The Landscapes of Lager — Utopian Brewing in Devon, England

In a massive agricultural shed in the middle of the soulful Devon countryside, Utopian Brewing makes Lager. 

Today, head brewer Jeremy Swainson and his two assistants are brewing a Czech 10°, one of the brewery’s core beers. Overhead lights hanging from the ribbed and girdered roof throw off distorted white light that dances on the stainless steel forest of fermentation vessels and conditioning tanks. The soundtrack is the irregular hiss of compressors, the clang of metal on metal, and the burst of voices. Hoses snake across the floor, sinister in their intent, while the kegger, brutal and unshaven in its sullen silence, waits to come into action. In the cold room next door, racks and racks of kegs and packaged cans stretch off into the distance. This is a working landscape of Lager, both of movement and labor, as well as the silence of lagering. 

There are other landscapes of Lager, ones shaped by nature. I have seen them in the small town of Frýdlant, close to the Czech-Polish border, where Albrecht Brewery has been resurrected in the midst of a lush bloom of woodland. There, the slow-moving waters of the adjoining Smědá are a metaphor, perhaps, for the equally steady, slow-rolling process of lagering. I have also encountered them in Franconia, at the Brauerei Zehendner in Mönchsambach, where, in the shadow of the brewhouse, the early-summer fields of arable crops glow gold and green. And here in mid-Devon, where Utopian makes its beers, I’ve had my latest glimpse.

One spring afternoon I took my mountain bike up a steep, high-sided and green-fringed road, appropriately called Barley Lane, in search of this landscape. Down below to the east, the ancient city of Exeter stretched out like a spread of tarot cards, each district with its own particular meaning and interpretation. Wind caught the grass in a sloping field reminiscent of a father playfully ruffling his young son’s mop of hair; hedge lines marched down the center of fields waiting for the summer cattle to be set out to grass. A hawk zoomed over the road, an avian fighter jet, while further up the lane I saw a fox with a generous red-brown brush. To the north the shadows of clouds floated like doubtful thoughts. 

This is a slow-moving, almost somnambulant landscape, eminently receptive to the deep sleep of lagering. It is not the landscape of the crash-bang-wallop motorcade of fast fermentation, or of the flashy insouciance and swagger of bucketloads of bright and breezy New World hops. Instead, it has evolved over time and been formed by the actions of countless generations, as well as nature and the weather. It is also a mirror that reflects the way Utopian works.

DOUBLE THE TROUBLE

In a country that now has well over 2,000 breweries, Utopian stands out as an authentic Lager producer, operating in the traditions of rural Bavaria and Bohemia. Working in the bucolic confines of mid-Devon, an area most commonly associated with blossom-heavy apple orchards and cider, the brewery’s 30-year-old, German-trained head brewer Jeremy Swainson oversees an arresting selection of lagered beers.

Utopian’s core range consists of a crisp, bittersweet Bavarian-style Helles (both filtered and unfiltered); an assertively bitter Czech-style 10˚ (Swainson is a big believer in bitterness); and a spritzy, sprightly Pilsner. He celebrates other members of this beer family with a judicious use of the traditional Lager calendar of seasonals that has developed over the last few centuries. These include a Maibock, a Vienna Lager, a Czech-style Black Lager, and a Dunkel. All the beers undergo at least 30 days of lagering, and the majority are brewed using a double decoction mash. Authenticity is a given, and a line in the sand for Swainson.

“You have enzymes to get rid of diacetyl, you have enzymes to make your mash faster, you can buy low-nitrogen malt which is easier to process, you can use finings to clear the beer faster. But none of them, in my opinion, is actually going to make the beer taste better, and for me that is cheating the consumer out of a wholesome and properly made traditional Lager.”

“We are quite deliberate with how we brew,” he tells me when I visit him at the brewery. “We are doing double decoction mashes with practically all of our beers. This means a double brew day starts at 7 a.m. and finishes at 10 p.m. Many other breweries, whether they make Ale or Lager, will find ways to shorten that time, but if I think that something we do in the mash or during the boiling process can improve the beer but cost us time, I am really happy to make that decision—it is just a longer brew day. As brewers we are not looking for the easy way out: You are looking to do things properly if you want it to taste good.”

