Opening a brewery during a pandemic is far from ideal. But if you have faith in the beer you brew, engage with the industry and embrace the community around you then you’ll be on the right path. And that’s exactly the approach Beak Brewery of Lewes has taken.
“All we’ve ever known is lockdown”.
It’s nearly one year to the day since Boris Johnson, the UK Prime Minister, took to the airwaves informing viewers that life, as we knew it, was about to change.
From that point on, you could only shop for basic necessities.
Exercise was limited to one form a day, travel was restricted for essential work only and ultimately, the people of the UK were told to stay at home.
The perfect time, then, to be opening your own brewery. But that’s exactly the situation that Danny Tapper, owner of Lewes-based Beak Brewery, found himself in.
“We had just signed for a 10-year lease on our site and then the whole of the UK went into lockdown,” he recalls. “And just like that, every pub was closed. Great, I thought”.
“And I had just handed in my notice!” adds head brewer Robin Head-Fourman.
Leaving his position of four years at the venerable Burning Sky to join a new business was always going to be a leap of faith. He just didn’t expect his decision to be challenged so quickly.
“I was ill at the time so I was actually isolating. I found myself watching the news and thinking ‘oh no, maybe this was all the wrong idea’. It was pretty terrifying,” he explains.
But through darkness, comes light.
The fledgling outfit had already brewed an early batch of its Parade IPA at Head-Fourman’s previous employers, and the response to the 6% hop-forward beer exceeded all of their expectations.
“Mark (Tranter, founder of Burning Sky) kindly let us brew a beer. We did a pre-sale, which went mental. It sold out and gave us a boost, not only in cashflow but for our confidence in what we were doing,” says Tapper. “We knew we just had to put one foot in front of the other, remember that we had come this far and to just keep on going.”
And 12 months on, they’ve done just that. While UK hospitality has remained in a state of flux, and that’s putting it kindly, Beak Brewery has used the fleeting periods between lockdowns to establish itself in the Lewes community.
Through its Sussex taproom and local deliveries, the duo, with the addition of operations and taproom manager Katerina Turkova, is satiating drinkers. Whether they’re dyed in the wool fans of good beer, or consumers that have had their curiosity piqued by a new kid on the block, the Beak name is permeating Lewes and beyond.
“From very early on, we were cautious about the role that the taproom could play in the business,” says Head-Fourman. “We’re about a 10-15 minute walk from the centre of town. I knew it was a good place for a brewery, but less certain if people would make the trip. For some, 10-15 minutes is a long walk. Thankfully the reaction to opening showed there was nothing to worry about”.
Tapper adds: “Coming from a big city, that’s not a long walk at all. We even had suggestions of running a minibus service between the brewery and town!
“But the community has been great. We had hoped for maybe 20 people over a weekend but instead we had between 200-300, which is incredibly rewarding.”
With the taproom currently shut, Tapper says the brewery is indebted for the support it has received from across the industry.
“I truly believe that independent bottleshops are the absolute saviour of the craft beer industry throughout this whole situation,” he says. “I’m surprised more hasn’t been said about it to be honest. Because, for us, if bottleshops didn’t exist, we wouldn’t be open right now.”
“Obviously we all love pubs, and with them all shut, we’ve all turned to other avenues to enjoy beer,” he explains.
Head-Fourman adds: “One thing I’ve noticed on local deliveries is how vital the community is. One week you’ll be delivering to one house and a week later, there’s three or four new customers on the same street.
“You’re turning up with fresh beer ahead of the weekend and everyone is very, very happy to see you. That level of support, along with the custom of bottleshops, has kept us going.”
“I truly believe that independent bottleshops are the absolute saviour of the craft beer industry throughout this whole situation,” Danny Tapper, Beak Brewery
While Beak Brewery emerged on many radars in 2020, it was actually conceived as a ‘nomadic’ project some years before. The Beak spent several years creating unfiltered, seasonally-inspired beer with friends at UK breweries such as North Brew Co, Partizan, Beavertown, Burning Sky and Northern Monk.
“There’s something of a mystery surrounding us,” says Tapper. “People in the industry might have seen, or sampled, our beers over the last four years but they were in very limited quantities.”
Tapper would brew, no more than two or three times a year, during his spare time. As an editor, author, columnist and food and drink writer, his love affair with beer was a long time in the making.
“Whenever I had a bit of spare time and money I would visit a friend’s brewery and brew a batch of beer,” he recalls. “But the trouble with nomadic brewing is that you often probably lose money on everything that you do. Or maybe that says more about me and how I approached it all!”
Hailing from Leeds, Tapper’s passion for beer comes from from sitting in Yorkshire pubs with his family.
“If we ever went out to eat it would be to a pub. We were never taken to restaurants. And through my grandad, I got into drinking Bitter,” he says. “And then later, my friends and I would visit pubs and rate pints of real ale out of five. It as almost like Untappd before those type of sites took off.”
A well-trodden path into homebrewing followed and Tapper tried his hand at recreating the beers from brewed at the beloved Kernel Brewery in London.
“I just tried to replicate the beers that Evin (O’Riordain, founder) would brew. I didn’t always get close, but it was fun nonetheless. And that’s how I learned more about beer,” he explains.
Immersed in beer, both professionally and personally, Tapper would eventually go on to brew batches of his own recipes at breweries across the UK. It gave him the taste for turning a hobby into something more than a side project and with that, Beak was born.
“I knew I really wanted to turn this into a more sustainable project and maybe get our own kit,” he recalls. “So we got some investment together to raise money for a brewery in Lewes and here we are. The whole story of Beak is about five years in the making, so it’s quite funny when people think we’re new, when I’ve actually been hanging around for ages!”
