FROM A GARAGE IN NEW ZEALAND...
To one of the top 100 Breweries in the world*
The story of Tempest started (unsurprisingly) at a brewpub in Canada. While slinging beers, a pair of star-crossed travellers from either side of the world met and decided to navigate the globe together, finally settling down in Annika's native New Zealand. It was there, while working as a chef, that Gavin began home-brewing in their garage in Christchurch.
Gav was able to cobble together a little brew kit and get his hands on some local hops. This was a time before the whole world woke up to the wonder of kiwi hops like Motueka and Nelson Sauvin.
*Ratebeer awards
Gavin and Annika left New Zealand for Scotland where there was a new beer movement happening. The burgeoning "craft beer" scene was beginning to catch fire as up and down the UK new micro-breweries were emerging, all united (sometimes unknowingly) by a desire to craft innovative, exciting beers.
In early 2010 they set up a ten barrel brewery in a disused dairy in Kelso. As new, innovative beers began rolling off the bottle line a small but loyal local following began to assemble, and so too did Tempest's brewing philosophy.
The importance of challenging your own ideas and constantly innovating became guiding principles for this fledgling brewery.
Pushing boundaries and chasing big flavours meant: dry hopping, using specialist malts, sourcing expensive hop varieties from New Zealand and the US with the aim of making the best beer imaginable.
Naming the brewery Tempest was in part a reference to the unpredictable nature of brewing and beer making but also pre-empting the turbulence that lay ahead. In order to ride the storm it became clear that a relentless dedication to quality and consistency would be the difference between making the odd good beer and regularly making mind-blowingly good beer.
While Gav had his head in the Mash Tun, Annika was running The Cobbles, Tempest's very one brewpub in Kelso. The Cobbles was and still is the 2nd home of Tempest, with all the beer lines exclusively ours.
Gavin may no longer be cheffing at the Cobbles, but his respect for ingredients and knowledge of flavour combinations would begin to influence the beers we were making, smokey beers, chilli beers, fruit beers, oyster beers... nothing was off limits.
"The line between creativity and gimmickry is a fine one but we made beers then, like now, simply because we wanted to drink them"
Gavin Meiklejohn
And as luck would have it, other people wanted to drink them too and orders started to come in from random outposts across Europe and even Asia. It almost became easier to pick up a bottle of Long White Cloud in Singapore than it was in Glasgow.
Having struggled with the limitations of the old dairy farm, we were looking to pastures, new. Moving from Kelso to a new site in Tweedbank was a real turning point for the brewery and the right time to begin carving out our own territory in what was fast becoming an extremely crowded space.
Shortly after the move, Tweedbank got its own train station... connecting Tempest to the capital. On hearing news of a hot local brewery, the Queen even agreed to do the ribbon cutting. Probably just as well we didn't have the taproom open then, otherwise Ma'am could've found herself on the wrong side of a couple of 10% impie stouts.
We knew we weren't going to move far, because the water in the borders is exceptionally good and soft (and the idea of carting all our brewery equipment across the country didn't particularly excite us)
Our new 30HL brewery in Tweedbank with more space for more brewing and a new bottling line brought a new energy and we seemed to be picking up an award for every other week. There's nothing like a bit of industry recognition to make you appreciate how far you've come. Equally there's nothing like a bit of industry recognition to give way to complacency.
And just as we started to believe our own bullshit, we remembered why we started to do this in the first place... to make the beer we want to drink right now, not what we think a judging panel wants us to make.
In 2017 we threw open the brewery doors, put a marquee up in the estate and hosted the inaugural Springfest and Oktoberfest festivals. Would anyone come? Turns out people will flock to an industrial estate in the name of good beer, good beer, good music and good vibes. Our festivals have grown every year since and now both Springfest and Oktoberfest have become mainstays in the craft beer calendar.
The more we grew, the more space we needed for holding stock as well as find a home for our new barrel-ageing program. And just like all serious breweries would do, we crammed all the barrels and kegs into one corner of our new warehouse and install a skate ramp... giving a different meaning to the "daily grind"
We've always been big believers in a strong work/life balance and a Friday afternoon on a skateboard or on a bike will always beat a spreadsheet.
As if to underline that point, our brewery just happens to be at the centre of the mountain biking universe, with some of the world's best bike trails on our doorstep. If our taproom's anything to go by, a day on the iron horse should always be followed by a beer.
Tempest has become a bit of a fixture on the event scene, and we're just as likely to be pouring at Tweedlove or the Enduro World Series as we are at a craft beer festival.
At the end of 2019 we found ourselves in quite reflective mood looking back at our first 10 years and how far we've come since that first Tempest brew in 2010. Determined to celebrate how far we've come plans were afoot to make the year of our 10th birthday our biggest ever: birthday celebrations, brand refresh, moving to cans, introducing a load of new new beers... and then 2020 happened.
The pandemic hit all aspects of this industry really hard and luckily for us it had a galvanising effect and forced us to look at all aspects of what we do and how we do it. To come out the other end unscathed is in no small part to the special community that we're a part of.
Over the years we've always challenged ourselves to make beers unbound by style... the beer we brew is the beer we want to be drinking right now. This is resulted in everything from oyster stouts and Jalapeño IPAs to a mango and sticky rice gose.
Having a core range that plays the hits and plays them exactly to the tune we want is what gives us that platform to experiment elsewhere. And by making the majority of the core range gluten-free they became that bit more accessible.
Bringing together the art and science of brewing is what drives us. Style without substance is of no interest to us and we always strive to make exceptional beer that’s been given the maximum respect and reverence at every stage. Which is why we’re continually investing in high-spec brewery and lab equipment.
Respecting the provenance and quality of ingredients is vital: from propagating our own strains of yeast, to using the best local malted barley, to making the most of the natural water resource in our area. We guarantee only the very best goes into each batch of beer. Brewing exceptional beer is a lot of little things done consistently very well and we will never lose that focus.
Installing an in-house canning facility was the vital last step in giving us total control over the entire process, enabling us to keep our beer unpasteurised and extremely fresh. This extends to our supply chain where we take special measures to promote the cold storing of our beer to guarantee it's as fresh as can be.
All this combines to make the beer in your glass as fresh, delicious, and of the highest quality possible.