Polly’s – A (mostly) abridged history
Polly’s – A (mostly) abridged history
2017
September
Fed up with being a one-man cask brewery, The Black Brook Beer Company is quietly wound down. Our owner Sean goes back to the drawing board to create a brewery and brand more in line with what he wants to produce. The genesis of Loka Polly begins.
October
Unnamed Gyles C30, C31 and C32 are brewed. Whilst these test batches ultimately end up being dumped, our rickety, woodbound brew-kit is retrofitted to withstand the needs of producing the hop-forward, modern styles of beer Sean is passionate about, taking inspiration from the breweries we’re now lucky enough to call our contemporaries.
November
The final designs for Loka Polly are sent back and signed off. Our first employee is drafted in to head up the sales side of the business in Arron with the brewery projected to launch in early 2018.
December
Galaxy Mosaic IPA, Cascade Zeus Pale Ale, Chinook Simcoe IPA, Citra Ekuanot NESIPA and Aurora Espresso Breakfast Stout are brewed. On a series of snowy, rainy and downright miserable Wednesdays across the month, with a canning machine hanging out of the brewery underneath a hastily thrown-up gazebo, the first Loka Polly beers are put exclusively into cans.
The Numbers:
Employees: 0
Total Gyles produced: 5
Litres sold: 0
Countries importing Polly’s: 0
2018
January
Loka Polly is finally born. On a snowy Monday in January, the brewery launches commercially with five canned beers, and a small stock holding of kegs to see us through the month. To say we underestimated demand would be an understatement. Through word of mouth and a carefully curated delivery route in our van of incredible customers willing to take a punt on an otherwise unheard of brewery, our kegs quickly sell out, and our canned stock, designed to carry us for around two months, is rapidly dwindling. We also manage to take home local awards for our beers, despite having only been commercially operating for less than a month. Back to the brew kit!
February
On the back of word of mouth rumblings amongst the wider beer community, our first palletised orders head out to our early distribution partners – hitting Scotland, the South East, London, and the South West. The word of Loka Polly is slowly spreading far and wide.
March
The brewery is (just about) keeping up with demand, sating people’s thirst with a steady flow of kegged beers, including a first commissioning of an in-house favourite of the brewery, Simcoe Waimea XPA. The strain being put on our brew length is beginning to show – we need to start expanding!
April
After a three month fallow period, we commission the next round of Loka Polly cans, including our first stretch beyond our comfort zone with a first ever DIPA. Two of our very early repeat brews also make an appearance in tallboys for the first time, with El Dorado Mosaic IPA and Citra Simcoe IPA wowing punters. We also take our first dive into festival pours, with demand so high at Chester Craft Beer Festival that we had to make an emergency run back to the brewery to collect more beer.
May
Now that the word of LOKA POLLY was firmly out in the stratosphere, we found ourselves a brewery in demand to attend events and collaborations. We brewed our first ever collab beer with the lovely folk over at Alphabet Brewing Co and paired it up with our first ever tap takeover event, gracing the bar of the now sadly-departed Kosmonaut in Manchester.
June
The arrival of summer sees us commissioning our first expansion at HQ – two new tanks arrive from China to bring our brew length to ten times a month, allowing us to brew beers destined for both can and keg concurrently, as opposed to just one format. This added flexibility means we’re able to put a whole lot more structure to our weekly brewing schedule, and we rather boldly decide to book slots with our mobile canning company up to the end of 2019 – something that takes even them by surprise.
July
A flurry of activity happens at the peak of our first summer as an active brewery – we take on additional help in the form of an assistant brewer in Scott bringing our total number of people to three, and we jump in head-first into some of the best festivals in the country; a highlight being our appearance at The Little Summer Beer Bash, hosted by Left Handed Giant in Bristol. We find ourselves pouring next to our brewing heroes DEYA, Verdant, and LHG, and the wheels begin turning in Sean’s head on how we’ll push to be considered amongst these behemoth breweries. The genesis of our Augment Range begins here.
