There will be beet.
It started with a typo. The first image of our first brewery in a shipping container, a grand pronouncement that there would be “beet”.
It’s a cliche to say we never expected to come so far so we won’t. From the moment we left Adam’s basement and started brewing on a 1BBL kit in our own space, our ambitions were for much more. We were naive of course. We bought an entire pallet of hops, which meant the first few months was a race to use them while they were fresh. That might partly explain why our beers were so hoppy, but our main inspiration was the amazing hazy beers we’d seen from the likes of Treehouse on Instagram.
That, combined with our love of sessionable pints created Headband, the beer we have said before built our reputation and wholesale success. Not many people will remember the bottles of it, but I think it was for many the first New England style beer they had had and is hopefully remembered for that.
We got orders from HAND (come see us there Thursday!) and Small Bar, which allowed us to move into our second space – a shared warehouse with head brewer James’ old business making the best darn falafel in the country. There we went into professional production and created the rest of our core range – Lightbulb, Bloom and Pulp.
From here we started to produce lots of different beers, pushing them out to the rest of the UK to get feedback from drinking paradises like Manchester, Leeds and London. We've always tried to spread our beer far and wide, but made sure that our friends in the South-West got the first choice of our beers. As we wrote in a previous blog, HAND Bar in particular has been hugely supportive over the years and even hosted our first ever tap takeover.
From the falafel warehouse we grew to the warehouse we are in now, and will leave with mixed emotions in a matter of months. It has been the place where all our ambitions have come true, where we have welcomed endless friends and brewing heroes as well as lots of thirsty Verdant fans.
2018 has been an incredible year for us. We’ve made some of the best beers we’ve ever made, tweaking our processes and recipes constantly to make those tiny improvements that change a beer from being good to being memorable. There’s no doubt there is pressure in growing from just over 3,000hl to a brewery that could turn out around 15,000hl a year but we now have everything in place to hit the ground running.
