Adnams brewery visit 2009

A recent visit to the Southwold based brewery by a small group of Ipswich CAMRA members was a chance to see how much has changed in recent years. It has taken over 8 years to modernise the entire brewery and today the work is nearly complete. A state-of-the-art brewery from Huppmann (Germany) is now in place. They are one of the leading companies worldwide to supply complete brewhouses complete with state-of-the-art process control. We were very lucky to have both Jonathan Adnams (company Chairman) and Furgus Fitzgerald (recently promoted to Head brewer) on our visit around the new plant. Much of the brewery is actually now located in the oldest part of the site replacing old wooden fermentors that were no longer required.

A new office on the first floor is where the whole process is controlled from, though much of the manual process is now based around monitoring to ensure that the system is performing as expected. Fergus explained that from the milling of the malt, and through the mashing, boiling and fermentation processes the entire system is now under full automated control. Across the road the (almost new) fermentation room was installed just a few years ago and the large sealed vessels provide the much needed extra capacity. A heat condenser is used to recover steam from the air to heat the next brew. Outside in the yard two large water storage vessels are the “lungs” of the new system – one storing very hot water and one storing chilled water. The two vessels were heavily lagged and could store the liquid with minimal energy loss until needed. Jonathan was keen to explain that the entire process was energy efficient and energy recovery and use were carefully planned throughout the process.

Jonathan is understandably very happy with the new brewery. It is the third upgrade he has been involved with at the historic site and he now expects it to work with minimal additional investment many years into the future. Later in the new tasting room he was also keen to impress upon us that by investing so heavily in such a sophisticated plant he was not just trying to brew efficiently and save money but also wanted to brew traditional beers both consistently and to a very high standard. He also hopes to use new knowledge gained through various recent visits to similar Belgium and German sites to introduce new premium beer products. The first one is Innovation. This bottled beer was first brewed last year to celebrate the completion of the new brewery. The hoppy, golden (6.7%) beer is brewed from Maris Otter barley and malted wheat, Styrian Goldings and Columbus hops deliver a brew that “combines a grapefruit and herbal bitterness with a subtle sweetness”. Innovation is now available in the company’s kitchen shops. We were also fortunate to taste an early sample of draught Extra (4.3%) which was available throughout their estate in April. Many thanks to Jonathan and Fergus for their time and hospitality.

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