The smallest brewery in Dorset, brewing big beers.
We’re two brothers in a shed, lucky enough to have a source of spring water and a delight in the science and art of brewing. Deep in the Bride Valley, near the source of the river Bride, we just want to make beer as it has always been made in farmhouses and cottages throughout the land. In tiny batches, experimenting, crafting, and continually learning.
Like all good breweries, St Bride’s started in the kitchen. We mashed in a picnic coolbox and boiled the wort in three separate pots. The brew bubbled in the corner for a few weeks, and then transformed into forty or so bottles, usually all gone a few weeks later.
Not a lot has changed. We have bigger pots, some pumps, and some fancy temperature probes, but St Bride’s still confidently lays claim to being the smallest licensed brewery in Britain, which, if you were wondering, makes the beer better, not worse.
William Cobbett, the great 19th century campaigner and pamphleteer, wrote vociferously in support of home brewed beer.
“Before I proceed to give any directions about brewing, let me mention some of the inducements to do the thing. In former times, to set about to show to Englishmen that it was good for them to brew beer in their houses would have been as impertinent as gravely to insist, that they ought to endeavour not to lose their breath; for, in those times, (only forty years ago,) to have a house and not to brew was a rare thing indeed. Mr. Ellman, an old man and a large farmer, in Sussex, has recently given in evidence, before a Committee of the House of Commons, this fact; that, forty years ago, there was not a labourer in his parish that did not brew his own beer; and that now there is not one that does it, except by chance the malt be given him…
These things will be altered. They must be altered. The nation must be sunk into nothingness, or a new system must be adopted.”
We brew in this spirit.