Double bubbles: beer collabs
By Phil Mellows
Collaboration has always been at the heart of the brewing industry. Hard-nosed business folk from other sectors are often surprised when they find competing brewers swapping information and ideas, loaning equipment and generally helping each other out.
It’s embedded in the culture of traditional family brewers, who send their offspring to other family brewers to learn the business, and collaborative brews, or collabs as they’ve become known to the syllable-averse, proliferate on the modern craft beer scene.
Pictured above is a rare cask ale collab between two leading craft brewers, found earlier this year at Nottingham’s Fox & Grapes – Croco Cask Pale from Beak and Deya.
Collabs are identified by an ‘x’ between the two brewery names on the badge or label – which I like to think of as a kiss, but then I always was an old romantic. It’s not bodily fluids that are being exchanged here, though, it’s expertise and inspiration, techniques and fresh perspectives.
For the drinker, this means new, often unusual, beers to try, and as well as keeping up the market interest, the brewers themselves benefit from spending time with each other, working with a different kit and invariably coming away with a bit more brewing knowledge.
At Norwich’s City of Ale festival this year they’ve taken that to another level, or rather another country, with four Norfolk brewers travelling to Belgium to pair up with four like-minded independents over there to produce four unusual cask beers for the month-long event.
The idea came from veteran beer writer Roger Protz, who discerned affinities between the beer cities of Norwich and Leuven.
Dave Cornell, of Poppyland Brewery in Cromer, enjoyed the experience of brewing at De Coureur, a new brewery and tap room in Leuven, “just for the chance to be able to work with another brewer in such a different brewery”.
Between them they came up with a Belgian Wit Bier called Strangers that, slightly darker than usual, gives a nod to English pale ales.
The other three collabs are just as adventurous. Moon Gazer of Hindringham teamed up with Adept to fuse a 16th Century Belgian ale with an English mild. Harleston’s Grain Brewery twinned with the grandly named Braxatorium Parcensis for another dark beer made with English hops and raw wheat and rye grown at the Abbey where the Belgian brewer has its home.And Tindall Ales at Seething came together with farm brewery Hof ten Doormal and concocted an oatmeal coffee pale.
The spirit of collaboration evident at City of Ale extends beyond the beers, though. The whole event is one big collaboration, as Frances Brace, one of its driving forces, is keen to emphasise.
A record number of Norwich pubs, 59, are taking part this year, organised into nine beer trails that take the visitor to every corner of the city, and more than 30 Norfolk brewers also have an active role.
Beer weeks, or months as the original City of Ale has become, were taking off in cities across the country until Covid put a stop to all that. Now Brace is trying to revive interest in the idea among brewers, setting out the benefits and practicalities in an article for Crisp maltsters.
The trick lies in seeing that collaboration can be good for everyone. And especially for beer.