Well, Team Moon Gazer is celebrating winning a gold medal and two silvers at a prestigious national brewing competition.
We were thrilled to win the bunch of accolades at the Digital Beer Awards 2020 – an innovative new award which had to adjust due to Covid 19.
Organised by the Society of Independent Brewers (SIBA) and open to all independent breweries in the UK, the Digital Beer Awards 2020 attracted entries from over 180 British breweries and 500 different beers. The beers were all blind tasted by a panel of 50 expert tasters across two live video judging days.
Each of the three lagers which we entered scooped an award in the Eastern region which covers beers from 7 counties.
As you can imagine we are delighted that we were judged to have brewed three great craft lagers – with StubbleStag (5% abv) scooping silver in the Premium Lager category and DewHopper (4% abv) lager a Gold in the Standard Lager and Pilsner category, while Jackalope picked up a silver in the Speciality Beer Category.”
Jackalope is a rather unique lager as it uses over 30kg of fresh route ginger, hand peeled and chopped to give the lager a ginger zest and is thought to be the only one of its kind in the UK.
To be awarded in all three of the lager categories against such a strong line up was amazing. We take great pride in our craft lagers, but in fairness we are probably best known for our range of Moon Gazer ales, so the recognition for lager was really rewarding.
These have been incredibly challenging times for brewers but we are delighted that SIBA have continued to support the sector and promote quality and craftmanship driven by events such as these.
There is also a strong Norfolk flavour in both of the lagers as both brews use Norfolk Maris Otter barley from Norfolk maltster Crisp Maltings. The other ingredient – the hops however are German and Czech as they produce hop varieties well suited to lager – such as Saaz and Hallertau, but clearly this blend of Norfolk and European ingredients is a winning combination.
We are now looking forward to developing our lager range further.