out of the old Truman’s pubs and the old brewery building, and having been the middle man as an importer and been squeezed by the brewers and the customers I was thinking the way to sort that out was to have our own brewery. I had the thought that if I could get hold of the Truman’s brand or in some way resurrect it it was going to be a winner. So in 2005 or 2006 we started contacting Scottish & Newcastle who then owned it, and they said they weren’t selling it, but we kept trying and got a licence for it from S&N by the time of the buy-out

by Heineken. So we were doing a bit of cuckoo brewing with Nethergate and then Everard’s and then Heineken within a few weeks were willing to sell it to us. In 2011 we bought it and then in 2012 we started work on the new brewery site in Hackney Wick and moved in in 2013.”

How did you go about reviving such an iconic brand and bringing it into the modern era?

“A lot has changed even in the six years since we launched and there is a constant need to evolve for everybody in the industry, not just small brewers. The key is to engage with your local community and your local drinkers to really understand what

is going on. We do that a lot in various different ways. We run a lot of events and obviously having the pub gives us instant feedback. That is really key. It is amazing how drinkers’ habits have changed. When we launched in 2013 that was probably peak cask, so we were very cask centric, and in 2016 we began getting to grips with keg and started doing keg to the point where now most of our business is in keg. I think you just have to be so flexible and keep your eye on absolutely everything, which is a really difficult thing to do.”

What are your aspirations for the business?

“Our plans now are for a new brewery [in Walthamstow], which is large, almost 10 times what we have in Hackney, so roughly 250,000hl if it was maxed out. It is phased, so the first phase on day one will be around 120,000hl. But our business model is actually really simple. Almost all of our business is within the M25 and it is in cask and keg. We do nothing in the off-trade and almost no export and almost no small pack. So the basics of it are that we are now London’s largest independent brewer now THE KEY IS TO and all these channels are still unexplored. So the next stage ENGAGE WITH YOUR is that we want to get really LOCAL COMMUNITY AND serious about small pack, we want to get into small pack and YOUR LOCAL DRINKERS we want to get into export in a really major way. I can see how TO REALLY UNDERSTAND within five years we’ll be three WHAT IS GOING ON. to five times bigger than we are now, so somewhere between 50,000hl and 75,000hl. I think we will also do some contract brewing as it seems to be a good time to be doing that too. We were lucky with the Newman Arms [Truman’s first pub, which they operate alongside a bar in London City Airport], because Shaftesbury had it before us and had shored up what was a very dilapidated building, dug out the basement, and now you can sit down there and have a drink. So the refurb was expensive for us but if you look at CAPEX for breweries it is eye watering – getting the returns you need to be on your mettle the whole time.

Whereas pub margins are more generous and less risky I would say. By the end of this year we will have another one if not two pubs and if everything falls into place we’ll have another three. At the new brewery site [in Walthamstow] we’ll also have an event space, brewery tap and brewery shop which will be incredible as we have none of that here.”

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How would you describe your brewing ethos?

Where are you investing this year?

“When we looked at the old gyle books from Truman’s and having talked to Derek [Prentice, the original brewer at the old Truman’s] about what was around at the time the general sentiment was that those wouldn’t actually go down very well. The thinking was that the nation’s palate has actually got successively sweeter every year, driven by soft drinks and confectioners who have gradually got us hooked onto sugar. But actually if you ask John Keeling for example from Fuller’s he would tell you that London Pride is hugely sweeter than it was years ago. So we went to the national yeast bank in Norwich and got hold of the original Truman’s yeast, which I think is a key bit of heritage, and then we used some elements of the old recipes to influence our beers, especially Runner which probably has the most links to the past.”

“In the new brewery we are investing over £2million. We have 15 shareholders, of which I am the largest shareholder then I have a silent business partner who is the second largest then we have 15 other smaller investors a lot of whom are friends and family who came on board when we first started. So the funding is essentially coming from them. Work will start in the next fortnight and we will be brewing by March 2020. The idea is that we will take over the kit from here and build a similar kit there with more bells and whistles and run them in parallel. That gives us much more flexibility on what we brew on a daily basis.”

What are the main challenges you see businesses like yours facing at the moment?

“I am sure plenty! I do feel that there is a tendency, and this is true with a lot of brewers, that you start with an ever increasing range. You see lots of brewers with dozens of beers. But in reality if you have four or five beers you are really proud of and are award-winning, and you are getting great feedback on from your customers, then looking back on it now I would just put everything into those. We are doing that and have been doing that and we only have eight permanent beers, but I still feel in hindsight would we have spent the last few years more gainfully employed pushing three or four?”

“The market has changed a lot. Clearly cask is having a tougher time and keg is in the ascendancy. That is a challenge not just because I personally love cask, it is why I got into brewing, but it is a challenge because customers of ours and I am sure every other brewer, want to have more craft keg on their bar and aren’t necessarily alert to the fact that will impact their cask sales. When you have cask sales that are dropping then is anyone actually putting the love and attention into the cellar work? So it could become a downward spiral. The challenge for us as a brewer that is keen to see cask succeed long term is to come up with a cask format that is much more modern. That for some CAMRA members is a challenging statement. I think a lot of the best cask now is probably being centrifuged to take out a lot of organic matter and whatever they can and they are then reseeding it which for some people is an absolute no no. But if you want cask to succeed then it needs to increase its consistency. There is already work Molson Coors and I am sure people like Marston’s are doing on temperature of serve and I think in reality it is very difficult to argue with the fact that especially in the summer you don’t want to go and drink a bitter at 12 degrees. That has to be tackled. We will sell 15,000 more casks this year so our challenge is to look at all the technology available to us both in the brewhouse and at the customers’ cellars to make sure our cask is as good as it can be. Then to make sure we have enough engagement and training to make it stick and work.”

Are there any mistakes you’ve made that you have learned from?

How do you define genuine craft beer?

“I don’t think ‘craft’ is a title or a badge that can be used. It doesn’t make any sense to me. It has become synonymous with brewers that use really high quality ingredients and brew in a slightly less rushed automated fashion to produce something that is seen to be, and in many instances is, ultra high quality, flavoursome, with great aroma. There is nothing about that inherently that is about size. So for me Sierra Nevada is a classic example, in that you can be brewing 3,000,000hl and still be producing something you’d say was craft. So I just don’t think ‘craft’ exists. What exists is really great beer, and to the extent that people want to call that craft then great, but I personally think it is a really unhelpful label because it has begun to mean one thing to brewers, another thing to drinkers, and another to people like journalists who write about it, so it has become a catch-all term with which to browbeat people.”

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BUSINESS PROFILE

WE HAVE SO MANY NEW ENTRANTS TO THE SECTOR, ALL IT IS DOING IS DRIVING DOWN THE PRICE OF CASK.

With margins for small brewers very tight how do you ensure you continue to make money?

How do you see the UK brewing sector evolving in the coming months and years?

“We are right at the nasty point of the duty curve at the moment.

It is an insane system. If you were going to come up with a system that actively discouraged the growth of brewers this is the system you’d come up with. It is obviously a highly charged issue that no one can agree on, but I do feel that the one thing everyone could coalesce around is the idea it is currently not fit for purpose. What terrifies some people is losing that 50% relief, and it is very hard if you are brewing the beer, invoicing the beer, delivering the beer, to be able to step back and say, ‘is this harming the industry?’. We have so many new entrants to the sector, all it is doing is driving down the price of cask.”

“It is shrinking by volume but by value it is increasing, so I suspect that is going to continue. Very broadly put it is premiumising and I think that will continue and people will be drinking less but drinking more expansive beer and that will be driven by quality and provenance and the strength of the brand.

It is interesting that we as a nation are drinking historic levels of alcohol, but that is because wine and spirits are in growth.

Another way of looking at it longer term might be that as beer essentially becomes more like wine, people are caring more about where it is from and the quality so there are a lot of parallels with wine, maybe we will start to see a shift back. One of the big unknowns is whether no and low alcohol beer will take market share from soft drinks. That is one of the reasons it hasn’t been successful to date, is that one of the biggest margins you can have is on soft drinks, so obviously a pint of Coke is going to cost a lot less than a pint of non-alcoholic beer. However, I do think the demand is such that will happen, and then you could see beer growing at the expense of soft drinks.”

How do you see small brewers’ routes to market evolving?

“Craft beer’s percentage of the pub market is increasing so I guess that is why people are focusing on it. I also suspect there is a route to market issue in that if you are a smaller bar or restaurant you may be dealing with Matthew Clark or one of the national wholesaler and maybe you just don’t want to have another five or 10 deliveries. Also if you are a small brewer putting five or 10 kegs into a pub and chasing the payment and doing the invoicing and building the relationship it is more worthwhile than serving a restaurant so it is a classic return on investment piece. But if you are building a brand you have to do both there is no choice, so we have just staggered it so we have got one bit right and now we are ready to do the next bit.”

How important is sustainability and environmental issues to your business?

“I would say that CSR for a city centre brewery is inevitably harder than it would be out in the country. If we were outside London there is no doubt we’d have a reed bed, a bioreactor, and all of the other things that make your impact much less. But in the city centre our CSR is really about working with our local community.

So our event space will be open free of charge to community groups that need a space to meet in and that is how we can really contribute.”

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BUSINESS PROFILE What are your views on diversity within craft beer in terms of women, people of colour and minority representation?

“It sounds trite but the best businesses reflect the community around them and I think it would be naïve of any business not to represent the community around them. So obviously in East London there are a lot of people from a whole range of backgrounds and we reflect that.”

How does your business approach recruitment and retention of good people?

“It is really tough. We had this conversation internally quite recently and the issue is that a lot of people who want to get into brewing are coming out of university, college or school and it’s their first job. They don’t really know what to expect and the issue is there is really no formal structured training in the industry for that. We need them to be in sales, marketing, heavy lifting, brewing, events – it is a bit of everything. We do apprenticeships and we will do more of them, and we send all our guys on to the General Certificate of Brewing if they show an interest and if they pass that we send them on to start their Diploma. But there are a lot of people who come into it and are not sure they want to be in it and you have to have a real talent for teasing out the ones who want it.”

Where do you get your ideas and inspiration from?

“I travel a lot and visit a lot of other breweries. Not that long ago I was out in Vermont and went round about 20 different breweries over there and got some ideas from that. I went to the Craft Brewers convention in the US which was really good. They are so into sours and gueuze over there and that I find a bit odd but they really embody the next big fad, A LOT OF THE BEST whereas if I wanted a really good gueuze I’d hop on the Eurostar IDEAS COME WHEN I TAKE and go to Brussels! I do wonder A LOAD OF MATES TO THE if our current zeitgeist in the UK for sours is driven by the USA PUB AND LISTEN TO WHAT when the best ones in the world are 100miles away. To be honest THEY HAVE TO SAY. though, where we are trying to be now as a business means a lot of the best ideas come when I take a load of mates to the pub and listen to what they have to say. You also have to look at what big brewers have done. They are experts in their fields so if you ignore them there is something wrong with you!”

What brewers and beers do you most admire in the sector and why?

“Fergus Fitzgerald at Adnams is very talented and brews great beer and I admire that business, which is very traditional, some of the pubs are very traditional, but some of their beers are much more progressive. I think people lose sight of the fact there is a simplicity and beauty in some of the more traditional beers too. If you have a pint of Landlord, and it’s been well kept, it is absolutely knock-out. In Vermont, Lawson’s Sip of Sunshine IPA was amazing. And Derek [Prentice] of course. What an amazing thing to have brewed for every major London brewer and still be brewing!”

What would be your desert island beer and where would you drink it?

“This is going to sound like I have been on some sort of training course on what to say, but I would absolutely take Truman’s Roller IPA, a case of it, and I would be sitting on top of a mountain.”

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LEGAL

GRAIN DUST: WHAT ARE THE RISKS TO WORKERS? In this article Napthens’ partner Terry Griffin, a regulatory legal specialist, looks at the risks for workers in the brewing industry and what employers need to do to limit those risks. . .

The Health & Safety Executive (HSE) consider the main occupational ill-health risks to brewing industry employees to be as follows: 1. Musculoskeletal injury 2. Repetitive handling injury 3. Noise induced hearing loss 4. Occupational lung disease following exposure to grain and malt dust 5. Occupational lung disease and nasal cancer due to exposure to hardwood dust in cooperages With this in mind, the risk posed to the health of any workers exposed to grain dust shouldn’t be under estimated.

Any employer that does not take adequate precautions risks having an unhealthy workforce with an ensuing loss of productivity. They also leave themselves open to work related compensation claims – and potential prosecution.

Fortunately the HSE, via their website, helpfully provides guidance to the industry as to the possible hazards it faces and sets out advice on the precautions which should be taken to prevent or adequately control, exposure to grain dust. It explains the necessary requirements to comply with the relevant legislation, including the control of substances hazardous to Health Regulations 2002.

All businesses within the industry should be aware of the possible risks posed to their workforce. This includes the need to adequately risk assess each step in the production process to prevent the exposure of employees to grain dust, or, if this is not reasonably practicable, to adequately control this.

All equipment used to control exposure Napthens' partner, Terry Griffin to grain dust must be maintained and in good working order, be in good repair and in a clean condition. Checks monitoring the equipment must be taken and records of maintenance kept.

Where it has not been possible to eliminate exposure to employees, personal protective equipment, including protective clothing and respiratory protective equipment should be provided.

All employees who are, or may be, exposed to grain dust must be given sufficient information, instruction and training to understand the potential health issues and precautions necessary.

There is an obligation on all employers to monitor levels of exposure and to provide the relevant information, instruction and training for employees.

When working with grain dust, it is also important to have appropriate washing facilities for the workforce and to carry out regular health surveillance checks and where applicable, to notify the HSE of any reportable disease instances.

The penalties for failing to comply with the relevant regulations carry potentially extremely severe financial penalties. Penalties would be based on the level of the harm risked, the likelihood of that harm occurring, together with the degree of culpability of the company - ranging from those with a flagrant disregard to the law and their responsibilities, at the most serious end of the spectrum, to those companies which just fall short of the appropriate standards. After determining these factors, a Court will then as their starting point look to the annual turnover of the company against the sentencing guidelines in imposing financial penalty. Fines frequently run into the tens of thousands of pounds.

For further guidance on this issue or if you require advice on a health and safety investigation or prosecution please contact Napthens for specialist legal advice.

