Harbour Brewing

Harbour will use fruit from the on-site orchard, foraged herbs and native yeasts to create a range of small batch beers at the new facility

Cornwall-based Harbour Brewing Co has opened a new research and development base.

Harbour will use the 900 sq ft facility in north Cornwall to develop a range of small batch, limited edition and experimental beers, using fruit from its on-site orchard, foraged herbs and native yeasts.

The brand has enlisted former Beavertown head brewer James Rylance to lead the project. “This new project is a dream,” he said. “We’re surrounded by some of the best ingredients I’ve ever encountered, growing wild in the fields and hedgerows, and have planted a lot of additional herbs on the land.”

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New kit includes a mobile coolship “so we can cultivate wild yeast from anywhere - whether that’s beneath a blossom-covered apple tree, or in a grassy paddock. The result is beer that we can truly call our own, with flavours unique to this spot in Cornwall, impossible to replicate anywhere else in the world”.

So far the facility has already produced three limited-run beers - a hibiscus & pineapple sage pale ale, a lemon verbena & sage saison and a cherry sour.

The brand was “extremely proud of our core rage”, said Harbour MD Eddie Lofthouse, but the R&D facility marked “an opportunity to take things one step further, with the capacity to be much more flexible and responsive as the seasons and ingredients”.