Currently the brewery decryption we have for many UK breweries is a bit of a history of the brewery. Opened XXXX, changed name in XXX moved location in XXXX.
This is an example from Beak.
Commenced Brewing in 2015. Gypsy Brewery making small batch beers. In 2020 commenced brewing from own plant.
I don’t mind this but wondered what people thought to including something more about the ethos or type of beer produced. Normally this is on a breweries website home page.
For example on their website Beak say:
We are a small independent brewery and taproom in the historic brewing town of Lewes. We love making everything from hop-forward IPAs and best bitters to saisons and imperial stouts. We also have a mixed fermentation project centered around a 5,000 litre oak foudre, which we use to create beers that showcase ingredients from the surrounding South Downs National Park, including native hops, wild yeast strains and grain grown just down the road.
Should we be aiming for a combination of the history and something more descriptive?
Something like…
Beak Brewery commenced brewing in 2015 as a gypsy brewery making small batch beers. In 2020 they commenced brewing from their own plant.
"We are a small independent brewery and taproom in the historic brewing town of Lewes. We love making everything from hop-forward IPAs and best bitters to saisons and imperial stouts. We also have a mixed fermentation project centered around a 5,000 litre oak foudre, which we use to create beers that showcase ingredients from the surrounding South Downs National Park, including native hops, wild yeast strains and grain grown just down the road.”
I agree that having more detail would be better, rather than just the basics - we do it for products so makes sense to me to match that for the producers. But think there needs to be some guidelines so some entries don’t become too gushing
I rarely read the blurb about breweries to be honest, as that doesn’t influence my buying beer, or at least not very often. So I am happy with what ever the Admins want to do.
As @reidyboy says though … nothing too gushing … informal but informative, say 2 or 3 para’s, we don’t need to know that the brewer Derek discovered his love of farm house ales on a trip to Belgium in 2005 … blah blah blah!
Retro updating existing entries would not be a priority job for myself. A nice to have. There are far too many beers need verifying and existing beers needing fixing (wrong styles in the main) and tidying up formatting entries for consistency all outweigh a more detailed brewery description for me.
Isn’t this why we try to keep their social media links updated? You want to read up on the brewery go there. This would add tons of admin work, which is very secondary to all the verifying and fixing that is a must over nicety.
The example you provide is how some admin areas keep track of these fly by night breweries that move several times and/or gypsy to becoming established brewery. This isn’t very common in other areas outside of the UK from my experience.
I don’t have any objection to people adding more info for the commercial descriptions. I definitely like having the ‘history’ of the brewery. Having that information is quite helpful. Not sure there are many resources like that on the internet.
