Revolutions rarely happen overnight. They bubble under the surface for years, changing the lay of the land slowly, inch by inch. Sometimes, their impact is only visible in hindsight.
There are a few key events people typically reference when discussing the origins of the U.K.’s craft brewing revolution: the introduction of Small Brewers Relief in 2002, which gave huge tax breaks to microbreweries; the debut of BrewDog’s now-iconic Punk IPA in 2007; the opening of The Kernel Brewery in London in 2010.
But one key event is rarely mentioned. So few people were there, and even those involved could never have guessed the influence the occasion would later have. They didn’t know that what they drank that day would eventually become the U.K.’s most-awarded beer; that it would introduce generations to new flavors, and shift perceptions around cask. They had no idea it was the genesis of not just one, but two seminal breweries.
Admittedly, it sounds a little absurd—but you could rightly argue that a garden party held at a country house in the summer of 2005 is what changed the British brewing industry forever.
Jim Harrison had hosted a few summer parties since he bought the crumbling Thornbridge Hall in Derbyshire, England in 2002, but this was the first at which he was serving his own beer.
He’d founded Thornbridge Brewery in one of the mansion’s outbuildings at the suggestion of his friend David Wickett, owner of Kelham Island Brewery, which had won Champion Beer of Britain with its Pale Rider American Pale Ale the summer before. It was the first American-hopped beer to win the coveted prize, and Wickett was struggling to keep up with demand. He promised to help Harrison get a brewery off the ground in exchange for using the site to contract brew additional batches of Kelham Island beers.
The timing was good. There were already signs of a brewing renaissance afoot, thanks to the introduction of Small Brewers Relief, and it wasn’t like the hall didn’t have the space. But being a serial entrepreneur, Harrison was wise enough to know that even with Wickett’s help, he’d need more expertise. He brought in another friend, Simon Webster, who had experience in the food and drink world, and between them hired two guys fresh out of university brewing courses. One of those brewers was a young Martin Dickie, who would later go on to co-found BrewDog with James Watt. Though Dickie initially went for a job at Kelham Island, he was offered the choice of an assistant brewing role there or more freedom at Thornbridge. He picked the latter.
The first few brews were all for Kelham Island, but Dickie remembers how he and fellow brewer Stefano Cossi were given complete freedom outside of that. Inspired by Wickett’s beers and their own experience of American craft brewing, they began by using U.S. hops while keeping the ABVs low, mindful of the U.K.’s drinking traditions and penchant for sessionable beer. It didn’t take long for that plan to go out the window, however. By summer they had a bold, 6% American IPA in tank, saturated with Cascade, Chinook, Ahtanum, and Simcoe hops.
“There was no craft beer scene back then, so we were selling our casks into traditional pubs. Nobody there really spoke about ABV because it was broadly the same, so people drank four or five pints of [Jaipur], stood up, and fell down.”
“Jaipur was the first one where we tried to mimic the American IPA,” says Dickie. “They always had a summer party at the hall and I think the first batch must have been for that. We dry-hopped a few casks and cracked them on the day of the party, which I think was a pivotal moment. Everyone there thought the beer was awesome.”
Webster had been pleased with the beers coming out of the brewery in the first few months, but remembers being “wowed” by the heady orange peel and pine aroma, as well as how drinkable it was for the ABV. The risk of bringing in two new brewers full of unusual ideas about how beer was supposed to taste was paying off. The IPA was named after the Indian city where Harrison got married, and Jaipur was born.
Though the beer was a hit at the party, the team was still concerned about how it would sell. A floral, citrusy beer with 60 IBUs was outside the comfort zone of nearly all British beer drinkers in 2005, and at 6%, the higher alcohol duty meant Jaipur was significantly more expensive than anything else on the bar. On top of that, Derbyshire was—and to some extent still is—a traditional and rural part of the U.K., with little presumed appetite for anything but traditional, low-ABV Bitters. In reality, though, there was a very different issue.
“There was no craft beer scene back then, so we were selling our casks into traditional pubs,” says Webster. “Nobody there really spoke about ABV because it was broadly the same, so people drank four or five pints of it, stood up, and fell down.”
Word quickly spread of a beer as drinkable as any other, yet so potent it could level even the hardiest drinker. People joked that if you drank Jaipur, you were “Jaipoorly” the next day. Dickie remembers tales of regulars switching their weekend sessions to Jaipur and going missing for three days after. If the brewers had worried they might alienate drinkers with the price or flavor intensity, they were wrong—people were putting it away faster than it could be brewed. The balance they had struck—by putting bold American flavors into a traditional British cask format—was completely novel. It caught everyone by surprise.
