Four ingredients.
Barley, hops, water and time. Everybody has the first three. Almost nobody is willing to pay for the fourth.
Why the time matters more than anything else.
Lagering is the slow, cold conditioning that turns a young beer into a clean one. It takes weeks, during which the tank is full and earning nothing. Every accountant who has ever looked at a brewery has suggested shortening it.
The difference between a lager that has been properly lagered and one that has been hurried is the difference between a beer you finish and a beer you finish and then order again. That is the whole argument, and it is why the first batch was thrown away.
Where each ingredient comes from.
| Ingredient | Source | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Barley | Diddly Squat and British farms | Roughly 500 acres of this farm, ≈1.6m pints |
| Hops | British growers | With investment behind the domestic hop industry |
| Water | Cotswold | Hard, and a large part of why the lager tastes as it does |
| Apples (cider) | British, freshly pressed | Never from concentrate |
| Time | Nowhere else | The expensive one |
Allergens
Beers contain barley and may contain wheat. Hawkstone Black and Spa Lager were both recalled over undeclared gluten from wheat, and we would rather you heard that from us than from a Food Standards Agency notice.
500 acres
Of barley on this farm.
1.6m pints
Roughly what that yields.
British hops
And an investment in keeping them British.
Weeks
Of lagering, unhurried.
The range it all becomes.
Four beers, three ciders, two spirits.
What people actually ask.
The two questions this page gets most, answered without a support ticket.
Yes. At checkout, and again at the door. The driver has no discretion about it and neither do we.
Because lagering properly takes weeks in a tank that could be turning over a faster beer, and because the barley is bought at a price that leaves the grower something.
