Our First Brewsletter of 2026
Welcome to our first Brewsletter of the year! If you’re new here, we like to reflect on the last few days, weeks, months and all the exciting updates at Vault City. It’s a new year, we’re in a new brewery and we’re looking back on what was honestly a pretty wild 2025 for us.
Before we look ahead, we’re taking a look back…
A Quick Look Back at 2025
We released 118 unique beers in 2025. That’s a lot, even for a craft beer brewery like us! However, it was instrumental in getting us into our new brewery, all while staying independent. There was a huge level of support from our amazing customers required to get where we are now, and that meant releasing a lot of new beers to fuel this giant leap for Vault City. So, thank you for sticking with us through what was our most ambitious, chaotic, and creative year yet.
The big takeaway from last year was that our community care deeply about what we do, and with your feedback we want to keep making things even better. Which brings us neatly on to…
Your Feedback (and What We’re Doing About it)
We recently ran a survey with our trade customers and carried out a little social listening across our channels, and the feedback was really thoughtful, constructive and reassuring.
Here’s what stood out:
Customer service & love for sours & stouts
There were some genuinely lovely comments and overwhelmingly positive sentiment regarding our customer service, specifically about Cammy who was managing our Info inbox and Joe & Ben who look after trade customers. That meant a lot to us and to the team behind the accounts.
There was a lot of love for our stouts, and the fact we brewed more dark beers in 2025 than any other year.
Volume of Releases
One of the most common bits of feedback was around volume of releases, particularly on allocation. We hear you. Brewing 118 unique beers was exciting but it didn’t leave enough breathing time between releases. In 2026 we’re simplifying things, aiming to stick mostly to 3 beers every 2 weeks, with a few BIG moments where we go harder around our birthday, Marvellous Liquids and Christmas.
Core Range vs Supermarket Sours & Stouts
Your feedback highlighted that while our core range pricing feels fair, you’d like a fresh look with new beers and more fruit forward flavours (plus more 5s on the sour scale).
The feedback also highlighted some confusion over our core range and where things sit. It’s designed to be a collection of Vault City beers that are approachable in terms of flavour and price but kept separate from supermarkets, although perhaps historically a few releases have blurred the lines, and it’s prompted us to review the range.
To put it into perspective, less than 10 beers from the 118 we brewed in 2025 ended up in supermarkets. The vast majority of what we brew is for our specials programme, and that’s not going to change. The way we work with supermarkets is very clear, we aim to keep a tight range of 4 or 5 seasonal beers that go across all the retailers we work with and this rotates twice a year
We’ve purposely positioned ourselves as a premium upsell within retail, taking a slightly different approach to most when it comes to price per litre, and our ingredient costs. For example, our average selling price per litre is currently +67% higher than the average price per litre vs the rest of craft beer category… We don’t cut corners just because a beer is going into a bigger shop.
So, in 2026 we’ll be brewing up fresh ideas for a core range review, with the aim to refresh and relaunch a tighter range specifically for trade customers (bars, taprooms, bottle shops). While we refresh our core range we’re also looking at future supermarket sours and stouts, communicating things clearer going forward so you know exactly which beers are for retail.
Quality First, Always.
Untappd shared a 2025 Wrapped stat that genuinely stopped us in our tracks. They shared a list of breweries with the most 5-star check-ins across the globe in 2025 and Vault City made the top 5 (alongside Other Half, & Treehouse to name a few)!
We’re number 2 in Europe for total check-ins, and one of the fastest growing breweries in the top 10 for unique users. That last bit means we’re bringing new people into modern sours and dark beers, not just preaching to the converted.
What we did notice though, especially during the challenging months where we straddled both our old site and our new brewery, was that our overall average dipped slightly (-0.3%). This is normal for a brewery with well over a million check-ins (and we know sours aren’t always for everyone), but it got us hungry to really push forward with what we do best and grow our ratings further.
Early Access, Loyalty Schemes & Behind the Scenes Content
Lots of survey responses highlighted that people wanted to see more of the process of how our beers are made, and the people who make them. You wanted earlier access to our release schedule and some tweaks to our allocations programme with every release included and reward tiers for bars and bottle shops. More on this later…
Looking Ahead in 2026
This year is about settling into our forever home and refining the way we do things. We’ve made some key hires specifically focusing on New Product Development to help us take small batch ideas like Gloop and brew them on a slightly bigger scale. We’ve also invested in lots of new kit to help us work more regularly with unfermented fruit (which we know works incredibly well with our mixed fermentation base beer) especially in smoothie sours. Did someone say Stoopid?
We’re also refining our allocations programme, introducing a brand-new loyalty programme:
Your Key to the Vault
We’ve built a new loyalty programme that rewards our amazing trade customers who subscribe to all our new releases with:
-Unique merch & gifts every quarter plus credit-based discounts that reward loyalty.
-Early access to our release calendar
-Exclusive small batch releases, priority support for events and export market exclusives/collabs only otherwise available outside the UK
For those already in the Vault, we’re working on your welcome pack so keep your eyes peeled. For those interested, make sure you’re part of our trade newsletter. All will be released soon.
Our New Site
There’s no two ways about it; this new site is a dream come true for us as a brewery. It’s big enough for us to consolidate multiple sites (production, dispatch and storage) all into one, and there’s room to grow, all while remaining independent. This was only ever possible because of your support through both our 2024 and 2025 crowdfunder sales and we’ll be forever grateful.
In November we closed our Portobello brewery for good, moving all production to our new site at the Biocampus, in Penicuik, Edinburgh. It was a gigantic effort and is still ongoing, but we have been brewing and packaging beer here for nearly 3 months while we continue to commission existing and new bits of kit.
Alongside some fresh tanks (and a brand-new 65-hectolitre, three-vessel brew kit), we’ve invested in a flash pasteuriser, a new kegging line, a de-aerated liquor (DAL) plant, carboblend, fully automated CIP skid and a decanter centrifuge. Together, these upgrades significantly improve stability, oxygen control, process consistency and most importantly, overall flavour.
We’re also working on opening our doors for tours, taprooms and crowdfunder reward-tier brew days (comms coming soon).
Sour Science & Innovation
Vault City have often been described as the Willy Wonka of sour beer, with a unique blend of traditional brewing and mad science to create a variety of weird of wonderful beers. We’re now diving deeper into the science, with Food Scientist, Madz Spence, joining the team to lead on innovation at Vault City. Joining us from Mathieson’s Bakery where she worked as New Product Development Manager, and Frucor Suntory as Product Development Technologist, she’ll be right at home researching and trialling new ways to make our beers better than ever, with more wham chew bars, and double deep fried m*rs bars no doubt!
For smoothie sours especially we’ve been focusing on sourcing the freshest produce and utilising unfermented fruits paired with our new pasteurisation process for a beer that’s extremely thick, flavourful and totally shelf stable. Our first smoothie sour of 2026 might be our best yet, and you seriously won’t believe it’s not crumble…
This same approach means new ways to scale up Gloop, our cream stout and Vault City’s highest rated beer ever. This of course will be available first to our loyalty programme customers. Watch this space.
One Last Thing
Thank you for sticking with us through a wild year in 2025, for being honest, and for sharing your feedback with us.
We’re making big plans for 2026 and as always you’re a huge part of that. More soon 🍻