For advice on this topic or on legal issues affecting your business please contact SIBA Legal Helpline: 0845 6710277 North West Law firm LLP is a SIBA supplier associated and Gold Standard Sponsor. The firm has a team of specialists looking after legal requirements of clients in the leisure and licenced trade sector, with clients including Daniel Thwaites Plc and Titanic Brewery.

Napthens manage the SIBA Legal Helpline which offers legal advice and guidance on a wide range of legal issues affecting your business, including: General commercial, intellectual property, corporate finance, dispute resolution and litigation, commercial property, licensing, debt recovery, employment law and HSE advice including investigations and prosecutions. Any enquiry through the helpline will receive up to 1 hour of free legal expertise (if further work is require, you’ll be advised of the appropriate charging structure).

Full details of the helpline can be found on the SIBA Members Toolbox.

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DIGITAL

HOW TO ENGAGE WITH YOUR CUSTOMERS ON SOCIAL MEDIA Digital is all about relationships, says expert Matt Jones from Inapub, and using constant small everyday interactions with your customers can build awareness of your brand and grow your following. Here he gives some advice on how to do this effectively…

One of the best ways in which you can develop your followers and audience on Social Media is to engage with customers. There are several ways you can do this whether it be beer drinkers, or pubs and bars that stock your beer. Some of these can be as a simple as a click or tap of a button. But doing so allows you to establish a relationship with those customers and that will bring more sales.

Many of you will have a selection of pubs which sell your beer regularly.

Many of them will be happy to post about and engage with your content.

Ensure you are following all of these businesses on all of their platforms.

When they post about the beers they have on sale you can engage with them by sharing it to your platforms.

If you have followers who are fans of your beers who live near those pubs they are then more likely to stop by. It is a relatively simple thing but retweeting and sharing posts will gain you more sales. The businesses themselves are also more likely to buy your beer in future as you have shown appreciation for them. If you do this regularly it might gain your pub a permanent place on the bar.

Pubs and bars are likely to also share your content which will gain you more followers.

Ensure you have all of your usernames and tags on your POS, delivery notes and any other related business documents. When these are sent out you might gain a follower or two. Many breweries are not making their customers aware of their Social

Media presence enough on different platforms, particularly Instagram. Add tags to your email footers, POS and anything you can associated with the business. This includes the beer labels for your bottles or design of your cans.

Advertising this will ensure you gain audience.

Not only should you go through your on trade customers and look to engage with them, but you should also look to your individual beer drinkers. Any time your customers tweet, message, comment or share anything you post it is an opportunity to communicate with them. If on Facebook you received a comment about your beers or on your posts, comment back. If on Twitter they tweet you, tweet back and thank them. Similarly on Instagram, if they tag or link to you, comment a thanks and like that post. If a customer said thank you and complimented your beer in person, you would always say thanks back, and engage them in a conversation. This same behaviour should happen on Social Media whenever possible.

Much of Social Media revolves around Hashtags. They are used on Instagram and Twitter, but not on Facebook. A Hashtag is a digital signpost to more content about that topic. So if you click on #beer, you will be shown more pictures, posts and content related to beer. You should always use these to link your content to general trends which are taking place on Twitter and Instagram.

A simple way you can use this tool to engage with customers is to create your own hashtag term. This

Matt Jones. Inapub's Digital Services Manager

could be something as simple as: #OurBreweryGoldenAle. It has to be unique to your business for it to be effective. Something as simple as #beers is too general to be used for you only. But if you create your own it makes it easier to reach your customers. All you need to do to find this content is to search for that Hashtag and see what Social Media users are posting about you.

If you find at any point you are seeing posts which are negative about you or your business, don’t engage with these. These posts are only seen by a limited number of people, but if you engage with them you will draw attention to them, and they will be seen by more people. If you think of it as a conversation, you avoid strangers if they speak in a negative way, but if you confront them this shows everyone around you there is a problem. This is the same on Social Media. It is best to avoid engaging in this way. The exception to this is if you receive reviews on online sites such as Google Business, Trip advisor or similar beer sites.

Most businesses do not regularly engage anywhere near enough with their customers. It is a missed opportunity to increase sales, develop your brand and showcase what you’re about. Even if you just like a comment it can make the difference between a customer buying your beer or not. The best businesses on Social Media do this kind of engagement all the time and you should look to do more when you can.

Inapub is the leading supplier of digital marketing solutions for Britain’s pub and beer trade, offering news, advice, training and website services. If you’d like to know more about how Inapub can help grow your business, email sales@inapub.co.uk or visit www.inapub.co.uk.

Matt can be contacted at mattj@inapub.co.uk or on 07387 099 674.

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MARKETING

WHAT’S NEW IN MARKETING FOR H2 2019?

Marketing moves fast in the digital world, and most businesses are only utilising a fraction of the potential routes to reach clients and customers more effectively, says marketing guru Mark McCulloch. Here he looks at the latest trends in marketing for the second half of 2019….

As we hit the halfway stage of 2019, I am out and about talking to clients in the beer, food and hospitality industries and it is striking me that we as an industry are merely scraping the surface of the potential for digital and social marketing. We are still doing this piecemeal rather than as a well joined up oiled machine, producing constant measurable activity which drives your business.

I would break this down into two areas. One is ‘business as usual’ where you have the following in place: Your Brand DNA (knowing what your brand stands for), your marketing strategy which includes your acquisition (PPC, SEO, Social etc), retention (CRM, Loyalty etc) and brand building strategies (Non immediate sales driving activity) for offline, online (social and digital). Also baked into this is an evergreen long lasting engagement programme for your teams.

The second area is where to focus over and above digital.

Here are my top tips/areas to focus on in the coming 6-12 months:

You Tube Not many food and drink brands are using You Tube to great effect but with 23m active monthly users in the UK and far longer viewing times than the usual social media suspects it is a fantastic way to tell your brand story, showcase products and create longer form content that educates, entertains and/or helps people who are watching. For example you could start a TV style show which reviews craft beers, you could showcase food and drink pairings or let people into your business meeting your suppliers, teams, frontline employees and your customers.

When it is BBQ season for example, it is no surprise that people are searching for your product whether that is beer, wine, meat, pizza. A set of engaging 'how to' videos and what to choose, buy and pair with is a great way in. You would also want to stick a bit of money behind your posts to ensure you are seen in the searches you want to appear in.

LinkedIn LinkedIn is actually the third biggest social media platform in the UK after Facebook and You Tube. However, there is a huge chance to cut through with B2C style more engaging content vs the grey and boring B2B posts you usually see up there. You can target so well on LinkedIn in terms of who you want to talk to through searching name, company name, job title, area etc. The targeting options in the back end are brilliant plus you can message anyone by buying some InMail credits. Just make sure your approach is unique, human and adds value to the person you are trying to get the attention of.

Content It is non negotiable now that you need someone on your team who can Mark McCulloch of Premium Brand constantly video, edit and Marketing Strategy consultancy and post lots and lots of Supersonic Inc content. It is said that you should be posting 80100 pieces of unique content per day across the various channels. This sounds overwhelming, however by shooting all day every day you will have so much to post and then it becomes an editing job vs a content creation job.

Documenting your brand, product, human and company story is now what people want/demand to see.

Internal Influencers Why have a social/marketing team of one or a few people when you can engage your teams to post about your brand, products and people all day every day. All you need to do is find out who is up for it. Decide what types of things you would like them to post, train them up and then add a confessional hashtag saying #iworkhere or #employee.

What’s App The messaging apps of What’s App and Facebook Messenger are now bigger than Facebook itself in terms of monthly active users. What’s App is a must look into for your business where you can broadcast to your most loyal fans and instantly communicate with them. Your open rate can be 90% vs 17% from promotional emails and the click through rate is said to be 35% as opposed to 3% from promotional emails. It’s a no brainer. Also using What’s App status (give it a try) enables you to communicate even more text and image based ‘story’ style messages to your signed up community. There is lots more to come from What’s App so do keep an eye out and start playing with it and testing it today.

Voice Lastly Voice (Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, Apple HomePod) is not coming, it is here. So the big question is are you using it, do you have a strategy in terms of how you will ensure you are front of mind when people are searching and buying with voice and are you investing in the platforms at the other end to ensure you are top / preferred or default search when someone asks Alexa for Beer, Cooking Sauce, Delivery of Food or Book a Restaurant? I would be starting to get all of that sorted asap.

Best of luck for H2 2019!

Mark McCulloch is one of the leading Food, Drink and Hospitality brand and marketing minds in Europe. Mark co-founded Brand and Marketing agency WE ARE Spectacular Ltd in 2012 and now runs Premium Brand and Marketing Strategy consultancy Supersonic Inc. Email: supersonic.mmc@gmail.com Phone: +447881314385 Website: www.supersonic.marketing Twitter & Instagram: @supersonic_inc

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REGULATION

SPOTTING THE WARNING SIGNS It has been hard to avoid the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR), which came into force in May 2018. In the run up to the regulations coming in, our inboxes were full of emails asking for consent to remain on mailing lists. Even though such emails should have now subsided, it is not the end of the story. The reality is that the GDPR is still there, looking over shoulders at every turn, making sure organisations are treating personal data with the utmost care and attention.

Data protection expert Thomas Chartres-Moore, who is head of the food and drink team at Stephens Scown LLP outlines the traps that businesses should avoid, along with tips to stay on the right side of the regulations.

TOP TRAPS: 1. “The GDPR doesn’t apply to me” This is, by far, one of the most common mistakes made by organisations; assuming that the new data protection regulations do not apply to them.

Regardless of your organisation, whether you’re a brewery, a firm of solicitors or a zoo, it’s a safe bet that you are holding some form of personal information about people. This could be subscribers from your website, contacts on your customer database or even just your employees. If you hold any names, addresses or other information that serves to identify a natural person, you will have to comply with the GDPR. 2. Legitimate Interests may not always be “legitimate” Just because someone likes beer, does not mean you have a “legitimate interest” under the GDPR to contact them.

Under the GDPR “consent is king” and generally without it any contact with other individuals may be subject to scrutiny. As such, a lot of people are relying on legitimate interests in order to justify contact, particularly for marketing purposes. Often this is done without paying any attention to whether or not their interests are legitimate under the GDPR. If you get caught out by this, and you have not done the requisite checks to show that you have a legitimate interest, you will be falling foul of the regulations and therefore could be subject to a hefty fine.

3. Not training your staff This is one trap that most businesses can get caught by, not just breweries.

As the GDPR is all encompassing, simply implementing a privacy policy on your website will not be sufficient in the long run. If / when a compliance issue crops up

within your organisation, the first question that the Information Commissioner’s Office is going to ask is: “what training have your staff received”. If the answer you provide is any less than “a lot”, you are likely to find yourself in hot water.

Thomas Chartres-Moore

done this yet, it needs to be done without delay. Without it, you can’t move forward with your compliance.

It can be a long process, but it is one that is imperative in the eyes of the ICO.

The best thing you can do is make sure everyone in your organisation, from factory floor staff to admin staff and sales people, is to ensure they are fully up-to-speed. This should include training on the processes being put in place by your organisation, as well as full training on the GDPR and its implications.

Conversely, if you already did this in the run up to the GDPR coming into force on 25th May 2018, it is likely that data has grown or changed. As such, it is advisable to review the mapping procedure which you undertook all those months ago. It may be the case that, following a review, you need to reassess some of your policies and procedures.

TOP TIPS:

It is vital to keep on top of this.

1. DON’T PANIC Even though the introduction of the GDPR may now seem like a distant memory, and you are no longer being bombarded by reminders that it is there, does not mean it does not still apply and that you do not have to comply with it. The key here, even if you have not taken any steps towards to compliance yet, is not to panic.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is becoming more vigilant in respect of non-compliant organisations, but there is still time, however you need to approach it methodically. Make sure you map your data (see the next tip) to make you slightly more informed about the situation you are in with the data you hold. From there you can make a plan of how to approach data protection.

Ultimately, once you start on the road to compliance, being able to show that you are working on it will be more productive than not attempting it at all.

2. Stay on top of the data you hold The first step to dealing with the GDPR is to get a proper handle on the type and extent of data that you hold or process within your organisation. If you haven’t

3. Don’t put it off The GDPR is always watching, through its many different guises; be it an officious ICO employee, or a vexatious customer.

If any of them deem you to not be complying, they will catch you out and your organisation could face a hefty fine and significant reputational damage, so the worst thing you can do is bury your head in the sand.

Make a start; show that you are attempting to comply, and if you already have, then don’t stop there.

So many businesses made some attempts at compliance in a rush before the regulations came into force and now have not looked a those attempts in months; consequently they have fallen behind or don’t realise that what they started was not sufficient.

Businesses that conduct such reviews of their mapping and processes in order to aid their compliance will benefit elsewhere, often leading to new efficiencies within the organisation.

So whilst it may be an extra chore to take on, it can be extremely beneficial in the long run.

If you would like to discuss the implications of the GDPR on your business or would like help with your organisation’s compliance, please do not hesitate to contact Thomas Chartres-Moore who is an expert in data protection and head of Stephens Scown’s food and drink team on 01392 210700,email ip.it@stephens-scown.co.uk or via www.stephens-scown.co.uk.

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Great Beers

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TECHNICAL FOCUS

By Dr Keith Thomas of Brewlab, Sunderland

ALL AT SEA

Is there any sea in your beer? For many cask brewers the answer is that there is as we often include fish in the form of isinglass finings. These, added to enhance yeast settlement and produce clarity, are protein extracts from sturgeon fish which are particularly effective in binding flocculating yeast together. In addition, copper finings / Irish Moss also have a seaside origin being derived from the red seaweed Chondrus crispus.

But what about other marine materials? Can oysters be used safely in a beer for example or are they merely a side dish to provide a tang of condiment? How about the sea itself - can we use sea water in the mash? After all, in times of water shortages sea water could be an abundant resource.

Commercial beers occasionally surface with sea water on their ingredient list or more extensively in their publicity. Er Boqueron for example from Xativa near Valencia in Spain includes exhaustively filtered seawater in its ingredients while Libertine brewery in California promote a similar offering to surfers. To some extent these beers are a mirror of the Goze style from Goslar in Germany where high levels of salt in the regional water provide a saline tang to the local product.

