WHERE QUALITY MATTERS
Alex Brodie is the founder and managing director of the Hawkshead Brewery in Cumbria and a key member of the Small Independent Brewers Association (SIBA) whose recent beer festival in Manchester proved a roaring success
Alex Brodie was an accomplished journalist working as a foreign correspondent on respectable news programmes like the BBC World Service’s News Hour and Radio Four’s flagship current affairs behemoth, the Today Programme. He’s travelled the world many times, lived abroad and, in short, has read the book, worn the T-shirt and watched the movie as far as being a journalist is concerned.
Bringing up kids in different countries and living a nomadic lifestyle can become a little tiresome, and while it might appeal to John Simpson and Matt Frei, to name but two foreign correspondents who spend a lot of time beyond ‘passport control’, there comes a time when a return to Blighty is what’s called for; and that’s how the story of the Hawkshead Brewery begins.
Club Mirror caught up with Brodie in Manchester at the Great Northern Beer Festival, which has effectively been ‘his baby’ and the cause of a few sleepless nights. “I felt strongly that the brewers took responsibility for exhibiting their products and not leave it to the consumers,” he said.
John Smith’s on hand-pull.
While Brodie is quite rightly proud of his achievements in journalism, he is probably prouder of his success with the Hawkshead Brewery, which he founded in 2002. It is one of a handful of small, independent breweries that has earned its stripes and gained a considerable level of respect from within the cask ale industry and from consumers.
Brodie’s first appreciation of cask ale was as a teenager. He has fond memories of John Smith’s on hand-pull, but remembers only too well the day when cask was replaced by keg and how he watched as they pulled out the handpumps in his local in Bridlington.
He joined CAMRA in 1973 and continued with what he called his ‘beer education’ in Kent where he enjoyed many a pint of Shepherd Neame. Prior to Kent, Brodie used to work in a pub where he was introduced to Courage Director’s. He continues to name-check other great cask ale producers: Sussex brewer King & Barnes (from Horsham) and Lewesbased Harvey’s, not forgetting Young & Co, which he remembers from when he lived in Wandsworth, and Fuller’s Chiswick bitter, which he enjoyed in Manuel’s Wych Elm, a pub in South West London.
“I like beer,” Brodie said as we sat in the lobby of the Palace Hotel in Manchester, the venue for the Great Northern Beer Festival that was going on underneath our feet in the Grand Ballroom. “Nowadays I’m not concerned with the method of dispense, it’s the quality of the beer that counts,” he said.
Brodie believes that CAMRA has won the quality battle and that he was more than happy to drink quality keg ale if it was not over-carbonated. “If you’re a beer lover, you want good beer,” he said, directing me to the Hawkshead Brewery website and the ‘about us’ section. Here I learned that Brodie’s brewery is ‘about making proper beer, properly, commercially and professionally on a small scale and helping people appreciate and preserve their national drink, which is now thriving, but so nearly died.’ What you have to remember about Brodie is that he’s been around; he’s well-travelled and has drank beer in bars around the world: Heineken from a teapot in Iran; the delights of the Murree Brewery in Pakistan after registering as a Christian to drink it; Dos Equis in Mexico City and, of course, there’s all the beers from the UK too. In short, as a dedicated ‘propper-up-of-bars,’ Brodie knows a thing or two about beer and uses the phrase ‘beer from the heart’ to describe the philosophy of the Hawkshead Brewery.
Hawkshead Brewery was established in 2002. In the beginning, Brodie used to commute to London to present a radio programme, spending four days in the capital and then 10 days at home in the Lake District setting up his brewery business and working alongside head brewer David Smith.
Increased capacity
By 2004, he’d given up his day job and was concentrating full-time on the brewery, which was located in a barn just outside of Hawkshead in the Lake District, but eventually out-grew the premises and moved, in 2006, to Staveley on the other side of Windermere. At Staveley, capacity was increased to 100 barrels per week. “We’re just about to open a new 180 barrels per week plant,” said Brodie. The secret of Hawkshead’s early success was based on Brodie going through the Good Beer Guide and sending out an anonymous flyer to 40 local pubs. The flyer said nothing, but contained just a logo. It was followed up three weeks later with another flyer, this time carrying the logo and the brewery’s name and then, another with the logo, name and a telephone number. The pubs that responded were Brodie’s first customers. “Most of those early customers are still with us today,” he said.
When Hawkshead started, it was developed with Brodie’s own finances, but in 2006 when he upped the capacity of the brewery and moved to Staveley, he took a deep breath and borrowed ‘serious money’ to buy a 20- barrel plant from Moeschle UK.
