A Bloody Good Little Brewery

As with most of my little trips, this started with a single-minded obsession to get hold of a certain beer. The beer in question this time being Good King Henry Special Reserve, an 11% oak aged imperial stout from a little brewery somewhere in East Anglia. I tracked down the address and convinced my girlfriend that a nice scenic trip across the country was in fact a lovely idea, especially given all the wonderful snow!

The Old Chimney brewery is situated on a small farm in a little village near Diss...that's kinda near Norwich or Ipswich or...somewhere East Angular (sounds so much better than East Anglian, right?). It is only marked by a small, hard to read sandwich board outside the farm gate, and don't expect your sat nav to help you, as the post code will dump you in the middle of a residential cul-de-sac half a mile down the road.

The brewery consists of a small two roomed, one-story farm building, with one room housing the brewing equipment and the other room being the brewery shop. Basically, it's ruddy bloody tiny!

I was pretty shocked a brewery that produces one of the most highly rated beers in the country is such a small operation but it really is what real brewing should be about; small runs of perfectly crafted beer with painstaking attention to detail and a contagious passion for what you're creating.


The place was set up by Master brewer Alan Thompson in 1995. I found him a lovely fella, very welcoming, and more than happy to talk about the beers and the brewery. He even gave us a couple of free half pint of Scarlet Tiger, a full bodied malty ale, which my girlfriend insisted we buy a bottle of.

It is blindingly obvious that it is not about the money for Alan, as with the quality of the products he could have grown Old Chimney into a beer leviathan by now. He clearly loves what he does and his small scale production allows him to brew some of the best beer in the country.

If you are ever in Diss (I'm sure people do actually go there for some reason or another) or paying a visit to Beers of Europe, which is conveniently only an hour away in Kings Lynn, drop by the brewery, if only to get hold of a bottle of their revered Good King Henry Special Reserve, which is ranked as the top beer in England on ratebeer.com.

Oh, and also, if you buy 12 bottles or more you get a 10% discount!