From redundancy to a Lifetime Achievement Award, Eddie Gadd, the founder of Gadds’ Ramsgate Brewery has spent 24 years proving that tradition and innovation make good company.

“I feel the more complete brewer in 10 years’ time will understand this technology more fully and be pulling all of the levers available to them every day. They can save money, save some energy, and also extend the shelf life of the beers they make.”

Ask Eddie Gadd what has driven him through more than two decades of brewing and the answer is not growth, awards or even a particular beer. It is the pursuit of something he knows he can never quite reach.

That outlook has shaped a career that runs from a Kentish pale ale served in a harbourside brewpub to a pioneering CO2 recovery plant and a patented approach to wort boiling that challenges centuries of brewing orthodoxy. It has also earned him the 2026 Brewers Choice Lifetime Achievement Award.

From redundancy to Ramsgate

Gadd’s route into brewery ownership began with a setback: redundancy while working in the Netherlands.

“We arrived in Kent quite randomly,” he says. “Some bloke said, ‘Come to Ramsgate. I’d like you to look at a job.’ And I came, and I just fell in love with her. I thought it was a tatty seaside town. That’s my upbringing, and it’s very close to Europe, and so am I.”

The ambition at the outset was modest. “The long-term plan was to earn a living doing something for myself that didn’t involve the corporate world,” Gadd recalls. “My wife and I decided the best way to achieve some happiness was by starting a little brewery that could look after us. That was as far as the ambition went.”

The first casks of Gadds’ Number 3 Premium Kentish Pale Ale were tapped at the Ramsgate Royal Harbour Brewhouse and Bakers more than 24 years ago, and one goal has remained constant since.

“The purpose was always the pursuit of the perfect pint,” Gadd says. It’s kind of asymptotic, in that the closer you get, the better you get at what you do, and the further away that perfect pint sometimes feels. It’s a place you can’t get to, but it’s a place to strive for.”

Winning over a sceptical town

Early on, a local pub magnate greeted news of Gadd’s plans to brew real ale with the words “No one drinks that around here”. Attitudes shifted gradually. A 2006 beer festival organised by the Thanet branch of CAMRA proved hugely popular and helped transform the area’s beer scene.

A move to Hornet Close followed, coinciding, according to Gadd, with a localism movement, the success of the Planet Thanet Easter Beer Festival and an emerging craft beer revolution. Demand for local beer grew and the phone finally started to ring.

Sales rose strongly, and the brewery was rebuilt with Dark Star’s old kit, tripling capacity.

Sticking to Kentish hops was never an easy sell while palates were wandering elsewhere. “Stood at a bar, everybody’s drinking Hophead by Dark Star, and you’re there saying, ‘But this is made with all Kentish hops,’ and everybody says, ‘Yeah, we don’t really care about that. We like this,’” Gadd remembers.

“So we stuck to our guns, but we evolved a little. We started doing guest beers and monthly specials, showing off with American hops. It was a way of showing them we were serious brewers who could make really tasty modern beer. But the brewery basically runs on a Kentish best bitter, which is pretty old school. It’s a recipe that is 24 years old, and it hasn’t changed substantially in that time.”

That loyalty reflects a genuine attachment to the county. “I love the connection we have with the hop growers,” he says. “I love being in the hop gardens. And I love being by the seaside. Kent’s quite a county. I’ve really fallen for it.”

The same long-term thinking runs through Gadd’s approach to sustainability, where his engineering instincts come to the fore. Gadds’ installed the UK’s first CO2 recovery plant of its kind, a feat for a 5,000hl brewery, alongside solar panels, and Gadd has helped other brewers operate more responsibly.

For him, sustainability is part of the definition of quality. “Surely the perfect pint is also the pint that’s been brewed with great efficiency, and a great level of skill,” he explains. “It’s also the pint that looks after the workforce, the people around you, everybody. It isn’t a pursuit of the bottom line, and it’s not a pursuit of the perfect pint without proper regard for the people that help you. The perfect pint is a big project. It involves everybody.”

Breaking brewing dogma

Gadd’s boldest expression of that philosophy is ‘simmer and strip’, a patented technology that bubbles inert gas through the kettle during boiling, removing unwanted flavours without the energy demands of a vigorous boil.

Few breweries use it. “Not many people are doing it,” Gadd says. AB InBev licenses it to craft breweries producing under a million hectolitres a year, and Gadd went through that process under Chris Lewington of Brew Resourceful, who first suggested it might suit Ramsgate.

It is, Gadd admits, a strange thing to do. “It’s breaking brewing dogma. We’ve been boiling our wort for hundreds of years, and when I started brewing, my head brewer would tell me my minimum evaporation rate should be 7% an hour, for 90 minutes. Woe betide any brewer that fell short, because their beer could turn into rubbish. We didn’t actually know what happened during the boil, other than that it got bitter from the hops. Boiling was just boiling.”

His breakthrough was to ask why. Higher gravity can be achieved with more malt, he points out, and sterilisation happens below boiling point. That leaves protein coagulation and the stripping of volatiles. “Both require temperature. It’s chemistry, and chemistry happens better and faster at higher temperatures,” he says.

“Then the volatiles need a surface area to escape through, and protein needs a surface to cling to. Traditionally we give them vapour bubbles, but vapour bubbles are horrendously expensive to make. Once you break it down, it’s just temperature and interfacial area, or a bubble, basically. And there are much cheaper ways of making bubbles than boiling water into vapour.”

Gadd was not always a believer. A friend’s blunt verdict after an IBD study trip to a simmer and strip brewery hardened his prejudice. “That stayed with me forever,” he says.

Returning to first principles changed his mind. “I tried to find a reason why it should taste any different, and there isn’t one. You can do it badly, and it will taste pretty terrible. But if you do it correctly, we can’t put our finger on any reason why it would taste any different at all.”

The technology was developed at South African Breweries in the early 2000s with shelf life, not energy saving, in mind. The bigger prize, in Gadd’s view, is control. “Instead of just putting the copper on, waiting till it gets to the boil, chucking the hops in and going for your sandwich, you’ve got levers now,” he says.

“You can say, this grist is going to produce a bit more of those compounds that cause me an issue, so I’ll deal with it differently from the pale ale we brewed yesterday.”

The brewer of tomorrow

Gadd recently shared his expertise in a Brewers Congress talk in London and expects the subject to be discussed far more widely in the coming years.

“The complete brewer in 10 years’ time will understand all of this and will be pulling those levers every day,” he says. “They’ll be in sensory or in the lab, saying, ‘On this recipe, maybe we should adjust the bubble field slightly, or lower our holding temperature by 0.3 of a degree, and we can save some energy and extend the shelf life of our beer.’”

It is a fitting vision from a brewer who has spent 24 years balancing a Kentish best bitter with relentless curiosity. The perfect pint may remain out of reach, but Gadd intends to keep getting closer.