Only Natural Ingredients in our Cumbrian Real Ale from Ennerdale

Our beers have only four ingredients – water, malt, hops and yeast. It’s very important to us that our beers are brewed using ingredients which are as fresh and natural as possible. The water is untreated, Lakeland spring water, from the valley of Ennerdale. It is filtered but otherwise untreated, and it is naturally very pure and soft. We use only English malts, freshly kiln-dried and milled for us. We don’t use cheaper wheat, maize or rice products in our beers. Our hops are whole-leaf, naturally dried hops – pelleted hops contain chemical residues from the manufacturing process. We’re often asked if we brew organic beers – the answer is ‘no’, we don’t, because we want to reduce our carbon footprint by using only English and European hops. Our yeast is developed from one of the longest established English Ale Yeasts, and we harvest yeast from each fermentation to use in the next brew, maintaining the distinctive flavours.

What do we leave out of our beer?

Many keg beers – and some of the mass-produced cask beers – have a long list of chemicals added to preserve colour, flavour and aroma. These include flavouring sugars such as protease, betaglucanase and amyloglucosidase; ammonia caramel to add colour and propylene glycol to add shelf life; rhoiso-alpha, tetrahydroiso-alpha and sulphuric acids to balance and enhance flavours and even silicone to aid pouring! Our beers are fermented for a week, then carefully transferred to racking and conditioning vessels for up to six days, depending on the recipe. Finally we condition the beers for at least a week in our newly-built Cold Room, to ensure that it is bar-bright before leaving the brewery. Pure natural goodness!