Closer to home Yarmouth Ale from East Anglia was reputed to have high levels of salt perhaps due to the levels in the wells but possibly due to later additions. Salt, of course, enhances flavour in general but specifically sweetness. Nor should we forget salt’s effect on thirst so providing plenty of motivation for an addition to increase drinkability.

Today saline beers are yet to become a main stream choice. Opinion should be deferred on their wider potential but with the search for novelty intensifying can we answer the question of whether sea water has benefits or hazards? On the benefit side claims have been made that salt in beer provides better hydration after exercise but few beers are recommended as a restorative after serious sport exertion. The negative features of alcohol in beer make any health claims a difficult ethical promotion – although low or no alcohol versions would be a valid way forward.

While most brewers provide salt treatments of calcium sulphate and chloride to their mash, sea salt itself is sodium chloride of which only the chloride element has value to managing pH and other brewing attributes. Sodium is unnecessary and typically low in standard water supplies, around 30mg per litre in London.

In contrast levels in sea water are around 35g per litre, about a thousand times higher and providing almost 20 grams in a pint.

Recommended daily sodium intake for health is to keep below 2.4 grams so brewing with pure sea water is certainly undesirable without extensive treatment. Moreover, sea water also has a high pH of around 8.1 so compounding its difficulty in use.

Many brewers adjust their water to produce brewing liquor suitable for mashing and fermentation. In many cases by simple neutralization of alkalinity but increasingly through ion exchange or reverse osmosis procedures. Desalination of sea water is feasible using a variety of techniques but unlikely at the moment to be cost

Figure 1

effective for regular use unless it is the only supply available.

Aside from its impact on mineral composition water can also affect yeast performance with effects resulting from the calcium / magnesium balance and the level of heavy metals such as iron, chromium, manganese and zinc. Heavy metal concentrations in seawater, although variable, are relatively low. Magnesium and calcium, however, are much higher.

In standard brewing liquor we typicaly have a preponderance of calcium over magnesium perhaps as high as 25:1 in Dublin water. The ratio in sea water is reversed with three times as much magnesium than calcium. Yeast will ferment in a range of calcium and magnesium concentrations but interestingly studies show that better fermentations are obtained with higher ratios of magnesium to calcium.

Yeast will certainly grow in sea water. Figure 1 shows the growth profiles of six brewing yeast strains inoculated into wort with seawater concentrations ranging from 10% to 50%. Very little difference is evident between the growth of the strains although the taste of a full brew at even 10% is likely to be too saline to be enjoyable and 50% to be of more use as mouthwash.

All of this does not stop beer being promoted as accompaniment to sea food particularly oysters with a stout. In years past some brewers extended the association by incorporating oysters or oyster extract into the beer itself while others used the ground shells as a fining agent. Inevitably this would increase the level of salt in the beer as well as providing a taste of the sea, often described as inky or iodine like – a feature also associated with sea weed.

Returning to our initial question of a sea food ale. Considering the variable hygiene of inland seas adding shell fish to beer would be considered a dubious risk today unless conducted before a sound boil. A clear allergen warning on the ingredient list would also be essential. Perhaps the easiest combination of the sea and beer is a pint in the pub at the harbour or at the bar on the beach.

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Cask British Dark Beers (4.5 to 6.4%)

Sponsored by

Crisp Malt

South West Region Bottle & Can Winners Overall Champion of the Bottle/Can Competition Sponsored by Atlas Packaging

Seth Conway presents Declan Teare with the gold award

GOLD Yeovil Ales YPA 7.3 SILVER Eight Arch Brewing Co. Corbel 5.5 BRONZE Eight Arch Brewing Co. Square Logic 4.2

REGIONAL BEER COMPETITIONS

Bottle/Can British Dark Beers up to 4.4%

Bottle/Can British Dark Beers 4.5 to 6.4%

James Calder, SIBA CEO presents Jonathan Crump with the gold award

James Calder, SIBA CEO presents Joe Dixon with the gold award

GOLD Black Tor Brewery Raven 4.2 SILVER Castle Brewery Moat Mild 4.4 BRONZE Kettlesmith Brewing Company Plotline 4.4

GOLD Salcombe Brewery Co. Island Street Porter 5.9 SILVER Box Steam Brewery Funnel Blower 4.5 BRONZE Padstow Brewing Co The Smoke 5.5

Bottle/Can British Premium Bitter (4.5 to 6.4%)

Bottle/Can Session IPA (up to 4.3%)

Bottle/Can Premium PAs (4.4 to 5.4%)

Sponsored by

James Calder, SIBA CEO presents Simon Lacey with the gold award

James Calder, SIBA CEO presents Steve Farrell with the gold award

Paul Arrowsmith, SW Regional Director presents Joe Thomson with the gold award

GOLD Country Life Brewery Golden Pig 4.7 SILVER Cheddar Ales Ltd Karst 4.9 BRONZE Hunters Brewery ltd Hunters Premium 4.8

GOLD Eight Arch Brewing Co. Square Logic 4.2 SILVER Harbour Brewing Co Ellensberg Session IPA 4.3 BRONZE Skinner's Brewing Co Ltd Lushingtons IPA 4.2

Bottle/Can Imperial IPA 6.5% and over

Beatson Clark Ltd

Bottle/Can British Bitter (up to 4.4%)

James Calder, SIBA CEO presents Stig Anderson with the gold award

GOLD Stonehenge Ales Ltd Heel Stone 4.3 SILVER Liberation Brewery Liberation Ale 4.0 BRONZE Padstow Brewing Co Padstow Pale Ale 3.6

Bottle/Can IPA (5.5 to 6.4%)

Paul Arrowsmith, SW Regional Director presents Steve Farrell with the gold award

GOLD Firebrand Brewing West Coast Session IPA 4.5 SILVER Driftwood Spars Brewery Lou's Brew 5.0 BRONZE Quantock Brewery Titanium 5.1

GOLD Eight Arch Brewing Co. Corbel 5.5 SILVER Dawkins Ales Ultra 6.2 BRONZE Harbour Brewing Co Antipodean IPA 5.5

Bottle/Can Session Lager & Pilsner (up to 4.4%)

Bottle/Can Premium Lager & Pilsner (4.5 to 6.4%)

Bottle/Can Speciality Light Beer

Paul Arrowsmith, SW Regional Director presents Declan Teare with the gold award

Paul Arrowsmith, SW Regional Director presents Jem with the gold award

Paul Arrowsmith, SW Regional Director presents John Magill with the gold award

GOLD Yeovil Ales YPA 7.3 SILVER Hunters Brewery Ltd Full Bore 6.8 BRONZE Downton Brewery Endeavour 10.0

GOLD Cheddar Ales Ltd Bedstraw 4.4 SILVER Red Rock Brewery Devon Pilsner 4.1 BRONZE Arkells Brewery Ltd Malthouse Craft Lager 4.2

GOLD Powderkeg Brewery Cut Loose 4.7 SILVER Hop Kettle Brewery Ceru Pils 4.8 BRONZE Moor Beer Company Pils 5.2

Paul Arrowsmith, SW Regional Director presents Sam Brooking with the gold award

Bottle/Can Speciality Medium to Dark Beers

Bottle/Can Sours/Spontaneous

Bottle/Can Strong Beers (6.5% and over)

GOLD South Hams Brewery Cloch Point 6.8 SILVER Padstow Brewing Co Lobster Tale 4.5 BRONZE Hop Kettle Brewery Grind 5.1

GOLD New Lion Brewery Fruit Sour 5.5 Paul Arrowsmith, SW Regional Director presents Tom Gee with the gold award

GOLD Hop Kettle Brewery Flapjack Marmalade 7.7 SILVER South Hams Brewery Corryvreckan 6.8 BRONZE Dorset Brewing Company Smoulder Draft 3.8

Paul Arrowsmith, SW Regional Director presents Joe Thomson with the gold award

GOLD Firebrand Brewing Imperial Stout 9.5 SILVER Quantock Brewery UXB 9.0 BRONZE Moor Beer Company Old Freddy Walker 7.3

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North East Region Cask Winners

REGIONAL BEER COMPETITIONS

SIBA North East Region

Overall Champion of the Cask Competition

Cask British Dark Beers (up to 4.4%)

Cask British Dark Beers (4.5 to 6.4%)

Nick Brading, Murphys presents Anna Scantlebury, Cullercoats with the gold award

Mark Anderson, SIBA Regional Director presents Bill Scantlebury, Cullercoats with the gold award

Ian Fozard, SIBA Chairman presents Michael, BAD Co with the gold award

GOLD Cullercoats Brewery Polly Donkin Oatmeal Stout 4.2 SILVER Brass Castle Brewery Annexation 8.3 BRONZE Daleside Brewery Ltd Monkey Wrench 5.3

GOLD Cullercoats Brewery Polly Donkin Oatmeal Stout 4.2 SILVER Goose Eye Brewery Ltd Black Moor 3.9 BRONZE First & Last Brewery Red Rowan 4.0

GOLD BAD CO Dark Necessities 5.5 SILVER Bridgehouse Brewery Ltd Bridgehouse Porter 4.5 BRONZE Treboom Brewery Orion’s Belt 4.5

Cask British Bitter (up to 4.4%) Sponsored by

Cask British Premium Bitter (4.5 to 6.4%) Sponsored

Cask Session IPA (up to 4.3%) Sponsored by

Beth Eaton, Charles Faram presents Ian Darvill, Acorn with the gold award

Beth Eaton presents Adam Cox, Daleside with the gold award

Ian Fozard, SIBA Chairman presents Mark, Hambleton with the gold award

Dave Shaw, SIBA Regional Director presenting Dan Alldis, Great North Eastern with the gold award

GOLD Acorn Brewery Barnsley Bitter 3.8 SILVER Timothy Taylor’s Landlord 4.3 BRONZE Rooster’s Brewing Co Capability Brown 4.0

GOLD Daleside Brewery Ltd Monkey Wrench 5.3 SILVER Hexhamshire Brewery Whapweasel 4.8 BRONZE North Yorkshire Brewing Co Ltd Flying Herbert 4.7

GOLD Hambleton Brewery Social Lubricant 3.9 SILVER Ainsty Ales Flummoxed Farmer 4.0 BRONZE Ossett Brewing Company Ltd White Rat 4.0

GOLD Great North Eastern Brewing Company LTD Hopnicity 5.0 SILVER Three Brothers Brewing Co Ltd Hopical Storm 5.3 BRONZE Rooster’s Brewing Co 24 7 4.7

Cask IPA (5.5 to 6.4%)

Cask Speciality Light Beers

Cask Speciality Mid to Dark Beers

Cask Strong Beers (6.5% and over)

Jamie Ramshaw, Simpsons Malt presents Mark Anderson, SIBA (proxy) with the gold award

Mark Anderson, SIBA Regional Director presents Michael, BAD Co with the gold award

Ian Fozard, SIBA Chairman presents Mark Anderson, Maxim with the gold award

Ian Fozard, SIBA Chairman presents Renato, Brass Castle with the gold award

GOLD Maxim Brewery Raspberry Porter 5.0 SILVER Hambleton Brewery Black Forest 5.0 BRONZE Ossett Brewing Company Ltd Black Voodoo 5.1

GOLD Brass Castle Brewery Annexation 8.3 SILVER Bridgehouse Brewery Ltd Dandylion 7.0

Sponsored by

Murphy & Son Ltd

The Gateshead Beer & Music Festival 3rd May 2019

Charles Faram & Co Ltd

Sponsored by

Simpsons Malt

GOLD Ilkley Brewery Lotus 5.9 SILVER Maxim Brewery Medusa 5.6 BRONZE Rooster’s Brewing Co Baby-Faced Assassin 6.1

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by

Rankin Brothers & Sons

GOLD BAD CO OFF Tempo 05-18 Milkshake IPA 5.8 SILVER Brass Castle Brewery Fruit Lupe 4.8 BRONZE Ainsty Ales Wild Wheat 4.7

Rastal GmbH & Co KG

Cask Premium PAs (4.4 to 5.4%)

North East Region Bottle & Can Winners

REGIONAL BEER COMPETITIONS

Overall Champion of the Bottle/Can Competition

Bottle/Can British Dark Beers (up to 4.4%)

Bottle/Can British Dark Beers (4.5 to 6.4%)

Mark Anderson, SIBA Reg Dir presents Dave Shaw, SIBA (proxy) with the gold award

Ian Fozard, SIBA Chairman presents Carl, Wensleydale with the gold award

Ian Fozard, SIBA Chairman presents Jan Anderson, Hadrian & Border with the gold award

GOLD Ossett Brewing Co Alpaca 6.6 SILVER Rooster’s Brewing Co Baby-Faced Assassin 6.1 BRONZE Cullercoats Brewery Royal Sovereign Barley Wine 11

GOLD Wensleydale Brewery Black Dub 4.4 SILVER The Hop Studio Ltd Porter 4.3 BRONZE Cullercoats Brewery Polly Donkin Oatmeal Stout 4.3

GOLD Hadrian Border Brewery Ouseburn Porter 5.2 SILVER Maxim Brewery Maximus 6.0 BRONZE Ilkley Brewery Hanging Stone 5.0

Bottle/Can British Premium Bitter (4.5 to 6.4%)

Bottle/Can Session IPA (up to 4.3%)

Bottle/Can Premium PAs (4.4 to 5.4%)

Dave Shaw, SIBA Regional Director presents Jan Anderson, Hadrian & Border with the gold award

Sponsored by

Beatson Clark

Bottle/Can British Bitter (up to 4.4%)

Dave Shaw, SIBA Regional Director presents Ian Darvill, Acorn with the gold award

GOLD Acorn Brewery Yorkshire Pride 3.7 SILVER Hambleton Brewery Stallion 4.2 BRONZE Treboom Brewery Kettle Drum 4.3

Bottle/Can IPA (5.5 to 6.4%) Sponsored by

Simpsons Malt

Jamie Ramshaw, Simpsons Malt presents Ian Fozard, Roosters with the gold award

GOLD Hadrian Border Brewery Grainger Ale 4.6 SILVER Black Sheep Brewery Yorkshire Square 5.0 BRONZE Ilkley Brewery Hendrix 4.9

Mark Anderson, SIBA Reg Dir presents Phil Douglas, Black Sheep with the gold award

