What a year it has been at Stewart Brewing! Despite a challenging trading environment and facing significant pressures, our business continues to grow as we enter our 18th year. At the heart of our business is a loyal and supportive community of beer lovers and an expert team of craft brewers who create the Stewart Brewing magic.
Our three founding principles remain; make great quality beer, deliver exceptional customer service and to have fun doing it!
Here’s a selection of our highlights from 2022. Don’t forget to comment or share your favourite moments too!
January –
We kickstarted the new year by releasing our new limited edition Cask Beer for the Six Nations Rugby, floral and citrusy Backing Blue!
February –
The Six Nations kicked off with Scotland beating England 20-17 and sales of Backing Blue continued to grow.
We began crafting our annual International Women’s Day brew: Clara Rosa, with the help of our female team members. Named after the founders of International Women’s Day; Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg, this year we crafted a Double Dry Hopped NEIPA with a tropical twist and donated £350 to ‘SHE Scotland’.
March –
With budding flowers come brilliant new flavours as we launched our Clara Rosa, zesty citrusy Orange Hop and blueberry Mosaic New Relic, and sold over 146,000 cans throughout the year.
Stewart Brewing then decided to turn its focus to international aid in our support of the Ukrainian war effort by crafting our solidarity brew: Resist. All proceeds went to the Red Cross Humanitarian Relief Effort and in total we managed to donate £6145!
April –
April began with fruity tones that give way to a long-lasting bitterness as we released our South Pacific Pale Ale: to Scottish Morrison’s and Sainsbury’s and launched our new, Stainless-Steel Growlers to help keep our beer fresh.
Stewart Brewing organised a local litter Pick before partnering up with Seilich to help protect wildflower meadows and natural wildlife habitats that are key to preserving the environmental beauty and health of the UK.
May –
Our new Skeleton Blues brew was sold on Jet 2 flights before becoming their number-one-selling beer! We also released our latest Project 7 Cranachan with a smooth and creamy oat flavour and successfully distributed our Forbidden Fruit, NEIPA and Small Giant brews into all Scottish Lidl stores.
This month Stewart Brewing had the incredible opportunity to support the Edinburgh Marathon Festival and sold a well-deserved beer to the finishers and their supporters.
June –
Hot off the fitness fever of May, the annual Stewart Brewing Hop Run took place in partnership with our friends at Durty Events. Hop Run is our landmark event, part of our initiative to encourage drinking sustainability and balanced living. We rewarded our athletes with celebratory beer and pizza at our restaurant.
July –
Our partnership with Heriot-Watt University blossomed into fruition as a small team of brewery students crafted, branded, and sold ‘Buck Wild’.
Stewart Brewing’s fruity Sunkissed Peach, rich Cocoa-Nut and refreshing State Trooper brews were launched into UK LIDL stores to showcase a variety of leading, cutting-edge flavours for Lidl’s upcoming beer festival.
Also, our Brewery Bar and Pizza Kitchen were named one of TripAdvisor’s Choice Winners for 2022!
August –
The Edinburgh International Festival and Fringe kicked off this month and we opened a pop-up bar at the Pleasence to showcase our new, innovative beers.
A collection of our beers placed 2nd in the World Beer Awards, notably our Orange Hop, Session IPA and NEIPA brews that showed off our world-leading recipes!
We were also part of Channel 4’s filming of Hobby Man with Scarlett Moffatt and Alex Brooker which helped display how anyone can get involved with their passion for beer.
September –
Brewery tours relaunched in September, offering the exciting opportunity to join us at 7pm on Friday nights and get a taste of how our team crafts delicious new flavours.
SIBA Awards gave us a silver for our Stewart’s 80/- brew for the best Scottish dark beer!
A combination of Lager and Munich malts create our lightly sweet and spicy Project 7 Oktoberfest brew, released at the turn of the month to celebrate the widely known Munich Festival.
October –
Happy eighteenth! We celebrated Stewart Brewing’s eighteenth year of business with a new Tropical IPA special and with takeover and Meet the Brewer events throughout Edinburgh.
The game was on as the Autumn International Rugby tests got underway and we teamed up with Edinburgh city centre pubs to launch our campaign: Taste Edinburgh, Support Scotland to encourage our rugby fans to try our award-winning 80/- brew.
We won Product development team of the year in recognition of the leading skill of our team and incredible quality of our new brews!
November –
We marked a month of growth for Stewart Brewery as our iconic, foundational brew ‘Radical Road’ was launched in all Scotland JD Wetherspoons in 330ml cans.
December –
It’s ‘All Good In The Pud’ for our limited edition, Christmas Pudding brew full of raisin, currants, and citrus peel notes that we released to LIDL this month!
Our final Project 7 brew for this year was a barrel-aged Belgian Quadrupel dark beer that brought together smoky, vanilla notes with a nutty toffee yeast to create the Bonnie Belgian.
Finally, we celebrated a new menu for our Bar and Pizza Kitchen to end the year with a Christmas feast...
