It’s fair to say I’ve developed something of an obsession with Theakston’s Old Peculier. Ever since deputy ed. Katie Mather and I sat down and had a couple of pints in Manchester’s The Salisbury a year or so ago, it’s become a cornerstone of my drinking habits. Katie went on to write a very fine profile of this majestic beer, and following that the brewery reached out and invited me to the brewery for a tour. 

Politely, I asked if, while there, I’d be able to record an interview with its former managing director, now chair, Simon Theakston. His wing of the family acquired the brewery from previous owners Heineken in 2003, bringing it back under family control for the first time since 1987. Simon and his brothers share the same grandfather as would-be heir, Paul Theakston, who in 1993, seemingly in defiance at his family brewery’s loss of independence, founded Black Sheep Brewery (which has now entered its own tumultuous phase.)

To my delight, they agreed, but getting to the brewery itself was an issue. I don’t drive, and the market town of Masham, North Yorkshire, where the brewery is located, is a fair way from the nearest train station. Thankfully the brewery found a solution. Current MD Richard Bradbury offered to pick me up from Sheffield station, as he commuted to work from his home in Derbyshire. This gave me a great opportunity to chat to Richard about his own background—how his career started at Bank’s in his home of Wolverhampton, and how he worked on various Heineken brands before landing the role at Theakstons—during the drive over. Richard also kindly agreed to sit in on the podcast, and he shares some useful perspective within.

What was most interesting about meeting and chatting to Simon himself, was explaining to him my aims and intent, and what Pellicle is all about. He seemed genuinely thrilled that our young magazine is so dedicated towards the coverage of cask beer, and afterwards kindly allowed me to ask questions at will—including, yes, about beer duty and the Small Brewers Duty Reform Coalition (SBDRC). 

Simon also gave me an in depth tour of the brewery, including a look at its vintage (and that’s an understatement) grain mill, and the famous Steel’s masher that helps contribute towards the unique character of Theakston’s ales. My favourite part of the tour—other than when Simon poured me a pint of Old Peculier from the wood—was the fermentation room. Here in this corridor lined with open Yorkshire squares, the unmistakable aroma of Old Peculier was at its most potent. I also got to have a peek inside the cooperage, where in house journeyman cooper Euan Findlay builds the very casks that dispense this hallowed beer. 

During the interview we get into all the good stuff, including the history of the brewery, and its current objectives as an old brewery in a very different market. We also dig into a bit of beer politics. It’s a very satisfying conversation, and one I hope you enjoy as much as I have done cutting it together. If you do enjoy this episode, do consider leaving the podcast a rating or review in the app you use to stream it, and sharing it with any friends who you think might find it interesting. 

We’re able to produce The Pellicle Podcast directly thanks to our Patreon subscribers, and our sponsors Loughran Brewers Select. If you’re enjoying this podcast, or the weekly articles we publish, please consider taking out a monthly subscription for less than the price of a pint a month.

Those of you with good enough memories will remember I have some thoughts on terroir in beer. Basically, I think the concept is a scam, and that a product which is so influenced by not just a confluence of ingredients, but so much human intervention can’t possibly express the t-word.

However, I remain open-minded, and I try to let those opinions remain somewhat malleable. While beer as a finished product might not be the best device to showcase the influence of climatic conditions on ingredients and flavour, when it comes to those ingredients individually I admit that differences can be demonstrated. 

Take, for example, Centennial, a public aroma hop variety that is known for expressing aromatics that range from freshly zested lemon rind to sun-warmed rose petals in full bloom. Centennial is a characterful hop that makes delicious beer, and if you don’t believe me just ask breweries like California’s Sierra Nevada, or Bell's Brewery in Michigan, who use this particular hop to stunning effect in beers such as Celebration and Two Hearted. In fact, the latter of those two beers is what we have to thank for the continued success and admiration for this particular hop variety. 

But what’s the difference between a Centennial hop if it's grown in the hot, arid climate of Yakima Valley in Washington compared to the cooler climate of Woodburn, Oregon? While located further south, with the city being just outside of Portland, it's also closer to the coast, which brings in that cooler, Pacific air. It means the hops experience completely different growing conditions, giving Oregon Centennial its own vibe compared to the harvest a few hundred miles north. 

Crosby Hops are the owners of that hop farm, and they are growing the Centennial that you find in Bell’s Two Hearted. But it’s also making its way over to the UK, and most recently it has been showcased in a new, nationally released IPA from the Leeds-based Northern Monk Brewery called Beyond. While it's still packed with that familiar pithy citrus, it also has something else—a brightness, a resonance if you will. It brings a distinctive character to the beer, and a lot of this is down to where it grows, and who grows it. 