August
After trialling the combination in a kick-ass DDH Pale Ale at LSBB the previous month, we find our first universally renowned beer across the board as we commission a DIPA version of Mosaic Simcoe. The 8.2% behemoth of a beer is perfectly paired with the blistering Summer we were celebrating, and through experimentation with the (now in hindsight, very limited) yeast blend we used, hit the sweet spot of creating those high-juice, low bitterness beers we’d strived to produce from day one.
September
Polly’s goes international! A pipe dream since day one at the brewery, we ship our first beers overseas less than nine months into our existence, with the first of now countless pallets of beer heading over to France. Our first steps into world domination begin!
October
A dream comes true for the brewery – we’re invited to, and pour at the Independent Manchester Beer Convention. As attendees since the early days of the festival, we suddenly found ourselves sharing a room with Amundsen, Cloudwater and Other Half – the very breweries that inspired us to create the brewery in the first place. Spain also joins the international Polly’s party, with our first order landing just in time to grace the taps at Barcelona Beer Festival.
November
Breaking ground! It’s become apparent that we’re rapidly outgrowing Polly’s old stable, and thanks to an extremely selfless gesture from Sean’s dad Phil, we make the move across the yard into the smaller of the two truck workshops. Our first steps into our now-permanent home start to take place, with work expected to be completed by January.
December
The festive season kicks off with us making our first tentative steps into Scandinavia; Norway becoming the latest country to board the Polly’s hype train. We round off the most surreal, drunkest year we’ve ever had with a medley of the hits of 2018 – Citra Simcoe IPA and Simcoe Waimea XPA are given a final runaround before the new year.
The Numbers
Employees: 3
Total Gyles produced: 62
Litres sold: 81,829
Countries importing Polly’s: 3
2019
January
Our first beers brewed and packaged from our new brewhouse land in the wild, and we kick off the new year with our first ever in-person venture overseas. Sean and Arron are hosted by the wonderful Broufox for a series of tap takeovers and meet the brewer events in Paris, France. Arron even tells his terrible gyle numbers joke in extremely broken French. It was awful to watch. Meanwhile behind the scenes, we signed off on something that was six months in the making…
February
After six months of build, we announce the arrival of Rosa, Spur, and Patternist. Our Augment beers have arrived and their task is to rattle the branches of the established group of breweries in the UK we want to mix with. Loka Polly is about to jump to the next level entirely! Our brew length expands to a total of three brews per week to boot, with the arrival of even more fermenting vessels to our new brewhouse.
March
The Augment range launches with our most ambitious project to date – twenty four venues all simultaneously pouring the same three beers at exactly the same time. The stress of the previous three months washes away as the beers are universally accepted with open arms. We hold in-person meet the brewer events across the course of the weekend in London and our hometown launch venue in Chester to rave reviews – the world is our oyster! Until…
April
The incredible highs of the Augment launch come screeching to a halt with a terrifying low; a cease and desist letter greets us on our arrival back to the brewery from lawyers representing Spendrups Bryggeri AB in Sweden, stating that Loka Polly is too similar to one of their umbrella brands, the soft drink LOKA. An amicable agreement is made for us to use up the remainder of our Loka Polly labels as a UK-exclusive brewery until May, when we’re forced to change our name.
May
Polly’s Brew Co is officially unveiled to the world. Despite the knockback to a barely twelve month old business of an enforced name change, we’re galvanised to make our beers better than ever, and whilst we now have a different identity, our passion for consistently improving our beers continues with added vigour. Demand only seems to spike, and we go back to routinely selling out, adding Denmark, The Netherlands, and undeterred by our C&D, Sweden to the countries Polly’s are reaching. We also get the opportunity to work with some incredible breweries, with collab beers released under our new name with Hammerton, Lost and Grounded, and personal heroes Salopian.
