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.”