Starry, starry night: in the seaside town of Southwold on the eastern coast of England towards winter’s end. Beyond the silent line of beach huts, where the ghosts of last summer chatter as if the sun still shone, the dark expanse of the North Sea engulfs the horizon, its curtained-off gloominess pinpricked with the lights of passing ships.
On a night like this, when the wind is needle-sharp and the tang of salt spray quickens the appetite, the only place to go is the pub. So I head to the Lord Nelson, down a side street just off the promenade. As I push open the door of this venerable place, once known as The Raven, the pub’s sign above me creaks and squeaks in the wind. I recall my favorite childhood novel, Treasure Island, and think of Jim Hawkins at the Admiral Benbow on the stormy night when Billy Bones came a-calling.
Inside, it’s bright and cheerful, humming with the voices of drinkers as they clasp their glasses of Southwold Bitter, Ghost Ship, or Mosaic, all of which are produced only a couple hundred meters away at Adnams Brewery.
I order a pint of Bitter, which pours a gleaming, well-polished chestnut brown, and take a swig. Here is a muscular English Bitter—for me, along with Harvey’s Sussex Best, it is one of the finest examples of this simple but sublime style. It has a sturdy malt character, a ping of sweetness and citrus, alongside a suggestion of mint from the Fuggles hops. The finish is dry and appetizingly bittersweet.
For a beer that is just 3.7% ABV, it has a great heft and weight of flavor, and is a showcase of classic English hops. But though this Bitter represents Adnams at its most traditional, Adnams is not a brewery that lives in the past tense.
Adnams is a great survivor of the British family brewing tradition. It has weathered the storms of the past few decades, which wiped out so many fellow businesses, and anchored itself firmly to the earth so as to better survive the ever-changing moods of an industry in constant flux.
As the craft brewing revolution has taken hold in the U.K. over the last 10 years, Adnams has achieved the delicate balancing act of remaining relevant while keeping hold of its own sense of tradition. It is not a brewery whose recent, craft-influenced beers—such as New England IPA and Earl Grey Lager, which are released under its Jack Brand label—make the drinker cringe with embarrassment. (Jack Brand, by the way, refers to Southwold’s 15th-century wooden figure Jack O’ The Clock, also known as Southwold Jack, which resides in the local church.) These beers are substantial creations, the work of Adnams’ head brewer Fergus Fitzgerald and his brewing team.
Collaborations with newer breweries, such as Northern Monk in Leeds, Lost and Grounded in Bristol, and Cloudwater in Manchester, demonstrate the respect that Adnams’ more recently founded contemporaries hold it in. Meanwhile, sustainability has been a part of the brewery’s direction since the late 1990s: its distribution center outside Southwold is made from sustainably harvested wood and has a grassed roof, while the brewhouse it installed during the aughts encompasses an energy-recovery plant, something only one in 30 breweries considered at the time. More recently, it has caught the non-alcoholic beer wave with Ghost Ship Alcohol Free 0.5%, which is currently 7% of its production, and could be up to 15% in 2022.
Since 2010, it has even maintained the Copper House Distillery: a steampunk lookalike of a distillery with an 800-liter pot still. It was created with the aim of making small-batch gin from scratch, and while Copper House Dry Gin is the flagship product, vodka, pink gin, an oak-aged eau de vie, and a trio of whiskies are also made on site.
This is a brewery in charge of its own destiny, whose inclination to remain rooted in Southwold is counterbalanced by its zest for innovation. Its continued development is all the more remarkable when you consider that Adnams’ beers have been made on the same spot since 1872, when George and Ernest Adnams bought the Sole Bay Brewery (brewing had previously taken place on site for several hundred years).
Jonathan Adnams is the current chairman, in his mid-60s and a confident and articulate advocate of the brewery’s place in the beer world. Adnams has been his life, which is not surprising given that Ernest Adnams was his great-grandfather. Following this, his grandfather Herbert was a long-term member of the board of directors, while his father John, who died in 2017, held the positions of managing director and chairman. Jonathan Adnams received his first pay packet from the company when he was 13, after working with the horse-drawn drays, then a common sight around town. Later on, after a couple of years spent working as a commercial fisherman on the unforgiving North Sea, he joined the company on his 19th birthday, and has spent 45 years there in a variety of roles.
