no. 035 | Burning Sky

We can’t remember showcasing a brewery whose founder has more experience than Burning Sky’s. batch no. 036's beers are the result of 28 years experience.

When the time finally came for Burning Sky’s founder, Mark Tranter, to fulfil his long-held ambition of opening a brewery, he was no stranger to the intricacies of the undertaking.

He’d been brewing commercially since 1996, having spent a laudable 17 years working with Dark Star, who were established in Brighton in 1994 and are widely considered as one of the most influential breweries in leading the UK craft beer revolution. Sadly, they changed hands several times following an initial acquisition by Fuller’s in 2018 and have subsequently fallen by the wayside as Asahi took control of the holding group in 2019 and closed their dedicated brewery site in 2022.

Before all of that, Tranter was a fine art student with a love of punk rock. That appreciation for craft, process and refinement, alongside an anti-establishment sensibility, still linger in his worldview and approach to brewing. Whilst he thinks about trends, it’s predominantly to avoid them: “We plough our own forough in a fickle and changeable marketplace”, he says. He’s an adamant believer in creating something people want to seek out — having courage in his own conviction and finding his audience, rather than being told what to do.

But that’s not to say Burning Sky hasn’t drawn influence from elsewhere. Mark had been influenced by traditional Belgian breweries — the likes of Cantillon and Lindemans, who are famous for their wild fermented concoctions, better known as lambics  — and that’s heavily informed the way in which they brew some of their own beers. As a result, their work gets hardened beer enthusiasts particularly excited, partially because it’s hardly being done properly (or well) in the UK.

Burning Sky was one of the first UK breweries since the 1930s to install a coolship, a broad, open-topped vessel used to cool wort during the brewing process. This has allowed them to create beers fermented with wild and naturally occurring yeasts from the South Downs, which are let into the brewery and allowed to mix with strains cultivated in Burning Sky’s own oak barrels. The result is beers that are inherently ‘of the brewery’, offering taste and flavour of the specific place in which they’re brewed having been imparted.

This all sounds complicated, and it is. However, it perfectly demonstrates the level of knowledge and control Mark and his team of 8 are exercising in the brewing process. There’s a lot that could go wrong, which is why this traditional technique is given a wide berth by the majority of breweries. But then, if you do what everyone else is doing, you get what everyone else gets.

When asked what’s next for Burning Sky, Mark is aloof. “We’ll keep that quiet for the time being”, he tells us, before quickly following up with “after the challenges of the last 4 years, we are quite happy to take it easy for a while, thank you”. We almost believe him…