In this episode of The Pellicle Podcast I’m lucky enough to sit down, in person, with Christine Clair and Nolan Russll of Crosby Hops, a generational family-owned hop farm in Oregon, USA. It was a great opportunity to chat about both the challenges faced by, and the opportunities available to modern-day hop farmers, and there’s a good mix of chat that veers from the scientific and technical, to the romantic. Hops are an ingredient that gets a lot of people fired up about beer, so if you love hops, then this is an episode for you. 

A special thank you to our sponsors at Brewers Select who made this episode possible by bringing Christine and Russell over to Beer X Liverpool, where this interview was recorded in March 2025. 

We’re able to produce The Pellicle Podcast directly thanks to our Patreon subscribers, and our sponsors Loughran Brewers Select. If you’re enjoying this podcast, or the weekly articles we publish, please consider taking out a monthly subscription for less than the price of a pint a month.

If you’re a regular user of pubs I’m probably someone you’d refer to as a ‘transient’ pubgoer. I enjoy variety—the spice of life, as it were. Stimulation, for me, comes from visiting lots of different pubs, and here in Manchester I am spoiled for choice.

It’s easy enough for me to hop from Café Beermoth, to The City Arms, to Bundobust, to head over to The Salisbury for yet another Old Peculier. And if I jump back on a train or bus to where I live in Stockport, I can visit The Magnet, Ye Olde Vic, The Petersgate Tap, Runaway Brewery… you get the picture. 

But it’s also part of a problem in that this desire I have to visit and experience lots of places often leaves me lacking the feeling of being grounded. And when you think about it, that’s one of the key reasons pubs exist in the first place. Thankfully, one pub, just down the road from me in the Stockport borough of Heaton Chapel, seems to have changed all of that. Here I have found a place where the staff know my name (and insist, for some reason, on always calling me by my full name), where they know what I want to drink before I order it, and where I can sit down and be in full conversation with other regulars within seconds. Here is somewhere I feel safe and welcome, always.

The place? Heaton Hops, a tiny pub (you might call it a ‘micropub’ but I find it diminutive so it's not a term I like to use) just off the busy A6 that’s nestled into a neighbourhood that has collected a multitude of similar small, independent businesses. A genuine community. The pub was founded in 2014 by husband and wife Damian O’Shea and Charlotte Winstone, initially as a bottle shop that sold a limited amount of beer to drink on premise. The needs of the community, however, dictated that it should be a pub first, and a bottle shop second, and so that’s what it became; home to eight lines of keg beer, and three hand pulls serving immaculately conditioned pints of real ale. 

Me being me, in my fondness for this place I decided to pitch an article about it to BEER, the quarterly magazine for the Campaign for Real Ale I write for relatively frequently. The piece will be featured in the Summer 2025 edition, and so if you’re a member you’ll be receiving that around the beginning of June. Listening back to the interview recently, I thought wouldn’t Damian, essentially the landlord of my local, make a great podcast guest. And so I’ve edited that recording into a nice, half-hour interview for you to enjoy.

Damian and I chat about Heaton Hops itself, and how he came to own and run his own pub. But we also get stuck into what’s happening in terms of small, independent hospitality businesses at the moment, and what kind of beer gets Damian out of bed these days while also indulging ourselves in a bit of nostalgia for the early craft beer days. It’s a fun conversation, and one I hope you enjoy. 

If you’d like to visit Heaton Hops (which is also featured in my book, Manchester’s Best Beer Pubs and Bars) you can find it at 7 School Lane, Stockport, SK4 5DE. You might even find me propping up the bar.

We’re able to produce The Pellicle Podcast directly thanks to our Patreon subscribers, and our sponsors Loughran Brewers Select. If you’re enjoying this podcast, or the weekly articles we publish, please consider taking out a monthly subscription for less than the price of a pint a month.

Coffee and beer are, when you think about it, strange bedfellows. One gets you out of bed in the morning, provides stimulation and impetus, while the other (hopefully) tells you that it’s time to slow down and kick back. Perhaps it's the inherent balance this creates which is why I can’t do without either.

I first got into coffee about 10 years ago, and for all wants and purposes in this podcast we’ll call it ‘third wave coffee’ (it’s a bit like craft beer, in that it is a term that was invented to definite a subculture within an industry, but it just ended up getting abused and misused.) For me, the appeal of third wave coffee was exactly the same as the one I found in craft beer: big, bold, unusual flavours from small producers. Once I’d discovered it, I was the owner of an Aeropress, hand grinder and scales faster than you can say “Yirgacheffe.” 