I meet him in his office the morning after my arrival in Southwold, just across the road from the brewery, next to a white-washed Methodist chapel built in the 1830s. He’s dressed casually in a multi-colored flannel shirt and jeans, quite the opposite of what is common in many family brewery boardrooms (when I interviewed Michael Turner, then Fuller’s executive chairman, in 2016, I felt obliged to wear a suit, though it didn’t look too good when I entered his office covered in dust after an hour in the archives).
“When I started here, it was a very different company,” he says. “We still had a bottling hall and machinery from the 1930s. We produced 20,000 brewing barrels a year, compared to 120,000 now, and our beer didn’t really travel outside Norfolk and Suffolk. It wasn’t until after the mid-1970s that we started to expand, and in conjunction with the Campaign for Real Ale’s emergence we began to get a bit of traction.”
In the latter half of the 20th century, Adnams enjoyed a period of golden growth, though problems endemic to the aging brewhouse were starting to make themselves known.
“We then had this wonderful growth for the best part of 20 years, even though there were ups and downs as infections tended to crop up every 10 years or so and whack us in the summer,” says Adnams. “One of the big lessons I learned when I took over strategic direction of Adnams [...] in 1997 was that I said that we must build a new brewery.”
The issues were not dissimilar to those that affected lots of other old breweries with vessels that were hard to clean, but recurring sanitation issues were beginning to impact the brewery’s beers, and its reputation. Some of them were fixed when former head brewer Mike Powell-Evans joined the company; as Fitzgerald notes, “one of his major achievements was cleaning the place up, and bringing in an on-site lab. Before that the results took weeks to come through so the beer was in trade before anyone knew something was wrong.” Still, a greater overhaul was needed.
“We decided that Southwold gave our brand provenance and relevance you could spend millions on marketing to achieve, but there was a very strong emotional drive to remain in Southwold. So here we still are. You choose your direction and off you go and you have to live with that for the next 50 years.”
According to Adnams, “I told the board that we couldn’t live with these infections as they were ingrained in the brewing plant. All the old breweries had the same problems. You had base levels of infections, which were fine while the weather was cool and not brewing too much. This enabled the plant to cool down. But when doing two brews a day the plant never got cold and then your infection level exploded. So from 1999 onwards we started to build a new brewery within the confines of the old building, and now there is nothing left of the old brewery.”
Cleanliness issues persisted even during the period of construction. “Adnams had an old yeast press where the yeast crop was made into a cake, put in a fridge and then weighed into buckets when the time came to reuse it. The buckets were notoriously impossible to keep clean and so it proved for Adnams,” says Fitzgerald. “Even when I started in 2004, we had to deal with the fact the cast-iron mash tuns were flaking, and providing a perfect breeding ground of bacteria while we were brewing, so after the second brew of the day we had to strip it down to do a CIP [cleaning in place] before we did the third brew.”
The now-complete, modernized brewhouse has given Adnams’ brewing team new control over their output. The fact that it occupies the same site as its predecessor has also bolstered the romance of the brewery’s heritage, though staying put wasn’t always the plan. Just as I was told by Michael Turner at Fuller’s that the board in the early 1970s considered moving from their iconic London headquarters, so Adnams had had similar discussions. The company owned a site in the nearby village of Reydon, and Jonathan Adnams says that Adnams had weighed up leaving Southwold and building a new brewery on a green-field site.
“However, we decided that Southwold gave our brand provenance and relevance you could spend millions on marketing to achieve, but there was a very strong emotional drive to remain in Southwold,” he says. “So here we still are. You choose your direction and off you go and you have to live with that for the next 50 years. We are quite happy where we are. A large chunk of the company is owned by two families [the Adnams and the Heald families, though there are also many minor shareholders], and they see Adnams as a long-term prospect.”
