One of the UK’s most regarded brewers, Jim Rangeley is known for his ability to brew a wealth of different beer styles. But it’s his passion for mixed fermentation that really excites our very own ‘2024 Brewers Choice – Brewer of The Year’. Here Jim, the lead brewer at Abbeydale Brewery’s Funk Dungeon mixed fermentation project, shares his own journey in beer and how valued figures Jim has met along the way have helped inspire and influence his own approach to brewing. Images: Mark Newton Photography, Noelia Amado Photography
As a Sheffield lad born and bred, and with a plethora of fantastic pubs right on my doorstep – one of which, The Sheaf View, is still my local – it was perhaps inevitable that I’d be a beer fan from as soon as I was old enough for pints.
My first experiences of homebrewing were using kits from Wilkinson’s (remember them) – not hugely exciting beer, but at the time being a tight Yorkshireman and a student, cheap booze was the aim. And despite being incredibly basic, brewing with these kits taught me many of the principles that encompass the now day-to-day workload – how to take accurate gravity readings and calculations for alcohol, as well as the critical importance of hygiene.
While over the years I may have packaged beer that became over carbed, due to a less than stable final gravity, or over primed at the bottling phase (leading to one memorable weekend of small explosions in my shared student house), it was all a learning experience and only made me more keen to learn and understand the processes taking place in my rudimentary buckets.
Over the years of home-brewing with extract, my main interest was to alter yeast. Moving from the Nottingham Ale yeast provided in most of the kits to either a Belle Saison or an Abbey strain, with an additional bag or two of sugar. This change became a more accessible entry point to alternative beer styles, years before the days of double dry hopping and intentional haze.
Also it meant rather conveniently, that the lack of temperature control on the fermenters was something I could see as a benefit and lean into, creating some deliciously high ester beers. This in turn kicked off my love affair with saisons and meant I began to seek out more interesting styles, made easier by living round the corner from the sadly no longer open Beer Ritz in Leeds. Durham Brewery were a particular favourite at the time with some excellent saisons and abbey style beers which felt innovative for the time, continental beers made in the North East and still going strong today.
I stopped brewing for a short while post uni, but my interest in beer and flavour grew and grew. My now wife Laura and I started a blog, initially writing about food and whisky before the pull of Sheffield pubs and the amazing scene we have here really drew us in.
Independent bottle shops with passionate, knowledgeable owners were starting to open up, and we were soon spending the majority of our spare time (and funds) chatting to people in these shops and our local pubs, attending beer and food pairings and meet the brewer events – which became more commonplace in Sheffield thanks to SIBA Beer X taking place here a number of years ago – and generally doing everything we could to learn as much about beer, the making of it, and what that ultimately meant in terms of a finished product.
With this ever-expanding thirst for knowledge I soon ventured down the whole grain path, starting with a brew in the bag setup on the hob and fermenting in demijohns. I started to experiment further with different grains, and occasionally locally foraged fruit, opening my eyes to the limitless world of wild yeast. I’ve actually still got some gooseberry saison in the cellar.
I upscaled to a 25l kit after a brewer friend of mine was emigrating from his job at Thornbridge to Canada and was getting rid of his larger kettle and mash tun. Turns out this was too large for the hob and I got banished to the garden with a propane burner after setting off the carbon monoxide alarm one too many times, another very important health and safety lesson! With this kit I would often split batches post primary fermentation to condition on fruit and spices in demijohns, allowing for some fun experiments with flavours.
It wasn’t long after this that I bagged my first job in a brewery (Blue Monkey, just outside Nottingham) in early 2015, when demonstrated passion and enthusiasm was enough for an “in” to the industry. I went from an unfulfilling job as a technician in a school to bouncing out of bed to drive an hour down the M1 to start at 5am and really threw myself into the role.
I was pretty soon brewing on a simple 50hl brewkit that operated in a similar manner to my kit at home, complete with a gas burner and all, and created my first seasonal beer there just a few months later. I also acquired their first barrels, some second use white wine barrels, for a barley wine.
The homebrew community continued to be hugely important to me and one of the formative days in my career took place in June 2015, where I was invited by a friend running BrewDog Manchester at the time to be a judge for the Great North West Homebrew Competition.