But like beer, my coffee journey has been one of peaks and troughs. In the early days I lusted after the rarest, most interesting coffees I could find, even once spending $15 on a single cup of pour over Colombian Gesha at a fancy American coffee spot. That was the peak. Then, just like with beer and my lust for cask bitter and precise lager, my coffee enthusiasm settled out. An automatic filter coffee machine replaced my manual equipment. A good pour of espresso, like a great pint of cask, was best left to the experts. I was happier now. 

My interest in coffee, however, lingers on. So when I was invited for a tour of Marsden’s Dark Woods Coffee (hands down one of the best roasters in the UK, in my opinion) I couldn’t refuse. What I love about Dark Woods is both how approachable their coffees are, and their seemingly unwavering commitment to quality beans. This was evident in every part of the process I saw during my visit, from the roastery itself, down to the perfect espresso I tried immediately afterwards. It was also great to see that they’re not limiting how they express their coffees, as I also got to try hopped, and fruited coffees, plus even bourbon barrel-aged coffee.

Perhaps there are more similarities between modern beer and coffee than I care to admit. This is why I was thrilled to get a chance to sit down and chat with two of Dark Woods’ founding partners, Paul Meikle-Janney and Damian Blackburn. I was curious to see where their perception of coffee culture is, and how what their industry is experiencing relates to what’s currently happening in beer. 

It’s a compelling listen, and I’d like to thank Paul and Damian for taking the time to chat. If you enjoyed this, then why not check out our recent article by Tom Wilkinson (also of Dark Woods) who recently wrote for Pellicle about the place of third wave coffee in a post-craft world. You can read it here. 

We’re able to produce The Pellicle Podcast directly thanks to our Patreon subscribers, and our sponsors Loughran Brewers Select. If you’re enjoying this podcast, or the weekly articles we publish, please consider taking out a monthly subscription for less than the price of a pint a month.

Although it’s still a few months away I’m already getting excited about this year's FyneFest. It’s one of the most important dates in my calendar, not just because we head up there to host our Meet the Brewer panel discussions, but because it’s simply one of the best beer-focussed events that the UK has to offer.

While I tend to get misty-eyed over glorious pints of Jarl from the source, I also recognise it as a chance to try some truly special beers that I don’t normally get to enjoy. The Origins Bar, where our talks take place, is a great example of this. Here you’ll find plenty of funky wild beers and mixed ferments from several breweries including Fyne’s own Origins project, plus wild-fermented ciders from producers such as Ross-on-Wye. 

For this discussion we decided to focus on the biggest beers pouring at the festival: stouts, barleywines, strong saisons and biere de garde—the kind of beers a situation like FyneFest is the perfect place to treat yourself too. On the panel I’m joined by Gareth Young from Glasgow’s Epochal Barrel Fermented Ales, Lally Morrison from Polly’s Brew Co in Mold, North Wales, and Sean Knight from Siren Craft Brew in Berkshire. 

Each brewer brought something truly special for us to taste, in addition to their wealth of knowledge and experience in producing these kinds of beers. Tune in for a little bit of ‘how’ but plenty more ‘why’ and, indeed, why we can expect lots more big beers from these breweries in the future.

We’re able to produce The Pellicle Podcast directly thanks to our Patreon subscribers, and our sponsors Loughran Brewers Select. If you’re enjoying this podcast, or the weekly articles we publish, please consider taking out a monthly subscription for less than the price of a pint a month.

Until the start of 2024 I had never heard of French & Jupps, the UK’s oldest continuously operating maltster, established in 1689. When I was offered to visit by my friend Jonathan Mitchell, who distributes their malt via his Northern Ireland-based company Get ‘Er Brewed, I just had to tag along. 

Malt has always been central to both my enjoyment and fascination with beer, and is my favourite ingredient. You can probably say that water is more important, and hops are more exciting (sorry, yeast) but it's malt that fuels my curiosity the most. Malt forms not only an important intersection between the technical side of brewing, and the creative, flavour-driven element, but for me also provides the most tangible connection to its agriculture – the fact that beer is a product of the land first, and the factory second.

Located a 20-minute train ride from Tottenham Hale station in North London, French & Jupps is located in the picturesque town of Stanstead Abbotts, next to the River Lea. Although by no-means small, it's not quite as gargantuan as other maltings in the UK, such as those operated by Crisp, Simpsons, or Bairds. That’s in part because they don’t produce base malts, instead focusing exclusively on crystal, roasted and what’s known as patent malt – the latter so-called because historically a permit was required to authorise its manufacture. 

