If you're angling for a good beer, try here
By Phil Mellows
It’s a little annoying when you try to do the right thing, prise yourself away from the telly and go down the pub, only to find Jeremy Clarkson jumping out at you from a beer mat.
Clarkson, shall we say, divides the crowd, but that hasn’t stopped the boisterous TV presenter, who, like the ghoul in Japanese horror movie The Ring, has slithered through the screen and into our locals to promote what he unashamedly pronounces “the best beer in England”.
This comes from his Hawkstone Brewery in the Cotswolds, a spin-off, really, from the Amazon reality TV series Clarkson’s Farm, to help champion British farming but, you feel, perhaps mostly champions Clarkson.
When I arrived at Hawkstone last year I was confronted by a giant mural of the humble farmer’s face adorning the side of a 20-foot-high barn. I turned the car around and drove straight out again. I admit I failed in my duty to test the taproom for you but I’m a bit squeamish about this kind of thing.
Other celebrities go about their beer business more quietly. The film director Guy Ritchie, for instance, opened Gritchie Brewing on his estate near Salisbury in 2018, and mostly sold ales through local pubs. He installed some state-of-the-art kit and had grand plans but couldn’t make it work commercially. It ceased production earlier this year.
The Who frontman Roger Daltrey might have better luck with Lakedown Brewing. It feels at once a more modest and more solid enterprise, based at the rock star’s 600-acre farm near Heathfield in East Sussex.
You’ll note that when celebrities feel the need for their own brewery they don’t stick it on an industrial estate or under a railway arch, and Lakedown is in a truly beautiful spot amid gently rolling greenery and the four fishing lakes Daltrey had specially dug to satisfy another hobby.
The brewkit is second-hand, from the former Bedlam Brewery that used to be nearby, and it came with its own head brewer, Clark Coslett-Hughes, who produced the first brew in September 2023 and has since created a surprising variety of beers, from pale to pilsner and from stout to bitter, about equally split between cask and keg, and also available in cans.
You can try them all for yourself at the taproom (pictured), which is down a track past the brewhouse, and sits, idyllically, beside one the lakes. Or you can go to Lakedown’s new pub, the Eight Bells in Hawkhurst.
There’s nothing about the branding to tell you Daltrey is behind the operation, unless you get hold of a can of his limited edition 80th birthday brew, which has his (30-year-old) face on it.
While he keeps an eye on the brewery from his house across the dale, day to day it’s run by a team comprising his son, Jamie, two sons-in-law, Chris Rule and Des Murphy, and James Cuthbertson, who brings experience from his previous role as managing director of Dark Star Brewing, another Sussex brewery, that was acquired, and closed, by global player Asahi.
What sets Lakedown apart from celebrity vanity projects, perhaps, is that it is, as Rule puts it, “a family endeavour”, a kind of legacy that looks to serve future Daltrey generations.
“We see ourselves as custodians of this land,” he says. “The brewery has to work in harmony with it.”