The Otter Brewery
The Otter Brewery is an award winning micro-brewery in the heart of the Blackdown Hills, an SSSI and AONB. After seventeen years with Whitbread it was the vision of David McCaig to create a complete antithesis to mass produced and artificially flavoured beers. Family values and service, traditional methods, environmentally sound practices and first rate ingredients all underpin the brand. The next stage of investment will see a new eco-friendly clay block cellar surrounded by willow beds and finished with a sedum (living grass) roof.
The aim of the brewery has always been to produce commercially viable beers that are full of integrity, provenance and real character. High quality local ingredients including malt from nearby Tuckers are combined with pure water from head springs of the River Otter (700 feet up) to produce a superior product. Otter Ale, perhaps the most well known, is a premium beer with a 4.5% ABV and is the perfect accompaniment to food. Production started in November 1990 and it sets the benchmark for the whole range. With a distinct malt aroma and hints of fruit it has a deep rich colour not too dissimilar to a beautifully polished piece of mahogany and is a completely natural product that gently carbonates itself.
Waste products from each of the brewing processes are extracted and used to benefit the breweries immediate surroundings. Spent malt is taken by Andrew Tucker to feed his beef herd in the Luppitt Valley, waste yeast goes directly to a pig farm in nearby Stockland and the used hops make excellent mulch for organic gardeners. All remaining brewery effluent is treated naturally using ponds and willow beds and the site is a haven for frogs, toads, newts, birdlife, deer, badgers and foxes. It is the extra effort made by the Brewery that impressed judges enough to honour them as the overall winner in the ‘Greener Devon’ category of the 2007 Devon Environmental Awards.
Otter hope their policy of sourcing ingredients locally will be adopted by others, and also their decision to be as environmentally friendly as is possible. Since 1990 they have planted lime trees, beech, oak and blossom orchards around the brewery and now aim to reduce their environmental footprint still further by exploring the feasibility of converting the fleet of 8 delivery vehicles to run on bio fuel. There are also plans to install a wood chip boiler at the brewery within the next 2 years which would use a sustainable fuel of locally cropped hedge row wood and willow from the on-site willow beds.
www.otterbrewery.com