French & Jupps produces everything from crystal malts – designed to add sweetness and body – to patent malts that can imbue beer with everything from notes of chocolate and coffee, to bitterness and astringency. You might not have heard of them as a maltster before, but you have almost certainly tasted their malt in beers such as Harvey’s Mild, or Shepherd Neame Christmas Ale. 

But there’s another reason you might not have heard of them, and that’s because their product was, until recently, distributed via other maltsters, and often re-bagged so none of their branding was present. This is, in part, where managing director Paul King comes in. Joining the company just over four years ago, Paul has had an illustrious career in brewing, holding positions at Diageo, SAB Miller and Anheauser Busch, in roles that have seen him based in Japan, South Africa and the USA. 

Now, under his stewardship, French & Jupps are beginning to take a more prominent role in their own distribution, but also starting to tell their own, fascinating story in greater detail. I’m pleased to tell you I’m working on a written companion to this interview with Paul that will fill in the details of this maltster's history, while also explaining a bit more about roasted malt on a technical level, and how it's used to make certain beers taste and feel the way they do. 

Until then, please enjoy this delightful conversation with one of the most interesting people in the beer industry I’ve had the pleasure of meeting. It’s about malt, yes, but also about understanding the vital role it plays in the beer we drink.

We’re able to produce The Pellicle Podcast directly thanks to our Patreon subscribers, and our sponsors Loughran Brewers Select. If you’re enjoying this podcast, or the weekly articles we publish, please consider taking out a monthly subscription for less than the price of a pint a month.

For the past few months I have been considering a very specific subgenre of British beer, its place in the wider culture of British beer, and my own enjoyment of it. You might call the beverages within this category by the name saison, sour, barrel-aged, or even mixed-fermentation. None of these terms, however, feel like they do this category, how exciting it is, or what it actually means to people justice. 

The reasons why they don’t are multifaceted—not to mention complicated—but the reason why it’s important that we do find the terminology to describe them is because of the vast range of quality and deliciousness producers of these sorts of beers are making. Some of the most stunning things I have drunk over the last 12 months have so often been left to mature in barrels or foeders, typically with a variety of yeasts and bacteria, and sometimes other ingredients ranging from foraged herbs to harvested fruits. I estimate that there are at least 50 producers of these beers within the UK at the moment (and as part of this project I hope to catalogue them). 

Some of these producers, like Balance in Manchester and Mills in Gloucestershire, are making these kinds of beers outright. Others, like Burning Sky in Sussex and The Kernel in London are making them alongside an existing range of “clean” beers. Now there’s a word that easily defines a pale ale, lager or IPA. For some reason, though, I don’t think “dirty” is going to work for the beers we’re trying to talk about here. But what about “wild?” Sure, it’s not not perfect, and I don't think there's a one size fits all solution here, but it works for me. (And how the hell do you present a beer like this to someone who doesn’t know anything about them and call them “mixed-fermentation?” Honestly, it's an overly technical term that does nothing to describe how a beer actually tastes, and we need to move on from it.)

There’s a lot of work to do to unpack the excitement occurring in British Wild Beer, and that’s a project I have assigned myself this year. This podcast, recorded in June 2024 at FyneFest, was pretty much the starting point for that thinking. It features an all-star cast, including The Kernel’s Evin O’Riordain, Burning Sky’s Mark Tranter, Will Harris from Balance Brewing and Blending, plus Dan Wye, who spearheads Fyne Ales own wild beer project: Origins. 

For a long time I have been asking “who are these beers for,” and you will hear me ask it as part of this panel discussion. Perhaps the biggest lesson this chat taught me is that this doesn’t matter, but the beers that are being made definitely do. It's time we found the language that helps place them into the wider culture of British Beer.

We’re able to produce The Pellicle Podcast directly thanks to our Patreon subscribers, and our sponsors Loughran Brewers Select. If you’re enjoying this podcast, or the weekly articles we publish, please consider taking out a monthly subscription for less than the price of a pint a month.

Will brewing ever truly manage to become ‘sustainable’? Acknowledged by the UK government as a highly energy intensive sector of the economy, the industrial act of making beer has a far larger drain on our natural resources than those simply caused by heating liquid up and cooling it down again.

Brewing uses a massive amount of water for a start, whether that’s for cleaning, packaging, or making the beer itself. More pertinently, there’s the fact that brewing is almost wholly reliant on industrial agriculture perennially lurking in its sizable shadow. The production of grain and hops for brewing has, arguably, the biggest impact on the industry's carbon footprint, which is why breweries like Gipsy Hill in South London are looking for ways to mitigate this.

