Nearly 50 breweries across the UK and Ireland will have opened during the time it has taken to produce this new publication.

If you’re reading this, you probably don’t need to be told how buoyant the brewing sector is in 2015, but equally, it’s clearly something that hasn’t developed overnight.

The UK and Ireland has a privileged mix of breweries that are respected across the globe. Beers produced by companies, whether they’ve been trading for five years, or more than 150, are being welcomed and consumed by audiences in the US, Asia, and everywhere in-between.

We’re traditionally known as islands famed for the production of bitters, brown ales, stouts, porters and pale ales, that much is true. But newer breweries, especially those in their formative months and years, have often been pigeon-holed as imitators in their attempts to brew beers that the wealth of respected US breweries have been putting out, to great success, for decades now.

But the latter assumption couldn’t be further from the truth concerning these breweries in 2015.

John Keeling, head brewer at Fuller, Smith & Turner, who is interviewed later in this issue, is among the most learned and personable figures you could hope to meet in the UK brewing industry. Having spent nearly 35 years at Fuller’s alone, Keeling has seen more change and development than most brewers will see in their professional brewing lives.

“You could say that up until the so-called craft beer revolution, brewers were forcing the beer to do what they, actually maybe not they, but what the marketing or accounting team wanted it to do. And brewers were seen as subservient, a tool to deliver what they wanted back then. It’s changed, you now accept the beer for what it is,” he explains.

And it’s that loosening of the shackles that has opened the doors to the raft of innovation in the beer styles and flavours we are now fortunate enough to experience, thanks to the work being done by breweries across the UK and Ireland.

So, while a brewery in Berkshire may be rolling-out a new 4.8% golden ale, another brewery several miles down the road may be releasing a triple IPA that weighs in at 11%, or a beer with brettanomyces. There are no boundaries, there are no walls and more importantly, there is a respect that exists between those steeped in tradition, and those forging their own path.

The Brewers Journal is entering this industry at a point of rapid change, huge numbers of new breweries launching. New beers and more power to the brewers. And our objective at TBJ is to acquaint brewers with each other; to stimulate their zeal; facilitate the communication of new facts and also, to ascertain what is known in their science and what remains to be discovered.

Tim Sheahan

Editor