Not content with a recent DBA Design Effectiveness Award for their packaging, multi award winning, artisan brewery Two Cocks has updated its brand to reflect the revamped business as a whole – something altogether more premium and with greater shelf/bar impact. The hand-applied feather to each and every bottle label and pump clip gives a nod to the business’s poultry farm roots and reflects the brand name, and at the same time underlines the brewery’s desire to produce a small-scale, non-intensive, artisan product with a known provenance. This approach seems to be working, with the beers winning 9 awards in the first two and a half years of brewing and gaining a loyal following of several Michelin-starred chefs. To the brewery’s delight, four beers in the range have also just been awarded Great Taste Award Stars (2 have received 1 star and 2 have received 2 stars).
You may recognise the Two Cocks Brewery name from the last series of Grand Designs (watch the video here) , where a pair of self-confessed urbanites escaped the rat race to build both a new life and a striking 21st century flint farmhouse in rural Berkshire.
The duo, ex marketeer Phil Palmer and former magazine editor Michael Butcher, set up Two Cocks Brewery in 2011 as part of their plan to turn a failing small poultry farm into a thriving modern rural business. Naming the brewery after the cockerels on the business’s logo, they now produce award–winning ale in small batches using water drawn from the farm’s borehole, sunk deep into the West Berkshire chalk.
Clear, fresh and sweet tasting, the water helps give the beers a distinctive edge. Using some of the farm’s own hedgerow hops in every brew gives the beers a definitive flavour note. Hot on sustainability, the brewery’s spent grain is used to feed the couple’s rare breed livestock and the spent hops are used to enrich the soil.
The beers, with Civil War-inspired names in honour of the fact that the brewery is based on a Roundhead encampment of the 1643 battle of Newbury, are nationally available in bottle through www.drinkmonger.com and www.bottleapostle.com and in cask in pubs across the south of England.