Dartmoor Brewery produces a variety of top quality cask conditioned real ales from the heart of Dartmoor National Park. We are in the unique position of being the highest brewery in England, situated at 1,465ft above sea level in Princetown, Devon.
To create the Westcountry’s finest traditional cask ales, our award winning brewery uses authentic brewing techniques, Dartmoor spring water, the finest Devon malted barley and only the best English hops.
Dartmoor Brewery was established in Princetown in 1994 by Simon Loveless, a former Gibbs Mew and first Hop Back Head brewer (also winner of Strong Bitter Class at CAMRA GBBF.), and Philip Davies, a local businessman, behind the village’s Prince of Wales pub.
Simon’s first class brewing skills quickly earned him a reputation for producing top quality real ales and it wasn’t long before our first beer, Jail Ale (brewed within 800 metres of the infamous Dartmoor Prison) attracted a strong local following.
Despite it being a time when cask ale was in decline and the beer market dominated by big brewers, Simon, who learned his craft while an apprentice with Wiltshire brewer Gibbs Mew, saw potential for quality, small-scale beer production. Cheered on by his growing success and local popularity, he began to expand his brewery and brand portfolio, launching Dartmoor IPA to join Jail Ale.
Word of his success got out, and beer lovers from across the region flocked to Princetown to seek out the home of Jail Ale and enjoy pints in the village pubs, The Prince of Wales and The Plume of Feathers. In 1996 we welcomed a royal visitor, HRH The Prince of Wales, who happily sampled a pint of the famous Jail Ale!
Growing sales saw our then 45 barrel per week microbrewery struggling to meet demand, so a new purpose-built brewery was created 400 yards from the original plot, thanks to an agreement from the Duchy of Cornwall to sell land on the site of the disused Princetown railway station.
In 2005, a new £1.5 million state-of-the-art brewery was built using the very best German brewing equipment, and in 2010 three new 14,000-litre fermenting vessels were added to further increase capacity to cope with ever-growing demand.
Today, Dartmoor Brewery employs 15 people and produces over 2.5 million pints per year to be enjoyed across the South West of England and beyond. We continue to make a name as the only genuine brewer of traditional cask conditioned ales on Dartmoor and are proud to be Devon’s second largest brewer.
The 6 stages of brewing
The taste and quality of Dartmoor Brewery cask ales depends entirely on our recipes, the careful selection of high quality ingredients and the skill of our Head Brewer, Mike Lunney.
Watch the video (on the left) to view the 6 stages of brewing.
Finest Ingredients
We are fortunate to have a rich source of quality ingredients on our doorstep and we work closely to ensure all the ingredients in Dartmoor Brewery ales are sourced as locally as possible. We use Dartmoor and Devon grown barley, English hops and, of course, pure Dartmoor water. For the authentic malted barley taste in our real ales, our barley is sent to Tucker's Maltings in Newton Abbot, one of only four remaining traditional floor maltings in the country.
To produce malt the barley is soaked in warm water, steeped, before the grain is drained and collected into special wheelbarrows. It is then spread evenly over the maltings floor and left to start growing with periodic turning to ensure even germination. When it has reached the correct stage of growth it is removed from the floor and collected, ready to have the little shoots and roots removed, before being sprayed evenly over the floor of the kiln where the Pale Malt is collected and put in bags for delivery to the brewery.
Other types of malt, important for flavouring and colour, can be produced by treating the barley slightly differently with different levels of kilning.
We only use English hops in our traditional cask ales. The varieties we use add a wonderful hop aroma and taste giving our beers a unique Dartmoor flavour.
Dartmoor has an abundant rainfall, which filters through the rock to produce the pure Dartmoor water used in our beers.
Mashing
Malted barley is milled and added to the mash tun (a dedicated vessel for mashing) with Dartmoor water, mixed and heated to 65°C to create the mash. The mash spends approximately an hour in the mash tun while the starch in the malt converts into sugars. The sweet wort (liquid in the mash tun) is then drained to the boiling vessel.
Sparging
To release all the extract from the mash the grain must be sparged by adding more hot Dartmoor water to the top of the mash. These are washed through again with the wort to ensure maximum extraction of the sugars. This is called sparging. Once all the liquid extract has been drained from the mash, the grain that is left is termed spent grain and used for cattle food.
Boiling
Once all the sweet wort is collected in the copper, it is boiled with a mix of hops particular to each beer. This sterilises the now 'hopped' wort and extracts the strong aromas and flavours from the hops, giving each beer its distinctive taste. After boiling, aromatic hops are added and the wort is then transferred to a hop separation vessel. Here the hops particles, having given up their flavours and aromas, are removed leaving clear hopped wort which is cooled for fermentation.
Fermentation
When the wort is transferred to the fermentation vessel, Dartmoor Brewery's unique strain of yeast is added. The yeast ferments the wort, converting the sugars to alcohol and producing carbon dioxide which naturally conditions the finished product, beer.
The fermentation process is temperature controlled to ensure the correct level of alcohol and taste is produced in each beer. After a 4-day fermentation process, the beer is cooled to separate the yeast which has grown, so it can be removed before racking to casks.
Racking
Finished beer is sent for bottling or is racked into cleaned and sterilised stainless casks in the brewery. At this stage a special liquid protein called finings is added. The finings are critical reacting with the yeast causing it to settle at the bottom of the cask in the pub cellar delivering a high quality, crystal clear pint of real ale.
Our Environment & Community
As the only brewery on the moor producing Dartmoor branded beer, we’re passionate about preserving and promoting Dartmoor and its traditions, from working with local suppliers to supporting the community and protecting the environment.
When the new purpose-built Dartmoor Brewery was constructed in 2006, great care was taken to ensure both the building and our brewing methods were as environmentally friendly as possible.
As well as sourcing our ingredients as locally as possible to reduce food miles and our carbon footprint, we are proud to use all products during the brewing process in an environmentally friendly way.
A key part of our traceability programme means that all our spent malt grains and liquids are collected every week by an accredited local farmer to be fed to cattle and pigs.
We are also committed to supporting good local pubs, community groups and events. In recent years, Dartmoor Brewery has backed a range of worthy local causes including pub launches, sporting clubs and music events.
The village of Princetown remains close to the heart of Dartmoor Brewery and we are proud of our ongoing efforts to support the local community, which include sponsoring and supporting the village football club, Princetown F.C.
Dartmoor welcomes a range of sporting events and endurance tests throughout the year and we like to do our bit, in the past sponsoring The Dartmoor Ten Tors and launching our very own Dartmoor Brewery Big Hash walking event across the moor.
Since 2010, Dartmoor Brewery has also sponsored Chagstock, a lively music festival on the northern edge of Dartmoor, supplying real ales as the event’s official beer supplier. We also teamed up with local gourmet food producer Tom’s Pies to create a one-off Official Chagstock Pie made with steak and Jail Ale – it went down a treat with hungry revellers!