Mark Anderson, SIBA Reg Dir presents Sam & Red, Twice Brewed with the gold award

GOLD Black Sheep Brewery Velo 4.2 SILVER Ainsty Ales Flummoxed Farmer 4.0 BRONZE Ilkley Brewery Limbo 1.2

GOLD Twice Brewed Brew House Northern Frontier 5.3 SILVER Rooster’s Brewing Co 24 7 4.7 BRONZE Hambleton Brewery Thoroughbred 5.0

GOLD Rooster’s Brewing Co Baby-Faced Assassin 6.1 SILVER Black Sheep Brewery Pathmaker 5.6 BRONZE Brass Castle Brewery Sunshine 5.7

Bottle/Can Imperial IPA (6.5% and over)

Bottle/Can Session Lager & Pilsner (up to 4.4%)

Bottle/Can Premium Lager & Pilsner (4.5 to 6.4%)

Bottle/Can Speciality Light Beer

Ian Fozard, SIBA Chairman presents Adam Cox, Daleside with the gold award

Dave Shaw, SIBA Reg Dir presents Phil Douglas, Black Sheep with the gold award

Dave Shaw, SIBA Reg Dir presents Phil Douglas, Black Sheep with the gold award

GOLD Ossett Brewing Company Ltd Alpaca 6.6 SILVER Black Sheep Brewery Legion IX 6.5

GOLD Daleside Brewery Lager 4.3 SILVER Firebrick Brewery Giuseppe 4.3 BRONZE Hadrian Border Brewery Tyne Pilsner 4.1

GOLD Black Sheep Brewery 54 Degrees North 4.5 SILVER Treboom Brewery Trommel 5.1 BRONZE Rooster’s Brewing Co Pilsnear 4.8

Bottle/Can Speciality Medium to Dark Beers

Bottle/Can Sours/Spontaneous

Bottle/Can Strong Beers (6.5% and over)

Mark Anderson, SIBA Reg Dir presents Jacob, Black Sheep with the gold award

Mark Anderson, Reg Dir presents Anna Scantlebury, Cullercoats with the gold award

GOLD Black Sheep Brewery Limoncello Sour 3.8 SILVER Rooster’s Brewing Co. One Trick Pony 4.1

GOLD Cullercoats Brewery Royal Sovereign Barley Wine 11.0 SILVER Brass Castle Brewery Monsters Of The Deep 6.5

Jamie Ramshaw, Simpsons Malt presents Ian Fozard, SIBA Chairman (proxy) with the gold award

Dave Shaw, SIBA Reg Dir presents Phil Douglas, Black Sheep with the gold award

GOLD Black Sheep Brewery Choc & Orange Stout 6.1 SILVER First & Last Brewery Damson Porter 4.8 BRONZE Ilkley Brewery Fruition 5.5

GOLD Black Sheep Brewery Pineapple IPA 5.3 SILVER Brass Castle Brewery Fruit Lupe 4.8 BRONZE Three Brothers Brewing Company Limited Honeysuckle smash 4.0

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Wales & West Region Cask Winners

REGIONAL BEER COMPETITIONS

SIBA Wales & West Region

Overall Champion of the Cask Competition

Cask British Dark Beers (up to 4.4%)

Cask British Dark Beers (4.5 to 6.4%)

Chris Yeomans, St Annes receives the gold award

Chris Gooch, SIBA presents Kyle Maxfield, Stonehouse with the gold award

Chris Gooch, SIBA presents Nik Milo, Boss with the gold award

GOLD St Annes Brewery Iron And Fire 7.5 SILVER Stonehouse Brewery Limited Ballast 4.4 BRONZE Brew Monster Leviathan 4.0

GOLD Stonehouse Brewery Limited Ballast 4.4 SILVER Mumbles Brewery Ltd Oystermouth Stout 4.4 BRONZE Hobsons Brewery Champion Mild 3.2

GOLD Boss Brewing Company Boss Black 5.0 SILVER Purple Moose Brewery Ltd Dark Side of the Moose 4.6 BRONZE Bewdley Brewery William Mucklow's Dark Mild 6.0

Cask British Bitter (up to 4.4%) Sponsored by

Cask British Premium Bitter (4.5 to 6.4%) Sponsored

Cask Session IPA (up to 4.3%) Sponsored by

Cask Premium PAs (4.4 to 5.4%) Sponsored by

Robbie Harrigan, Farams presents Robert & Gavin, Glamorgan with the gold award

Robbie Harrigan, Farams presents Adam Kimber, Mantle with the gold award

Robbie Harrigan, Farams presents Tom Kendall, Brew Monster with the gold award

Carl Heron, Crisp Malt presents Chris Allen, Prescott with the gold award

GOLD Glamorgan Brewing Co CWRW GORSLAS 4.0 SILVER Tomos & Lilford Wright's Best Bitter 4.3 BRONZE Salopian Brewery Darwins Origin 4.3

GOLD Mantle Brewery Hoodwinked 5.0 SILVER Goffs Brewery White Knight 4.7 BRONZE Harbwr Brewery Tenby R.F.A Sir Galahad 4.6

GOLD Brew Monster Leviathan 4.0 SILVER Brewhouse & Kitchen Shed Head 4.0 BRONZE Glamorgan Brewing Co Welsh Pale Ale 4.1

GOLD Prescott Ales Super 6 No 1 4.5 SILVER Hobsons Brewery Simcoe Chinook (BBNo Colab) 4.8 BRONZE Grey Trees Ind Craft Brewers Afghan Pale Ale 5.4

Cask IPA (5.5 to 6.4%)

Cask Speciality Light Beers Sponsored by

Cask Speciality Mid to Dark Beers

Cask Strong Beers (6.5% and over)

Sponsored by

Radnor Hillls Water

Ludlow Spring Festival 10th May 2019

Charles Faram & Co Ltd

by

Rankin Brothers & Sons

Napthens

Rastal GmbH & Co KG

Crisp Malting Group

Carl Heron, Crisp Malt presents Salopian Brewery with the gold award

Malcolm Ireland, Napthen presents Eric, Gower with the gold award

Malcolm Ireland, Napthens presents Chris Yeomans, St Annes with the gold award

Phil, Ludlow Food Festival presents Chris Yeomans, St Annes with the gold award

GOLD Salopian Brewery Bulletproof 5.8 SILVER Cold Black Label Red Beast 6.0 BRONZE Boss Brewing Company Boss Brave 5.5

GOLD Gower Brewery Company Limited Lighthouse Lager 4.5 SILVER Mumbles Brewery Ltd Murmelt 4.2 BRONZE Corvedale Brewery Ale Of ODIN 4.2

GOLD St Annes Brewery Iron And Fire 7.5 SILVER Mantle Brewery Dark Heart 5.2 BRONZE Harbwr Brewery Tenby Trawlers Dread 5.4

GOLD St Annes Brewery Majors Stout 7.0 SILVER Salopian Brewery Cico Buff 6.9 BRONZE Clun Brewery Unk IPA 7.5

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Wales & West Region Bottle & Can Winners

REGIONAL BEER COMPETITIONS

Overall Champion of the Bottle/Can Competition

Bottle/Can British Dark Beers (up to 4.4%)

Bottle/Can British Dark Beers (4.5 to 6.4%)

Rich Higgins presents Robert & Gavin, Glamorgan with the gold award

Robert Humphreys, SIBA presents Gavin, Glamorgan with the gold award

GOLD Glamorgan Brewing Co WELSH CAKE STOUT 4.3 SILVER Mumbles Brewery Ltd Oystermouth Stout 4.4 BRONZE Stonehouse Brewery Limited Ballast 4.4

Robert Humphreys, SIBA presents Mumbles Brewery with the gold award

GOLD Mumbles Brewery Ltd Lifesaver 4.9 SILVER Stroud Brewery Ltd Big Cat, Organic Stout 4.5 BRONZE Wye Valley Brewery Ltd Wholesome Stout 4.6

Bottle/Can British Premium Bitter (4.5 to 6.4%)

Bottle/Can Session IPA (up to 4.3%)

Bottle/Can Premium PAs (4.4 to 5.4%)

Bottle/Can IPA (5.5 to 6.4%)

Norman Pearce, SIBA presents Sam, Goffs with the gold award

Norman Pearce, SIBA presents Salopian Brewery with the gold award

Chris Gooch, SIBA presents Wood Brewery with the gold award

Georgi Valkov, Anton Paar presents the gold award to Lab Culture Brewery

GOLD Goffs Brewery White Knight 4.7 SILVER Bewdley Brewery 2857 5.0 BRONZE Magic Dragon Brewing Eyton Bitter 4.5

GOLD Salopian Brewery Oracle 4.0 SILVER Ludlow Brewery Blonde 4.0 BRONZE The Hop Shed Pekin Pale Ale 4.0

GOLD Wood Brewery Ltd Coracle 5.2 SILVER Stonehouse Brewery Limited Kelly Point IPA 4.4 BRONZE Purple Moose Brewery Ltd Antlered IPA 5.2

GOLD Astwood (T/A Lab Culture Brewery) Galilale Galilei 6.0 SILVER Salopian Brewery Kashmir 5.5 BRONZE Wye Valley Brewery Ltd Glorious IPA 6.0

Bottle/Can Imperial IPA (6.5% and over)

Bottle/Can Session Lager & Pilsner (up to 4.4%)

Bottle/Can Premium Lager & Pilsner (4.5 to 6.4%)

Bottle/Can Speciality Light Beer

Rich Higgins presents Pawel Mekarski, Zerodegrees with the gold award

Rich Higgins presents Salopian Brewery with the gold award

GOLD Zerodegrees Cardiff The Bohemian Czech Pilsner 4.8 SILVER Purple Moose Brewery Ltd Mwsh 4.7 BRONZE Wye Valley Brewery Ltd 1985 4.5

GOLD Salopian Brewery Slipstream 5.1 SILVER Geipel Brewing Hefeweizen 5.6 BRONZE Stonehouse Brewery Limited Witbier 4.4

GOLD Glamorgan Brewing Co WELSH CAKE STOUT 4.3 SILVER Brecon Brewing Mind Bleach 10.0 BRONZE Boss Brewing Company Boss Black - Chocolate Orange Edition 5.0

Georgi Valkov, Anton Paar presents Buster Grant, Brecon with the gold award

Georgi Valkov, Anton Paar presents Robert & Gavin, Glamorgan with the gold award

GOLD Brecon Brewing Mind Bleach 10.0

GOLD Glamorgan Brewing Co WELSH LAGER 4.3

Bottle/Can Speciality Medium to Dark Beers

Bottle/Can Sours/Spontaneous

Sponsored by

Beatson Clark

Bottle/Can British Bitter (up to 4.4%)

Robert Humphreys, SIBA presents Magic Dragon Brewing with the gold award

GOLD Magic Dragon Brewing Eyton Gold 4.0 SILVER Salopian Brewery Darwins Origin 4.3 BRONZE Gloucester Brewery Cascade 4.2 Sponsored by

Anton Paar Ltd

Bottle/Can Strong Beers (6.5% and over)

Rich Higgins presents Nik Milo, Boss with the gold award

GOLD Boss Brewing Company Boss Black - Chocolate Orange Edition 5.0 SILVER Astwood (T/A Lab Culture Brewery) Chocolate Milk Stout 5.0 BRONZE Purple Moose Brewery Ltd Chocolate Moose 4.5

Robert Humphreys, SIBA presents Rob Lilford, Tomos & Lilford with the gold award

Robert Humphreys, SIBA presents Salopian Brewery with the gold award

GOLD Tomos & Lilford Wild Rose 4.9

GOLD Salopian Brewery Cico Buff 6.9 SILVER Bewdley Brewery Decennium 10.0 BRONZE Bluestone Brewing Co. Pierre Bleu 6.5

SIBA JOURNAL SUMMER 2019

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GOLD MEMBERS

A D AY I N T H E

Hop Kilns

The day starts at 6am with a berating alarm that gets more and more unwelcome each morning.

The first hour is spent preparing the same Hop picking machine that has been picking our hops in the Frome valley, for over forty years. After the team have arrived I retreat back up into the main drying building and prepare the elevators that feed hops to our kilns.

Meanwhile the tractors head off to the yards to load the whole hop bines into the back of our hop picking trailers. There is a cutting wheel on the front right side of the trailers that chops the bottom of the bine loose. Meanwhile, the men stood in the back of the trailers pull the bines down off the high wirework and into the back of the trailers until there is a full load of around 50 to 60 bines. All of our hop yards are named after species of tree or surrounding woodland.

The bines are then hauled back to our central picking facility where each bine is individually hung by hand onto a bine track that guides them through the first part of the picking machine, the “plucker bank”. This is where all the cones and leaves are stripped from the bine before they go on to be separated further in order to remove as much leaf and twig matter from the hops as possible.

Once the hops have gone through the cleaning belts they make their way up into the kilns to be loaded via a main gantry elevator. On our farm the kiln loading is still an extremely manual process and all of the hops are levelled by hand using a fork so they are a consistent depth. It is important that they are not compacted together forming “tight spots” as these prevent the hops from drying evenly. If this has been allowed to happen, they are discovered later as “cold spots” on the conditioning floor and have to be extracted and re-dried. 11 o’clock we have usually filled the first 3 kilns and it is time for the mandatory sausage sandwich that keeps us all going. We feel it is important to dry the hops slowly, especially on a wet day, using lower temperatures and a high fan speed in order to keep the heat moving up through the hops. This prevents them from stewing and preserves the oils while reducing the moisture levels making them less volatile in store. In our kilns on average it takes nine hours to dry a load of hops.

We have a “two tier” kiln system that allows two loads of hops to be dried one over the top of the other. There is a tipping floor in the top level of the kiln. The first part of the drying period is spent on the top level until the hops have “feathered”.

This means that there is a slight rustling sound

By Bertie Phillips Charles Faram Sales Advisor and Hop Farmer

from the petals on the outside of the cone, similar to that you would hear from a pile of dried leaves, when tapped with our kiln stick. Not exactly the height of scientific innovation I grant you. Then the floor is tipped and the hops fall into baskets on the lower level where they spend their last hours drying reducing the moisture from the core of the cone, at the same time the fresh load on the top begins to dry.