“I went from an unfulfilling job as a technician in a school to bouncing out of bed to drive an hour down the M1 to start at 5am and really threw myself into the role.”
Jim Rangeley, Abbeydale Brewery
There I met the beer hero that is Jim Cullen of Salford Beer Festival, who was to be integral in helping the Funk Dungeon – Abbeydale Brewery’s mixed fermentation project, which I now lead – go from a passion project capable of producing a few corny kegs, to a real and tangible part of our output. Winning beers on that day were made by incredibly talented people who went on to set up breweries including Torrside and Track, and it was a privilege to be there as someone who’d already been able to take the leap from homebrewer to pro.
A few months after this, a production brewer role opened up at Abbeydale Brewery, and ten years later, I’m still very happily here and now Lead Brewer of our barrel project and Co-Owner of the UK’s first employee-owned brewery.
In my first year at Abbeydale I started producing mixed fermentation beers, initially a little bit by stealth as the sales team took a fair amount of persuading that this was definitely a good idea. At the time we offered a “signature” range, where each member of staff had total free rein to make whatever they wanted, and I’d decided on a Galaxy dry hopped mango kettle sour.
Our kit is pretty big, so I was going to have to make rather a lot of it. A compromise was to barrel age and brett some, to save sales from being inundated with something completely new and allegedly controversial. Anyway, long story short, it was a great success and now I don’t even have to keep the barrels hidden in the cobwebby space under the brewery that gave the Funk Dungeon its name – it’s still kept very separate to our main production space, of course, but has a dedicated area with such mod cons as pallet truck access and drainage.
Alongside gradually acquiring barrels, I was creating a house blend of brett strains, that a decade on is still going strong in a wooden polypin. This blend of yeast is the foundation of most of the beers that come out of the Funk Dungeon. I built the blend over the years, blending home brew strains from the likes of White Labs and Omega with some wild harvested strains and some spontaneous fermentations.
The main aim from a wort production point of view is to feed the blend with loads of complex sugars, so I mash quite high and use grains that don’t have the highest diastatic content. I usually use an isothermal mash stand, at around 68c – our brewkit is not engineered for traditional Belgian turbid mashes so I’ll never be making lambic style beers, even if sometimes the flavour profile at the end beer may be similar.
Over the years I have found my preferred blend of malt and hops I produce for most barrels, using a blend of Plumage Archer, our house grain, (Maris Otter), wheat, rye and some crystal malt, with a large dose of English grown hops. A variation of this base beer has formed the core of many of the Funk Dungeon releases, most notably Ryes Again (finished with sour cherries and raspberries), Sage Advice in collaboration with Colin Stronge (finished with apricots and sage) and What’s This? where we added about 175kg of pumpkins in the mash, later conditioned on peaches.
I aim for a reasonably high hop content, which helps slow lactic acid producing bacterial growth and restricts the acid potential at the end of a long secondary fermentation in oak – although there will be some acid, usually through acetobacter growth encouraged through the micro-oxidation in the wood. I often primary ferment in steel then transfer off after around 80% of fermentation has completed, this will leave the majority of yeast matter and trub behind with it the dead cells after high krausen and reduce the chance of autolysis.
Depending on how the beer ages, I like to add a dry hop with whole cone hops in barrel – while this make emptying barrels somewhat more of a challenge, to put it politely, the inter play between hops and brettanomyces fermentation produces incredibly fruity esters that I find remain far more stable in beer than in standard fermentations.
Things to read and listen to that I found helpful and formative when homebrewing, and still refer to frequently.
American Sour Beers: Innovative Techniques for Mixed Fermentations – Michael Tonsmire
Historical Brewing Techniques: The Lost Art of Farmhouse Brewing – Lars Marius Garshol
Wild Brews: Beer Beyond the Influence of Brewer’s Yeast – Jeff Sparrow
Yeast: The Practical Guide to Beer Fermentations – Chris White, Jamil Zainasheff
Master Brewers Podcast
The Sour Hour – Jay Goodwin (Rare Barrel)
Milk The Funk Wiki – an excellent sour beer resource
