The Farmers Mart Dec/Jan 2016 - Issue 43 | Page 22

Great Newsome Farm

There’s something brewing
at Great Newsome…
Chris Berry headed to the Holderness coast to meet arable farmers and
award-winning brewing family, the Hodgsons of South Frodingham.
»»Sleckdust, Outfoxed,
Frothingham Best, Pricky Back
Otchan and Liquorice Lads
Stout. These are all now as
familiar to the Hodgsons of
Great Newsome Farm in South
Frodingham near Withernsea,
as naming their wheat varieties
– for the record those are:
Invicta, Revelation, Lili and Zulu,
all grown for the soft biscuit
market.
Great Newsome Brewery
began in earnest in 2007,
several years after brothers,
Matthew and Jonathan and
their father, Laurence had
begun thinking about it. They
now brew five times a week,
regularly supply more than 50
pubs, deliver as far as Whitby,

Sheffield and Bradford, have
nine bottled beers, sell to
wholesalers anywhere in the
UK, have an export trade, have
six cask beers on all the time
throughout the year and a
seasonal cask beer.
In 2013 they entered their
Frothingham Best in the World
Beer Awards hoping that it might
do well. It was a great idea: they
won the Best Beer in the World
under 5 per cent, which got
them on to BBC Radio 2 and
BBC Radio 5 Live. Since then
they have won the European
Bronze Award for Frothingham
Best in 2014 and in 2015, their
new Liquorice Lads’ Stout took
the European Gold Award. Other
awards have followed.

22 Dec/Jan 2016 www.farmers-mart.co.uk

“Our biggest challenge
has been in marketing and
producing a product that
someone wants to buy,”
Matthew told me. “We’d been
used to running the farm
producing crops and getting
the best price we could from
the merchant, but with beer
it is listening to what your
customers tell you that is
the key to finding out what
works. ‘Outfoxed’ is a recent
addition and is a red rye beer
to cater for the guest beer
market where people are more
experimental in what they drink.
Most of our customers enjoy
something that they can have a
few pints of on a night out,” he
explained.

“Starting a microbrewery
had been in our minds since
the end of 1999. We did quite
a lot of research and had
a consultant who came to
see us but at the time things
didn’t look as though they
would stack up. Then the
local food and drink surge
started to kick off around
2005-06 and we could see
where there might be a
market for what we had in
mind, as one or two pubs
in the area had become
freeholds. We also scaled
back our initial idea to house
the brewery in a smaller older
farm building, which meant
our start-up cost was more
affordable.”