Just in time for the festive season, Edinburgh-based craft brewer Vault City has secured a place for one of its stouts on the shelves at Tesco.
Vault City made its name with heavily fruited, modern sour beers, and a range of those is already being stocked by Tesco, Asda, Morrisons, and Sainsbury’s.
But with stout sales soaring – it is now the fastest-growing beer category in the UK – the firm is particularly happy to have made an in-road with one of its stout products, the Gingerbread Latte Imperial Stout.
Featuring chocolate malt, oats and vanilla, this Christmassy ‘Jingle brew’ has an ABV of 11%. The tasting notes promise ‘delicate sweetness while subtle coffee notes meld with cosy, warming spices of cinnamon and ginger’.
Tesco said in April this year that it had seen sales of stout grow by 35%, driven not just by incumbents such as Guinness, but also a growing number of craft producers.
The supermarket said it was stocking 15 different stouts ‘which would have been unthinkable about five years ago’.
Vault City also recently debuted a Last Christmas Sour Beer, taking its name from ‘80s pop band Wham!, and its flavour from boiling and infusing 500 Wham chew bars into the brew.
Vault City’s co-founder Steven Smith-Hay said: “These new supermarket listings are yet another major milestone for us as we seek to reach as many people as possible with our beers in a wide range of mind-blowing seasonal flavour combinations.
“Our Gingerbread Latte Imperial Stout has proved highly popular since it was launched. It tastes really festive, with the lightness of the vanilla, spiciness of the ginger, and the sweetness of the brown sugar balancing well with the rich and deep flavour of the stout. We firmly believe it stands out among more established rivals.”
The entrepreneur, who began by brewing beers in his kitchen, added: “We have always wanted to be the biggest dedicated sour beer producer in the world – and now securing our first supermarket listing for stout means we can make major in-roads into this growing market too. Our plans are being accelerated by our upcoming move to a much larger manufacturing site.”
The company is moving to a new state-of-the-art brewery seven times the size of its previous premises, funded by a £330,000 crowdfunder.
The 34,000 sq ft site, at BioCampus, Scotland’s first dedicated national bio-manufacturing campus located within the Midlothian Science Zone in Edinburgh, will allow Vault City to produce more than 10 million litres of beer a year, an increase of more than eight million, with scope to expand further.
