We deep sadness we have updated this article to mark the closure of Nomadic Beers on the 15th of September, 2022, just seven months after this feature was published. It is an immensely tough time for small breweries at the moment, and we would encourage you to support those you cherish. Pellicle would like to send our best wishes to the team at Nomadic.

***

“Academia wasn’t for me; there’s just too much paperwork involved.”

Dr. Katie Marriott suppresses a laugh as she clears some space on a desk buried under forms, printouts, and cask pump clips. The assorted paraphernalia giving away that we’re in the office of Nomadic Beers, a brewery in Leeds, West Yorkshire, which Katie has owned since it was established in 2016.

Over occasional metallic clangs as taproom supervisor Lars Harrison shifts casks freshly filled with Bandit pale ale, Katie begins to tell me about her dedication to traditional beer styles in an ever-evolving market, how visitors to Nomadic still ask to speak to her male employees over her, and the initiatives she’s backed which have aims beyond pints on the bar.

Nomadic’s slogan may refer to “a wandering thirst”, but listening to Katie, it feels to me like she’s always been certain of her brewery’s direction.

Tucked into an anonymous industrial estate, Nomadic Beers is a brisk 15-minute walk from Leeds city centre. The facility sits near the end of a single-storey line of commercial buildings, but hop plants sprouting from repurposed plastic kegs offer a clue to thirsty travellers that they’ve arrived at their destination. (If those travellers paused, the asymmetrical chimneys and fable-style artwork on the bottle-green door could make them wonder if inside, magic might be swirling.)

Despite the busy roads snaking either side of the brewery, the tap room still feels relaxed and inviting. However, there were several twists and turns before Nomadic was able to settle in its current location.

In 2015 Katie was studying for a chemistry postdoctorate at the University of Glasgow, having previously achieved her PhD in the impressive-sounding “origins of life”. (She provides a very simplified example for my benefit. It involves DNA, phosphorus, and meteorites.)

Originally from Northampton, Katie formerly sat on the committee of Leeds University’s Real Ale Society and has been a member of the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) for many years. Although, in terms of production experience, she’d never attempted so much as a homebrew. This, alongside the years spent on her postdoctoral qualification, mean Katie’s decision to return to Leeds and work as a brewery assistant could have been described as a sizeable gamble. But by late 2016, she was a brewery owner.

She had spent the previous 11 months at Leeds’ (now defunct) Whippet Brewery; cleaning casks and racking beer before moving to recipe development. It was at Whippet that Katie met Ross Nicholson, who taught her how to brew, and is now Nomadic’s head brewer.

“It didn’t have the right ethos for us; it wasn’t a very nice working environment,” Katie tells me. “So Ross and I decided to leave and start on our own.”

The pair initially spent 18 months working with a brew kit from the 1970s in the cellar of Leeds’ Fox & Newt pub. While their equipment had been in place for decades, they were aiming to find their place within a dynamic English craft beer scene where breweries were frequently serving up new and exciting styles.

“Ross and I both like cask [beer], so we just got on with producing cask,” Katie says.

““They’re definitely known in Leeds for doing really good cask beer. They’re staples on the bar here.””

— Beth Templeton, Whitelocks

“It did feel risky but I'm really glad we did it, and that we've stuck to it. The first few beers we brewed, we’re still brewing. We tend not to go with fads.”

Strider, a 4.4% best bitter, is one of two Nomadic beers brewed year round. Toffee-coloured, its moreish malty notes are balanced by a snap of bitterness, and each gulp fades into pleasant, lingering dryness. It’s a beer which, after just a sip or two, cheerfully suggests that fish and chips should be ordered to your table.

The other permanent fixture is Bandit, a 4.8% American pale. Clean and sessionable, it’s rounded out with notes of spruce and grapefruit. It’s Nomadic’s most popular beer among punters, but it’s Strider which remains Katie’s favourite.

“It’s exactly what I want to be brewing,” she says. “It’s a very traditional best bitter; it’s what I’d choose to drink in a pub.”

This devotion to classic styles and beer served on cask is striking for a brewery launched so recently, because the decline in UK consumption of cask beer has been flagged by various sources. In 2020, the Society of Independent Brewers’ British Craft Beer Report described “a continued fall in sales of cask ale”, which had dropped by 8.2% the previous year.

The shuttering of pubs in lockdown periods compounded the challenges facing this historic product. In June 2021, the Caskenomics report from the All-Party Parliamentary Beer Group spoke of the “gradual decline of cask, prior to sales falling off a cliff with Covid.”

