WISSEY VALLEY BREWERY
Wissey Valley Brewery
Wretton
Norfolk
Tel: 01366 500767
Mob: 07722 570835
e-mail: info@wisseyvalleybrewery.com
web: www.wisseyvalleybrewery.com
This is a brewery on the move! Already in its short (post-2000) history, it has had three homes. Not to mention a number of names! It began life as Cap'n Grumpy's Beer Co. at the Ship Inn at Brandon Creek, on the A10 where Norfolk becomes Cambridgeshire. This is a popular boating pub, and the name of both the company and the revered Cap'n Grumpy's Best Bitter derived from a wry assessment of the demeanour of the passing trade!
Tony Hook, Wissey Valley's owner and head brewer is seen here in the brewery's present home at the Clover Club in Wretton -- but that wasn't the next stop. Tony sold up at the Ship and decided to go into brewing full time, starting up behind the Blue Bell pub in Stoke Ferry.
This is a brewery with a somewhat different focus to most. It concentrates on 'specials' -- ales for beer festivals and village events. In part, this is because Tony himself tired of the strains of distributing his product, driving mad mileages around the country to drop off his maximum output of four barrels a week. As befits a concern that cares about its quality, Wissey Valley uses local barley: sometimes from farms around Bury St Edmunds, but also from the Branthill Estate near Wells next the Sea. The water is what everyone else in Wretton drinks!
Traceability is not only important, but also possible -- Tony is close to being able to lift a glass of one of his ales and tell you the field in which the barley grew.
Wissey Valley offers brewery tours -- although the entire operation from brewing through to bottling can be seen by standing in one place and turning your head. Like most small breweries, there's a great deal of invention: the two fermenting vessels began life as milk tanks, and the cask washing machine (above right) is one of Tony's home-made joys.
This is a brewery where beer is more of a culture than a product -- Tony has just finished a series of talks on the history of beer, charting the way its taste has changed over the years and inviting his listeners to sample what might have been drunk a century ago -- one tremendous advantage of being a small output brewery is that you can make specials like this to order. In fact, Wissey Valley will happily brew to order -- a specially flavoured ale for the next village community day, perhaps. And as well as flavoured ales (we declined peach in favour of the original Cap'n Grumpy's) Wissey Valley are devoted to the relationship between beer and food. The project currently under way is a partnership with Impson's the butchers of Swaffham: the new line of 'stout and mustard sausages' uses Wissey Valley stout brewed specially. And in the top photograph, you can see the range of beer-related chutnies and pickles that Tony is especially proud of.
So -- what beers do they produce, and how can you sample them? This is where it gets tricky -- as the brewery rarely brews the same ale twice in quick succession, the best we can do is to reproduce Tony's list of the cask ales he expects to be available in early 2007. To get them, you could try buying bottles at Beers of Europe in Setchey, talking directly to the brewery, or keeping an eye open for fetes and beer festivals -- where Wissey Valley ales regularly collect prizes! In particular, the Residents Association in Stoke Ferry (next to Wretton) are mounting a combined church festival and producers market in April this year -- and there will certainly be a special festival ale!
The beers (or at least some of them ...)
Cap'n Grumpy's Porthole 4.3%
Light, malty and flavoured with vintage port
Little Walsingham Ale 4.0%
Amber coloured clean, malty flavoured with a dry hopped character
Khaki Sergeant Strong Stout 6.7%
Award winning classic stout
Honeyed Porter 4.7%
Dark ale with rich chocolate and honey flavours
Sir Ironbladder 5.0%
Rich robust flavours in this dark amber ale
High Cock 3.7%
Malty, late hopped character pale ale.
You'll notice that our third label 'First Edition' isn't represented -- of course not! If Wissey Valley returned to brew this, it would be Second Edition!