Our Collab with Mark Dredge

We are so proud and excited to have collaborated with esteemed writer and beer expert Mark Dredge on our series of films, celebrating and educating on craft lager. Here’s what he had to say about our partnership…

“Lager is my favourite drink. I think a lot of people also call it their favourite drink, or at least the beer they choose most often. But it seems to me that not enough people really understand lager. It’s seen as an industrial product; a liquid made in a factory like a soft drink. But that’s untrue of even the mainstream brands, and especially untrue of the best craft lagers.

Lager has more than 600 years of history, but it didn’t become the popular, brightly carbonated golden beer we love today until into the 20th century, where it grew to become the world’s most-drunk type of beer. As it became this great global drink, large breweries have found neat ways of being able to make it quicker. That can still make nice beers, but there’s something special, something more interesting and more delicious, about lagers that still respect some of the old traditions of lager brewing, and that means being patient.

Brewers like Freedom brew classic lagers in modern ways, and still follow the traditions of leaving their beer to mature, or ‘lager’, in cold tanks. It’s a six-week process, without shortcuts, and that gives us lagers with a fuller flavour and a natural carbonation. That’s a difference we can taste.

As they are the original British craft lager brewers, Freedom are now part of a really exciting British craft lager scene, in which we’ve got some incredible breweries focused on making quality lagers, in a wide range of styles. As a drinker it means we’ve got the ability to choose the lager that’s right for us, whether it’s something classic and familiar, or modern and bold. Lager isn’t just one type of beer, it’s a whole family of styles worth exploring.

Through these films, I wanted to tell different stories about lager. One of them is to help educate people on what lager is, how it’s made, what makes a proper craft lager, and why that matters. For everyone who chooses to drink lager, I want to have something which gives you some kind of validation that you’re drinking something good. And for everyone who doesn’t drink lager, I wanted to unwrap some of its mystery and remove that misunderstanding that comes from a drink most closely associated with international brands.

To go with that, I’ve always wanted to write something that could be an anthem for lager. We decided to focus on the idea of taking time, and how great lager is worth the wait: Freedom take the time in the brewery to make the beer properly, and that takes a long time (six weeks!). It’s about how that time transforms the ingredients into something special, how that links back to the origins of lagers and also moves to the future, and then there’s the special moment when the brewery passes that lager over to us to drink with friends. Because that’s what really matters: a delicious lager, shared with others.”

Watch all three of our new films here