Foiled – 4.0% Chocolate Stout
Typically, we brew more dark beers in winter and so a stout may not seem an obvious choice for April; however, I wanted to do something a little bit topical for easter weekend (which is the 18th-20th) so thought what better than an easter egg you can drink! The base beer recipe is fairly simple and at 4% we’re keeping the ABV at an approachable level, but it’s the additional ingredients that make it interesting. Cacao nibs are added for an extra hit of chocolate flavour on top of the chocolate malt & roast barley, and after a test brew to compare the beer with and without lactose we’ve decided to add that for a creamier texture and milk chocolate flavour. Foiled is available now and we’ve done only a small run of casks, so tell your local if you’d like them to stock it!
SIBA (The Society of Independent Brewers and Associates) have designated the 11th to 20th April 2025 as Indie Beer Week, an opportunity to promote the work and efforts of independent brewers across the country. But what is an independent brewer? It might seem obvious – independent means not being owned by someone else – but then a multinational brewery with one majority owner could count. Clearly in this context, “Indie” conveys not just a sense of ownership, but also an ethos – a small, hands-on business more focused on quality than churning out volume.
SIBA therefore define an independent brewery as:
- A beer manufacturer with their own equipment or brand produced at a qualifying brewery, producing <1% by volume of the British beer market;
- Be based in the UK and produce at least 75% of its beer here;
- Not be under the control of or connected to any other UK brewer unless the combined group still satisfies point 1.
Interestingly, this actually means a brewery that isn’t independent is still counted as such if they brew their own beer and the overall company is small enough! And small is a relative term – it’s very hard to find a figure for the size of the British beer market, but 1% could easily represent as much as 30 million litres per year. For context, we brew between one and two hundred thousand!
The American Craft Brewers Association is even less strict on production volume (the biggest craft brewery is in fact the seventh biggest brewery in the country!):
- Annual production of less than 6 million barrels (700 million litres);
- Less than 25% owned or controlled by an entity that is not a craft brewer itself;
- Is a brewer or has a beer brand brewed for them in the US and is primarily concerned with the sale of that beer.
So, what’s the benefit of terms like indie and craft? While they can certainly be vague, they’re definitely a good starting point. If you do nothing else besides look for that logo you can be sure that your money isn’t going to a global behemoth, even if it doesn’t necessarily mean local; and if you’d like to do more research into a brewery, it’s an easily accessible top-level assessment. Events like Indie Beer Week are great for getting UK craft breweries some much needed extra attention – even if I think we should continue to think about and revise exactly what an indie brewery is!
