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Breweries - Summerskills

 © Campaign for Real Ale (Plymouth Branch) 2008

Brewery address:

15 Pomphlett Farm Industrial Estate
Broxton Drive
Billacombe
Plymouth
PL9 7BG
Tel 01752 481283
Website:- www.summerskills.co.uk
Email norm@summerskills.co.uk

The Summerskills Brewery crest originally a sign of a nobleman from Bigbury, later the crest of H.M.S Bigbury Bay.

The brewery was originally set up by Adam Summerskill in his vineyard at Bigbury in1983 with a 2½ barrel brew plant. From there it moved to the White Lion, Stonehouse in 1984 then to its present location in 1985. This enabled the expansion to a 10 barrel brew length with equipment from the Penrhos Brewery that had closed in 1983, only for production at Summerskills to lapse in 1988. Fortunately for the ale drinkers of Plymouth, Carl Beeson and Rick Wilson purchased the brewery in 1990.

Rick took on the mantle of brewer, using as today malt from Tuckers at Newton Abbot and English hops from Charles Faram in Worcestershire.

The brewery has gone from strength to strength and won a number of awards. When Rick retired in 2005 Carl bought his interest in the business and employed his BLO (Brewery Liaison Officer) David Lewis aka Norman as the new brewer. His first task was to revive Indiana's Bones and a number of new beers have since been introduced with I.K.B 1859 and Devon Dew becoming seasonal and all year round brews respectively.

Carl retired as of May 2012 and Norm has acquired ownership of the brewery.

National distribution is via a carefully vetted network of wholesalers, ensuring nationwide coverage for the company's award winning ales.

Please see brewery website for list of current beers

 

 

 

 

 

 
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The 2012 Good Beer Guide is available from 15th September 2011.

Prices start at just £10 (members only) for the paperback edition. To purchase your copy please visit our online store.

Save your pint!

The beer duty escalator was introduced by the last Government in 2008, and is currently in place until 2014/15. It means that beer duty is automatically increased by 2% above inflation every single year.

As a result, tax on beer has gone up by over 40% since 2008. You now pay over a third of your pint on tax.

Any more increases in beer duty will increase the pressure on pubs already struggling to survive and damage the long term ability of the beer and pub sector to continue contributing over £6 billion a year in duty and VAT, and over £21 billion to the UK’s GDP.

CAMRA is calling for the Chancellor to abandon the unfair beer duty escalator in the next Budget.

What is Real Ale?

Real ale is beer brewed from traditional ingredients, matured by secondary fermentation in the container from which it is dispensed, and served without the use of extraneous carbon dioxide.

Real ale is also known as 'cask-conditioned beer', 'real cask ale', 'real beer' and 'naturally conditioned beer'. The term 'real ale' and the above definition were coined by CAMRA. Real ale comes in bottles too!. It is beer which continues to ferment, mature and condition within the bottle. It contains a visible amount of viable yeast cells together with sufficient fermentable sugars for this to take place..