A brewery in the middle of a town or city has become a rare sight, as opposed to 60 years ago. Go to Lewes in East Sussex and Harvey’s Victorian pagoda-style brewery sits in the center. Hook Norton Brewery’s similar facility, constructed by the same architect, is in the middle of a small Oxfordshire village. There are very few other examples left. Adnams, too, is a brewery in the midst of its community, a hub and a heartbeat, rather than hidden away on the edgelands of town or city. The brewery is situated at the back of the high street, facing a lush grassy green, the aforementioned Methodist chapel, and one of its pubs, the Sole Bay Inn.
I meet Fitzgerald outside the main gate, where I catch the gentle, cereal-like aroma of a brew in progress. He grew up in southwest Ireland and started his brewing career in the labs at Fuller’s in 1996. His former boss at Fuller’s, Georgina Young—who is now head brewer at Bath Ales—remembers him as a very diligent lab technician. “I was coaching a few of the lab technicians through their Institute of Brewing Diploma brewing exams, but Fergus was the only one who actually sat the exam, as he had worked hard and was prepared,” she says. “Years later I discovered the others just sat in the pub!”
Fitzgerald came to Adnams in 2004 as the assistant brewer to the aforementioned Mike Powell-Evans. “When I began,” Fitzgerald says, “it was very similar to Fuller’s but with less hierarchy. At Fuller’s there was a lot of reporting to the next layer of management; here it was a lot flatter. You could talk to people about decisions. It was a very old brewery, almost Victorian, and we weren’t step changing—we were going straight from the 19th century to the 21st. We were installing a continental/Lager brewhouse, including a two-step mash-conversion system, 19 square fermentation tanks, 11 dual-purpose conical tanks, and five bright beer tanks. In the old brewhouse we were having to mash in over the sparge arms, and if you got that wrong, half the mash went on the floor. There is a lot of romance talked about old brewhouses, but anyone who has ever worked in one will tell you a modern one is much better.”
When Fitzgerald took over from Powell-Evans, he had big shoes to fill. In the words of Mark Dorber, who leases the award-winning Anchor Inn from Adnams in the neighboring village of Walberswick, “Mike was a great head brewer in that classic Burton tradition, a robust scientist combined with a real artist’s understanding of what being a brewer was, such as the bigger ramifications of buying hops and buying malt.”
15 years ago, Adnams was best known for Southwold Bitter (then called Adnams Bitter) and Broadside, a Strong Bitter with plenty of citrus and spice on the nose. The Bitter, as I discovered in the Lord Nelson, remains a bar-top staple, as does Broadside, though it could be said that the latter has lost ground to its younger, livelier, and more contemporaneous colleagues, such as Mosaic and the best-selling Ghost Ship.
“[Powell-Evans] bedded the brewery in and then Fergus picked up the reins in a very skilful way and caught the changing moods of the craft beer movement, and came out with a couple of winners, in both keg and cask,” Dorber says. “Mosaic, which is one of the most subtle of their cask ales, demonstrates the Mosaic hop to perfection, [...] while their out-and-out winner is Ghost Ship, which demonstrates a great use of Citra with its insistent, hard-edged bitterness.”
Times and tastes change, and even though I still love Broadside’s deep and satisfying palette of flavors, it’s the bright, cheerful, and chatty beers that appeal to many who are discovering Adnams for the first time. The brewery has even branched out to a cider, Wild Wave, which is made for it by West Midlands-based cider makers Aston Manor. A blend of bittersweet and dessert apples, it was developed by Fitzgerald and the brewery’s commercial and retail director James Davis, who is also a Master of Wine.
Walking through the brewery with Fitzgerald, I feel as if I’m in a forest of stainless steel vessels and pipes, whose soundtrack, instead of birds and insects, is the hissing and wheezing of processors alongside the odd bang of a hammer and the clang of a lid being closed. Fitzgerald has a small and dedicated team of brewers around him, one of whom was, until recently, the revered Ed Razzall. Last year, Razzall left to set up his own brewery, Symmetry Brewing, but he remembers his chapter at Adnams fondly.