June
With our brew length now extending to three brews weekly, we undertake our first advertisement for a new brewer to join the party here at Polly’s, and are absolutely staggered at the volume of responses we receive. Applications from brewers with experience at some of the very breweries we aspire to be as good as really begins to put into perspective where this tiny little brewery in the sleepiest corner of North Wales is headed.
July
We make our first tentative steps into the supermarket craft side of things as our collaboration with South Walian counterparts Tiny Rebel, Pineapple Express lands into Tesco stores nationwide. Our internal processes also take a step up with our bespoke in-house LA3 yeast strain finally landing in the brewery and allowing us to embrace that incredible “fluffiness” that the breweries of the East Coast US utilise and inspire us so much. This makes its debut in one of our most sought after and highly rated beers, as Nada makes its first appearance.
August
After an exhaustive application process, where we interviewed some of the best and brightest brewers in the country, we welcomed our new head brewer Lally to Polly’s, bringing our total number of people to four. Bringing a wealth of knowledge from working at Mad Hatter and Magic Rock, Lally quickly became our secret weapon for exploring styles of beer beyond our well-trodden path of pale and hoppy beers.
September
As the weather turned, we found ourselves making our debut pouring at one of the best festivals the UK has to offer – Leeds International Beer Festival. Over the course of four very boozy days in West Yorkshire, we found ourselves a whole raft of incredible new fans, as well as cooking up an absolutely awesome DIPA with one of our brewing heroes and now superbaes, North Brewing Co.
October
The Lally effect is in full swing heading into Autumn, as we release our first ever sour beer Kirschentart at Salt Beer Factory’s Oktoberfest. The sour cherry gose was the first step on what we feel is now one of the strongest arms of our output across the brewery and we’ve since revisited it more than any other sour we’ve produced to date! Our fledgling team also grows to a total of six with two additional brewers joining the party in Matt and Guy.
November
In our most ambitious sour beer experiment since bringing Lally on board, we unleash A Passion for Fashion onto an unsuspecting public. Taken for a spin on the sour train once with our lactic acid pitch, this beer ended up becoming double-soured thanks to the sheer amount of lime we packed in. One of our most hotly contested beers to date, and the one we have the most requests for a rebrew of – one for tequila barrels in the future perhaps? We also finally take delivery of our very own canning line, bringing all of our packaging in-house and completely under our own control.
December
We round off 2019 by signing off with our headline beer of the year, Rosa. Plans are being put in place behind the scenes to gradually move over into the new workshop by the middle of 2020, with work scheduled to begin by the second quarter of the year. Everything was all in place – cellar side on one side, brewing side on the other, new brew kit by April, core range by May. If only we knew what was ahead!
The Numbers
Employees: 6
Total Gyles produced: 78
Litres sold: 225,343
Countries importing Polly’s: 12
2020
January
A bittersweet decision is made to kick off the first month of the year – after two solid years, and a full first year of carrying the brewery solely on its back, the decision to quietly retire the Polly’s Originals range was made and set in place. It was heartbreaking to see the very last of some bonafide Polly’s classics, and we made sure it went out with a bang with a return of the beer that put us on the map in the first place – Galaxy Mosaic IPA.
February
In what would be unbeknownst to us, our last attendance in any capacity at a festival for almost eighteen months, we attend Cloudwater’s Friends & Family & Beer in a social capacity – making contacts with some of the best breweries in the world, taking a particular interest in the work of OG craft masters Odell Brewing, who introduce us to styles that would soon become frequent parts of our output. In between elbow bumps with our contemporaries, we don’t realise that this is the last time we’ll see some of them to this day.
March
It was all going so well; we were standing to produce a record month of sales, with confirmations of attendance at some of the most prestigious festivals in the country, and then…it all came to a halt. We had heard of a virus rapidly spreading as early as January but had no idea of the impact (both immediate and longer lasting) that it would have on Polly’s. A coronation year for the brewery had the brakes firmly put on, and we took the decision to stand down from production indefinitely, or at least until we could figure out what the future plans were to be for the brewery
April
With just Sean and Arron left in the brewery running the day to day operations, we had to pivot business plans pretty drastically. All expansion plans were put on hold, our core range was delayed indefinitely, and whilst we would package any remaining beer in the tank, our brew plans were scrapped entirely. We put a hopeful trade list out to our customers, absolutely stacked our webstore with as much beer as we possibly could, and just sat and waited. To say we were overwhelmed was an understatement – we sold out of beer in twelve minutes flat, and between the two remaining members of staff we fulfilled pallets worth of orders daily – in spite of everything going on there was a glimmer of hope we’d be okay.
