Sussex brewery run by 25-year-olds is growing fast

Tell us a bit about yourself

I’m 25 and am head brewer and co-founder at Three Acre Brewery. I studied architecture at Brighton University, but my love of beer ended up coming first.

I was born and raised in the Sussex countryside, surrounded by some of the best pubs in the world, which is where the inspiration for the brewery came from.

The brewery is based just outside East Hoathly, down the road from where my co-founders and I grew up.

Before we started the brewery, we spent our younger years riding bikes, building treehouses and playing sport in the “Three Acres” – and we became a great team in the process. Even at a young age, we were always working on some project or other together and in our late teens we became fixated on the idea of running a business together.

We already enjoyed home brewing as a hobby, experimenting in a plastic home brew kit in a garden shed. It was our No 8 IPA test recipe which was the turning point – with some juicy, tropical mango flavours – a sudden breakthrough which outclassed anything we’d brewed until that point. That was the moment when we decided to get serious. The rest is history.

Three Acre pale ale

Give a quick lowdown on the beers and your process

Brewing is an age-old craft. While the process has not changed for over a hundred years, the equipment and ingredients available have advanced considerably. Our process is fairly traditional as we don’t add adjuncts to our beers, and we extract all the qualities of the beers from the best ingredients.

The process begins with extracting sugars from the grain in a vessel called the mash tun. This is done by adding hot water (63C to 69C) which breaks down the starches in the grain into sugar. This is where the beer get its body and colour.

The sugary wort from the mash, the sweet liquid that beer is fermented from, then enters the kettle where it boils for an hour. This is where you add hops at various stages to get bitterness and aroma. The wort is then crashed to around 20C and transferred to the fermenter. The yeast will then be added and the conversion of sugar to alcohol starts. Once the wort has been fully fermented into beer, it is crash cooled to clear it and racked in casks. The casks will then be stored for between one and eight weeks to condition. There are many techniques we use to produce the highest quality beers and we are always experimenting with old and new processes.

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How many others are on your team and who are they?

My two co-founders, Chester and Peter, are both childhood friends. Chester covers marketing strategy and communications and Peter runs the financial and legal side as well as being my partner in crime with recipe creation and beer development. Our team has grown a lot over the past six months – now eight of us in total – which we’re really proud of.

How have you adapted during the pandemic?

When the first lockdown came in, we had only been selling beer to pubs for five months. We had barely found our feet and we had no equipment or budget to get our beers into cans or bottles, and no direct-to-consumer customer base. We knew we had to do something fast.

We found a food packaging wholesaler online and ordered a few hundred milk cartons. This gave us the ability to pour beer into cartons directly from our casks – which were previously destined for pub taps.

Once the beer was in a carton, it only had a shelf life of about four days, but it was something. With pubs closed, we were one of the only sources of true cask beer around.

We spread the word via friends and family, then flyered a couple of local postcodes and before long the snowball started to roll. Over a few months, we sold thousands of cartons in just four postcode areas. Before long we were brewing more beer again. Even though we have since moved on to cans, bottles, mini casks and beer boxes we still have customers who swear by our cartons.

What would you like to tell people about your business?

Our mantra is “modernising the traditional”. We brew beers which are inspired by the rich brewing history of the UK with a contemporary spin. Whether you swear by traditional real ales, or you’re into more modern craft beer, we’ve got something for you. We won our first awards late last year, too – a Society of Independent Brewers bronze award for our porter, and I was humbled to take home the Bite Sussex Young Food and Drink Producer of the Year in November. It was an amazing feeling to get that recognition.

What are your plans for the future?

We’re mid-way through upscaling the brewery and we’ve got bigger and better brewing equipment arriving. We’ve been struggling to keep up with demand for months, so can’t wait to get it set up and running.

Next up, keg beer. Until now, all our barrels in pubs have been casks: the more traditional way of brewing and storing beer, pulled from a hand pump on the bar. We’ll never turn our back on cask, but having experimented with more and more beer styles, we decided it’s time to take the next step. Our first keg beers are launching on February 10 with our IPA and new English Pale coming out first.

The last one I’ll call out is our upcoming membership scheme. Members will get a regular delivery of beer and a load of other perks including tasting events, free samples, members’ glasses and much more.

All three of us co-founders are 25 years old… we have reason to believe we’re the youngest commercial brewers in the UK, who knows, perhaps even worldwide?