Périgord Beers is slowly, yet very surely becoming a firmly-established microbrewery that’s holding its own in the craft beer world. Our traditional style brewery is a real family concern and sits in a gorgeous setting, hiding quietly lakeside by a former working mill in the Dordogne region of France.
Founded in 2015 by us, Mike and Val Povey, and Mike’s cousin, Lorraine Whitear & stemming from a simple yet well-forged dream of opening our very own 900L microbrewery, we eventually made our first commercial bottle of beer ready to go into production in early 2016.
What began as just two of our favourite types of craft beer, we now feel we’ve evolved pretty nicely. Our aim is to make more than a fairly decent contribution to beer making history in our region and beyond. And it’s beginning to look like it’s all working out as planned!
Yet if you delve a little more into our French on-site brewery you’ll notice that aside from our love for great beers we’re pretty deeply inspired by our British roots. Of course, given that we produce predominantly British beer that should, in theory, be obvious. But it also takes something other than inspiration and passion. Because behind any great beer is a gleaming recipe which needs creating, alongside a traditional brewing method that’s adhered to!
For this reason, we’re somewhat set in our ways of using only the finest of raw materials that we source ourselves. And we will only settle for ingredients that produce beers packed with integrity and taste. Using barley from the rolling countryside of our great British Isles through to elderflowers from the tree which sits in our Périgord garden there are no negotiations when it comes to the rich character of any beer we produce.
Then there’s the water, which is the beginning of any brewing process. Ours comes from a constant supply which is then double-filtered at the brewery. Of course, aside from those ever-crucial ingredients, there’s also the addition of intense care and attention and our own personal refusal to cut any corners!
But let’s move on because as mentioned before, it’s not just about ingredients going into our bottles which give our beers their robust and flavoursome impact. It’s also about the methods we use to make our traditional, but contemporary beers taste real. It’s a carefully thought through process, which is why we don’t pasteurize and we only ever produce natural CO2 during secondary fermentation in the bottle instead of forced carbonation. It also goes without saying that we need to clean our equipment and given that we whole heartedly respect the environment, we only ever use environmentally-friendly cleaning agents.
If you share our love for great beer and want to find out more about how it’s made then why not book a visit to our microbrewery. One thing you’ll notice is a constant and real work-in-progress. You’ll always find us with rolled-up sleeves, checking the temperatures of the beer, filling and sticking labels on bottles or maybe just having a sneaky taste. But it’s always done with a great passion for our product. We are massively conscientious and pay attention to all the subtleties of traditional production methods in our tried and tested recipes.
So if you’re curious and want to find out a bit more about how your favourite brew is made, then contact us and we’ll book you in for a tour. We can show you around, answer all your questions and then you can settle down in our cozy tasting room to see what all the commotion is about.