May
With it becoming rapidly obvious that the beer we were drip-feeding from our cold store for sale wouldn’t last as long as we thought it would, the decision is made to fire our brew kit back up in early May to brew initially six times a month, but this is quickly upped to twice a week to keep up with demand. List releases become increasingly chaotic as demand for craft beer absolutely skyrockets, and we’re routinely out of beer in less than ten minutes from the point of listing it. Great for sales, not so great for wanting the beer to be getting into as many hands as possible!
June
In what feels like a two month sprint through our entire two years of growth by that point, we make the decision to up our production back to pre-pandemic levels of three times a week, bringing our entire brew team back to work just shy of three months after standing them down. We’re absolutely over the moon to welcome everyone back, and set about making as much beer as we possibly can to match demand.
July
As we come out of the first lockdown, we start dipping our toes tentatively into producing kegged beers again to cater toward the shift in focus back to pubs (albeit, not ones we can sit in at the time). Our never ending quest to produce the best beer we possibly can takes its next step as we enter the peak of summer by releasing our first ever TIPA. DDH Spur drops at the very beginning of the month and is leagues ahead of our biggest beer to date; our emails and webstore simultaneously crash from the volume of traffic trying to get their hands on the beer. In an effort to help ease our outgoings, our Brewery Manager Rob joins the team after a lengthy hiatus due to having to shield thanks to the Covid pandemic.
August
In what will become an annual event here at the brewery, we pass the reins from Sean to our incredible staff to design a beer completely of their own – this includes everything from naming the beer, to the artwork, and the grist bill and dry-hop charge. Endless Festoon, Murmurations, and Yellow Blaze all land in quick succession and set a precedent of staff satisfaction being the most important part of our business. Polly’s also went truly global, with Asia joining the hype train, as our beers found their way to China, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan.
September
After overwhelming feedback to the first, we go ahead with our second ever TIPA in early September. Still leaping on that yearning for the biggest, daftest hop bills possible, DDH Patternist is the second of our TIPA trilogy and is released to rave reviews. As we moved into Autumn, and with our routes to market starting to open back up again, we upped our game to four brews per week, double brewing our beers so they were available as full can batches to satisfy retail demand, as well as full keg batches to match the growing demand from reopening bars.
October
A month of mixed emotions sees us complete our Augment TIPA trilogy with DDH Rosa dropping with just as much incredible feedback as the original version, but also sees our closest major city in Liverpool thrown back into the strictest of lockdown tiers, and the hospitality industry as a whole subjected to disproportionate lockdown rules; causing us to have to flip our business plans on what feels like an hourly basis at times.
November
A second lockdown comes into effect in England, causing us again to pivot business plans – gone are the kegs, and back into steady flow come the cans. With people gobbling up tallboys faster than we can produce them, we quickly commission DDH Pines and DDH Every Piece Matters to join the TIPA party, and work the other way with our original Augment trio, dropping Little Spur, Little Rosa and Little Patternist for a more sessionable experience of our bigger beers.
December
After a twelve month delay, work finally begins on the takeover of the larger workshop here at Polly’s HQ. We break ground in the final week of December, and order a brand spanking new brew kit to celebrate the move. Everything is on course for a March 2021 commission date to hit saturation point at the brewery!