All of our hops are still dried to “feel” with only a little guidance from temperature probes above and below the kiln tiers. Once dried, the hop baskets are pulled out by hand and left to cool on a large conditioning floor for a further 5 hours at least before the baskets go on to be tipped into a hopper in the floor and then baled. We feel this resting period is extremely important for stabilising the moisture levels of the hops that go on to make great beer.

By the time we have finished feathering the last load of the day, the hops are stable enough to be dropped to the lower level of the kilns and left overnight and it is time for bed. During the picking season at least two of us will sleep in the hop kilns at any one time and it is usually between 12.00 – 1.00am by the time we get our eyes down ready for the next busy day ahead.

Check out the Faram website or get in touch with the sales team for an up to date picture of all the products available. Whether its hops, malt, dried yeast, finings, kegs, sensory training kits, bottle tops or closures they are very keen to hear from you.

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FARM TO

Faram

GOLD MEMBERS

ROBBIE AND THE

What happens after the harvest?

Sampling & certification

Hop bales are sampled and collected from the farms

Pesticide residue testing

Samples are sent to independent certified laboratories to check compliance with approved residue levels

Alpha testing

In our on-site laboratory, bale samples are tested using an LCU analysis, according to EBC (European Brewing Convention) method 7.4

West Coast I PA

This month’s ‘Robbie and the..’ is a 7.4% West Coast IPA with Amarillo™ and Jester®.

We’re keen to see how the Jester® performs in this style, but our gut feeling is that it will be pretty good! We’re aiming for bright notes of orange/citrus from the Amarillo™ backed up by dank, resinous, grapefruit from the Jester® Robbie kept the malt bill fairly simple and added a touch of Weyermann® Carared® to give a nice malt backbone & rich colour.

We have good availability of both of these hop varieties in leaf & T90.

Watch out for our monthly newsletter for the outcome.

Delivery to stores

Hops bales are delivered to Charles Faram stores in the UK and Yakima

Moisture testing

Bales are tested with a moisture meter to check that they are below 12% moisture

Grading

Faram’s inspect samples for quality and grading.

At this point the hops are accepted or rejected

Shipping

Hops are shipped from hop producers across the globe

Customer selections

Brewers make batch selections for their next hop contract

Packaging

Whole hop cones are processed into pellets or vacuum packed into 5kg packs

Storage

Many brewers take delivery of all their hops for the year as soon as they are ready, but most are stored at Charles Faram cold stores for call off or spot sales

Delivery to the customer

Charles Faram hops are distributed to breweries all around the world

Ben voyage

We have said farewell, but not goodbye to Technical Advisor Ben Adams as he crossed over to the Canadian office.

As we lose the greatest Technical advisor of all time, they gain a General Manager. The UK team will feel a hit to their dynamic for a short while whilst they get used to his departure, and they have assured Ben he will be missed.

From recipes, to brewing process advice, to endless knowledge about hops and ingredients Ben has made a big impact at Charles Faram.

Ben started in the Canadian office 5 years and 1 day after his first day at CFUK in Malvern.

www.charlesfaram.co.uk 01905 830734 WWW.SIBA.CO.UK

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GOLD MEMBERS

Beer Foam What you need to know!

There is nothing more satisfying than the frothy mouth-watering theatre of a beautifully dispensed beer cascading from the tap with all its promise of tasty goodness. Whether a nitro stout, crisp pilsner or a weisse, getting the foam right, with a head that gently follows the beer to the bottom of the glass, is a vital part of the perception and experience of a beer. With competition between brewers fiercer than ever for space on the bar, elements of quality such as foam stability are being put under the microscope by buyers and consumers alike.

There are many aspects relating to beer foam which have long been the subject of study and debate. Here’s the basics you need to know…

What is foam and how does it form?

Put simply, a foam is a two-phase system in which a gas phase is dispersed in a small amount of liquid in a continuous phase.

The life span of a beer foam Bubble Formation Bubble Formation Bubble formation begins when gas in beer becomes insoluble and hydrophobic in beer. For any foam to form, a surface-active foaming agent is crucial - in beer this is protein. Proteins of importance in this case are certain proteins of both High Molecular Weight (HMW) and Low Molecular Weight (LMW), including Lipid Transport Proteins (LTP1, a protein from barley which survives mashing but becomes foam active when de-natured in the boil), hordeins, glutelins, albumins (protein Z).

Creaming

Disproportionation

give the importance of getting the dispense and glassware correct.

Nitrogen is also greatly important as this will naturally form smaller bubbles, trapping more liquid between bubbles in the foam head making it creamier and more stable. Typical levels of nitrogen in beer of this kind are 15-20ppm.

Creaming

Creaming occurs as foam starts to form at the top of the glass. This is not a single phase process as foam will continue to be replenished by further rising of bubbles as well as foam collapsing. The foam structure is held together by the surface active proteins with the hydrophillic ends starting to stick together, trapping liquid in between them.

Disproportionation

Bubble = Radius

(

)

3 x Radius of Nucleation Site x Surface tension 1/3 2 x Relative Density of Beer X Acceleration due to gravity

From this you can see that with relatively small variability in the other parameters such as surface tension, by far the biggest influence on bubble size is the size of the nucleation point which

In any system, gas bubbles have a great propensity to join-together to form larger bubbles due to pressure differentials. This diffusion from small to large bubbles, changes the distribution of the bubbles altering the surface tension leading to liquid drainage.

Drainage Liquid starts to drain from foam via gravity. This liquid moves along the lamellae to the curved junctions (Plateau borders) where the pressure is lower. This movement begins the process of the disappearance of the head on the top of the beer.

Murphy & Son Ltd, Nottingham, UK Tel: 0115 978 5494 Technical: techsupport@murphyandson.co.uk Laboratory: laboratory@murphyandson.co.uk

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Importance of Lipids As there are such a large number of variables in both the chemistry and physics it can be tricky to get the beer head just right. One issue that is not in doubt is the number one enemy of the beer foam are lipids.

If you imagine an oily substance when added to water, it will first form a monolayer on the surface. This is due to its highly amphipathic (both hydrophobic and hydrophilic) sections with one part of the lipid attracted to the water and the other to air above.

Some proteins in the beer have a hydrophobic end which is attracted to the gas and a hydrophilic end which is attracted to the liquid surrounding the gas. These proteins align with each other to form the bubble.

For a stable foam, bubble size has a huge influence on the stability of foam forming a tighter matrix trapping more liquid. Bubble size can be calculated with the following formula.

Drainage

Any small amounts of lipids picked up during the brewing process are likely to be dispersed throughout the beer. The real threat comes from lipids just added to the beer upon or just after dispense. Obvious potential contamination points include dirty glassware (grease and lipstick), inadequately rinsed glassware detergent and oil in dispense gas.

When lipids enter the beer surface and before they start to interact with other molecules on the surface, they will act independently to cause disruption to the surface film causing the surface film to collapse.

If there are sufficient levels of a certain type of proteins called Lipid Binding Proteins (LBP), lipids in the system such as fatty acids and phospholipids will become bound in complexes minimising their foam destabilisation effects.

Once these complexes are formed, these lipidproteins will be carried to the head of the beer via the normal mechanism which will give a stable foam (although not as stable as if there were no lipids present at all).

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Helping Foam 1

The Grist

It has long been accepted as fact that the use of wheat (such as torrified and malted wheat) in the grist will help improve beer foam (typically up to 10% of grist). This is because wheat is naturally higher in protein and also increases the levels of LBP’s.

A recently published Chinese study (Xiunan Hu, Yuhong Jin, Jinhua Du, Journal of The Institute of Brewing, Dec 2018) examined the foaming character of cloudy wheat beers evaluating the “quality” of foam head for beers of different ratios of wheat and barley malt. They concluded that the foam wasn’t only influenced by the quantity of protein present but also by protein character and origin.

They hypothesised that the proteins found in barley malt provide the skeletal structure of the foam matrix with wheat malt protecting and stabilising the foam head. By use of both barley and wheat in the grist, they ensured a good variety of high molecular weight protein and low molecular weight proteins to achieve a good stable foam.

2

Brewing Liquor composition

As always brewing liquor is of great importance to the quality of your product. Having a handle on its composition and its treatment can really make a huge contribution to beer foam quality. Metal ions such as iron will have a very positive effect on the foam, lacing and head retention all enhanced through their ability to bind proteins and iso-alpha acids. However, despite this very positive benefit, these ions can cause no end of further quality issues as well as being potentially toxic.

For this reason, metal ions of greatest importance to the brewer are Calcium and Magnesium. These bivalent ions will form the needed ionic bonds in hydrophobic areas encouraging cross linkage between iso alpha acids and proteins. These also have fewer negative impacts on flavour when present in the correct amounts.

The influence of the constituents of brewing liquor on the pH throughout the process should always be given careful consideration in many aspects including beer foam. The pH of the mash dictates protein extraction and enzyme activity and in the boil the pH of the subsequent wort will influence protein coagulation and denaturation.

Nitrogenous material in beer (i.e. protein) will act as natural buffers in low pH, acidic conditions by naturally reacting with hydrogen ions. In foam positive proteins this causes the hydrophobic end to pick up a charge making it hydrophilic. This affects the entire balance of the system that leads to bubble formation so will cause the bubble structure to collapse. This phenomenon explains why some sour beers appear to have poor foaming ability.

3

Get your finings correct

Did you know that isinglass finings have been shown to improve beer foam in poor foaming beers by 15-25%?

Not only will this give a superbly bright beer but the addition of isinglass to beer will help bind up and drop out lipid materials for improved foam and flavour stability.

Getting the correct addition rates of kettle finings is also important, over boiling and over dosing of finings can overly reduce content of important proteins in foam

formation. As always Murphy’s technical support is here to help get the dose just right to maximise the clarity, ease of processing and foam stability.

4

Use of Murphy’s Antifoam

At first it sounds counter-intuitive that the use of Antifoam will help improve the quality of the foam but each time foam is formed, future foaming potential is lost. Avoiding boil overs or foam loss during fermentation means that important foam positive proteins (often the first to form foams) in processing will be lost from the beer over the side of the vessel.

The formation of foams is prevented, and excessive foam is knocked down with the introduction of highly hydrophobic silica which disrupts and prevents the foam formation.

Use of antifoam also helps keep the brewery clean and can also allow the increase in capacity allowing vessels to be filled to a greater percentage of their overall capacity.

When used at correct levels, it has been proven that particles of antifoam will attach to the yeast cell walls removing them from solution in the beer. This means that the action of the antifoam is completely neutralised and removed with the yeast in normal processing. However, all the beneficial foam positive proteins remain unaffected and in solution in the beer ready to contribute to stable head formation.

5

Hops and Hop Extracts

An often over looked aspect of yeast flocculation is the role of calcium.

Multicharged calcium cations promote natural flocculation and dropping of yeast - so once again it’s a case of ensuring there’s enough calcium in the brewing liquor. Effective yeast cropping and use of finings post fermentation will also help reduce break up of yeast cells removing them before this happens.

7

Use of Murphy’s PGA

Propyline Glycol Alginate (PGA) is extracted from the cell walls of brown seaweed and has long been used for foam stabilisation. The action of PGA helps increase head retention and protects against the action of lipids and other foam reducing compounds also greatly improving the lacing of foam down the glass.

PGA is a large polysaccharide molecule which contains carboxyl groups on the glycol alginate which interacts with amino groups on peptides in the bubble wall. The size of this molecule means that its action is much more effective than any influence from hop derived compounds. Like most reactions in the world of bubbles this is electrostatic. Because the polysaccharide is such a large molecule this acts as a bridge cross linking the proteins together helping keep the bubble structures and matrix intact. This also forms a formidable obstacle for lipids to have their disruption influence.

Owing to their hydrophobicity of iso-alpha acids plays a great part in foam stability. It is thought that these compounds act by bridging the proteins producing addition support to foam structure (this is why the area where the foam meets the beer often tastes most bitter).

Reduced hop extracts such as tetra hop can also help improve foam when added post fermentation because these are more hydrophobic so are more effective at supporting the foam structure.

6

Reduce Yeast Autolysis

Yeast autolysis occurs when stressful conditions cause the membranes of vacuoles inside the yeast cell to start to break down. This in turn releases hydrolytic enzymes such as lipases and proteases into the cell which weaken the cell structure causing them to burst open. As well as the potential to add off flavours, this process will also release foam harming proteases into beer.

The strategy to avoid this issue is simple, reduce yeast stress throughout fermentation and reduction of yeast count in finished beer as quickly as possible.

Pitching healthy yeast at the right levels with suitable oxygenation in a temperature-controlled environment free from contaminants to give a consistent fermentation is vital to reduce yeast stress. Another important consideration is use of a good quality yeast nutrient such as Murphy Yeast Aid or Yeast vit. These contain a balanced blend of essential amino acids, zinc and other trace elements and vitamins to ensure that yeast has everything it needs to give a healthy stress-free fermentation.

8

In the trade

Assuming the carbonation / nitrogenation levels of beer is correct (after all if there isn’t enough gas in the beer, the bubbles won’t form!) and all other aspects have been addressed in the brewery, the effect of dispense and after sales support should not be underestimated.

Ensuring a lipid free environment from keg to consumer is vital as well as ensuring the correct serving temperature and nucleated glassware will all help ensures beer reaches the consumer in the correct condition.

References and further reading: O’Rourke (2002), Getting a Head, The Brewer Int Vol.2 (7) Xuinan Hu, Yuhong Jin, Jinhua Du (2018) Differences in Protein Content, J. Inst Brewing 550 Bamforth (2012), Perceptions in Beer Foam, J. Inst. Brewing Vol. 110 (4) Roberts, Keeney, Wainwright (1978), Effects of Lipids & Related Material on Beer Foam. J. Inst Brewing Vol. 84 (1) Jackson, Roberts, Wainwright (1980), Mechanism of Beer Foam Stabilisation By PGA, J. Inst. Brewing Vol 86 (1) Ang, Bamforth (2014), Foam Inhibitors in Speciality Malts, J. Inst. Brewing Vol 120 (3) St John Coghlan, Woodrow, Bamforth, Hinchliffe (1992), Polypeptides with Enhanced Foam Potential, J. Inst Brewing Vol 98 (3) Ballard (1987), Isinglass Types in Relation to Foam Stability, Institute Of Brewing

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SIBA brewers' news

SIBA BREWERS' NEWS

Great Newsome Wins at the London Beer Competition at its First Attempt East Yorkshire's Great Newsome Brewery has taken an award at the highly prestigious London Beer Competition the very first time it entered.