The brewery’s founder, Sam McMeekin, has appeared on this podcast before speaking about what’s know as ‘regenerative agriculture’ – a system of sustainable cultivation that endeavours to increase the amount of carbon locked away by soils and their surrounding ecosystems. At FyneFest in 2022 the brewery was pouring a beer called Regenerator, which in addition to using regeneratively farmed barley malt, also utilised second use hops, reclaimed using a centrifugal filter Gipsy Hill has invested a considerable amount of money in.

In August 2024 I paid a visit to the brewery to learn more about its investment into sustainable beer production. Regenerator has now spawned two new core beers. Called Trail (a pale ale) and Swell (a lager) both breweries use completely regeneratively farmed barley, contracted directly by Gipsy Hill and then malted for them at Warminster Maltings. 

A lot happened at Gipsy Hill after this conversation was recorded, including its acquisition by Sunrise Alliance Beverages – a step it took to avoid putting the company into administration. Which begs the question – can breweries actually afford to invest in sustainability at a meaningful level? Tune in to hear about the efforts Sam and Gipsy Hill continue to make in reducing this brewery’s carbon footprint.

We’re able to produce The Pellicle Podcast directly thanks to our Patreon subscribers, and our sponsors Loughran Brewers Select. If you’re enjoying this podcast, or the weekly articles we publish, please consider taking out a monthly subscription for less than the price of a pint a month.

It’s that time of the year once again, and you can bet we’re making our lists and checking them twice. 

In what feels like a breakout year for Pellicle, join our editor-in-chief Matthew Curtis and deputy editor Katie Mather as they chew through the year that was. There’s plenty of reflection on the magazine itself, as well as space for discussing some of the bigger topics in beer and cider for 2024. This includes some healthy conversation about the rise of Guinness and the trad pub ‘revival’, plus a nod to Thornbridge and Epochal Brewery taking on Burton Union Sets from Carlsberg. The pair also discuss the pressing issue of DEI in beer, before looking ahead to the new year.

Thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in to The Pellicle Podcast this year. We’ve managed to publish 19 episodes—our most in a calendar year ever—and have produced some of our favourite episodes to date. If you’re new to the podcast, do dig into our back catalogue as there are some absolute gems in our archive. A special thanks to our podcast sponsor Loughran Brewers Select, and to our wonderful Patreon supporters for giving us the resources to bring our magazine and podcast to life. Merry Christmas to you, one and all!

This episode is dedicated to our dearly missed friend and peer Susanna Forbes. 

IPAs. We love to hate them. We love to love them. It’s fair to say that the darling of modern beer has, over the past 10 or 20 years, been discussed to death. But we felt there was life in the old dog yet. That’s why at FyneFest earlier this year we hosted a panel discussion to talk about the present and future of the IPA with two breweries who are pushing the envelope as far as this category is concerned.

Matt Dutton is the head brewer at Manchester’s Track Brewing, one of the innovators at the forefront when it comes to utilising the latest hop technology. Coming from a background as an award-winning homebrewer, Matt has led the brewing team at Track for the past eight years, and is in charge of ensuring every pint of Sonoma, Half Dome, or whatever weekly special happens to be pouring at their taproom tastes as good as it possibly can.

We know Track means business too, as we brewed one of our fifth anniversary beers with them, a resolutely modern IPA that we called Optimism Forever. This provided a perfect stepping off point for us to chat about how modern brewing techniques and technology are ensuring there’s still plenty of ground to cover when it comes to experimentation and flavour within the IPA category.

Our second panelist is Vik Stronge, who long time Pellicle Podcast listeners might remember from previous episodes where she appeared as strategy manager of Huddersfield's Magic Rock Brewery. Since then Vik has moved on from Magic Rock, teaming up with her husband and experienced brewer to form their own brewery: Lost Cause. With both Vik and Colin’s extremely high brewing pedigree you’d expect greatness out of the gate from these two, and that’s exactly what we’ve been served so far. 

During this panel Vik discusses the use of new hop varieties and how they are helping Lost Cause to define itself as a brewery. We taste its IPA, Love You, Bye, which is hopped with a recently developed proprietary hop variety from Indie Hops in Oregon, USA, that tastes like cloudy lemonade on a hot summer's day. It’s vibrant, electric and proof positive that there’s plenty of exciting hop flavours still out there for us drinkers to experience and enjoy. All of which is discussed in this podcast episode.

We’re able to produce The Pellicle Podcast directly thanks to our Patreon subscribers, and our sponsors Loughran Brewers Select. If you’re enjoying this podcast, or the weekly articles we publish, please consider taking out a monthly subscription for less than the price of a pint a month.