“Working there was brilliant,” he tells me via email. “It gave me the opportunity to work in a brewery that had seamlessly managed to marry its traditional roots with an ultra-modern brewhouse and cellar, and make beers that fell in both camps of traditional cask beer and more modern Pales and IPAs. Fergus is also the perfect head brewer. He is happy enough to hand over responsibility and trust you to work pretty much autonomously, but also approachable enough to help with any problems or questions.”
“It was a very old brewery, almost Victorian, and we weren’t step changing—we were going straight from the 19th century to the 21st [...] There is a lot of romance talked about old brewhouses, but anyone who has ever worked in one will tell you a modern one is much better.”
Another former brewer who recalls her time with Adnams and Fitzgerald fondly is Belinda Jennings, who joined in 2005 as quality manager from Greene King. She eventually moved up to quality and production manager before leaving in 2015, and is currently head brewer with Bruha in the small East Anglian market town of Eye.
“What I liked working at Adnams,” she recalls, “was their investment in people, such as training—I did my Master Brewer exams there. Also there was investment in kit, feeling looked-after, nice people, a modern approach, great collaborations, Southwold itself [...] I remember my first day and a lovely chap called Robert Palmer, who we sadly lost at an early age, saw me in the yard and just said, ‘AWESOME, a woman in production.’ There were no issues in fitting in.”
In addition to bolstering its own portfolio with more modern offerings, Adnams has also, over the last decade, pursued collaborations with leading British breweries, as well as U.S. breweries the likes of Sixpoint Brewery, The Alchemist, and Avery Brewing Company. When I meet him, Fitzgerald had just returned from Thornbridge Brewery the previous evening, after collaborating on a Dry Stout.
“The first collabs were purely for Wetherspoons beer festivals,” he says. “The first was Avery, and we have had some amazing brewers over, including John Kimmich from The Alchemist. We learned a lot doing them. Brewing in essence is the same wherever you go—you are still taking starch from barley, turning it into sugar, then giving that to yeast and flavoring it with hops. But people do different processes at different stages, so you always learn something.”
A recent collaboration took place with Lost and Grounded, a dry-hopped Red Ale called The Rule of Twelfths. Lost and Grounded co-founder Alex Troncoso first worked with Fitzgerald when he was brewing director at Camden Town Brewery, and has the greatest respect for the Adnams brewing team.
“They are a traditional regional brewer,” he tells me by email, “but behind this facade is a team running an ultra-modern brewery, with progressive thoughts around brewing while always keeping close to their roots. It’s truly admirable. Fitzgerald is an amazing head brewer—down-to-earth, has a great sense of humor, and is extremely knowledgeable. He is a legend of the U.K. industry in our minds, and one of our brewing heroes.”
Like many traditional family breweries, Adnams also has a pub estate. When Jonathan Adnams first joined the business, Adnams maintained 72 pubs; after a deal with Whitbread (the U.K.’s largest hospitality company) in 1993, the number peaked at 130. Now it’s down to 44, of which 36 are tenanted and eight managed, all concentrated in East Anglia.
However, not everyone agrees with this slimmed-down ownership of pubs. According to the eminent beer writer Roger Protz, who first visited the brewery in the 1970s and described Fitzgerald as one of the most brilliant brewers he has ever met, “I do have grave doubts about the current marketing strategy with the pubs. To sell off many of your tied pubs and become a free trade brewer could prove to be foolhardy when the global brewers can beat you on price any day of the week. Adnams can offer superb beer but many publicans will play safe and go for [Sharp’s Brewery’s] Doom Bar, which they can buy so much cheaper. It is a high-risk strategy. Jonathan thinks cask is doomed and is concentrating on ‘craft beer,’ but again all the signs are that the craft bubble is leaking if not bursting, and cask is showing some signs of recovery.”
