Saturday 8th June 2013

Linda Clarke

This brewery started up in 2010 and is a 10 barrel plant. There are four 10 barrel fermenters and one of 20 barrels, mostly for Trinity Ale.

The brewer is Andy Moffat and, as we arrived, he invited us to help ourselves to three different beers served directly from the cask: Trinity, Easy Ryeder and Fellowship Porter.

I was with husband Bob and we were visiting the brewery because Redemption had won the Beer of the Festival at the Pigs Ear Beer Festival in Hackney, London. That was in December 2012 and the beer was Peruvian Coffee Fellowship Porter. In fact this was the second year running that they had won, as in 2011 they had won with (their usual recipe) Fellowship Porter.

The Brewery Liaison Officer for CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale), Ian McLaren, gave us a short talk explaining the brewery's short history up to then. The information given below comes from Ian's oration that afternoon.

There were about 40 volunteer workers from the Pigs Ear Beer Festival in attendance and later about another 20 local CAMRA branch members turned up as well. The Festival is organised annually by CAMRA's East London & City Branch and brewery is in the area of the CAMRA North London Branch.

The Mash Tun and its chute were from Slater's Brewery in Stafford, and they acquired them second-hand in the first place. The throughput is 40 to 50 barrels a week. They have a job keeping up with demand. All English Malt is used and one beer has Rye in it. Andy brews two to four days a week and produces 2000 litres each time, approximately 3500 pints.

There are five regular beers plus seasonal ones: Trinity (3%), is remarkably tasty for this low-strength; Pale Ale (3.8%); Hopspur (4.5%) was originally made for the Spurs Supporter Club; Urban Dusk (4.6%) is a dark ale; Fellowship Porter 5.1%. I found this a little too sweet. Easy Ryeder 5.5% (made with a little rye) is a seasonal. They also produce Big Chief Beer for the M & B pub-owning company.

English Hops are used for some of the beers. The Pale Ale contains WGV and Bramling Cross is used in the Urban Dusk. Hopspur has Cascade and Liberty. Trinity uses Cascade, Columbus and Chinook, all from the USA and Fellowship Porter has Liberty, WGV and Cascade.

Big Chief is brewed with Nelson and Motueka; both from New Zealand. Next year Andy is hoping to do a Red Rye beer with Amarillo hops, maybe for the autumn.

Three guys work full time in the brewery, plus a full time driver. Sam, Andy's other half, works in the office. They sell most of their beer direct to pubs, 75 fairly regular ones, such as the Land of Liberty, Peace and Plenty, and some Youngs pubs. 95% of the business is within the M25 and 10-15 miles of the brewery. They send a couple of casks to Bustin, Belgium and have sent some to Italy once or twice.

We arrived at 14.00 and the presentation was set for an hour later. Derek Jones, the Pigs Ear Festival Organiser said that Redemption had produced an absolutely blinding beer and it was an honour to award Andy a certificate for Beer of the Festival, this year for Redemption Coffee Porter, a variation of the usual Fellowship Porter.

Andy said that is was a privilege to win it. He liked the fact that they were able to do something local and was struggling to come up with ideas for next year. Ideas welcome.

It was an interesting visit and I would like to thank CAMRA's East London & City and North London Branches, for arranging it.

Important Information:

Redemption Brewery, Unit 2, Compass West industrial Estate, West Road, Tottenham, London N17 0XL
Tel: 020 8885 5227; Website: redemptionbrewing.co.uk