As we talk, he hands me a glass of the brewery’s eloquent Pilsner, poured straight from a conditioning tank. Its flavor chimes on the palate, as if the late, great Seamus Heaney had sprung back to life and taken up brewing. I think of one of my favorites among his poems, “The Haw Lantern,” when taking in the beer’s serenity, its subtle bittersweetness and gentle lemon notes. “You might say that this Pilsner tastes good today, but it has another week and a half in tank,” Swainson says. “Sure, you could taste this and say, ‘We’ll sell it, we’re short on beer, we need it,’ but you are using that element of letting the yeast have enough time to do what it is supposed to do.”

His phone rings, a harsh sound within the cathedral-like calm of the brewery. It’s a call he must take, and while he deals with it I concentrate on the beer in my glass, marveling at its capacity to both refresh and engage my attention.

“There are things out there that can help speed up the process and make our lives as brewers easier,” Swainson says, after finishing the call. “You have enzymes to get rid of diacetyl, you have enzymes to make your mash faster, you can buy low-nitrogen malt which is easier to process, you can use finings to clear the beer faster. But none of them, in my opinion, is actually going to make the beer taste better, and for me that is cheating the consumer out of a wholesome and properly made traditional Lager.”

THE LAND REMEMBERS

Utopian’s home is part of a working beef cattle farm, which belongs to a family that has farmed in this part of the world for several generations. It is called Clannaborough Barton, appropriately enough, as “Barton” is an Old English word meaning barley (bere) enclosure (ton). A small medieval church, its exterior battered by the centuries, also keeps watch on the site. Given that brewing can be an act of faith, it seems appropriate that this place of worship stands just opposite. 

In the distance, there are soft and gently rolling hills, ancient tracts of woodland and timeless fields, upon which sheep and cattle graze. A few miles away, the austere, granite outcrops of Dartmoor stand. Utopian is a brewery that has embedded itself in this old and tranquil landscape, and Swainson’s firm belief in the righteous way of lagering reminds me of a quote from Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory: “Landscape is the work of the mind, its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock.”

Within the context of contemporary British brewing, Utopian belongs to a small but vibrant cohort that also includes Hartlepool’s Donzoko Brewing Company, London’s Bohem Brewery, and Leicestershire’s Braybrooke Beer Co., all of which make Bavarian- and Bohemian-inspired Lagers. There’s one key difference with Utopian, though: All of its beers are made with British malted barley and hops. Whereas other British Lager makers opt for the likes of Hallertau, Saaz, and Spalt, English varieties such as Fuggle, Golding, and Jester go into the kettle here. 

“The focus on 100% British-grown ingredients comes first and foremost from our commitment to sustainability. Much of the production of great Lager is about attention to detail in the brewing process rather than which hops you use, so I was pretty confident that you could find the right ingredients from the wide range available from U.K. growers, to make great Lagers provided that all the other important pieces were in place in the production set-up.”

“The focus on 100% British-grown ingredients comes first and foremost from our commitment to sustainability,” says Utopian’s managing director Richard Archer. “Much of the production of great Lager is about attention to detail in the brewing process rather than which hops you use, so I was pretty confident that you could find the right ingredients from the wide range available from U.K. growers, to make great Lagers provided that all the other important pieces were in place in the production set-up.”

Utopian’s use of British ingredients is apparent in the glass. Take Rainbock, its vivid Maibock, whose fine graininess and spirited citrus character are unignorable. There is an ample malt heft that lifts the body; an amaretto-like sweetness; a finishing, cracker-like dryness. The beer’s delicate, floral hoppiness comes from the use of Boadicea hops, which for me evoke the sound of church bells on a summer’s eve, the long day’s labor done.

BEGINNINGS

The brewery had its second birthday in March this year, releasing the Ungespundet Export Kellerbier Now We Are Two to celebrate the occasion. But its story actually goes back to 2016, when Archer and co-founder Steve Cox started planning the business. Utopian has three founders, with Cox and Archer joined by accountant Steve Hanlon, though Archer is the only one involved in day-to-day brewing operations. In the early days, they were also helped by a small number of friends and family investors, while £400,000 was raised by crowdfunding in 2018 (there are approximately 200 investors now). 

