At Stroud Brewery, we’re passionate about producing great tasting organic beer that brings people together and creates positive change. So, we’re over the moon to discover both our local community and our business peers think we’re doing a great job of this. In fact, they’re so impressed with what we’re doing that they’ve honoured us with a bevy of awards for our beer, our taproom and our overall business. At the risk of coming over all bashful, here are the details:
Readers of our local newspaper, Stroud News & Journal, voted for us as the ‘Business of theYear’ category of the inaugural Community Heroes Awards. This means the world to us as we wouldn’t be here without our local community: their investments enabled the brewery to get started, and then by raising over £114,000 in crowdfunding to keep us afloat when our position became precarious during the pandemic.
SoGlos honoured us with the titles of ‘Gloucestershire’s Lifestyle Business of the Year’ and ‘Pub/Bar of the Year’. We were up against stiff competition as the county is home to a plethora of fabulous innovative businesses providing top class customer service and, wherever you turn, there’s another wonderful pub or bar. Our success here is thanks to you, our customers and the public, voting for us once again added to the decision of SoGlos’ judging panel who also saw us as worthy of the titles. To win this top award from the county’s leading lifestyle media and to be recognised by the county is such an honour.
The awards given out by SIBA (Society of Independent Breweries) are all about the beers. We were thrilled when four of our beers (Budding, Hop Drop, Easy Peazy and Light Organic Lager) won Gold at SIBA’s Wales & West annual beer competition with Light Organic Lager also claiming the overall winner’s title in the category for Bottles & Cans Session Lager up to 4.4% ABV. Light Organic Lager goes through to the National Finals at the BeerX Festival in Liverpool early next year. SIBA is the UK’s leading voice for independent brewers so they know a thing or two about beer.
The golds continued in the Taste of the West Awards’ when the judges awarded gold in the beer category to our Big Cat Organic Stout, accompanied by silver for Budding Organic Pale Ale and Easy Peasy Organic Session Ale. TOTW is the largest independent regional group in the UK to promote and support local food and drink from Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Somerset and Wiltshire.
This is such good news for us. If we don’t brew great tasting beer which people want to drink, then it doesn’t matter how sustainable and responsible we are, we won’t have a business!
And it doesn’t stop there! We’ve just heard that we’ve made the finals of the Sustainable Pub of the Year category of the Great British Pub Awards. The winners will be announced on the 19th September – keep your fingers crossed for us!
