Brewers
Track
This highly regarded Manchester outfit has a reputation for super characterful hop forward beer. With a focus on quality and consistency, it is now rated in the top 10 of 3000+ UK breweries and continues to innovate and push the boundaries across multiple styles spanning low ABV table beers, Pales, IPAs, DIPAs, Fruited Sours, all the way up to huge imperial stouts.
Beak
Founded by former food and drink writer Daniel Tapper, Beak spent several years creating beers nomadically before laying roots in Lewes, East Sussex. It is widely known for producing super soft and juicy pales, IPAs and DIPAs but also boasts a small but ambitious mixed fermentation project focusing on hyper local ingredients from the South Downs National Park. It’s yearly beer festival, These Hills, regularly attracts some of the world’s best brewers.
Verdant
Based in Penryn, Cornwall, Verdant Brewing Company creates hoppy, juicy, hazy, unfiltered, vegan-friendly beers. Verdant was founded in 2014 by homebrewers who teamed up to craft US-inspired beers that weren’t available locally. The team’s focus was hop-forward beers inspired by the New England craft beer scene. The Verdant ethos revolves around brewing flavour-packed beers people love to drink, and ensuring that beer lovers have access to delicious, quality-driven brews.
Talks
Rose Boyt (Picador)
Rose Boyt is the author of Naked Portrait, a searing new memoir covering her relationship with her father, the renowned artist Lucien Freud. The book explores her experience of modelling for him from childhood until after her marriage, the power imbalance in their relationship, her adulation of him and how - years later - she worked it all out. It is a viscerally honest account of a very complicated father-daughter relationship.
David Keenan (White Rabbit)
David Keenan is the author of five critically-acclaimed novels; the cult classic This is Memorial Device, which won the London Magazine Prize; For the Good Times, which won the Gordon Burn Prize; The Towers The Fields The Transmitters, Xstabeth and Monument Maker, which was a Rough Trade Book of the Year. He lives in Glasgow, Scotland, and has recently completed a new work called Magic Is Real: Magic, Creativity, Love and Resurrection in Literature.
Eliza Clark (Faber & Faber)
Born in 1994 in Newcastle Upon Tyne, Eliza Clark is the author of Boy Parts (2020) and Penance (2023). In 2020, Boy Parts was Blackwell’s Fiction book of the year, and in 2022 Eliza was chosen as a finalist for the Women’s Prize Futures Award for writers under thirty-five. In 2023, she was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. She also writes for film and television.