10 out of 10 for Acorn Brewery

By their very nature, anniversaries and birthdays force you to look back, and 10-year anniversaries in particular prompt some curious musings. There’s something odd about 10 years: once you’re older than 30, you simultaneously think, ‘Crikey, is that 10 years already? It doesn’t seem like it’, and ‘10 years! Blimey, that is a long time’.

Psychologists refer to this holding of two opposing views simultaneously as ‘cognitive dissonance’. F Scott Fitzgerald called it ‘the test of a first-rate intelligence’. So I guess that means 10th anniversaries make you simultaneously smarter and more confused, which is in itself another example of cognitive dissonance. I think.

There was a great deal of this kind of doublethink going on in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, last week at the 10th anniversary of Acorn Brewery (it does seem to get easier to think two opposing thoughts simultaneously after you’ve had a few pints).

Impressive range​

On 4 July 2003, Acorn’s Dave Hughes mashed in his first brew of Barnsley Bitter. I hadn’t met Hughes at this point: I’d left Barnsley, the town of my birth, and had been living in London for about 12 years. Apart from visiting relatives, I couldn’t imagine there would ever be a reason for me to want to visit Barnsley.

It was around that time that I opened a copy of Wired magazine and first saw the word ‘Wi-Fi’. I didn’t have a clue what it was. When I read the article, I thought it was science fiction. The same magazine also carried a feature on something called ‘blogging’. I read that one too. ‘What a terrible idea,’ I thought, ‘who would be sad, stupid and self-important enough to ever want to write one of these blogs?’

An awful lot changes in 10 years.

As Hughes was mashing in, I was quitting my last full-time job in advertising because my first book, Man Walks Into A Pub,​ had just been published. The final few chapters of that book talked about the excellence of Stella Artois and the stupidity of 11 o’clock closing. I think it referred to porter as ‘extinct’. There was no mention of the words ‘microbrewery’ or ‘craft beer’. I, along with almost every beer drinker in Britain, had never tasted North American hops.

Since 2003, the amount of beer we drink in the UK has fallen by 25%, yet the number of breweries making beer has doubled. As the total beer market contracted year after year, breweries like Acorn posted double-digit growth and issued press releases about their struggle to raise capacity to meet soaring demand.

I doubt that Hughes could have seen this coming as he mashed in. I don’t think he would have entertained any prediction that his beers would go on to win more than 50 awards in a decade, that he would brew an Imperial stout named after Barnsley’s Ukrainian twin town (Gorlovka) that would win bronze in the Champion Winter Beer of Britain competition, or that Barnsley Bitter would win silver in its category at the Great British Beer Festival.

He certainly would never have guessed that, as well as the brewery, he would also be running an award-winning real ale-focused pub in Barnsley town centre, which stocks an impressive range of craft beers from around the world, most of which did not exist when Hughes started brewing.

The past 10 years has seen unimaginable change in British brewing. And yet, at the same time, everyone at Acorn’s birthday party was shaking their heads and saying: “10 years? Already?”

Excitement​

This reaction was fuelled by two things. One is that Hughes doesn’t look a day older than he did in 2003 (if only that were true for the rest of us). The other is that Acorn still feels new and fresh, like it’s only just warming up and getting started.

It’s easy to look back, but 10 years in, it’s also useful to look forward. Where will we all be in 2023?

I’m pretty sure most people in the Old No 7 pub on 4 July 2013 will be back there again (I suspect one or two won’t have left much over the intervening years). Britain will still have a thriving craft-brewing scene, with cask ale at its heart. And of course, we’ll still be arguing over the term ‘craft beer’, what it means and whether it exists.

But whatever we’re calling it, Acorn will still be part of that scene, brewing great beers that combine the best of an honourable brewing tradition with the excitement of new ingredients, styles and techniques.