That in itself became a talking point. Jaipur left drinkers newly interested in hop profiles, drinkability, and even beer history as they pondered the difference between this strong beer with orange, pine and citrus-peel notes and the other primary IPA they knew: the 3.8% Greene King IPA.
At the time, Greene King’s flagship beer was the best-selling cask ale in the country. Despite its India Pale Ale tagline, the beer has little in common with its ancestors. It is around half the strength of 18th- and 19th-century IPAs, and lacks the heavy hopping rate that, as the story goes, allowed those beers to survive months at sea to reach India.
“We used to say there was more chance of an iceberg making it safely to India than that beer,” says Webster. “We couldn’t afford marketing so we just talked about the true history of IPA, because the great thing about brewing is the stories, and it became an evocative, emotive beer.”
Over time, stories about “the Jaipur effect” created a mystique that attracted the few people making their money as beer writers in the U.K. at the time. Pete Brown had tried American hops for the first time at the 2004 Oregon Brewers Festival, and was telling everyone who would listen about the new flavors he’d tasted. Just a few months after the garden party, he stumbled across a Thornbridge tap at a pub in Castleton, a small village in Derbyshire’s Peak District.
“I’d never seen Thornbridge beers before so I ordered a pint, tasted it, and basically lost my shit,” he says. “I went back to the table saying, ‘This is that flavor, this is what I was talking about. Taste it, it’s absolutely brilliant!’”
Excited to try more Thornbridge beers, he wrangled himself an invite to stay overnight at the hall and see the brewery. When he arrived, the team had just done a tour for a group of CAMRA members, and all the beers were lined up to taste. Brown took his time sampling each one, reveling in the hop aromas he’d just rediscovered, until he reached the last beer.
“I drank Jaipur at the end, and it was just incredible,” he says. “I couldn’t believe how it had everything from the American IPA point of view that I’d been searching for, but it was a great pint of cask too. It just unified these two worlds.”
“I’d never seen Thornbridge beers before so I ordered a pint, tasted it and basically lost my shit. I went back to the table saying, ‘This is that flavor, this is what I was talking about. Taste it, it’s absolutely brilliant!’”
Brown has gone on to write endlessly about how American IPAs so rarely work in cask; how the high level of hop oils combined with the lower carbonation makes them slick and oily on the palate. Jaipur was a rare exception, although he didn’t know it at the time.
“Exceptional” is a word often used to describe Jaipur. It’s not just an adjective for how good it is—it’s won more British brewing medals than any beer since its conception—but because even as it has grown into a national brand, it has always been an outlier.
In 2007, Dickie left Thornbridge to found BrewDog with James Watt, where he started by making another 6%-ish American IPA, Punk. For the next five years, Jaipur and Punk IPA were the standards against which all American IPAs brewed in the U.K. were judged. Everything that came after was inspired by them. You could see their footprint in the use of Maris Otter malts for rich sweetness, and in heavy doses of hops like Chinook and Simcoe.
Punk started with a similar malt and hop bill, set apart by the use of the New Zealand hop Motueka, but within a few years was dialed back to 5.6%, and infused with a more complex hopping regime.
Not long after, Thornbridge Brewery moved out of its eponymous hall and to a site on the outskirts of the small market town of Bakewell, where it has been ever since. Meanwhile Jaipur, in cask at least, hasn’t changed. Even as hundreds of breweries opened and the price for cask stagnated, Webster was resolute that the beer should remain as it was at the garden party. Sure, it was strong, unusual, and expensive, but this was precisely the reason for its success. Changing the recipe to go with the tide would only mean Jaipur would be swept away with it.
“We always talked about challenging the drinker and dragging them along,” says Webster. “It’s interesting because a lot of the time now, breweries are reactive to trends, whereas back then we had to set them.”
While Punk IPA flew out the door at BrewDog bars, supermarkets, and Wetherspoon chain pubs, Jaipur stuck to its traditional northern outlets, venturing down south only to appear in discerning pubs, and mostly still on cask.
The sole admission the brewery made was to release the beer in keg for the first time. To make that transition smooth, Webster employed Rob Lovatt, who had been working at Meantime Brewery as head brewer. He insisted on a small recipe change, albeit only for kegs and bottles, from a traditional Yorkshire yeast strain to an American one.
