Three of the things we’ve been gaining a reputation for at Beer Nouveau are being a completely vegan brewery, recreating heritage recipes, and brewing things that are a little bit weirder than you might expect.

We made the decision to be a vegan brewery because we don’t agree with using animal products to make things look pretty. There is no justifiable reason to use finings in beer other than for marketing purposes, making a beer clear purely to sell it.

Heritage brewing is something we’ve always been interested in, the fact that brewers of the past were able to produce beers so good they were able to build up large estates of tied pubs full of loyal drinkers, with far more basic equipment and simpler ingredients than we have today.

And coming from a homebrew background, there’s always been a side for experimentation: we launched with a thyme-infused session beer and a barley wine, and gained a name with a passion fruit and sage pale ale!
These are three things that we want to keep pushing, but whilst we’ve been doing our research into historic recipes we’ve come across two that don’t fit with our brewery being vegan. We’ve been debating with ourselves for a while now about whether or not we’d ever brew these two beers.

Coming up soon we have a Weird Is My Happy Place weekend, where we’ll be pouring some of the weirdest beers we’ve ever brewed. For this event we’ve decided to brew these two unusual historic beers. This will be a one-off break in our vegan rule. We’ll be making only one cask of each of these beers, and they’ll be on sale only at the brewery tap where we ourselves will be serving them, making sure that people know these are not vegan or vegetarian.

So what are these two incredibly weird beers that we’re resurrecting? The infamous Cock Ale, and Mercer’s Meat Stout. We’ll put up more details about the beers and how we’ve recreated them as we brew them, but for now we felt that a warning, and an explanation, were required.