The Numbers
Employees: 7
Total Gyles produced: 176
Litres sold: 278,701
Countries importing Polly’s: 21
2021
January
Our third birthday sees us release a beer long in the planning process. After the silliness of the 2020 TIPA craze, where do you go when the country is back in another lockdown and in need of something big to rally around? We go QIPA strength. A fitting send off to the rickety, woodbound brew kit that carried us through our first three years, our Third Birthday QIPA pushed every single piece of equipment in the brewery to the limit. The single busiest day of sales at Polly’s since we started the brewery sees us sell out in record time, even with strict limits in place to ensure even distribution of the beer. Pure, unadulterated insanity.
February
After a hobbled first month of post-Brexit confusion, we slowly start to rebuild our working relationships with our export customers. In true Polly’s style though, we don’t make it easy for ourselves and end up having to hand-sticker almost two hundred cases of beer to make them EU compliant and legal to sell on the continent, even managing to bring Finland aboard the Polly’s party train with a huge order heading out to their ALKO Government-controlled supermarkets.
March
The advent of spring sees us take part in our first ever International Women’s Brew Day collaboration, cooking up an incredible Rosewater and Hibiscus Berliner Weisse. As a brewery beginning to be looked upon for advice and guidance, we wanted to consciously become better flag-bearers for the pressing issues within the industry and this was a great launching pad – it helped that the beer was absolutely delicious to boot!
April
As our reputation within our industry grew, so too did our accessibility to the most modern and up to date technology available to us as a brewery. Our Spectrum Series landed in April to huge amounts of fanfare, and the choice of making it a vertical IPA, DIPA, TIPA, QIPA with exactly the same liquid hops had drinkers clamouring to get their hands on the latest step in our brewing journey. For the brewing nerds, we also take delivery of a centrifuge to the brewery – whilst not the sexiest piece of kit we’ll ever own, this brings the quality of our beers up to the absolute next level – slowly but surely we’re edging our way to perfecting our beers!
May
After over a year on the sidelines, we’re out of hibernation and begin to actively engage in collaborative brews once again. A collab long in the making saw Lally make the trip down to Reading to brew with one of the OG UK craft titans Siren. It felt so good to finally get back out on the road and see all our pals again after so long! May also sees the first of our solo supermarket offerings land in Marks & Spencers – Moonwrecker arrives to awesome feedback and remains a fixture to this day!
June
Expansion a-plenty at the brewery! We bring in not one, but two people to bolster our roster to nine people – Joe joins on the brewing side of things to replace the dearly departed Guy, who moved to be closer to his family in West Wales, and after three and a half years of carrying sales solo, Alex joins the sales team to help expand our sales base and share some of the load from Arron. Our delivery van also celebrates a return to the road after fourteen long months in hibernation, and the clamour to deliver beers to people we’d missed for so long was completely real! We honour the faith that Sean’s dad Phil gave us from the start and bring him on board as our new drayman – keeping it in the family!
July
After well over a year away, festival season returns to Polly’s with aplomb – a nervy first fixture away at Manchester Craft Beer Festival sees us absolutely tear through all the beer we brought in record time, before we finally get the feather in our cap of attending Hop City in Leeds. The honour of pouring next to some of the best breweries in the world, let alone Europe is not lost on us, and we spend the festival actively engaging and learning techniques, tricks and tips from the very breweries that inspired us to begin with. We were also busy once again on the collaboration train – Sean heading to London to brew a hyped up DIPA with Howling Hops, and Lally spinning his sour beer wizardry with Vocation Brewing.
August
Our extremely cramped festival season rumbles on with attendance at Liverpool Craft Beer Expo hotly followed up by an appearance at our spiritual home, Leeds International once again. Unlike our first appearance, we return to Leeds Town Hall as a solidified headliner brewery and end up selling through the beer we brought ourselves by the Friday evening session; leading to a very grovelling call to a local distributor to buy back some of our own beer to be able to continue pouring! Two more additions to the team are made to boot. Will joined us permanently in the warehouse, before Jack joined the team on the packaging side of things, becoming the king of the canning line in the process, bringing our team to nine!