The cleaner yeast profile meant less perceived fruit character, but actually a slightly higher finishing gravity for more body and sweetness in the face of higher carbonation. It was brighter and zippier, but still recognizably Jaipur. Even so, where once it was cutting-edge, Jaipur soon became old news among beer geeks. By 2016, ticking culture was at its height within the craft beer industry, and a new trend was about to challenge classical IPA as the flagship style of craft beer.
“It wouldn’t matter what we did now, even if we marketed the hell out of it, we’d never be able to make a beer outsell Jaipur.”
In a matter of months, the attention of much of the U.K.’s craft beer industry turned to New England. Bitterness and malt character became signs of old-fashioned thinking, replaced by pillow-soft haze and tropical aroma hops. Many new beer lovers didn’t even recognize those older, piney, grapefruity beers as IPAs.
Despite the English ale yeast in its cask version and its heavy hopping rates, Jaipur was a long way from New England-style brewing. It had a rich biscuit character, a potent finish, and was as clear as day. As hundreds of breweries pivoted to quench drinkers’ seemingly endless thirst for juice, it would have been easy to dial Jaipur’s bitterness back, or up the dry-hopping rates. But Thornbridge stood firm, believing in its beer and people’s enduring love for it. A decade spent focusing on traditional outlets and permanent lines did the brand wonders—its volumes weren’t tied to the fickle habits of hardcore beer lovers, and quick turnover meant it was fresh pretty much everywhere it was sold. Sales continued to skyrocket.
“It wouldn’t matter what we did now, even if we marketed the hell out of it, we’d never be able to make a beer outsell Jaipur,” says Lovatt. “What I really like about the beer is that we haven’t compromised. A lot of breweries have a flagship brand they want to get further afield so they tone down the ABV or reduce the bitterness. You see it across the board.”
By 2019, Jaipur was bigger than ever. It was available in cask, keg, bottle, and can. You could buy it in British supermarket chain Tesco in the center of London, or in an isolated local in the middle of the Peak District. Wherever you found it, it was almost certainly fresh.
“Did Thornbridge create Jaipur, or did Jaipur create Thornbridge?” asks Webster. “I really don’t know, but I think about it a lot. We supply 35 countries, and Jaipur is [our] best-selling beer in every single territory.”
The brewery made around 20,000 hectoliters (17,000 barrels) of Jaipur last year—more than 50% of its output—and has even started brand extensions, such as the coveted Double IPA version, Jaipur X. Now, there are even rumors of a DDH version. The New England craze only seems to have spurred sales, and anyone worried about the decline of West Coast ideals could look to Jaipur for reassurance. Where it once stood out against a sea of 3.5% Bitters, it was now standing firm against a tidal wave of Hazy IPAs.
“The trend today is this Mosaic- and Citra-dominated profile, which means any muppet can make IPA,” says Lovatt. “Old-school American hops have their own unique flavor, so it’s fantastic we can still use them.”
For Lovatt and his team, the skill in making IPA is in the blend of hops—finding unique character within varieties and between them, rather than relying on one or two big-hitters and using those hops as marketing tools. Thornbridge is far from alone in still having that approach, but to be the one leading this style of brewing for 15 years makes it one of the most enduring breweries in the U.K. When we talk about the breweries that made the craft brewing revolution possible, it’s often BrewDog that’s mentioned first. But two years before that, Dickie and the team around him were already on that journey.
“For me, Jaipur was the start of the British craft brewing scene,” says Brown. “BrewDog brought the attitude, the packaging, the language, but Thornbridge were the trailblazers.”
Jaipur’s legacy and future are bright because it continues to inspire and excite new people. While within the beer bubble attention moves so quickly from one beer, one brewery, or one trend to the next, outside it people move much more slowly. Many drinkers are still loyal to the brands they first fell in love with. Where the beer came from, who brewed it first, even what style it is is irrelevant to them. In understanding that, and in trusting the instincts of those at that original garden party, Thornbridge’s Jaipur has transcended the very scene it helped to create. It has become bigger than West Coast versus New England, bigger than cask versus keg.
“Of course Jaipur is a West Coast IPA, but it’s weird to call it that,” says Brown. “In Sheffield it’s just ‘Jay-per,’ and it’s just on the bar. It’s drunk by people who don’t know what a fucking West Coast IPA is. To them, it’s just a good pint.”
Words + PhotosJonny Garrett