When Archer and Cox began the planning, they operated a pub in southwest London, which was also going to be the intended site for the brewery. But the local planners didn’t embrace their vision, Archer says, and the idea eventually fell through. Archer had family in Devon and it seemed a logical move to try and find a rural site in the county instead. After a swift search online, he saw a couple of large, connected farm buildings available to rent. They had previously been used for processing rutabagas, but had been empty for several years after the crop proved uneconomical.

“That pub [in London] was in a place called Merton Abbey Mills, which had many years before been the site of a William Morris factory, and the pub was unsurprisingly called the William Morris,” recalls Archer. Morris was a leading light of the Arts and Crafts movement in later Victorian England, whose name has become synonymous with elaborate, botanical patterns and decorative wallpapers. But there was more to the man than prints and textiles, and he influenced much of today’s thinking around reuse, recycling, and avoiding waste. “Whilst he saw the need for machines in the appropriate roles, he also cared passionately about making the workplace a place where craft and artisanship should be able and encouraged to shine,” Archer says. 

Though the pub location was not to be, Morris remained the inspiration for the nascent brewery’s name. “His 1896 book, News from Nowhere, talks about his vision for a ‘Utopian’ society, and we take influence from his work—particularly around caring for the natural world and making the workplace an enjoyable place to be,” Archer explains. “And so felt it was appropriate to dedicate the brewery to him.”

Once the idea for the business became serious, a head brewer was needed. The founders interviewed various candidates, but when Archer saw Swainson’s resumé, he realized the right person had been found. Once again, the landscape played its part. “He was in Germany, so we Skyped a couple of times, and then he flew over to take a look at the two empty barns,” Archer recalls. “It was October, but nature was kind to me, as it was the most glorious day with not a cloud in the sky and rich autumnal colors everywhere.”

Swainson, who grew up in Canada, with a Canadian mother and English father, had always enjoyed beer, but this love cemented itself during a year spent in Germany at the age of 18. After he returned to Canada, Swainson turned to homebrewing, and realized he wanted to be a brewer. 

Through various connections in Germany, he managed to get an apprenticeship at Privatbrauerei Bolten, located outside Düsseldorf and specializing in Altbier. After this, he went to the Doemens Academy in Munich and eventually landed in London, where he became the brewing manager at Camden Town Brewery’s new facility in the North London borough of Enfield. After a couple of years in this role, he and his German-born partner Maike Isserman (now Utopian’s events and online shop manager) decided that they had had enough of London and wanted to move to the country.   

“Initially I was responsible for overseeing the commissioning of the Krones brewhouse and cellar,” Swainson recalls of his time at Camden. “Working at Camden was exciting—there was an incredible energy to continuously improve what we were doing, and ensure the beers were spot-on. I’ve always enjoyed great Lagers, but it wasn’t my main focus until Camden. Like many brewers I was drawn to hoppy IPAs, Belgian Saisons, Imperial Stouts. Working at Camden ensured I stayed focused on brewing Lager, and by the time I met Richard I think the decision had been made for me.” 

He pauses and laughs. “Before I started at Utopian, I almost went to work for a brewery in Canada which pretty much only made Sours, so things could have turned out quite differently!”

Until recently, Ruth Mitchell was Utopian’s head of sales, but she now works at Elusive Brewing in Berkshire. What stood out when first meeting Swainson, she says, “was his absolute determination to do what was right rather than what was easy. I asked him why Utopian use decoction mashing. As someone who had come from Ale-based breweries [including West Berkshire Brewery and Adnams Brewery], it was a step I wasn’t familiar with. He responded that even though it was a lot of work, and didn’t seem from the outside to add anything dramatic to the finished flavor profile, it gave the beer soul—something you couldn’t pinpoint but that the beer would be lacking without.” 

