We’ve got lots of things to talk about in this Arran Brewery News update so "strap" yourselves in as we give you an update on what’s been happening behind the scenes here on Arran.
Back up and Brewing!
As many of you who have visited our Brewery over the spring and summer will already know; we’ve been suffering from a cataclysmic boiler failure for a significant amount of time, this has left us unable to brew our delicious beers for pretty much the entire year. We were fortunate to have our tanks full of beer after Christmas and were able to bottle at the beginning of the year, but without a boiler we simply cannot brew. We had multiple visits from engineers and multiple false starts where our boiler has seemed to be up and running initially and then change it’s mind halfway through a brew….
Now fortunately for the brewery and the people who enjoy our beer, you will be glad to know after a final repair affected by some hard working engineers early last month we are finally back up and brewing!
Fat man in the Copper and Fermenters full of beer!
Above you can see Yorick “enjoying” his first time going in and then out of our Hot Copper, and also being excticed that for the first time in a while we have fermenters full of beer!
As you can probably imagine it’s been an incredibly tough year for us and we’ve not quite ramped back up to full speed yet but we’ve had a successful brew of our Arran Blonde and Arran Dark has just entered the maturation stage and seems to be as delicious as ever! The next planned brew is our British IPA the Brewery Dug which our newly promoted Brewery Pup - Freyja - will be overseeing, with many more in the pipeline and hopefully back in stock soon!
Arran Brewery extends 24 year award streak with World Beer Awards success!
Now despite our production woes this year our beers have still been as good as ever! We are very pleased to announce that we here at Arran Brewery have extended our long running boast of winning an award at least once a year, every year, for one of our beers since the brewery’s founding in the year 2000. This time we’ve come away from the World Beer Awards with three!
First of all we have been awarded Scotland Gold for our Sleeping Warrior in the - Dark Beer Barley Wine Category -
For those of you who have tried our Sleeping Warrior before, this will come as little surprise as it’s one of our most unique and flavoursome brews. We are hoping to brew our next batch this month!
Secondly our usual collaboration with Arran Distillers has gone down a treat! With another Scotland Gold for our Milestone Special Reserve in the - Flavoured Beer Wood Aged - category beating out fierce competition from the likes of Innis & Gunn.
Such success with our Special Reserve beers cannot be achieved without our friends from Lochranza Distillery and in particular Stewart; who hand picked us some fantastic casks this year.
Lastly we have a Scotland Bronze in the Dark Beer for our classic Arran Dark - one of the original beers that we have been brewing here on Arran since the year 2000. This award will join it’s many kin on our award walls with the very first award the brewery won which was incidentally also for Arran Dark, a beer that has been world class for well over 20 years!.
It’s a hard and (very) often financially unrewarding job brewing beer on Arran so we here at The Isle of Arran Brewery take great pride in the accolades we are awarded. The numerous awards earned reflect not only the dedication of our team but also the passionate support of our customers.
We think of any success as a celebration of both our brewing heritage and the spirit that has driven brewing on Arran for so many years and really adds fuel to our metaphorical burning passion for brewing good beer!
Brewing but not as we know it.....
Now for our final bit of news in this update, we’ve got something quite exciting! With some beer brewing “down time” this year we’ve had an itch to “brew” something else….
With that in mind we’d like to introduce you to our newest venture: Arran Brew Coffee! (Pun very much Intended). Those who have visited the brewery this summer will have already seen (and hopefully tried) our test range of coffee. We’ve got a brand new coffee roaster and we’re going to be roasting all winter long! We’ve also got a “mini” roaster that should match perfectly with our larger one which we are hoping to use to make custom brews for all of our business friends around Arran!
We’ve had some really good feedback so far and our initial test batch has already all but sold out, so thank you very much everyone who has chosen to be one of our Guinea pigs this summer!
We are hoping to have a full selection ready to go for Christmas and with the help of Alistair from Makerspace Arran we’re also trying our hand at own custom cafetiéres! The sky is the limit!
Coffee on the way!
That about wraps up everything that has happened over the summer, our next task will be to crack on with these many projects and very graciously approach our friends at Arran Distillers to see what they have in store for this years Special Reserve beers…..
Bonus news....
Freyja has been on her first delivery run to Pirnmill and back, but she’s not quite sure she’s cut out to be a delivery dog…