Happy New Beer!

Time for a recap of 2021 and a look ahead to 2022. We are excited to be starting a new year full of new opportunities and great plans.

2021 in many ways felt more relentless than 2020 – after a full brewery shutdown over the festive period we are back revived and restored ready to embrace all the challenges and ambitions we have set ourselves for 2022!

Growing Out of Crisis

In 2021 our rock solid team grew from 5 to 9 full-timers, alongside 4 casuals in our taproom team. We also grew our production capacity. In spite of all the market closures and uncertainty, we increased our cellar capacity to meet demand by 30%. Finishing the year with a 40% year-on-year increase in sales by revenue. We hit our 200th gyle brewed right around hitting 2 years in Norfolk and topping out at around the 2ooohL mark across over 40 different beers!

A Warm Welcome On The Farm

Our happy distraction from the early lockdowns of 2020 was our essential shop (a lifesaver with pubs closed for most of 2020). In 2021 our Brewery Kiosk turned into Tap Days our al fresco taproom and we welcomed you in your droves to enjoy a farm-to-glass beer with your families and furry friends. With the help of a local government grant, we launched Tap Days with a horsebox bar and enjoyed a wonderful summer together.

Our online tour and tasting events turned into real-life, founder-led tours. In Autumn as the seasons changed we took things inside to our barrel store and Tap Days continued with street food by Fanny Adams and Wood Fired Pizza and pints poured using our custom-made local chestnut bar. A bar we also took on the road to beer festivals like London Craft Beer Festival.

We enjoyed some special food and beer pairings events like our Oktoberfest with the magical Rouladen and Moules Frite paired alongside our Fermata range Bottle Share. And to make sure we didn’t grow too big a beer belly we partnered with Ascent Yoga for a mind body and soul cleansing Yoga & Beer sessions.

Perhaps one of the most rewarding aspects was simply getting to raise a glass together with our customers!

Collabs of 2021

Inviting our dear brewing friends over for collaborative brews designed together meant so much and this year some highlights for us were our cellared saison Sail made with Lewes-based Beak, Momentary Stability with Elusive, and our Blackberry and Mugwort Saison with Dark Times Apocathery and many more. All beers past and present can be seen in our BEER LIBRARY

We also made it out to some wonderful festivals to pour beers shoulder to shoulder with our brewing friends and look forward to many more festival appearances in 2022. Read on for more.

Fame not Fortune

While we worked hard to stay on top of the challenges thrown at us in 2021 we may not have made a fortune. Our rewards, however, came in several notable and kind accolades bestowed upon us and our beers. We featured in several beer books. Not only were our beers Doses and Sweeping Coast featured on Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch and ITV’s Love Your Weekend, we also picked up no less than 8 awards:

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• Best Brewery by Subregion for East Anglia (second year in a row)

SIBA BeerX Regionals

• Golds for Premium Lager with Doses 5.1% German Pilsner
• Gold for Speciality Lager with Harvest Bier 5.5% Marzen
• Silver for Imperial IPA with Remember When The Pub 7.1% West Coast IPA

Brewer’s Choice Awards

• Best New Brewery
• Best New Beer for Turtles All The Way Down 5.5% American Pale

Lux Life Food & Drink Awards

• Best Farmhouse Brewery
• Best American Pale for Turtles All The Way Down 5.5% American Pale

Norfolk Design and Craftsmanship Awards

• Gold for Best Conversation Project

Slow Beers in the Barrel Store

This cold snap gave us the beautiful image of the ruins – see up top. It also helps with the coolship brews, providing a cool night breeze to chill the hot wort so lots more to come these coming months.

We really began to hit our stride in 2021 with our Fermata Range (fermata means to prolong or elongate a note, musically speaking).

In 2021 we released 6 mixed fermentation beers, 3 were slightly quicker slow beers coming to fruition in under 6 months and 3 were true slow beers all over 12 months in foeder. Getting to let our fermata beers evolve slowly over time is what we love most about our work and the proof is in the flavour, exquisitely balanced ‘sours’ we prefer however to call them Wild Ales.

What Lies Ahead At Duration

We have some very exciting plans in store for 2022.

We’ve just secured planning approval (believe us at our historic site, we have a lot of red tape). This will allow us to expand our plant by installing a centrifugal vessel on the back of our cellar and installing our first triple-sized fermentation tanks. Lots more beer made with better efficiencies to help us strive towards our sustainability goals. We have also begun mapping out how our taproom and brewery kiosk will evolve – it’s currently al fresco and set in the barrel store so a purpose built option may help us expand the barrel store AND still welcome you over. More on that in spring!

2022 will also see us improving our water treatment plant to calibrate both inbound and outbound water for better efficiencies. Having received full sign-off from the Environment Agency for how clean we scrub our wastewater we are discharging to the River Nar and truly want to work towards less waste with circular waste principles – the Wagyu herd, Pigs, and Blueberries are really enjoying the grains, spent hops we are feeding them!

We hope you will be able to come to see our destination farmhouse brewery set amongst Norfolks idyllic barley fields. Our Tap Days take place every Friday and Saturday afternoon with Tours and Yoga Classes on select Saturdays. A cold beer and a warm welcome await.

You will also have the opportunity to say hello to the team and sample our very latest freshest releases across the country. We will be on tour to some very special festivals in Lewes, Cornwall, and Sheffield to name a few. Plus we’ll be popping up at some bars and bottle shops for Tap Take Overs too. Keep abreast via our latest happenings over on our events page.

Behind the scenes we’ve also supported our local football team and local rugby team. Our charity of choice is the Norfolk Rivers Trust for whom we raised £365 and we have given raffle prizes to various local organisations including schools, sports clubs, firefighters and charities.

Lastly, we have some incredibly special collaborative brews planned on both the fresh and fermata side of things and not just with beer producers either. We don’t want to spill the beans just yet, but let’s just say we feel a little fangirl and fanboy about them.

Thanks for all your support and wishing you the very best possible year ahead.