Food, Drink, Entertainment

Beer: Pentrich Brewery

Pentrich Brewery have, for some time, been making some quality hop forward beers which have been available in cask, keg and, more recently, in cans. I asked Ryan Cummings, co-owner, what can people expect from their beers?

We are probably best known for our super hoppy and hazy cask beers locally, and now with our cans being in a much wider circulation we’re starting to build a bit of a reputation for producing big hoppy IPAs in cans now, too. We have always been proud of the eclectic range of beers we have been focused on producing since day one. Ultimately, we brew beer with an emphasis on flavour, and styles that we are both passionate about. We make sure we execute each beer to the best of our ability, and strive to produce beer that we both like – with the hope that other people will too!

Your move into small pack looked like a sublime move, with the onset of the pandemic; something that clearly doesn’t happen overnight. What was your thought process on making that switch and at the same time a rebranding exercise?

We were certainly very lucky with regards to the timing of moving to small pack, releasing our first batch of cans in January 2020 – just before the true scale of the pandemic was realised. We had always been keen to get our beers out in small pack ever since we started the brewery, however it wasn’t until we’d upscaled on to our current brew system in November 2019 that we were happy to proceed with producing beers in cans. The key factor, when putting the beers into small pack, is ensuring that the quality isn’t compromised by doing so. When we were on our old cobbled together 6BBL brew kit that just wasn’t something we could guarantee. We had a short spell where we hand bottled our beers back in the days when we were cuckoo brewing, around 2015, but we felt the quality of the beer suffered due to the process so we quickly knocked it on the head. Cask beer will always be a part of what we do. It was the lifeblood of our brewery for the first 4 years, and we are incredibly passionate and proud of the cask beers we have produced so far, so we can’t wait to get back to producing it!

Over the festive period, you treated us to great beers, which could be seen as a bit of a diversification from your USP: a great Scotch Ale, Smoked Porter and Imperial Stout. Could we expect to see any of these types of beers returning throughout the calendar year?

We will be looking to continue to release a broad range of styles over the next 12 months. With a couple of lagers on the way very soon, as well as our first foray into sour beers too. The pales and IPAs will continue to be the bread and butter of the business but we will always look to keep our range of beers as expansive and as exciting as possible!

Do you have any aspirations to have your own little tap room, be it in the brewery or in a more centralised location?

We certainly have talked about setting ourselves up with a tap room – so that will definitely be on the cards once things eventually get back to some sign of normality.

We were actually actively exploring this avenue just before the first lockdown occurred. In hindsight we were probably quite lucky that we hadn’t quite got it over the line. If we do get around to opening one then it will most likely be in a centralised location rather than at the brewery itself. We’ve always talked about setting one up in Derby, but we will just have to see, I guess…

By Sean McKeown

Follow Sean on Twitter @joonip3r