Traditional Adnams Brewing (Southwold, England) collaborates with new breweries from America.

When I started drinking Adnams beers in the mid 1980’s, the brewery was already over 100 years old. It was one of three regional breweries in the county of Suffolk in East Anglia, England, and it had a proud local reputation. In fact it had won national and even international awards in the 1950’s. At that time it was very much a traditional brewery. Much has changed since then, with Adnams recently having collaborated extensively with younger ‘craft’ breweries, especially from America. To find out more about how Adnams developed these collaboration brews, I met with head brewer Fergus Fitzgerald, who explained some of the developments that have happened at the brewery in his time there.

Adnams Headbrewer Fergus Fitzgerald

“I joined Adnams in 2004, which was a time of great change for the brewery. The brew kit at the time was essentially Victorian. It had only been installed in the 1970’s, but it had been bought from Wells brewery and Thwaites brewery; it was all copper and cast iron. We went through a process of replacing all the kit with modern stainless steel equipment, which brought us up to the 21st century in terms of brewing technology.

“Adnams has always been a cask beer brewery. We were quite an anomaly in that we were pretty much the only brewery of our size which couldn’t filter and keg our own beer onsite, which meant we didn’t have the control we would like of our keg beer. In the last two or three years we have developed that capability onsite. Then, at the beginning of this year, we have installed a de-alcoholisation plant so that we can produce an alcohol free version of Ghost Ship.

“When we put the new brew kit in we had chosen something that would give us more flexibility in terms of the styles of beers that we could produce; before that we had stuck to traditional styles of beer because that was the limit of the sort of kit we had. From about 2006 onwards we were doing a different beer every couple of months or so. That was more driven by what we wanted to do as brewers, and less by what people wanted to drink at the time; although that gradually started to change over the next couple of years.”

Since around 2013, Adnams has been brewing in collaboration with a number of different breweries, starting with a number of beers that were produced exclusively for the JD Wetherspoons pub chain. Fergus explained how this came about, and led to more recent collaborations that have been internally driven.

Southwold Jack, Adnams oldest trademark dating form 1912

“Like lots of breweries, we sell beer to Wetherspoons, so they asked us if we would brew a beer with Avery for them. From a business point of view, this was great as it meant that the beer was sold before it was brewed. Anyway, the guys from Avery (Adam Avery and Steve Breezley) came over and we brewed this low ABV beer (3 point 5 Session Ale), which was really heavily hopped with American hops. Originally, it was just meant to be that one beer, but we learnt quite a lot from doing that, so when the opportunity came up to do another one we said yes. We’ve just kept saying yes ever since.”

Some people might wonder what benefits arise from breweries collaborating together. In fact, it has been suggested, perhaps by those of a more cynical disposition, that it is just a marketing gimmick combined with a chance to hang out with brewing mates; Fergus doesn’t agree.

Some of the Adnams range in thebrewery tasting room

“Don’t get me wrong, it’s certainly fun to meet up with other brewers, but we find we learn something new every time we brew with someone else. Like, you learn how to block up a wort cooler when you have Mitch Steele over, because he puts so many hops in! Then you find how you get round that. When we had Wayne (Wambles) from Cigar City over, he talked to me about bio-transformation – how yeast reacts to hop oils, and what it does to those hop oils. That was a great conversation to have, and it’s not one we would’ve had unless we were doing a collaboration together.”

Over the last five years or so, Adnams has done seventeen collaborations (by my reckoning), so I was interested to know more about how they all came about.

“The brewing community is relatively small. When Mitch was over here, he mentioned to some brewers (in the US) that they should definitely come and work with Adnams. Essentially, for them it is a free holiday in England. Southwold (the home of Adnams) is a nice quaint seaside town, and they get to experience what the beer is like here in England.”

The Sole Bay Inn, less than 100m from the brewery gate

This is how Adnams came to work with breweries such as The Alchemist (Vermont), Firestone Walker (California), Rogue Ales (Oregon), Golden Road (California), and Sixpoint (New York); all of these collaborations were brewed for JD Wetherspoon. More recently though, Adnams has been creating collaborations without an intermediary.

“Working with Cigar City came through Magic Rock really (Huddersfield, UK). We did some beer judging at the Great American Beer Festival in Denver 4 or 5 years ago. I met Rich (Burhouse) from Magic Rock while I was over there. He said he would like to do a collaboration with us, so when we got back (to the UK) we actually did Herbalist. At the time the guys from Magic Rock were doing a collaboration with Wayne (Wambles, head brewer at Cigar City). They told him that he should come and do one with us at Adnams.

“Every beer I’d ever had from Cigar City was excellent, so I was really pleased when Rich put us in touch with Wayne. He has a reputation as a really technically precise brewer. I think anyone who has ever brewed with Wayne has learned something.

“At the time we couldn’t do it, but we agreed to do one next time he was in England. Last year he was here to do a talk at Beavertown Extravaganza. He did collaborations with them (Beavertown) and Marble (Manchester, UK). So we said come up here and we’ll do a brew together.”

That beer was Two Bays, named after Sole Bay in Southwold and Tampa Bay – the homes of Adnams and Cigar City respectively.

Tow Bay, a collaboration brew with Cigar City, alongside two other Adnams seasonal specials

“With Harpoon, we had started importing their beer, and we thought it would be good to do a collaboration with them because they are a well established craft brewery. One of our brewers, Ed Razzall, had been to see what they do and was quite impressed, so he took charge of that collaboration.”

Arabella SB was quite a traditional English special bitter, with the twist being that it was dry hopped with American Casacde hops. It was named after a ship which took beer from the UK to early settlers in the US.

The iconic Southwold lighthouse towering over the Sole Bay Inn

Almost all of these collaborations have involved American brewers coming to brew with Adnams at Southwold. I wondered if Adnams brewers had been brewing in the States, and how available Adnams beer is on the other side of the Atlantic.

“A lot of the time the guys we brew with don’t actually get to taste the final beer. At the moment, we only distribute in a small part of the East Coast. Years ago, we had wider distribution in the US, but we found that the beer quality was suffering. So we decided to pull out of that until we could develop a better partnership.

“We’ve had lots of invites to brew in the States in the last couple of years. Because of the development projects here, we haven’t been able to take up those invites. Hopefully we’ll be able to do that in the next couple of years.”

For now, finding Adnams beer in the States is clearly not easy, but I would highly recommend them if you are in England, and especially in Suffolk. Otherwise, you will have to look forward to Adnams doing some collaborations in the States, maybe sometime fairly soon. My only regret is that those beers are unlikely to find their way back here to England.

Article written by Sean O’Reilly

Blog at https://uncruliarbrewsandviews.blogspot.com/

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