Topsham Ales - The Community Brewery

About Topsham Ales

The story so far…

When Greg Towning, a very small-scale professional brewer in Topsham, heard that a local micro-brewery was selling its equipment he light-heartedly texted his friend Alastair Mumford asking if they could get £15,000 to buy it. Alastair, not being one for detail, misread the text as £1,500 and so replied positively visioning brewery days ahead of him. Later they met and the real price was ascertained. Although spirits dipped something had been light within the two and the story couldn’t end there.

Other residents of Topsham had been interested in starting a brewery and the local Transition Town group was looking to support projects of this kind so the idea of a community brewery grew and 2 become 10. At the first meeting it was quickly ascertained that a bit more cash would be needed - the 10 had to become even more. So a business plan was developed and a co-operative business model found that worked in terms of providing a method to raise cash, a return on investment and the democratic value of ‘one member, one vote’. The Cumbrian brewery Hesket Newmarket Brewery gave a lot of impetus and to our knowledge is the only other community led, co-operative brewery in the UK.

The working title of Topsham Brewing Co-operative got shortened to the much easier to manage Topsham Ales.  After a few months the 10 become 60 and the money was raised to buy the equipment and start building the brewery.   The co-operative has always valued its local connection, its sense of place and one expression of this was the agreement to use local artists to create the pump clip designs.  So far, we’re very grateful to Tom Jay (who also created our logo), Natalie Elston and Jane Cope for creating some lovely designs.

Topsham Ales has had its bit of luck and one was Liz Hodges from the Globe Hotel who saw the potential in the idea and offered a site.  The area at the back of the hotel had already been earmarked as a micro-brewery site and Liz was more than happy to let the community brewery move in.

Slowly but surely what was once a storage area at the back of the Globe pub was turned into a brewery. Members had also their strength tested after showing their powers of giving up cash when the brewery equipment was delivered before the brewery site had been finished. Luckily, brewery landlady and committee member, Liz Hodges, kindly allowed the equipment to live in their garage and front garden. So with some sweat but luckily no blood and tears the equipment was moved by members into its temporary home. Then with the brewery finished and given a lick of paint by the members the equipment was finally delivered to its home.

After some teething problems of the ‘what goes where?’ and ‘why doesn’t that do that?’ variety the first test brew was started by Greg and fellow members. By the third brew Greg was happy with the product and we had our official launch with ‘Knock Seven Bells’. The beer sold out quickly at the Exeter Winter Ales Festival and at pubs in Topsham. Now we’re in the process of refining the process and ingredients to produce our name beers so watch this space!

The community of Topsham is important to our members. So we invest a percentage of our profits into social causes each year and use suppliers from as close as possible, preferring the independents to the groups. Equally, the environment the community lives in is important so we make sure we are as resource efficient, non-polluting and low carbon as possible. And although Topsham is an important speck on the globe we also make sure our actions are not damaging to other communities.

One planet brewing

The community of Topsham is important to our members. So we invest a percentage of our profits into social causes each year and use suppliers from as close as possible, preferring the independents to the groups. Equally, the environment the community lives in is important so we make sure we are as resource efficient, non-polluting and low carbon as possible. And although Although Topsham is an important speck on the globe we also make sure our actions are not damaging to other communities. This is through some of the values mentioned above but also in our commitment to using ethically sound materials and suppliers. The question is how do we do this? Well below is a list of initiatives currently in place but we’re going to keep on trying to think of new ones.

In the pipeline: moving to a green electricity and gas tariff, installing solar thermal units to preheat the water, installing solar PV to generate electricity