The big jump came towards the end of 2019. Packing up the kitchen and taking the opportunity presented by Duncan at 71 Brewing. To rent a corner of their warehouse for cold side (fermentation and packaging) while using 71’s brewkit for hot side (brewing). To put this leap into perspective, our brews went from 400L to 4000L at a time! We quickly added two new fermenters into the space to cope with the huge jump in size.
It’s a unique position somewhere between gypsy, contract and cuckoo brewing but we’ve found our stride with our new neighbours. The 71 Team helped us dial our recipes up to commercial batches 10 times the size of our kitchen operation. Distancing our mixed-culture fermentations from the beers at 71 Brewing was crucial to prevent our yeast ending up in their beers, a potential disaster!
The Vault City style, which we have coined Modern Sour Beer, was born out of this house mixed-culture. Each base beer has heavy tropical undertones and a sherbet-like tartness but also a natural sweetness for balance, and of course, we then add a boat load of fruit into the mix!
Just before Covid-19 hit the UK we doubled our capacity by adding two more 4000L fermenters to the cellar. Not long after that we welcomed in our new bottling line, an amazing step up from hand bottling, which is capable of filling as many bottles in an hour as we could in a full day by hand! With the demand in the UK and abroad increasing for our Modern Sour Beers, and our love of making them growing with each brew, we picked up the pace of new flavour combinations and releases all summer!
So here we are. Writing from our space at 71 Brewing in Dundee, overflowing the space and staring to prepare for a move back to Edinburgh. Portobello in fact, where the floors are being prepped for the arrival of our very own brewkit.
More stories from the Vault coming soon…