The farm-based brewery's Frothingham Best bitter was awarded a Bronze medal in the competition which recognises not only taste but also value and packaging.

Frothingham Best has become one of Great Newsome Brewery’s most decorated beers having previously won World Beer Awards in 2013, 2014 and 2018.

Matthew Hodgson, Director, said: "This medal is recognition for all of the hard work that the team put in to every beer we brew here and especially as Frothingham Best is a special beer for us. Any award that is judged by our peers, beer writers and sommeliers means a great deal to us all.”

Since starting out in 2007, Great Newsome has developed a reputation for classic easydrinking ales with a modern twist and has built a loyal following. It produces more than 20 beers annually in cask and bottles, and supplies to pubs and retailers around Yorkshire, the UK and Europe, as well as selling from its brewery shop, both at the farm and online.

Find out more at www.greatnewsomebrewery.co.uk

Docks Beers mashes in with Brew York Grimsby’s Docks Beers has teamed up with Brew York brewery to launch its first ever collaboration beer, ‘Controlled Explosion’. The beer was unveiled in May at a special event in the King Edward Street taproom.

Mike Richards, Director and Head Brewer of Docks Beers, said: “‘Controlled Explosion’ is a 5.5% Raspberry Saison. It is the result of our first ever collaboration and we jumped at the opportunity to brew with Lee, Wayne and Roddy from Brew York. Essentially we carried out a controlled explosion in our Grimsby brewery. We cleared the area, attached a raspberry charge to a saison bomb and detonated it to create this incendiary beer. It’s brewed with Vienna, Maris Otter and wheat malt and fermented with a Belgian saison yeast strain for a funky, spicy beer. To this we have added lemon zest, coriander seeds and huge amounts

of raspberry puree to create a fruity taste explosion.”

Fellow Docks Beers Director, Shahram Shadan, added: “Our barman Luke Wheatley came up with the name. We loved it because it evokes the activities of companies like James Fisher Marine Services who, operating from Grimsby Docks, carry out unexploded ordnance removal and boulder clearance out in the North Sea. The name is also a not-sosubtle nod to the explosion of fruit in this beer. The graphics for the pumpclip and can, designed by our agency Source Four, feature an explosion at sea. As is customary with collaborations we will be heading over to Brew York in the very near future to brew another beer on their brewkit.”

Controlled Explosion will be sold initially on draft in the Docks Beers and Brew York taprooms and later canned.

Find out more at www.docksbeers.com

Old Mill Brewery celebrate brewing of Jack’s Batch 34

Old Mill Brewery’s celebrity patron Yorkshire cricketer Jack Leaning has taken part in the brew day for his first namesake beer.

Jack’s Batch 34 (his squad number) was brewed by the man himself, who said: “I’m really pleased to finally get the brew finished, we have spent many hours trying to get the recipe right, I think we’ve created a beer that I would enjoy in my local, the Victoria Hotel in York.

"It is also great to be able to promote a charity very close to my heart in the Three

Bear’s Foundation (www.justgiving.com/ companyteams/ThreeBearsFoundation) by donating 5p for every pint sold to them.

This will help further raise awareness of the amazing work that has been carried out by Mark Burn and others raising thousands of pounds already in the fight against pancreatic cancer.”

The beer is a refreshing blonde ale with a citrusy finish that at 3.8% is perfect session beer for the summer.

Brewery Manager Ryan Truswell added: “We are delighted to be able to create a beer with Jack and the Three Bears

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Foundation. We are hoping that you enjoy it just as much as we did in creating it.

We’re incredibly proud to have a capped Yorkshire cricketer supporting our brand, as we are very much proud of our Yorkshire roots. We’ve chosen the malts for the brew from acclaimed Yorkshire maltsters, Thomas Fawcetts.”

As well as being available direct from the Brewery, Jack’s Batch 34 has also been picked up by a national wholesaler to be promoted throughout July.

Find out more at www.oldmillbrewery.co.uk

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SIBA brewers' news East Yorkshire brewery wins Chairman's Award

SIBA BREWERS' NEWS

The team at Wold Top Brewery is celebrating after winning the Chairman's Business Award in the East Riding of Yorkshire Council's Chairman's Awards.

Left to right: Clare Frisby, Alex Balchin, Kate Balchin and Margaret Chadwick Kate and Alex Balchin receive the award

Wold Top Brewery directors, Kate and Alex Balchin, were presented with the award for the Under 50 Employees Category at an Awards Dinner at Bridlington Spa in May. The awards will be presented by the Chairman of the Council, Margaret Chadwick and Clare Frisby from BBC Look North.

Kate Balchin, accounts and export manager at the fourth generation of the family business, was delighted to win. She said: "We are so proud of the work we do and we are a really strong, tight-knit workforce so this is definitely a team award rather than an individual award."

Alex added: "It's incredibly humbling. We work within the local community and to be recognised by the community is fantastic."

The Chairman's Awards are presented annually to individuals, companies and organisations within the East Riding of Yorkshire to recognise their achievements towards enhancing the area in which they work and live.

Find out more at www.woldtopbrewery.co.uk

Getting funky with Abbeydale Brewery this September Following on from the success of the inaugural event last year, Abbeydale Brewery is for the second time hosting a unique celebration of wild and mixed fermentation beers as they open up their roller shutter doors on September 7th and 8th for Funk Fest 2019.

As well as a showcase for their own much acclaimed Funk Dungeon project, Abbeydale plans to feature releases from breweries who are renowned for their experimental beers including Siren Craft Brewing (Berkshire) and Little Earth Project (Suffolk), plus up-and-coming breweries in this area such as Wilderness (Wales) and Wide Street (Ireland).

There will be 30 lines of the very best

mixed fermentation beers available, from fruited sours to oak aged stouts, including a number of festival-only exclusives and other rare releases. In addition, a homebrew competition will be taking place during the Sunday session, in which sour beer enthusiasts can win the opportunity to brew their recipe on the Abbeydale kit.

Funk Dungeon Lead Brewer Jim Rangeley said: “Over the past few years, our passion for ageing beer with wild yeast and bacteria has grown, along with the number of beers in our cellar – the Funk Dungeon. We are hugely looking forward to showcasing how far this project has come, alongside beers from other great producers of this style, many of whom are good friends of ours. To my knowledge this is the biggest event of its kind to take place

in the UK outside of London, so it really is something special.”

Abbeydale Brewery co-owner and director Susan Morton added: “For our brewers, production of these sorts of beers is fun yet challenging, as it’s essentially learning to control the uncontrollable. We’re always keen to encourage their creativity as well as their education, and the Funk Dungeon project is a fantastic place to do this.”

Tickets are available now via Party for the People at bit.ly/funkfest19 and are priced from £5-7, which includes entry and an exclusive festival glass.

Further details regarding the homebrew competition can be found at bit.ly/ funkfesthomebrew.

Traditional blessing for Hogs Back Brewery hop garden Surrey-based Hogs Back Brewery has celebrated the growth of its new hop garden with an official blessing by local vicar Rev. Claire Holt, attended by close to 200 local residents and customers.

The 8.5-acre hop garden next to the brewery on Manor Farm in Tongham, was created late last year, when Hogs Back relocated 2,000 hop plants from its previous site across the road and added 4,000 new ones. The new garden is almost treble the size of the old one and the hop plants are now beginning to flourish in their new home, growing up posts and wires ahead of harvest later this year.

Blessing the hops, Rev. Holt, of St Paul's

Church in Tongham, explained the origins of crop blessing ceremonies, which were traditionally held on Ascension Day falling this year on 30 May, which was when the Hogs Back blessing took place.

She said: "When the crops were planted, a group of young and old people from the village, usually led by the priest, would walk round the boundaries of the parish, stopping at each boundary post to pray for the protection of the crops. Blessing the hop garden therefore revives a long-held tradition that would certainly have been part of the cycle of hop growing in Farnham for many years. It gives me great joy to lead today's prayers for the Hogs Back hop garden, the brewery, and all who work in them, for this year and long into the future."

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Rupert Thompson, Hogs Back Brewery managing director, said: "Ever since we planted our first hop garden five years ago, we've been keen to observe hop farming milestones and were delighted to welcome back Rev. Holt, who also conducted a blessing for us in 2014.

"Today's celebration was a much larger affair, which shows the extent to which the community has engaged with the hop garden and the brewery in that time. Hogs Back's values of tradition, authenticity and local community appeals to a growing number of craft beer drinkers, across Surrey and beyond."

Find out more at www.hogsback.co.uk

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SIBA brewers' news

SIBA BREWERS' NEWS

Fisher’s Brewing Company launches Red Rye Newly launched Red Rye is Fisher’s Brewing Company’s new twist on an English Bitter. The brewery has been experimenting with rye malt and new aroma hops for a complex and floral red ale. An easy drinking session ale (4% ABV) the first batch sold out in a week, but fear not – more is coming off the line soon!

The brewery’s recently launched New England IPA has also proved to be very popular and will also be back in production

soon, with it's naturally hazy and double hopped citrus punch it weighs in at 7% ABV. A recent addition to the brewery’s neighbouring Wycombe dining scene, restaurant Lata Lata has enthusiastically promoted Fisher's bottled beers (APA, Saison, Dunkel). The team there embrace the use of local products in sourcing food on the tapas style menu (arancini to die for!) with a relaxed ambience.

For more information go to www.fishersbrewingcompany.com

Hillside Brewery is named Best Rural Drinks Business

The winner of the Best Rural Drink Business Award at the Rural Business Awards was Hillside Brewery! This Gloucestershire-based brewery and events business impressed the judges with its clever and creative diversification, as well as its innovative ways of maximising customer engagement. Its sustainable ethos and support of other local businesses truly made it stand out.

Hillside Brewery is a family-owned-andrun business, passionate about its awardwinning range of traditional beers and one-off craft specials. Situated on a 40acre farm in a converted dairy shed and reconditioned stone barns, the brewery is a great place to spend an afternoon. In fact, since opening in 2014 they have had over 25,000 people visit the site.

Hillside Brewery are committed to producing the highest quality beer possible, and to date have won almost 50 awards. Their Classic Ales are great proven styles of beer and are brewed all

year round, while their Craft Specials are constantly changing using seasonal and new ingredients to produce new flavours.

They source their ingredients as locally as possible with the majority of our hops coming from just 8-miles away. Even closer to home, they have brewed a golden 4% elderflower beer, with hand-picked elderflowers from their own farm.

The business has diversified, creating a “destination” based around the brewery.

Hillside now runs events, tours and experience days, which have been voted as some of the best in the country. There’s also a variety of experiences on offer in partnership with other local businesses – beer pilates, anyone? Or how about battlezone archery and bubble football?

Or forging your own bespoke bottle opener, followed by a brewery tour? Whatever your interests, there’s truly something for everyone.

Hillside Brewery are also passionate about supporting other local businesses. In addition to their beers, the on site shop stocks a range of local wines, spirits, ciders, local beer-related woodwork and a beer soap (made with their own beer). All of which have been sourced from within 30-miles of the brewery.

Find out more at www.hillsidebrewery.com

Herefordshire’s Swan Brewery marks 50th anniversary of moon landings Swan Brewery has celebrated half a century since man landed on the moon with two aptly named ales, Swan Small Step and Swan Giant Leap.

Head Brewer Jimmy Swan said: “Hops named Apollo, Eagle, Comet and Flyer caught our eye.

These have great aroma and flavour profiles and line up perfectly for beers to celebrate the Apollo 11 mission. The names Swan Small Step and Swan Giant Leap fell into our lap.

I’ve developed the recipes with lighter ales in mind for summer, plus the complex character

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that the range of hops will offer.”

Brewery Partner Gill Bullock added: “The pump clips for Swan Small Step and Swan Giant Leap show a moon-boot print and earth viewed from the moon and will help sales go like a rocket.

At 4.1% and 5% these cosmic ales will be out of this world.”

The beers on draught launched at a Tasting Day at the start of July. A limited-edition Swan Giant Leap 5% bottled ale is already available in the brewery shop and local retailers.

Find out more at www.swanbrewery.co.uk

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SIBA brewers' news

SIBA BREWERS' NEWS

Brighton brewery Lost+Found A.BL: relaunches with beer52 partnership Craft beer discovery club Beer52 has invested in young brewery Lost+Found A.BL: to help it continue its beer vision.

The new partnership will see the beloved Brighton-based brewery return with greatly increased capacity, reaching more UK and international beer lovers than ever before.

To celebrate the relaunch of Lost+Found, Beer52 sent the brewery’s four core beers to its 60,000+ members in June, along with a selection from other excellent nearby craft brewers.

Lost+Found was founded in 2015 by Simon Checkley and Chris Angelkov, after leaving their mundane jobs to chase their dreams of opening their own craft brewery.

Pretty quickly, Simon and Chris realised they had something special on their hands, and brought in third partner Jon

Rutter to help take their brews to thirsty punters.

James Brown, founder of Beer52, said: “Originally Lost+Found caught my eye because the design of the can was incredible, but the thing that impressed me most was the consistently high quality of the beer. I was gutted to hear the guys had hit a run of bad luck – the kind of external stuff that happens to small breweries every day – so I gave Chris Angelkov a call to see if there was anything we could do to help.”

With this partnership, Lost+Found will have brewing access to Beer52’s capacity at the world-class De Proef Brewery in Belgium. De Proef is home to the best craft brands in the world, including Mikkeller, To Øl and Omnipollo.

Simon Checkley, co-founder of Lost+Found, said: “This is a logical next step for us. It means we can produce large volumes at totally repeatable quality. We can now confidently talk to big outlets, pub chains, and take the beer beyond where it’s been to date.”

Under the new setup, Chris will have oversight of the brewing at De Proef, enjoying more time to focus on recipe creation and the other more creative aspects of the job. The team at Beer52 will share the beers with their community, host special tasting events and take care of order fulfillment and logistics. Jon will concentrate on UK sales, while Simon will grow the business internationally.

Find out more at www.lostandfoundbrewery.com

Stroud Brewery joins the Party on the Hill at Chalfest Festival 2019 Stroud Brewery has announced it is partying on the hill this month and supporting Chalfest Festival.