September
As the sunshine rolls back into hibernation for another six months, we drop a new line of beers to celebrate the hop varietals that we’ve enjoyed working with most over the previous twelve months. The Late Summer series sees us embracing the incredible little idiosyncrasies of the latest crops of Citra BBC, and new varietals to us, Talus, Bru-1 and Idaho 7. Our staff designed beers make a welcome return as Arron, Joe and Matt drop Disco Infiltrator, Flora Fauna, Air & Water, and Conditioned Response into our brew plans. We round off the month by brewing a world (yep, you read that right) renowned West Coast IPA with our Leeds based pals Kirkstall Brewery that places first in the Yakima Chief Alpha King Challenge – an award previously won by Pliny the Elder, and one that was graciously accepted.
October
A range well over eighteen months in the making, the Polly’s core range lands after a lengthy delay thanks to the ongoing pandemic complicating matters. We wanted to wait until there was sufficient confidence in pubs remaining open, and by October we were confident that we could release a core range with little to no trouble. Rosebud, Little Petal, and Floret are dropped to incredible feedback – brewed to exactly the same spec as our Augment beers, but set at a more accessible price.
November
One of the white whales left in our list of collaboration breweries is finally snagged, as Lally makes his way down to Penrhyn to brew Fashion is Danger with fellow Celtic juice-slingers, Verdant. A beer that could only have been a DIPA, we absolutely jumped at the opportunity to work with one of the very best in the UK, if not the world today. Two collab DIPAs in two weeks became a thing as Arron and Sean travelled down to Bristol to brew It Floats Above the Water with a brewery we’re eternally grateful for taking a punt on us all those years ago, Left Handed Giant. Arron also makes a really crap cheese joke at the beer and cheese pairing we attend later that night.
December
We round off the year with an unusually quiet one (for us anyway). After the stress and strife of the previous eighteen months, we’d earned ourselves a little bit of respite – we only dropped a Quad IPA on our final availability list of the year. This Never Happened could probably be an accurate summary of our experience of the previous year and a half; arriving almost a year to the day since we brewed our first QIPA, this beer took all the techniques we’d learned over 2021 and applied it to the most extreme pale and hoppy style we brew. What a way to round off the year.
The Numbers
Employees: 11
Total Gyles produced: 258
Litres sold: 460,393
Countries importing Polly’s: 26
2022
January
Our fourth year as an active brewery kicks off exactly as we mean to go on – for the first time in four years we actually have enough beer to facilitate everyone who needs it, and our traditionally quiet month smashes all previous years records. On the beer side of things, we are particularly proud of Finding Dark Magic – our first foray into the incredible world of robust Export Stouts. We also make moves in the January transfer window, with head of packaging Jack moving in-house to a brewer’s role, and warehouse op Will taking the reins of the canning machine. With these internal moves around the brewery, some space opens up for even more staff to join the Polly’s party!
February
With staff welfare one of the highest priorities here at Polly’s, and our passion for making a job at Polly’s the best it possibly can be, we make our most radical shift for our team yet – introducing a four day working week across the board. The positive effect is almost instantaneous, and feeds back with even better beer being produced by people happy at their place of work.
March
As the milder weather rolled in, we opened our doors once again for our first in-house collaboration beer since the pandemic began. It only felt natural to invite the brewery we collaborated with on our last beer before Covid, and Big Mountain jumped at the opportunity to come and brew an updated version of Oh My…Vol.2 – the cult classic got another spin around! An idea that was born at the latter part of 2021 also came to fruition as we took our original Augment trio for a trip to the dark side as we released our highly ambitious B-Sides series.
April
Our cold store capacity reached maximum saturation point as Easter rolled around – three new containers brought our cold store capacity up to six separate spaces, and allowed us to introduce a staff canteen, a purpose built office, and a cold store completely dedicated to our webstore and hop storage. We officially couldn’t get any bigger at Holland Farm! With all this additional storage space, we finally filled the slot left by Will moving over to production as Nick joined us to head up all things warehouse and logistics, bringing our team up to an (unlucky for some) thirteen. A highlight on the beer side of things for April was definitely Red Odyssey – an 11% triple fruited imperial sour that definitely signified our intentions to become not only the best pale and hoppy producing brewery in the country, but the best fruited sour producing brewery to boot.
