TRIPLE FFF BREWING COMPANY The loudest brewery company

By Donnie Rust

Loud and cool, Triple FFF Brewing Company is considered the Fortissimo brewery, fortissimo being music score instruction for “loud”, and there being three of them to make them very loud.

Speaking to Xen Gladstone, Managing Director, he immediately makes it clear, that they love great music, and they make great beer!

No Substitute For Experience

Xen reveals that the founder, Graham Trott, has been home brewing since the 1970s and in 1997 decided to roll the dice and do it commercially. Within five years he was collecting awards on a national level. Xen joined him later and heralds from a finance background but spent time as a business analyst looking at the biggest beer company in the Philippines (San Miguel Philippines).

“My first working exposure to home-brew was in the Wasatch brew Pub in Park City, Utah in 1992,” he reflects, “I’ve been a beer lover as long as I can remember.”

Cream Rises To The Top

Xen says that they have seen a fragmentation over the past 30 years in the beer industry in the UK. Whereas simplistically in places like the USA the market is split between Bud and fabulous IPAs, in the UK it feels like the craft market is more diverse.

“We see many players either focused on “the story” of the beer or pushing packaging and marketing budgets against beers they themselves see as “good-enough”,” he says, “We are swimming against the tide somewhat here because we are focused on only making great beer, we are sticking to our knitting with cask-only ales whilst both kegging and producing traditional cask lagers.” says, says,

The fact is, as Xen explains, the most successful British brewers of the last three centuries have outlasted competitors because they focus on making good beer first and just let the story unfold itself.

That being said, their story isn’t exactly boring. They are a regional brewer distributing primarily in the Southeast of England, but it is not uncommon for their beers to appear in parts of Norfolk, Suffolk and Kent due to some of the wholesale agreements that they have in place. Exports are not a major focus for them, as they ship cans and bottles nationally throughout the UK, but Xen reveals that they do have a wonderful following in Sweden and the Nordic countries.

Their best-selling beer Moondance, was the first British Pale Ale to be brewed using American Cascade Hops and it won the Premium Best Bitter at the Great British beer Festival in 2002 and has been top three in the Supreme Champion Beer of Britain Category at least twice. Xen explains that trends are for those who want to follow.

2024 Into 2025

Innovating rather than following trends is important in any market, and true to this spirit Tripe FFF Brewery Company have commissioned a small 5BBL brew kit to complement their 50BBL kit in 2024, and have produced some new beers including Jagged Little Pilsner which has been a great hit and the 5.4% Fool’s Gold which sold out in around one hour. They have been using this new kit to also bring back successful beers in smaller batches that have not been seen for a long time such as their We’ll Meet Again which was a smash hit to honour the D-Day remembrances.

“We have also purchased an open square as Graham loves the flavours that can add to some of our most followed beers such as Comfortably Numb and Whole of the Moon,” he says, “Increasingly we use vegan finings in our beers and are in the process of doing a business study on the pros and cons of gluten free beers.”

A potential innovation that the team are excited about is the possibility of capturing the carbon dioxide produced in the fermentation process which can then be used to carbonate their lagers and potentially sell externally.

“This is some ways off yet and will be expensive to implement,” he says, “But is all part of the circular economy concept we try and live as much as possible.”

Behind The Scenes

Xen jokes that brewing is mostly about making a mess and then clearing it up! This is because, according to his expert opinion, everything begins with hygiene. As such Triple FFF Brewery Company have the top (5) rating when it comes cleanliness which has been awarded from their local regulators, although Xen does point it is always an effort battle to keep improving.

“There is a lot of bureaucracy in terms of the safety checks that chews up time and resources.” He says, where the power is in the official ticks on the checklist, “The other thing is ingredient integrity and equipment maintenance, which basically boils down to the philosophy of building on firm foundations.”