This year the brewery team will make a special limited edition beer for the festival which will be served at all the bars alongside a selection of Stroud Brewery’s organic beers. The name of the beer will be decided through a competition and the winner will have a pump clip designed and put on every bar throughout the festival as well as winning a hamper of Stroud Brewery goodies to take away.

Greg Pilley, MD of Stroud Brewery, said: “We are delighted to once again be supporting Chalfest Festival. We have been involved since it started as like Chalfest, community has always been central to our vision for Stroud Brewery. We make every effort to help and engage our community where possible. The way in which our business, and in particular the Stroud Brewery Tap, has brought our community together is what motivates us the most.”

Headliners at the festival include Faithless, Sophie Ellis-Bextor and Dick & Dom.

Find out more at www.stroudbrewery.co.uk

Humpty Dumpty comes of age with barleywine Humpty Dumpty Brewery is one of the oldest, most well established, award winning and generally well recognised micro-breweries in the beautiful Norfolk Broads.

Established in 1998 in stables at the back of the now closed Railway Tavern, Humpty Dumpty Brewery started out as a modest five barrel concern. 21 years later, it remains a key player in the Norfolk real ale community and as for many big anniversaries before, Humpty Dumpty Brewery will be brewing a celebratory strong barleywine, Black Jack Barleywine, already generically known as "21".

You can’t turn 21 without a party, so the (now 12th annual) Reedham Beer Festival (19th-21st July 2019) is the obvious place to celebrate! The festival will have many exciting new beers, ciders, music, food and fun on offer over the weekend. There will be some special celebrations, and the brewery is always looking for exciting beers or collaborations or ideas to showcase.

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SIBA brewers' news

SIBA BREWERS' NEWS

Friends of the Earth, Stroud Brewery and Toast Ale collaborate on planet-saving organic amber ale

Friends of the Earth, Stroud Brewery and Toast Ale have announced the launch of ‘Flour Power’ – an organic amber ale collaboration which demonstrates some of the solutions for a greener future.

Flour Power is a modern, heavily hopped amber ale with Citra and Azacca hops for an intense citrusy aroma. Well balanced with a fruity finish.

The beer uses Hobbs House Bakery unsold organic bread which would otherwise have gone to waste, in an organic brewery where the aim is to

support the environment and reduce carbon footprint. Five percent of proceeds will be donated to Friends of the Earth’s climate campaign.

Mike Birkin, campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said: “At Friends of the Earth we’re always keeping an eye out for those businesses showing a better way of doing things, so collaborating with Stroud Brewery and Toast Ale is hugely exciting.

With Flour Power we’re aiming for a craft ale that proves that the things we enjoy can be produced in more considerate, sustainable ways. The climate change situation can seem dire, but the solutions are out there and some are on display right here with Toast Ale and Stroud Brewery. We hope to see more businesses, including further breweries, respond to the climate emergency. So let’s raise a cheer to Flour Power for showing us a way forward.”

Chloe Brooks, Production Manager of Stroud Brewery, added: “Stroud Brewery is dedicated to producing great organic beers with production helping to support local farmers and the ecosystems they manage.

The organic standards we adhere to support our ambition to be a business that cares for people and planet. Flour Power was a great project providing us with the opportunity to collaborate with like-minded businesses to produce a product that not only tastes good but does good. We were

very excited to work with Toast on another project, especially during B-corp month, and to support such an important issue for Friends of the Earth. Hobbs House Bakery very kindly saved their unsold organic loaves for us so that they could have a second life in this beer.”

Chris Head, Collaborations Manager at Toast Ale, said: “At Toast Ale, we're reviving one of the oldest traditions in the world by using surplus bread as a grain for beer.

In the UK, 44% of bread is never eaten.

We're on a mission to change that by working in partnership with breweries and bakeries all over the world to create greattasting beers that are better for the planet.

It's a revALEution to end food waste. We're incredibly proud to partner with Friends of the Earth to raise awareness of climate change and to support the great work they do. Food production, one-third of which we waste, is one of the biggest contributors to climate change, so they are a powerful ally to our mission. Collaborating with fellow B Corp Stroud Brewery to create Flour Power has been a fun and delicious adventure, resulting in a wonderful organic golden ale that will empower drinkers to do their bit. For it is within all of (fl)our power to change the world.”

Flour Power is available at toastale.com and stroudbrewery.co.uk

Bowness Bay Brewing set to expand with European funding boost Kendal-based Bowness Bay Brewing is raising a glass to expansion after securing European funding to support investment into new brewing equipment.

The brewery, which was launched in 2012 by former traffic policeman Richard Husbands, produces 12 beers which are handcrafted at its Castle Mills brewery in Kendal. Among its core beer range is the popular Swan Blonde, Lakeland Blonde and Steamer IPA, which won two Gold Awards from SIBA industry in 2018.

Funding from the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development of £60,000 will enable the Brewery to buy six state-of-the-art 5000 litre fermenters, which will increase capacity by four-fold. In addition, the funding will see Bowness Bay Brewing acquiring a new fully automatic keg machine which will help increase output to over 1000 kegs per month and new sterile filter equipment.

For more information got to www.bownessbaybrewing.co.uk

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SIBA supplier news THIELMANN Starter Kegs set brewers up for greatness

SUPPLIER NEWS

THIELMANN has designed its Starter Keg with the micro-brew operation in mind. Whether a brewing company is producing five million kegs of beer per year or a single one, the processes and requirements are largely the same at the level of the keg. The keg must be hygienic, cleanable and able to protect the characteristics of the beer throughout the brewing and storage process. Once the brewer wants to start selling his ware, his beer must be produced in a keg that is certified for use within the beverage industry. For the top end producer, these are all things that can be managed on a large scale, cost-effectively. For the smaller operation, these can act as limitations due to the expense of acquiring cleaning and filling equipment.

With a deep understanding of the fact that one size does not fit all, the THIELMANN Starter Keg meets the needs of the smaller brewer. Manufactured in 20 litre capacity (5.28 gallons) from high-grade stainless steel, the Starter Keg provides a cost-effective solution for new businesses. It offers safe and easy manual cleaning and filling, removing the need for investment in expensive equipment, is 100% UV resistant and has a Sankey type spear for integration with conventional dispensing systems.

For operators looking for kegs in a hurry, THIELMANN has also cut the lead time on its customisable keg service, enabling brewers to get their hands on up to 500 units from stock, quickly.

For more information email sales@thielmann.com or go to www.thielmann.com

PBC Brewery installations and Impianti Toscana Inox Italy announce partnership PBC and Impianti Toscana Inox have announced a partnership for new brewery installations.

David Porter, PBC’s managing director, said that Impianti Toscana Inox will offer a significant new dimension to what PBC has been achieving for the last 15 years, adding: ‘I liked Toscana’s approach, they have been in business for over 40 years and they have total flexibility to manufacture breweries which are fully

automatic, semiautomatic, gas steam, electric from 250 L to 4000 L capacity.

They have a clear mission to listen to their customers and provide to their customers the best solutions for their needs, they do not have one model that fits all and have full adaptability.”

Impianti Toscana Inox can supply three vessel brewhouses at the simplest end but can also include cereal cookers, mash mixers and lauter systems if required.

PBC will be selling and installing Toscana’s equipment throughout the UK and selected parts of Europe, this means that there will be on-call engineers UK-based who are familiar with the product so warranty issues can be addressed quickly and if PBC doesn’t hold spare parts in stock they can be sourced at short notice.

Find out more at www.pbcbreweryinstallations.com

Simpsons Malt and MSP bid farewell to loyal employees Simpsons Malt, the Berwick-based fifth-generation maltster, and its agricultural trading arm McCreath, Simpsons and Prentice (MSP) have recognised the contributions of two of its longest serving employees who are retiring after 80 years’ combined service.

Operations manager Ivan Goodwin joined Simpsons Malt as a labourer shortly before his 18th birthday in 1975, whilst compliance manager Kathleen Park has been with the organisation for 35 years, having joined MSP as an administrative assistant in 1983.

A member of the Simpsons Malt operations board, Ivan was responsible for overseeing malt production at the company’s Berwickshire plant prior to his retirement. More than six million tonnes of malt have been produced at the maltings since Ivan first joined 43 years ago.

Kathleen sat on the MSP board as company secretary and was its first female member.

Simpsons Malt managing director Tim McCreath said: “Ivan and Kathleen have been an integral part of the Simpsons Malt and MSP family over the past 40-plus years - a time in which our companies have enjoyed substantial growth. On behalf of the board, I would like to thank both Ivan and Kathleen for their 43 and 35 years of service respectively. All of the staff here at Simpsons Malt and MSP wish them a very happy retirement.”

Find out more at www.simpsonsmalt.co.uk

Kathleen Park and Ivan Goodwin

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integrity BEER of thE

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SIBA supplier news The Can Makers launch first Sustainability Hub

SUPPLIER NEWS

A brand new website has launched to showcase the benefits of drinks cans, reflecting the UK’s growing demand for more sustainable drinks packaging. Run by the Can Makers, the trade body representing drinks can manufacturers in the UK, the Sustainability Hub provides the go to, ‘one stop shop’ for the latest information and resources on sustainable metal drinks packaging.

The site’s launch means market experts, drinks makers, brands, retailers, industry bodies and governments can access the information they need in one easy place. It covers six focus areas: sustainable packaging, the proposed deposit return scheme (DRS), the circular economy, recycling aluminium, permanent materials and sustainable design, where users can find videos, in-depth reports, articles, data and infographics.

With a whole host of information available, the Hub aims to bring clarity for users. The dedicated online portal will be continuously updated with the latest information from industry bodies and other thought leaders.

Visit the Sustainability Hub here: https://www.canmakers.co.uk/sustainability-hub

WPA Pinfold: Vanity or Sanity?

Myles Pinfold, of brand design consultants WPA Pinfold, asks where future growth will come from in a pressured craft beer market…

“The beer industry appears to be at a watershed. If you look to the USA, which is a bellwether for the UK, the leading craft brewers are facing flat or negative growth: according to the Brewers Association, total growth in craft beer was just 4% in 2018 (four years earlier it was 18%) and most of that growth was delivered by brew pubs (up 13%) and microbreweries (up 16%). With a surge of new brewers due to enter the market, these stats will be further compounded.

Buying local has become a significant trend and it looks like the Americans are discovering that small can actually be beautiful...

In the UK the big brewers continue to

pick off the leading independent brands, whilst crowd funding is growing in fashion. We are following the USA in the rush to IPAs and Pale Ales (making up approximately 60% of craft sales) and the American ‘Haze Craze’ (hazy IPAs) is still bubbling under. For the UK too, the cask conundrum continues as it struggles to find its place in the new ‘craft beer’ order.

It appears that on both sides of the Atlantic, consolidation is the order of the day for the larger regional brewers. This sets out an interesting scenario whereby we are starting to see another tier of brewers - the early proponents of the craft beer revolution (think Brew Dog, Brooklyn Brewery, Boston Beer Co…) are now big global brands and there is a new wave of brewers emerging to challenge the status quo. Local community brewers and tap houses are now on trend and consumers are continuing to evolve their drinking

SUPPLIER viewpoint

repertoire and beer choice. However, whilst there are pressures on price from a trade perspective, with overall production below capacity, added value continues to be the order of the day for the consumer.

There is still a lot to play for (for brewers large and small) and there has never been a more exciting time to be a brewer – innovation, variety and quality are still big market drivers. The trick is to be relevant and ensure your brand is differentiated from the rest of the crowd, where gratuitous graphics seem to be the current trend.

Be smart, not big, and remember the old business adage: volume is vanity, profit is sanity…”

For more information go to www.wpa-pinfold.co.uk

Chalmit Launches Protecta X Leading luminaires manufacturer Chalmit has launched a new generation of LED Lighting for the food and drink industry.

Protecta X LED is a revolutionary light for the food and drink industry, up to 50% brighter than any traditional linear light on the market, with a user-definable light distribution and a maintenance-free lifespan of over 120,000 hours at 25°C. It is designed to be easier to maintain, and thanks to an optional battery stick, can be installed in half the time.

Chalmit, part of the Hubbell Harsh & Hazardous group, is a leading supplier of lighting to many industries. The Protecta X is Chalmit’s largest ever investment in product development; with four patents pending it is expected to lead to a whole new generation of LED lighting within the food and drink sector.

To find out more about the Protecta X visit www.XSeriesLED.com

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SIBA supplier news

SUPPLIER NEWS

SUPPLIER viewpoint

Move over divergence, hello to convergence and peaceful co-existence on the bar, says brewing consultant David Smith...

“For anyone recently perusing the wider press and brewing periodicals including SIBA’s own Craft Beer Report, it has become apparent that we are seeing a sea change running through the craft brewing industry.

Articles recently published are excited by a revival of “traditional” beers. However, this isn’t a revival as such because cask beers have never been away, they simply fell out of favour or sight from the writers of weekly column inches.

It was forever thus – the shiny new overshadowing the staples of life. And it’s fun to read about the shiny new. But whilst they have been busy telling us about the latest canned beers from this new brewery or that new brewery, all producing a few litres here and there, the beers that sell many thousands of litres week on week have been over-looked that is until now.

More importantly however, for some of the newer craft brewers, the penny has finally dropped that it is a commercial world out there and beers produced need to have a sufficiently large market for a brewery to survive. This means not limiting the types of products sold.

There is an unfortunate narcissistic tendency of many craft brewers in thinking that whatever they produce

is good. This false impression can be exacerbated by the odd favourable review on a beer review site. Then if these brewers fail to find a market for their beers, some of them blame the “uneducated consumer” rather than their beers. We all know of brewers who continually brag to anyone close-by how good their beers were, right up until the point they go out of business. A little more humility on such a brewer’s part, mixed with a large dose of observational ability to see all the other beers being sold around him which are keeping his beers off the bar, might have made him realise the Customer is always King.

Conversely, for brewers with longer pedigree and a better understanding of the beer market - breweries such as Hawkshead, Fyne Ales or Saltaire bringing in new, more exotic, flavoured beers is carried out against a background (and a large portfolio) of high-quality casks beers with a wide appeal. These are the beers that sell quietly week on week and pay the wages, whilst the more esoteric keg and cans can be there to grab the headlines. Similarly, brewers such as Brewdog and Cloudwater are now finding producing cask beer is quite appealing as well as profitable. A good balance is what is needed.