“It gave me the opportunity to work in a brewery that had seamlessly managed to marry its traditional roots with an ultra modern brewhouse and cellar, and make beers that fell in both camps of traditional cask beer and more modern Pales and IPAs.”
In addition to the uncertain strategies surrounding Adnams’ pub estate, the coronavirus crisis is a new, greater storm for the brewery to weather. With the arrival of the present lockdown, Adnams closed all its pubs, which saw 80% of its income vanish. Rent for its pub tenants was canceled and the majority of its 552-strong workforce was placed on furlough, though brewery, distillery, and distribution-center staff have carried on working with precautions in place.
According to an interview with Adnams’ chief executive Andy Wood in the Daily Telegraph, “having a diversified business gives us a chance, because we’ve still got income coming in. Supermarket sales are up 12% on this time last year. Online—which was a tiny part of our business—is up by 400pc on this time last year, too.”
The brewery staff echo his optimism. “We think pubs will still have a place and maybe even an enhanced role in their communities after this,” says Fitzgerald. “Longer-term it’s too early to be certain—the trend to buying online may well have been accelerated for good, the trend to drinking at home had already overtaken drinking in pubs, and this is likely to have cemented that. I'm sure there will be a celebration of pubs reopening but we need to prepare for trade in pubs to be slow until people feel properly safe in the glorious company of strangers again.”
During my conversation with Dorber, I ask if he thinks Adnams should be doing anything differently. Given his background—Dorber helped bring about the revival of the IPA in the early 1990s when hosting a conference on the style at the White Horse in Parsons Green, West London—he sees the brewery as being in pole position to bring about the renaissance of the English-style IPA.
“I would like them to do an English IPA,” he tells me as we sit down in the main bar of The Anchor, “one which we understand is in the English tradition. A lot of craft beer followers today only appreciate the beauty of U.S. hops—Adnams, with their expertise, could showcase the beauty of English hops.”
For the moment, though, Fitzgerald is enthralled by the idea of perfecting a Lager.
“Every brewery in the world wishes they were Orval to a small degree,” he says. “That you could sit down and try and make that beer the best thing it could be. That was one of the things I discussed with John Kimmich when he was over. He didn’t want a big range of beers, and wanted to try and get Heady Topper the best it could ever be, but obviously we live in a commercial world and John has had to add some other beers.”
“Lager is something we would like to play with,” he continues. “We have invested in equipment that has allowed us to brew some excellent Lagers, and the next thing we want to do is make a really good clean Lager—clean, crisp, hoppy [...] I would also really like to do a Vienna Lager.”
“They are a traditional regional brewer, but behind this facade is a team running an ultra-modern brewery, with progressive thoughts around brewing while always keeping close to their roots.”
Whether or not those plans come to fruition, Adnams has done plenty to garner respect among both traditionalists and modern beer fans. Nobody knows what the future holds—particularly during this unique moment of instability—though talking with Jonathan Adnams, I can’t help but feel a real sense of positivity. “It has been my life—Southwold has been my life, the brewery has been my life—and I have a great team, and Fergus is wonderful to have in the brewery, and a great joy to work with,” he says.
Before I leave Southwold, I return to the Lord Nelson for a final session. As the early-afternoon drinkers drift in, I dive into a glass of Mosaic. It has the aromatics of a bowl of tropical fruit that has been lazing in the afternoon sun, plus what I always see as the Mosaic hop’s savoriness, which pulsates on the palate before the beer’s dry and boldly bitter finish. Ghost Ship, on the other hand, has a lemon-and-lime vigor on the nose, passing over to a fruit-gum chewiness before a lingering, dry finish.
As I savor these exceptional beers to a soundtrack of laughter and occasional exclamations, my thoughts return to the North Sea. It is sometimes stormy and at other times calm and considered, but the sturdiest of seagoing vessels will always find a way to handle its many moods. If I could toast the last of my pint of Ghost Ship, it would be in salute to the hardiness of the good ship Adnams, and its skillfulness in navigating those waves.
Words, Adrian Tierney-JonesPhotos, Sean McEmerson