TIME WAITS FOR CHEESE, CIDER, AND LAGER

Besides Utopian, this region of mid-Devon is home to several other well-regarded food and drink businesses, including artisanal cheese and cider producers. They, too, serve as a reflection of the timelessness of the landscape, their seasonal, methodical approach another example of the region’s surface slowness. However, if you look beneath this veneer of stillness, there is activity—animals are reared, crops sown, cattle milked, cheese aged, orchards cropped, and beer lagered.

A few miles from Clannaborough Barton, the town of Crediton is home to Sandford Orchards, an award-winning cider business founded by Barny Butterfield nearly 20 years ago. Sandford is located in purpose-built premises constructed between the two World Wars in the middle of a now-vanished orchard. The original cider producer that had occupied this land, Creedy Valley, was bought and closed by Bulmers in the 1960s, bringing an end to 150 years of cider-making in the area. When I visit Butterfield, we stand on a site overlooking Crediton and he shows me where orchards once grew, including the space where a big supermarket now sits. “At one stage you could say that Crediton was a town within an orchard,” he reminisces.

Inside the building, I see a sprawling space, packed with stainless steel vats that reach up to the ceiling. It looks like a lot of cider, I say, but Butterfield points out that these vessels contain the juice from apples picked from up to two years ago, all of which will be used for blending. I make the connection with Utopian’s dedication to lagering and Butterfield laughs. “Anyone who makes Lager will understand the pain of storing liquids. We’ve been selling Utopian’s beer for over a year at the Cider Works for our customers. I’ve only heard good things about them—I also love the fact that they are loyal to British-grown ingredients, [which is] a rare trait in beer.”

Further south of Crediton, there is another food producer for which landscape and time are an integral part of the process. This is the artisanal cheesemaker Quicke’s, based in the nearby village of Newton St Cyres (where incidentally, the oldest brewpub in Devon, The Beer Engine, is located). The Quicke family has farmed in this area for many generations, and Mary Quicke explains how the local landscape feeds back into the cheesemaking she oversees. 

“The landscape is the background, the ground and the context of everything we do,” she tells me by email. “Who knows which bit? It’s another of those glorious unknowables, like the microbial communities in the soil, the cows’ rumens, our heritage starters, on the rinds of our cheese, the maturation of cheese, and the way the flavors show up for people with their own landscapes and contexts. I love belonging here. It’s a deep joy, privilege and honor.” 

This handsome part of Devon is a place where people care about their food and drink, how it is made, the enjoyment and pleasure it gives, and the place it has in the environment. It does not surprise me that Utopian has experienced a generous welcome in local pubs. Many, which are used to selling cider, traditional cask beer, and generic Lager brands, are now stocking Utopian’s beers. 

“The landscape is the background, the ground and the context of everything we do. Who knows which bit? It’s another of those glorious unknowables, like the microbial communities in the soil, the cows’ rumens, our heritage starters, on the rinds of our cheese, the maturation of cheese, and the way the flavors show up for people with their own landscapes and contexts. I love belonging here. It’s a deep joy, privilege and honor.”

“The fabulous thing about being in a fairly rural setting is that many of the pubs around us are independent, which gives you a better starting point than being surrounded by ones operated by Greene King or Wetherspoon’s,” says Archer at the brewery. “The local pubs have been fantastic.” 

Swainson chimes in to share that one local pub recently replaced Coors Light with his Czech 10˚ Lager. “The beer is 25 IBUs and 3.9%, and so you think we took Coors Light off the tap and put a pretty dark golden beer with 25 IBUs and a significant hop aroma and people are happy to drink that. That is about as happy as I can get.” 

ELABORATING ON COLLABORATION

“What identifies Utopian is making Lager, and making a high-quality Lager as much as we can,” Archer says. “Keep improving. At the same time, we love brewing different things, and do that through collaborations.”

To this end, Swainson recently partnered with Bristol Beer Factory on an Alt and a Helles, while a collaboration with Yeastie Boys (which bases its operations in both the U.K. and New Zealand) yielded an ESB. “We don’t plan immediately to create another brand for us to sell Ales through,” says Swainson. “We will always be completely focused on Lagers, but where there is room to experiment and put out something interesting, via a single outlet or with a collaboration, we will do that.” More significantly, the itinerant Yeastie Boys recently asked Utopian if it would contract brew all its beers at the rural outpost in mid-Devon. 