We talked about the hierarchy of small independent breweries and how things progress from micro to local to regional and then, of course, national. Right now, Brodie claims to have climbed on to the next rung of the ladder and classes Hawkshead as a local brewer. “We’ve carved out a nice niche in South Lakeland and have some good customers in Greater Manchester, Cheshire and Merseyside and we’re quite happy servicing our North West customers,” he said, adding that he and his team have enough to do and there are no plans to get any bigger. Brodie, now 60, admits that he’s tired and wants to enjoy running the business.
Hawkshead beers are distributed outside of the brewer’s Lakeland heartland via a national pub company and the brewery ‘does good business’ with Wetherspoon both regionally (directly) and nationally. “They champion the cause, but you need to be producing a certain volume to do business with them nationally,” said Brodie. The brewer’s bottled ale business is performing well, with a presence in Tesco in the North West (with Lakeland Gold) and a long-standing relationship with the top-end Booth’s chain. Brodie said that 20 per cent of total business is retail and that Hawkshead uses larger regional brewers (like Stockport-based Frederic Robinson and others) for bottling. “Right from the very start we were determined to have trade in the chimney pots and we do a nice trade in urban Lancashire,” he said, explaining Hawkshead’s ‘Lungs of Lancashire’ strategy, which involves following the Lakeland tourists home to Greater Manchester, Lancashire and Merseyside.
Hawkshead offers an impressive array of beers starting with Hawkshead Bitter (3.7 per cent abv). What was once best bitter is now called Red (4.2 per cent abv) and that is followed by Lakeland Gold (or just Gold to fans), which sports a healthy 4.4 per cent abv and has won many awards, including SIBA’s Champion Beer of Britain award. Brodie’s Prime (4.9 per cent abv) is a premium dark beer and then there is Organic Oatmeal Stout (4.5 per cent abv); and Lakeland Lager (5 per cent abv).
Nobody expects lager from a cask ale brewer like Hawkshead, but the website points out that ‘lager/pilsner is a great beer style given a bad name by multi-national fizz’. Windermere Pale (3.5 per cent abv) is Hawkshead’s latest offering and is described by Brodie as a highly hopped session bitter. Then there is the aptly named Jingle Fells (4.5 per cent abv), a festive ale, and All English (6 per cent abv), a
strong beer made with all-English ingredients and rarelyused hops such as English Pioneer, Cascade and Pilgrim. Outside of the brewery, there is a very successful Beer Hall operation, which Brodie describes as a ‘showcase for proper beer’. The recently extended bar of the beer hall has been built looking into the brewery and brings together manufacturing and retailing, creating ‘a symphony of glass, stainless steel and wood’ with two dual fermenting and conditioning tanks dominating the bar.
“It’s a very busy and exciting place,” said Brodie of his beer hall. “It shows people what it’s all about; the cellar is glazed so you can see all the casks racked behind glass and there’s a specialist beer shop, which is part of the cellar, where we sell beers from all over the world,” he said, listing American craft beers, Belgian beers and German beers. “It’s a beer-lover’s paradise,” he said.
The Beer Hall offers quality food with a strong leaning towards beer and food matching. The food is classic and traditional, not fancy, and is furnished with locally-made furniture designed for sitting and drinking beer. “We’re not out to preach to the converted. People know about us and it’s not what people expect; it’s not a pub,” said Brodie.
Summer beer festival
In July the Beer Hall hosts a beer festival and people come from far and wide. “It’s enormous and this time [2011] there will be at least 50 hand-pulls,” said Brodie, explaining how the recent bar extension has left space for extra pumps. “All the beers are from a properly chilled cellar and served in the traditional northern manner with a creamy head,” he said.
Brodie has a lot to be positive about: his brewery is doing very well and its success is reflected in the wider buoyancy of the cask ale industry. “We’re holding the pub industry up, and I’m on the niche end of the business. We know that our bit breaks the rules. People who make real ale know that sales are up and now the rest of the industry has woken up,” he said.
He believes in credit where credit is due and tips his hat to former Prime Minister Gordon Brown for introducing Progressive Beer Duty, a move that made way for the current proliferation of micro breweries and developed greater consumer interest in cask ale. “The proliferation of small breweries excites public interest and that drives interest in the generic product at a time when people want localism,” Brodie explained.
He likes to compare today’s cask ale market with the wine industry. He believes that wine was de-mystified when it was branded by grape and that the more he and his fellow SIBA members talked about ingredients, styles and flavours, the more consumers would appreciate the products.
Historically, of course, Hawkshead is one of a number of ‘new kids on the block’ when compared to more established brewers founded way back in the 18th century, but that doesn’t stop Brodie coming across as an old-timer when he ponders what the next generation will be doing to further the cause of the cask ale industry.
“One way to describe what we are is first-generation family brewers,” he said, bringing it home to me that Hawkshead and its contemporaries are, in many ways, the Timothy Taylors and Shepherd Neames of tomorrow.