WWW.SIBA.CO.UK

On the trendy bars, we have previously seen rows of keg “IPAs” replacing more traditional branding, and where the “I” can denote anything from “Insipid” through to “Intense” or even “Idiotic” and rarely reflect a true India Pale Ale! In the more recent past, these new IPAs have ousted traditional cask Bitters and Best Bitters, but this is now no longer the case. The divergence into two camps of novel keg (and can) versus traditional cask (and bottle) is thankfully coming to an end. Divergence into two camps is being replaced by a convergence on the bar supporting a range of both keg and cask beers, in company with bottle or can products sitting comfortably side by side in the fridge.

We will perhaps see more of the new craft brewers, at least the commercially minded ones, considering all beer drinkers as a potential market and producing a wider range of products; and this realisation and convergence of ideas about producing and marketing their beers in all formats may well save many new breweries from going to the wall.”

David Smith is a Brewing Consultant and can be reached at david@ brewingservices.co.uk

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SIBA supplier news

SUPPLIER NEWS

Schafer launches ECOKEG on demand in the UK, an alternative to renting

The well-known keg manufacturer Schafer Container Systems is launching into the UK market the fully reusable ECOKEG, having recently installed a dedicated highvolume robotic line at their main facility in Neunkirchen in Germany.

Sales Director for the UK and Ireland Mike Hickman explained that the design of the keg will lend itself to a very fast turnaround between initial order and delivery of a keg which will be unique to the individual brewery, irrespective of order size. It should be possible to cover the cost of a new 100% owned ECOKEG keg by eliminating six maybe five pay to fill rentals.

Schafer believes that the ECOKEG with its colour coordinated polypropylene hoops and decorated steel body, using electro etching or silk screening, will help dramatically improve keg repatriation within the UK. The ECOKEG will by substituting coloured polypropylene hoops for the steel alternative reducing the steel content by a massive 5kg making the keg far less attractive to metal thieves, while

the overall weight reduces by a significant 2.3 kg on a 30-litre keg, a big positive for bar staff and logistics operatives.

Having the ability to deliver as few as a pallet load of kegs anywhere in the UK on demand, while including a finance and transponder package can help start the brewer towards owning his own fleet rather than renting.

The ECOKEG perfectly matches the critical generic keg dimensions but is also stackable, and importantly significantly reduce noise due the PP hoops being the contact point rather than the expanded rolling bands and steel chimes on the all steel keg.

For more information email mhickman@ schaefer-container-systems.com or call 07538 069886.

Autumn courses available through the Brilliant Beer Company The Brilliant Beer Company, a global training, set-up and troubleshooting consultancy for the brewing and distilling sector, will be running a General Certificate Training course in Autumn 2019 as well as a Flavour Training Course.

The week’s General Certificate Training course, to run from September 26th, follows the Syllabus of Institute of Brewing & Distilling General Certificate, and is essentially based around PowerPoint slides (handouts provided through Dropbox). It includes videos, multi choice questions, site visit and discussions.

The cost per delegate is £650. To book a place please e-mail admin@ brilliantbeer.com or register online at www.brilliantbeer.com/GCBautumn.

The Flavour Training Course is an advanced tasting programme, designed to give delegates a thorough appreciation of the key flavours in beers, their common origins and how they may be controlled.

The course covers 30 spiked flavour samples commonly found in beer, which may be considered positive, negative or off-flavours. Wherever possible, flavours will be demonstrated with beer samples exhibiting similar flavour notes. During the course, the origins of flavours and ways to control them will be discussed.

The Course will run from 2.00pm to 6.00pm over three days from October 16th.

To book a place, please e-mail admin@brilliantbeer.com or register online at www.brilliantbeer.com/tastercourse.

The cost is £150.00 per delegate.

Croxsons wins a Queen’s Award for Enterprise Leading glass packaging company Croxsons has been honoured with a Queen’s Award for Enterprise.

The family owned business is one of only 201 organisations nationally to be recognised with a prestigious Queen’s Award for Enterprise. Announced in April, Croxsons has been recognised for its excellence in international trade, which has seen the firm return continuous growth in overseas sales for the past six years.

First trading in 1872, Croxsons’ faultless commitment to quality continues to provide leading food and drink manufacturers and brand owners with unique and innovative packaging solutions. With its base in Morden, Surrey, and further operations in New Zealand, Australia and the USA, Croxsons sells in over 50 markets worldwide.

Commenting on their achievement, both James and Tim Croxson, the fourth and fifth generations respectively, who currently head up the firm, said: “We are thrilled and privileged to have been recognised for international trade with a Queen’s Award. The achievement is testament to the collective and sustained effort from everyone here at Croxsons who have helped ensure that the business continues to be a success story that would delight our forebears.”

Find out more at www.croxsons.com WWW.SIBA.CO.UK

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GOLD AND SILVER MEMBERS

Gold Members BREWERS SELECT

Dan Unwin dunwin@brewersselect.co.uk

MURPHY & SONS LTD Emily Kerrison info@murphyandson. co.uk

CHARLES FARAM & CO LTD Paul Corbett paulcorbett@ charlesfaram.co.uk

CLOSE BROTHERS BREWERY RENTALS

CROXSONS

PREMIER SYSTEMS LTD

THOMAS FAWCETT & SONS LTD

Tim Croxson Tim.croxson@ croxsons.com

Reem Mohsen enquiries@ closebreweryrentals.co.uk

NAPTHENS

Malcolm Ireland Malcolm.Ireland@ napthens.co.uk

Sam Williams Sam@ premiersystems.ltd.uk

James Fawcett james@fawcett-maltsters.co.uk

Quality, Consistency & Support

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RANKIN BROTHERS & SONS

Silver Members

KEGSTAR

RASTAL GMBH & CO KG

ANTON PAAR LTD

KEG LOGISTICS UK LTD

SAXON PACKAGING LTD

Giovanni Solferini sales@icfsgroup.com

Tertia Rimell tertia.rimell@anton-paar.com

BEATSON CLARK

Charlotte Taylor charlotte.taylor@beatsonclark.co.uk

BEER BOX SHOP

Simon Hulse sales@beerboxshop.co.uk

BFBI

Ruth Evans ruthevans@bfbi.org.uk

Jim Rankin sales@rankincork.co.uk

Christian Barden Christian@kegstar.com

Nick Crossley ncrssly@aol.com

Chris Sapyta csapyta@keglogistics.com

Mike Impson mikeimpson@saxonpackaging.co.uk

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Sarah Young syoung@lallemand.com

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MOESCHLE (UK) LTD

Andrew Wall andrew@moeschle.co.uk

CASK GLOBAL CANNING SOLUTIONS INC MUNTONS PLC BH Jamison bh.jamison@cask.com

Joanna Perry joanna.perry@muntons.com

CORE EQUIPMENT LTD

NFU MUTUAL

Jonathan Chaplin jonathan.chaplin@core-equip.com

CRISP MALTING GROUP

Nigel Gibbons nigel.gibbons@crispmalt.com

FESTIVAL GLASS LTD

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FLEXTECH HOSE SOLUTIONS LTD Gary Shaw gary@flextechhose.co.uk

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Darren Seward Darren_Seward@nfumutual.co.uk

NORRIQ LTD

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PENTAIR FOOD & BEVERAGE SOLUTIONS Debbie Larkin Sales.uk@pentair.com

SCHAFER CONTAINER SYSTEMS

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SPASOFT LTD

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VALE LABELS LTD

John Riches john@valelabels.co.uk

VIGO LTD

Andy Pegman sales@vigoltd.com

WILLIS PUBLICITY

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ZOEDALE PLC

Tim Guest tim@zoedale.co.uk

VISION33

Ben Crow ben.crow@vision33.com (orchestrated beer)

Independent Family Maltsters since 1809 Manufacturers of the finest Pale Ale, Crystal and Roasted Malts All Malts delivered ON TIME to your specification, crushed or whole.

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Meet the

SIBA TEAM NAME: Elle SpencerBlanchard JOB TITLE: Operations Assistant CONTACT: elle.spencerblanchard@siba.co.uk How long have you worked for SIBA and what did you do before?

I recently joined SIBA in March this year from a job within retail that I had been in since I left school. Starting a new job in a completely different sector is a little scary as it’s a whole different work environment and there is plenty still to learn!

What does your job role with SIBA involve?

I do several administration tasks here at our head office, this includes taking and processing orders as well as undertaking any queries that come in. I also assist my colleagues in preparations for and attending SIBA Beer Competitions around the UK.

MEET THE SIBA TEAM

NAME: Jenna Barningham JOB TITLE: Operations Administrator CONTACT: jenna.barningham@siba.co.uk How long have you worked for SIBA and what did you do before?

I have been with SIBA for seven years now. Before joining SIBA I worked at a hotel after leaving school, starting with waitressing and working my way up to events manager.

What does your job role with SIBA involve?

What, in your view, is SIBA’s key purpose?

I feel it’s to keep small independent brewers getting repeat business and to keep a lot of the smaller pubs in business as many small breweries rely on the pubs within their local area to keep ordering their products.

I organise the regional and national SIBA beer competitions, I am also involved with Beerflex and other day-to-day operational activities and help with the organisation of the exhibition for the annual SIBA BeerX event.

What, in your view, is SIBA’s key purpose?

How do you support SIBA members in your role?

Supporting SIBA members is very important, making sure that our members can keep in contact with the pubs that they are supplying is crucial for small breweries getting repeat business, I also communicate with our members as to any queries they have that I can resolve.

What is your favourite aspect of your role at SIBA?

Within SIBA I get to work with people who all share the same passion, and it’s great when I can see everyone is enthusiastic within what they do. It’s a great team to work with!

What has been the highlight of working at SIBA for you so far?

To bring together breweries to share ideas and help grow their businesses.

How do you support SIBA members in your role?

I’m one of the first ports of call for any SIBA queries that come in from our members and can help them resolve any issues they may have.

What is your favourite aspect of your role at SIBA?

I love getting out and meeting all the members at the beer competitions and regional meetings around the country. It is such a sociable industry and it’s nice to be a part of that.

The SIBA South West beer competition in Newton Abbot, as this was my first competition and it was great to see how much effort is put into the event to make sure that it runs successfully.

It was also great to see that everyone enjoyed the event, it’s very rewarding to see the reaction from the people who attend it.

What has been the highlight of working at SIBA for you so far?

What are you most looking forward to in your role this year?

There has been a lot of changes so far this year, with a new SIBA CEO now appointed for one, so I am looking forward to seeing what the future holds.

Attending the SIBA beer competitions that are taking place later within the year as each competition is different to the next, also attending BeerX 2020 is something I will look forward to as it is our biggest event of the year and will be my first one.

Tell us something readers might not know about the work SIBA does.

SIBA has a very small team, smaller than you might think, but although we are small everyone works really well together to do the best possible work for our members. It is so important that we all keep in close contact about what’s happening within the business so it can run smoothly.

What do you like to do outside work?

I enjoy catching up with friends over the weekend with a few drinks, I’m also a football fan so enjoying watching that over the weekend too.

What is your favourite beer and where would you most like to drink it?

My favourite beer to drink is anything light and fruity and I like to drink it in any beer garden that’s sunny!

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My wonderful colleagues of course – we’re only a small team but we all get on so well. They’re a supportive bunch and make for a very happy working environment.

What are you most looking forward to in your role this year?

Tell us something readers might not know about the work SIBA does.

SIBA has a directory of supplier members who offer a number of services to brewers.

Anything from equipment and ingredients to business assistance. Many of these suppliers have supported SIBA for many years and I hope they continue to do so for many more to come.

What do you like to do outside work?

My family and friends are very important to me so I spend a lot of time with them. And dancing – I love to dance!

What is your favourite beer and where would you most like to drink it?

I don’t know about favourite, but I enjoy trying different speciality beers. Particularly the fruity ones. I’d love to be sat in the sunshine in my back garden with one right now.

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contacts SIBA Head Office: 01765 640441 Cellar Services: 01765 641099

SIBA TEAM James Calder Chief Executive james.calder@siba.co.uk Sara Knox Company Secretary/ Directors Assistant sara.knox@siba.co.uk

Rachel Harriott Head of Operations rachel.harriott@siba.co.uk

Louise Henley Operations Administrator louise.henley@siba.co.uk

Neil Walker Head of PR & Marketing neil.walker@siba.co.uk

Jenna Barningham Operations Administrator jenna.barningham@siba.co.uk

Rebecca Kirby Financial Controller rebecca.kirby@siba.co.uk

Elle Spencer-Blanchard Operations Assistant elle.spencerblanchard@siba.co.uk

All General Enquiries contact riponoffice@siba.co.uk

BOARD OF ELECTED DIRECTORS Existing members wishing to contact your regional representatives can use the relevant regional e-mail addresses listed below. For individuals, just type firstname.lastname@siba.co.uk Chairman of SIBA Ian Fozard

EAST east@siba.co.uk Ian Rydings Marcus Beecher Richard Naisby

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Leigh on Sea Brewery Elgood & Sons Ltd Milton Brewery

SCOTLAND scotland@siba.co.uk Christie Slater Loch Leven Brewery Gerald Michaluk Isle of Arran Brewery Stuart Cail Harviestoun Brewery

MIDLANDS midlands@siba.co.uk Greg Maskalick Draycott Brewing Company John Allcroft Grafton Brewing Co Anthony Hughes Lincoln Green Brewing Co Ltd

SOUTH EAST southeast@siba.co.uk Andy Hayward Thames Side Brewery Jaega Wise Wild Card Brewery Robert Wicks Westerham Brewery

NORTH EAST northeast@siba.co.uk Ian Fozard Roosters Brewery Mark Anderson Maxim Brewery Dave Shaw Hop Studio Ltd

SOUTH WEST southwest@siba.co.uk Guy Sheppard Exe Valley Brewery Peter Martin Driftwood Spars Brewery Paul Arrowsmith Red Rock Brewery

NORTH WEST northwest@siba.co.uk Shane Swindells Cheshire Brewhouse Dave Sweeney Bank Top Brewery Steve Briscoe Peerless Brewery

WALES & WEST west@siba.co.uk Norman Pearce Corvedale Brewery Chris Gooch Teme Valley Brewery Dave Shaw Big Hand Brewing Company Ltd

SIBA JOURNAL SUMMER 2019

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