Freedom Brewery from Staffordshire have been around for a while now, certainly before the current rise in the thirst for all things ‘craft’ and real ale; setting up shop in Fulham, London in 1995 with the intention of setting up a brewery to produce decent British lager for the market to challenge the assumption it was only the domain of the big batch products and continental names. A few years down the line and they are still with us, 21 years is some going in the industry, especially given the number of breweries with any kind of longevity being bought out as a ‘craft arm’. The Brewery is as of 2004, located just to the Northeast of Burton-upon-Trent and has revamped the range of beers it is now offering. Luckily, I was sent their range to write about and review, I was also intrigued as to how they have been relatively quiet in such a buzzing scene at the moment, so sent over a few questions to boot. So, what about the beers?
Aside from the beers sent through to me and as mentioned above, I also managed to catch up with someone from the brewery and had a few questions for them:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hi Andy, good to hear from you again, thanks for doing this, let’s start of with an easy one… Do you not think the lager industry is one of the harder areas of the UK beer market to crack? Absolutely but it is also one of the biggest markets! Just think of the number of pints of boring fizzy yellow stuff that are sold each year. It's great that a small percentage of the drinking population that have had their eyes opened to beer with flavour but let's open up the eyes of the mainstream. Joe Bloggs isn't going to leap from Fosters to Mikkeller; quality lager is the perfect step. Even hop heads keep coming back to a good Lager. Do you ever sell outside the UK, given the boom some of the UK breweries have seen, especially with sales of 'craft' to Italy and Spain? Part of my joining Freedom was to help focus on export. It is a great opportunity, but much like the UK it is mainly Pale Ale people want to drink (good job we have East India Pale Lager). This doesn't worry me much, as there is definitely a trend in people turning back to more sessionable accessible beer in the UK and if Europe follows suit this will only help us. There is an obvious difference in size, ethic and brewing from the likes of Carling, but what is different in the way you produce and present your lagers compared to other UK brewers who do 'dabble' with making lagers? To make a truly tasty, quality lager with real points of difference from the big boys isn’t too much of a challenge. Our head brewer is ex big beer and he brings all the great experience regarding quality standards to our brews. One of the big differences is that we actually get to 'lager' our beer properly, everything we produce we mature for a minimum of 4 weeks. With regard to some of the other brewers producing lagers, honestly.... I am convinced a number of 'lagers' out there are actually repackaged golden ales. There are 3 or 4 truly amazing Lagers from small producers (excluding ourselves at Freedom of course) that I really rate but that’s about it. Has there ever been a temptation to push the boat out and brew more traditional British style ales given the staggering growth of the market and the popularity surrounding beer in the last decade or so? The customer is always right and there are many different customers for us. Some want clean crisp, better levels of quality, whilst some want the tropical fruit and citrus hop bombs and finally, some want the traditional ale flavours. I would actually class our 4% beer as a traditional product, but feel it is in a different class in terms of quality. Freedom kicked off innovative, interesting, quality (and yes, hoppy) beers in 1995, so we will carry on what we started! What's next for Freedom in terms of market presence? This summer, one of the best bits of customer engagement you will ever see, you’ll have to stay tuned and look out for that! Add to that us relaunching an old classic, (our Soho Red) and one more big surprise that is to come in May; I know I am bias, but the trial brew we carried out was head and shoulders above the competition. ---------------------------------------------------- Hope you enjoyed, see you next time! Pedro. --------------------------- Many thanks to Andy Ahmad-Walsh for his time and to Freedom for sending their products across for review. Freedom Brewery Bagots Park Abbots Bromley Staffordshire WS15 3ER Tel: +44 (0) 1283 840 721 Website: http://www.freedombrewery.com/ Email: [email protected] Twitter: https://twitter.com/freedombrewery Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/freedombrewery
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