College Farm, Bourton-on-the-Water.
The Cotswold Brewing Company was founded in 2005 by Emma and Rick Keene. In May 2022 it turned its whole operation over to this range. Rick is the master brewer, and the reason the first batch of lager was thrown away and brewed again.
How this came about.
The Cotswold Brewing Company is founded
Emma and Rick Keene start brewing at College Farm, Bourton-on-the-Water, with no involvement from anybody on this estate whatsoever.
Hawkstone Lager launches
Brewed with barley grown on Diddly Squat. The first batch fails a blind taste test and is rebrewed. This is not a story we have ever hidden.
The brewery goes all in
Cotswold Brewing transitions to focus on the Hawkstone portfolio.
The cider recall
A batch over-ferments. It is recalled with a public statement beginning "we completely cocked up". Sales go up afterwards, which taught everybody involved something important about honesty.
Waitrose
The first national grocery listing — more than three hundred stores, with Premium, Session, IPA and Cider.
Twenty-third on the Sunday Times 100
Sales almost tripled to £21.3 million in the year to March 2025. Three-year average growth: 134 per cent.
Europe
The range begins reaching European customers for the first time.
The batch we threw away.
The first batch of Hawkstone Lager did not pass a blind taste test. It was, by the account of everybody who tasted it, fine — and fine is not the same as good, so it was rebrewed.
Two years later a batch of cider over-fermented in the bottle. It was recalled, and the statement that went out said, in plain English, that we had completely cocked it up. Sales rose afterwards.
There is a lesson in that which most drinks brands never learn: an honest recall builds more trust than a flawless record, because a flawless record is not believable and everybody knows it.
- 1
- batch rebrewed
- 2023
- cider recall
- Up
- sales afterwards
What happens to the barley.
Roughly five hundred acres of this farm grows barley, which is about enough for one and a half million pints of lager. Here is the journey it takes.
- Drilled
Autumn or spring, depending on the blackgrass and the weather.
- Harvested
Late July or August, weather permitting, which in 2025 it very much did not.
- Malted
The starch converted to fermentable sugar.
- Mashed and boiled
At College Farm, with hops and water.
- Fermented and lagered
Properly, and slowly, which is the part most breweries hurry.
- Bottled
And into two thousand pubs, four thousand outlets and this website.
Four ingredients, one of which is patience.
Barley
Grown on Diddly Squat and by British farmers.
Hops
British, with an investment in the domestic hop industry behind it.
Water
Cotswold, and the reason the lager tastes the way it does.
Time
The ingredient everybody else economises on.
Come and see it.
A two-hour brewery tour and tasting, twenty-four pounds a head, including the lagers, the cider and the vodka.
What people actually ask.
The two questions this page gets most, answered without a support ticket.
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.
Not from this site. Hawkstone reaches ten European countries through distributors, and the stockist finder is the honest route.
