Mark Tranter’s Burning Sky Brewery has been named best drinks producer in the BBC Food and Farming Awards.
The artisan brewer and blender is based in Firle, East Sussex, not far away from where Mark originally made his name as a Dark Star brewer.
Mark Tranter picks up his award at the ceremony in Bristol. Picture: BBC
With coolships, spontaneous fermentation and barrel ageing, the brewery owes a lot to Belgian methods of production, which is unusual in the quintessentially English Sussex countryside.
At the awards ceremony, host Sheila Dillon introduced Mark as the brewery’s “laid back head brewer” and asked him to describe the Burning Sky style of brewing.
Mark said: “Yes, we do complex things, but we don’t expect people to pontificate too much and, like, er, worry about what they’re drinking. It’s a social drink. We provide the flavours and we hope other people provide the conversation.”
How, asked Sheila, did you know you were going to make your mark? Mark said: “We didn’t really know that we were going to make out mark, but the ideas I had for what I wanted to do weren’t really workable in a traditional concept of a brewery, with a board and accountants and things like that.
“The most expensive beers we make don’t actually make any money — they run on negative profit. So the only way to do it was to do it myself / ourselves.”
