no. 050 | Verdant
It’s a new month, but we’re staying in Cornwall. Coinciding with a half century of batches, this isn’t feature brewery no. 050 Verdant’s first time in Jersey, but we’re very pleased to be reintroducing them after a brief hiatus.
Verdant began simply, as three friends in a Cornish garage with a love for aroma, hops and experimentation. What started with a kitchen stockpot and a freezer stuffed with hops soon grew into something larger: a shipping container in a quarry, for which they paid rent of £120 a month and brewed one day a week. “Batch one was a Citra Nelson pale ale and it was good!” recalls co-founder and head brewer James Heffron. “Better than what was around, in my opinion. That excitement carried us forward.”
It was James’s travels that lit the first spark for Verdant. Backpacking in New Zealand, he was enjoying beers like Mac’s Gold which presented him with flavours he hadn’t experienced before – bright citrus flavours, hazy bodies and rounded, elegant mouthfeel. Returning to the UK he started to see (and drink) the likes of Sierra Nevada Pale and early Punk IPA cropping up and knew something was shifting. “The romanticism was too much,” he laughs. “I came home, filled the freezer with hops, and started stinking the whole house out brewing on the stove.”
From the very beginning, Verdant refused to hold back. “I’ve never been restricted on what I can put on a recipe sheet,” says James. “If the whirlpool needs 10 grams per litre, that’s what it gets. If the dry hop needs 25 grams, then it’s 25. The focus is the end product".
Growth has been steady but relentless. Penryn now houses a shiny modern brewery and taproom, with forty-odd people on the team. Beyond their IPAs and DIPAs, they’ve set themselves the challenge of mastering four core styles: New England, West Coast, lager and cask. “We just want to make the best in the world of those four,” says James. “That’s it. Simple as that.”
And they haven’t stopped pushing. Alongside their taproom, Verdant operate four four bars and pubs across Cornwall and this year made a return to London with Verdant in Residence at Craft Metropolis Brixton, a dedicated tap space pouring their freshest beers straight from Cornwall.
What keeps Verdant moving is the balance of instinct and obsession. James puts it plainly: “What keeps me awake at night is trying to make the next beer better than the one before.”