Stu McKinlay, the British-based Yeastie Boys co-founder, remembers how his former head brewer JK “searched every corner of the country for a new brewery, over nine months or so in 2019. I think we had 30-40 on the list, with JK visiting around a dozen that were relatively serious options. Utopian somehow ended up on that list. They were completely new, possibly just commissioning the brewery when we first heard of them, so we knew nothing about them other than their grand plans to make great British Lager.” 

Having worked with several U.K. breweries since setting up the British side of the Yeastie Boys operation, McKinlay has a pretty good idea of what works for his idiosyncratic approach to making beer. It wasn’t long before he started to take a great interest in Utopian’s operations.

“We quickly discovered that they were going to be near the top of the list. JK visited them and immediately picked Jeremy and Richard as being humble and very serious about quality,” McKinlay says. “They had everything we needed—the right type of brewery, capacity, a focus on quality, and as good an in-house canning line as we could hope for … by Christmas 2019 we’d decided that we really wanted to brew all our beer with them, so we focused on the transition in the first few months of 2020.” 

When the pandemic hit, the volume of beer McKinlay expected to brew was halved, and planning had to be done over Zoom. However, everything at Utopian was already in place before the first lockdown began, which helped make the transition smooth.

For Archer, the decision to contract brew is not just about getting volume through the brewhouse, which of course is useful from a financial perspective. He also sees it as beneficial for the brewing team.

“It is nice for the brewhouse team to be able to brew different styles of beers from time to time, and to work with and exchange ideas with other brewers,” he says. However, he is also content at the moment to stay with the brewery’s two core partners, Bristol Beer Factory and Yeastie Boys.

“We’ve built great relationships with both of these breweries, and by and large there is little overlap with what we do, so the arrangements are mutually beneficial beyond just the additional volume,” he says. “That is very important to me, and so going forward I definitely see it remaining as an important part of the business—but an area that becomes a smaller proportion of our business as our own volume continues to grow.”

THE FUTURE IS COMING

Nobody knows what the future holds. Two years ago, none of us could have guessed at the devastating effects of the pandemic, which was financially challenging to the brewery, according to Archer. “Whilst the big increase in can sales has been fantastic, we desperately need keg volume to keep the brewery busy at the level we need it to be,” he admits. “We are fortunate to have a very supportive set of shareholders who have dipped into their pockets to support us, and that’s been an invaluable lifeline as overall government support has been patchy at best. The great news is that we kept everyone employed and also kept brewing, helped in no small part by the contract work for Yeastie Boys.”

As well as maintaining the brewing schedule and keeping the staff in work, Archer sees a silver lining in the long months of lockdown, a viewpoint that reflects the generally upbeat nature of Utopian’s philosophy.

“However, without lockdown, we may not have brewed the Czech 10˚, the Cerne [Black Lager], the Export, and the collabs with the Yeasties and Bristol Beer Factory, all within the space of five months,” Archer says. “Those beers have undoubtedly helped us get the Utopian brand out to a much wider audience and across a much wider geographic spread within the country, so as things loosen up it’s now down to us to make sure that we use that as a springboard to keep us moving forward.”

Success is worth celebrating, but it also invites questions about the brewery’s future. If there is more demand for beers, will Swainson be pressured to cut his lagering time? Will he always be able to adhere to his values, of doing things slowly and according to tradition, despite the associated expense? At the moment, he and Archer say that won’t change. The latter points out that there is space in the shed to double the number of both fermentation vessels (the brewery currently has three 35-hectoliter, or 21-barrel, FVs, and three 70 hl/43 BBL FVs) and conditioning tanks (four 35 hl and five 70 hl), but life has a habit of coming up with all sorts of surprises. 

However, that is the future. For now, as I drive back through this landscape of Lager, cheese, and cider, of grass-fed beef farms, of independent pubs finally able to open up to local people, I think about how slowly life moves out here. Yes, Lager has its landscapes in continental Europe, but so it does in Devon, too.

Words by Adrian Tierney-JonesPhotos by Nicci Peet