Tapper was introduced to Head-Fourman, Beak’s would-be head brewer, through Jonathan Hamilton. Hamilton previously ran the Tempus Project at Beavertown in London before co-founding Newbarns Brewery, some 400 miles north in Leith, Scotland.
“Jonny messaged me saying that Danny was moving to town and that we should meet up,” says Head-Fourman. “We met for some beers and there was talk of opening a brewery. There was definitely some shared interest in making that a reality.”
Head-Fourman, in his own words, started out home-brewing as a means to get cheap beer when he was a teenager. But this would quickly turned into a genuine interest.”
“I’ve pretty much been brewing beer since before it was legal for me to brew beer, or drink it,” he laughs. “I managed to convince my dad it would be a great science project and I would learn a lot from it. And it worked! I got a little kit, a can of extract and off I went on a home brewing journey.”
He adds: “During my undergrad, I did a few shifts at a local brewery, and I was hooked. I decided to enrol in the MSc in Brewing and Distilling at Heriot-Watt.
“While completing my Masters I worked in Edinburgh where I was lucky enough to meet Mark Tranter, who took me on for some work experience at Burning Sky. One thing led to another and I found myself brewing at one of my favourite breweries.”
“At Burning Sky there is respect for quality and for consistency. But within that, there is scope to be quite playful and quite experimental, too,” he says.
“A lot of Mark’s beers have a great deal of refinement to them. And it’s that combination of qualities that I hope to have taken with me.”
“You’re turning up with fresh beer ahead of the weekend and everyone is very, very happy to see you,” Robin Head-Fourman, Beak Brewery
Coming on board the Beak journey with Tapper gave Head-Fourman the opportunity to add his technical expertise to the growing operation.
“I had put in quite a lot of the groundwork regarding the business side but when Robin got involved, he really took over the production responsibilities, while mapping out the beers we would go on to brew,” says Tapper. “Having him able to jump in and take over that side was very valuable.”
The duo commissioned Derbyshire-based Malrex on the brewhouse front. It was the first time Head-Fourman was tasked with designing and building a production brewery, but an opportunity he relished.
“I’ve made a few key modifications; firstly, we’ve got an oversized mash tun that allows us to make any strong beers that we want without resorting to adjuncts; secondly, we’ve designed a custom whirlpool to allow high hopping rates in our IPAs, and finally we’ve a simple bit of kit to allow us to purge hops with CO2 before adding to the fermentation vessel. These small modifications were made on top of a great design by Malrex.”
The oversized mashtun, which forms part of the three vessel brewhouse, can fit up to 1.25 tonnes of grain. An important quality for a brewery that brews a lot of beers in and around the 6% ABV ball-park. And much of this focus is beers in the hop-forward space.
Current beers on offer at the time of writing include Queue, a 5% IPA brewed with Azacca, Simcoe, Amarillo and backed up with a grain bill of Marris Otter, Oats, Wheat and Caragold, while London Fog brings it all together.
Elsewhere, the aforementioned (and award-winning) Parade features Citra, Mosaic and Idaho-7, brimming with fruit bubblegum flavours of mango, orange peel, pineapple and ripe flat peaches.
“Robin is a very good cook and my background is in writing about food. Together we are interested in beer, not just for the sake of beer, but from a flavour perspective,” says Tapper. “When it comes to making a new beer, it has to focus on the experience of flavour, aroma, and what works. It’s not simply about making something that is incredibly hoppy.”
For Head-Fourman, he wants to make beers that people can enjoy together.
“When brewing Strangers, I found myself looking at all these amazing places you would want to go on holiday, but couldn’t,” he says. “I imagined nice tropical cocktails on the beach, and tried to recreate that with the addition of hops like Sabro. It might sound a bit self indulgent, but it was just my way to trying to give that beer a story.”
Beak’s hazy, hop-forward beers have helped establish it during its formative months as a bricks and mortar brewery. But the head brewer, along with Tapper, are certain on their plans to brew a diverse range of styles.
One such example is Déšť, a 5% Unfiltered Czech Pilsner, while Oopla is a 10% imperial stout brewed with six varieties of malts along with flaked oats, organic Madagascan vanilla pods and 30kg of freshly roasted coffee.
“When it came to Déšť, I guess I wanted the professional challenge of brewing a solid lager,” he says. “I love lagers and there aren’t too many brewed around here, so it was a really nice counter-balance to the really fruit-forward juicy New England IPAs we produce.
Tapper adds: “At the end of the day, we are really into beer. And it’s not just the New England-style Pales and IPAs. We tend to be interested in all different beer styles and believe it or not, there will be a time when New England IPAs are not going to be the most in-demand beer. We don’t want to pigeonhole ourselves.
“Of course, they account for a massive amount of our sales, but you want to play around with different styles. And you know, that’s what keeps it interesting.”
Another part of the brewery’s proposition is its mixed fermentation offering.
“Lots of breweries have been ageing beer in oak for a long time now. For our mixed fermentation beers, I chose a material that’s popular in wineries – concrete. I wanted our mixed fermentation beers to reflect their surroundings – being located on an industrial estate under some imposing chalk cliffs, concrete seemed like the right choice,” he says.
Head-Fourman adds: “The concrete is breathable, allowing the wild yeast to continue to develop flavour slowly, and will also impart a nice minerality to the beer. I’m working with a yeast-lab to cap-ture and isolate a few strains of wild yeast from locally foraged flowers, fruits and honey. These will form the basis of our house yeast culture and provide a unique flavour to the beer.”
And Beak is unique in itself. For an outfit that has only really existed during the constraints of a global pandemic, Tapper is excited about what the future holds for the brewery.
“I’m excited because, right now, this is hopefully the worst point for us. I’m optimistic the situation will improve from springtime onwards,” he says.
“And i’m just excited to see our beer in pubs!” exclaims Head-Fourman.
Photos by Alex Catt
