ABC

Manchester’s Alphabet Brewing Company - also known as ABC (very clever guys) - has been operating out of the heart of Manchester’s famous Picadilly Beer Mile since way back in 2014, helping cement the city’s reputation for brash, hop-forward, often strong beers. It’s become a real mainstay of the scene there, and in 2018 opened its second bar in nearby Chorley.

Like everyone else, 2020 hit ABC pretty hard, particularly through the closure of its own bars. But the team was able to regroup and focus its brewing strategy on selling through the web shop, as the brewery’s Alex Parkinson explains.

“We grew pretty quickly in the early days, so were used to having at least one or two of our brews each week being core beers,” says Alex. “But it was clear to us that lockdown was likely to last a while, and that we’d have to do much more business through our web shop. That meant keeping our existing customers interested, and hopefully even picking up some new ones. The best way to do that was to be constantly offering something new, staying at the front of people’s minds.”

This led to ABC going from six specials in 2019, to a staggering 35 in 2020. As well as being stressful in some respects though, Alex says the experience was also liberating for the whole team.

Alex continues: “We no longer really had demands for our core beers that we needed to meet - the onus was suddenly on us again to create that demand. So our whole approach was flipped on its head; we could see rewards for trying brews that were a bit different and took some chances, because that’s what people wanted.”

Even now, as we gradually emerge from lockdown, Alex sees ABC’s approach changed permanently as a result of its experiences. 

“Without a doubt it’s made us more creative, technically good brewers; all those lessons we’ve learned from pushing ourselves and taking some risks, we can apply back to the core range, and generally to the way we run the business. 

“As things have shifted back more towards trade and less through the web shop, we’ve definitely talked about whether we should scale back on the specials, but the conclusion was that we have no intention of doing that. So I think we’re going to try and have fun and probably match what we did last year as well in terms of new beers. It’s definitely a welcome upside to a situation that had a lot of very significant downsides!”

In the box: Coffee Shop of Horrors

A variation on ABC’s cult hit Flat White, Coffee Shop of Horrors is a luxurious vegan stout, switching out milk-based lactose for a host of clever brewing tricks.

“We’ve been playing around with making beers that have traditionally used lactose and trying to make them even vegan,” says Alex. “I’m vegan, and a couple of other stuff are as well. We needed to maintain the sweetness and the creaminess you expect those sorts of beers, which is generally achieved by dumping in a load of lactose.”

“So we’ve increased the amount of oats in the mash bill, and used dextrin malts and melanoidin malts to increase the perceived sweetness. A real breakthrough for us was vanillin powder; we did a lot of dosage tests, because we didn’t want it to just come out tasting of vanilla. As we thought, there’s a literal sweet spot, where the perceived sweetness goes up, but you can’t detect any vanilla flavour.”

Feed me, Seymour!