Distilling unused beer stock from lockdown? Now that’s the spirit
More UK brewers are producing high-ABV drinks to sip like whisky and they’re on a roll, writes
Real ale, otherwise known as cask-conditioned beer, has a shelf life of about two months. In normal times, that’s ample for a brewery to get its casks out to pubs and for pubs to sell that beer to customers. The start of the Covid-19 pandemic was not normal times. With the closure of pubs, independent breweries were suddenly faced with the challenge of what to do with thousands of pints of unsold ale before it went off. Lymestone Brewery in Staffordshire opened its doors to the local community, selling beer direct to customers who arrived with empty soda bottles and milk cartons. But with no online retail business in place, there was only so much beer they could shift at short notice.
“We couldn’t sell the stock to anyone. We couldn’t claim anything back on the insurance,” says Lymestone co-founder Viv Bradford. She and her husband, Ian, the head brewer, were on the point of tipping 1,000 pints of their award-winning Stone the Crows ale down the drain when they had a bright idea. If the beer couldn’t be saved, could it be made into something else? The Bradfords had already been speaking informally to Tim Massey, a friend and co-founder of The Beer Barrel Distillery Co, about distilling one of their beers into a unique new spirit. It seemed as good a time as any to give it a go. “We rang him and said, ‘I know this is a crazy time to be doing this, but do you fancy having the beer off us?’” recalls Viv.
Having been granted their distilling licence just two weeks before lockdown, the team at Beer Barrel – Massey and his wife, Fiona, and head distiller David Goldingay – jumped to it. By the time they delivered the finished Stone the Crows Beer Spirit, six weeks later, Lymestone had an online shop (lymestonebrewery.net) and pre-sold the first batch of 72 bottles. Batch two is selling well and the beer for batch three has just been dispatched to the distillery.
Viv is delighted with the new product, which she describes as having a “really nice warm vanilla
note to it, almost a little bit caramelly”. It has been going down well at Lymestone’s two pubs, too, including among whisky afficionados, enjoyed neat or with a drop of water. Massey also recommends a “boilermaker”, where a shot of the spirit is drunk alongside or in a pint of the beer it was made from. “The brewers tend to take the afternoon off when they taste it for the first time,” he says with a chuckle. Making high-ABV drinks from beer isn’t new. For generations in Europe, small breweries have worked with local distillers to produce a liquor known as bierbrand, bierschnaps or eau-de-vie de bière, depending on where it’s made. That didn’t happen in this country because of historic laws that made it difficult to distil at a small scale, explains Fergus Fitzgerald, head brewer at Adnams, which began distilling its Broadside ale into a 43% ABV product called Spirit of Broadside in 2010.
Even though the legislation has now changed, making it much easier for wannabe distillers, breweries have been loath to embrace a product that’s still so little known in this country.
While American craft beer producers have been innovating in this arena for the past decade, the UK market is still in its infancy. “Once you get people to try it, they really enjoy it, but you need to get them over that hurdle of trying in the first place,” says Fitzgerald. Adnams sells one bottle of Spirit of Broadside for every four bottles of whisky.
The trick, says Massey, is slowing down the distillation process enough that the original hop flavour of the beer comes through. That, and the addition of small pieces of bourbon or cognac barrels that transfer flavour and colour to the end spirit. Depending on the batch, Goldingay might also add a blend of hops based on those that went into the original beer. As a result, says Massey excitedly, “every single one we do can taste completely different”.
Beer Barrel is producing beer spirit for a further three craft breweries – Kelham Island in Sheffield, Purple Moose in North Wales, and Dancing Duck in Derby – and is about to start distilling for six more. Massey says they’re also in talks with several larger breweries, whose more corporate-style collaborations are likely to take much longer to negotiate.
For the moment, he’s relishing the chance to work with independent brewers passionate about what they do and keen to experiment. “It shocks the brewers when they first taste it, the flavours of their original hops and beer, in the spirit. They get very excited.”
‘Once you get people to try it, they really enjoy it, but you need to get them over that hurdle’