Cullercoats Brewery wins Bronze in Regional Beer competition
Sean Hardy, assistant brewer at Cullercoats Brewery collects awards from MD of sponsors Spa Soft Ltd at the York Competition 18.9.14
Award winning Bottled Beers from local brewery
Cullercoats Brewery is celebrating success at this year’s Northern Region Society of Independent Brewers (SIBA) beer competition, held in York last week. Rocket Brigade IPA and Polly Donkin Oatmeal Stout were both awarded Bronze in the bottled beer section. SIBA North East covers 66 breweries and the competition saw 137 bottled beers fight for places in 8 categories.
Owner and brewer Bill Scantlebury said “ It’s a huge boost to win such a prestigious award in a purely blind tasted competition, in a region packed with outstanding micro breweries. Our bottled beers are all produced by hand so that we can make a top quality drink, with the yeast in the bottle for secondary fermentation, which all adds to the flavour. This is fairly unusual in bottled real ale and we feel it makes all the difference. “
The bottled beer is only available at Boda Home, the specialist off licence and food retailer in Whitley Bay, and Seasalt restaurant in Amble.
The brewery, now almost 3 years old, has steadily expanded to the current production of about 18,000 pints per month, employing Bill and his wife Anna, and assistant brewer Sean Hardy full time. Sean attended the competition held at York beer festival, and was thrilled to be collecting the awards on behalf of the brewery.
Bill and Sean are currently working on a new range of all English dry hopped beers, where hops are added to the cask as the beer is barrelled. The hop harvest has just come in so they are looking forward to working on new recipes to highlight the fantastic English hop varieties coming onto the market this Autumn.