May
Festival season kicked off with a bang for 2022 as we embarked on our first ever, and in our opinion long overdue, international festivals. Early May saw Arron and Lally jam pack their schedule with a weekend of city hopping – hitting Antwerp and Amersfoort, before finishing the weekend at Hop in t’Slot festival in Nijmegen, Netherlands. We round May off with our single biggest sales month since we started the brewery in 2018 – a staggering achievement and a sign of things to come.
June
Jubilee weekend has us triple (you read it right, triple) booked for festivals – a first here at the brewery and only achievable thanks to our incredible team. We’re slinging the juice at Riverside Festival hosted by Brew By Numbers, Arron and Joe are making a tonne of new friends at the DGB Invitational festival in Norway, and our brew team celebrate a second consecutive year of slinging the juice at Hop City by brewing a collaboration beer with one of our all time brewing heroes, Northern Monk.
July
Heatwave season begins and Polly’s are right on the money – brewing our first venue exclusive beer with our pals over at Hawarden Estate. You Look Amazing floods their bars, festivals and various event spaces, and opens up the good word of Polly’s to friends a little closer to home. We also found time to add one more member of staff to our incredible team, with Ad joining to head up webstore management and slowly take the reins of social media away from our captain!
August
As Summer reaches its peak and the nights ever so gradually begin to shorten, we send our chief Scotsman Lally to Aberdeen to brew his first ever beer in Scotland; combining with the incredible Fierce Beer to make a kick-ass fruited pale ale. We also got our first taste of those peak-lockdown rabid sellouts once again as we released our second collaboration beer with Cornish hop-slingers Verdant and duly had our webstore crash within minutes of release.
September
School term starts up again and we’re honoured to be invited back to the first Leeds International Beer Festival to be hosted inside the incredible Kirkstall Abbey. Whilst the event was tinged with the death of the Queen just as proceedings were kicking off, we still had an absolute blast in one of our favourite beer cities. Bringing things a little closer to home, we made our first local appearance at Mold Food Festival and were blown away at the demand – so much so we had to make not one, but two trips to replenish our beer stocks!
October
Autumn rolls in for another year and we celebrate by hosting an incredible IMBC fringe event to celebrate the first edition of the festival for over two years. Those missing out on the traditional soft-serve beers at the festival itself got to hit the decadent button with us running Red Odyssey through an ice cream machine – possibly the biggest stroke of genius we’ve ever had. Lally also found himself giddy with joy as we finally released his Wild Beer Co collab that had been sitting away in Tequila barrels for eight months – a rarity in these parts; a bottled Polly’s beer!
November
We round off the festival season for 2022 by attending what might be peak-Polly’s festival going as we absolutely smash the 5th edition of Billies Craft Beer Festival. An honour to be considered amongst the 50 best breweries on the planet, we are extremely humbled to be pouring at one of the most prestigious beer festivals in the world; being joined by the best Europe and the US has to offer, as well as the best from Asia and South America to boot. A fitting way to kick off our fifth anniversary month, which we celebrate with our first ever Barrel-Aged Imperial Stout. Quinquennium is here, and we’re toasting to another five years.
December
As we wind down for the year and take a well earned break for the festive period, we drop the second of our three fifth anniversary beers; this one celebrating the 1000th commissioned gyle here at the brewery – Gyle #1000. A brash and bold Triple West Coast IPA; huge on the pine notes, dripping with resin flavours, with just enough sweetness from the malt to bring things back to par again. A perfect way to sign off and begin our fifth year as a commercial brewery – little did everyone know the biggest beer of our birthday celebrations was bubbling away in tank…
The Numbers
Employees: 14
Total Gyles produced: 441
Litres sold: 570,840
Countries importing Polly’s: 28