The way Xen talks about it, brewing is seven days a week job requiring a mad-scientist’s dedication to an experiment with customers never being aware or privy to the number of hours that are consumed with the list of things that need doing. Be it the regular checking of the gravities of the beers in production, to yeast and equipment checks and these priorities do not go away just because they are a small team.

“But as a small team we all know the importance of what is happening and we work together,” he says, “Reliable team work literally makes a difference to the taste of a beer.”

Customers

Along with having a reliably superb taste, winning and keeping customer loyalty is right up there with the priorities of a brewery. When it comes to managing these relationships, Xen reveals that in the same way that good friendships are built on reliability, commitment and honesty, being truthful is the best way to win trust, but within the business-vsretailer it begins with process.

He explains, “For our core beers we use exactly the same recipe for each brew, but you are dealing with nature’s ingredients and no two fields on earth are absolutely identical, so there is art in brewing the same beer every time, just as there is chemistry and science!”

If things ever are not as they should be in terms of product, they have a zero-quibble policy and replace as fast as possible. Then they get into the lab to investigate what could have happened. Luckily, as Xen says, the harder they work the luckier they get! And the amount of time invested (as mentioned above) pays dividends.

“I think our problem rate has been less than one in 2,000,” he reveals, “Or 99.995% of customers being satisfied. We aim for 100% but in truth that is highly unlikely to ever be the case.”

Quality

Unquestionably, quality control is important to keep the relationship between brewery, customer and drinker. Xen explains that in addition to their no quibble policy, they make sure they only use the highest quality ingredients and partners. Their Malt comes from the traditional Floor Maltings at Warminster as well as from Crisps and French and Jupps. With hops they use the ever-reliable Charles Fareham and meet with them to do a hop-sniffing at the start of each year to get the best possible match from the recent harvest for their beers.

“We rigorously and regularly test water and our beers with Murphy’s whom we also use to buy most of our chemicals,” he elaborates, “For recyclable packaging we use the PolyKeg Company and Niche for keykegs and for courier services we use InExpress who have surpassed all other logistics companies in our experience.”

Brewery software is from Brewman who could not be more responsive and having their systems cloud based means they should never miss an order and when they send pallets, they use PalletOnline. The common theme here is using suppliers that are firstly accredited and secondly understand how the company runs and thirdly often are family run and have the personal touch. Also, Xen says that they try to use local where they can cut down on their environmental footprint.

“Barrel to Tap is amazing and do the cellaring in our Taproom,” he adds, “Chillpoint take care of our cooling needs, and we collaborate wherever we can with those in the industrial estate we are based in.”

2024/2025 HURDLES

The hospitality trade continues to suffer from the knock-on effects of global inflation and cost-of-living crisis, Xen tells us. The situation is not helped by local councils and government institutions in the UK who seem keen to put sand into the gears whilst fulfilling their mandated duties. This also includes the VAT which is levied at 20% creating a barrier to consumer spending which is hitting the industry and brewers especially hard. It would seem that the UK can learn a lot from overseas markets as to how to support small to medium enterprises.

Relationships With Suppliers

The Lost Executive: When looking at new suppliers what is the most important thing you look for?

Xen: Quality is our overarching criteria for our suppliers. Sometimes they need to have appropriate accreditation too, which we obviously insist on where needed. Price is important of course, but we like people we can trust – we had a persistent and widespread issue with some packaging we were supplied wherein the supplier told us we were the only ones seeing this problem – it is very hard to trust them after this and we are looking for alternative suppliers. Location is important as we want to cut down carbon miles, and our experience of dealing with family businesses is usually better than big companies!

Charles Faram Hop Merchants and Factors has one of the largest range of hop varieties available from stock in our temperature-controlled hop storage warehouses in both nitrogen-flushed leaf hops, Type 90 (T90) pellets and Type 45 (T45) pellets.

Varieties come from the UK, Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Poland, Slovenia, New Zealand and the USA.

Faram’s provides an artist’s palette of flavours to create every type and style of beer from the traditional varieties to exciting new developmental varieties from Faram’s own breeding and development program.