Our plans for this year

This year will see some of the beers we released last year rebrewed.

It’s been a while since we’ve written a blog, so here’s a quick update on what we’ve been up to…

We’ve spent the first part of 2021 thinking about how we want to grow and evolve as a brewery. Thanks to the demand and interest in the beers we’ve produced so far, we feel confident that we could sell more beer if we were bigger. For us, expansion necessitates moving to a larger premises, and we’re now clear that this is something we want to do. Although we don’t anticipate moving out of the garage this year, we do expect to complete much of the planning in 2021 – in order to make a move to a new location possible in 2022. As a consequence, it’s unlikely we’ll be able to produce beer at the same rate as we did last year – but producing less now in order to produce more in the future seems to make sense.

With regards to beer releases for this year, producing high quality sour beer is going to be a major area of focus for us. In recent years we have drunk some exceptional fruited sour beers, made by some highly revered breweries, and we are not shy in our ambition in wanting to emulate the very best.

A key change in our sour beer production process this year is that we will be co-pitching bacteria and yeast within the same fermentation tank, as opposed to kettle souring (where bacteria is added in the kettle before fermentation, and then boiled once the desired level of acidity is achieved). Combined with sourcing high quality fruit to add to our beers, and increasing both the quantity of our fruit additions, and the period in which our beers are in contact with fruit – we hope to increase the depth and complexity of our fruited sours.

Although we won’t exclusively be brewery sour beer this year, it will be our primary focus, at least until the Autumn anyway.

This year will also see some of the beers we released last year rebrewed. Our plan is to have a series of seasonal beers released annually. They won’t be exactly the same each year, as we intend to tweak and experiment year on year in order to refine and improve, but they will always be recognisable variants of the original. We hope that by adopting this approach we’ll provide variety in our range throughout the year, whilst building familiarity with our beers over time.

We have two beers in progress currently, and we hope to have these ready for sale in April - including at Reading Farmers’ market on Saturday 3rd. It’s going to be great to be back at the market after a brief absence this year. We really enjoy the opportunity it allows us to meet our customers, and we genuinely can’t wait to return. Hopefully see you there…

And a quick update for those who like to purchase our beers online, we hope to host our next online sale in May – in the meantime we’re working on improving the experience of purchasing via our online store.

Please do let us know if you have any additional comments or questions, we always love hearing from you…