Despite this, Katie remains committed and proud of her business’s cask output. Indeed, Nomadic only started to sell kegged beer after two years of trading, and has so far produced a single run of cans in March 2021. Katie says that for her and many other cask fans, even beloved brews just don’t taste the same from a bottle or can as they do from a glass in a quality pub.

However, when all pubs were shut during the UK’s first lockdown in 2020, that focus on cask beer—which has a much shorter shelf life than its kegged equivalent—meant the contents of Nomadic’s fermenters suddenly had nowhere to go, and could have ended up as costly waste product.

Not to be defeated, the team decanted 90 casks-worth of beer into recyclable plastic pouches for local delivery. These found favour with customers still craving the closest thing to a pub pint during lockdown, with the success of the adaptation shown in their demand. Orders for pouches which were still arriving in autumn 2021.

***

“I was aware of Katie beforehand, [and] that she was a champion of women in beer,” Rock Leopard Brewing’s Stacey Ayeh tells me. “[The Nomadic team] are very knowledgeable, and they all know what each other are thinking.”

At Rock Leopard Stacey mostly makes modern American-style IPAs and pales. But when Nomadic brand ambassador Harriet Edgar was scanning social media in early 2021, she saw he was ambitious to brew a more traditional bitter. The resulting collaboration was called Wandering Cat and the Tails of an Amber Ale, a double-dry-hopped amber built on Fuggles and Challenger hops.

Stacey had never previously brewed with English hops, and had only put his beer into cask once before. For him, the brew day with Nomadic and subsequent positive feedback was an “eye-opener”, and he’ll now look at working with English hops again.

That potential for friendly collaboration is something Katie says distinguishes brewing from academia, and far-ranging partnerships are a feature of Nomadic’s story.

Another example is the brewery’s continued support of Leeds Co-Hoperative, which sees locals tending hop plants in their gardens, balconies or allotments. These are gathered at an autumn “hop drop” and the group reconvenes to sample the results. Within a few years, the amount of hops collected has risen from 7kg to 32kg. Nomadic brewed with these hops again in 2021, and Katie plans to offer talks on brewing and hop cutting to help make the initiative “more of a community.”

That idea has also informed Nomadic’s support of Compass Festival, which delivers programmes of live art every two years. In summer 2021, Nomadic’s team ran a two-week “pop-up pub” in Leeds’ historic Kirkgate Market, where punters could share their thoughts on what the future of pubs could look like.

Katie says emphasising pubs as social and community spaces, rather than merely alcohol-service areas, was especially relevant after the prolonged Covid-19 restrictions.

“It was fantastic,” she tells me. “We had lots of feedback about how people liked the space being there, so they could meet people again. Have a beer, a soft drink; it didn’t matter.”

“And Kirkgate Market is full of the most diverse people, so it was really fun working on the bar and watching the world go by.”

““The first few beers we brewed, we’re still brewing. We tend not to go with fads.””

— Katie Marriott, Nomadic Beers

Diversity is an area Katie wants to improve in; she makes a point of mentioning that Nomadic’s small team is all white. That said, she has consistently worked to promote inclusivity for women in beer, a topic under increased focus following the seismic reaction Instagram posts from US brewer Brienne Allan calling out instances of sexual harassment and toxic workplace culture within the beer industry.

For example: Nomadic is a longtime supporter of Harrogate’s Women On Tap festival, which celebrates women and beer in Yorkshire. Katie also invited female beer workers from the county to brew for International Women’s Day 2020, and the result, an English pale ale called Shield Maiden, is expected to return in 2022. But despite these efforts, she feels she could do better at being a visible and vocal female brewery owner.

“It can be really frustrating,” Katie says. “Sometimes we’ll get a grain delivery and the driver will say ‘Is it only you here? Can anybody help?’ People assume it’s Ross who’s the boss, or ask Mike how the brewery’s going while I’m sitting there.” [Katie’s partner Mike Hampshire helps out at Nomadic when he’s not running Leeds Beer Tours.]

“I’ll still get the ‘Oh!’ when I say I own the brewery. It’s more punters [than fellow industry workers]. I just correct them and get on with it.”

Referring to the online allegations mentioned earlier, Katie calls herself “one of the lucky ones” in terms of her experience as a woman in beer. She’s positive on seeing more “not males” working in the sector—her wording—to acknowledge that people may identify in various ways, but says significant change is still needed.

Katie tells me how she feels individuals can do their part through telling others if they feel uncomfortable, as well as calling out bad language or behaviour. Something she feels it’s especially important for men to do.

“And the industry needs to do better,” she continues. “Larger companies should make sure there’s someone for people to talk to if things aren’t right, and believe them.”

Katie feels bigger breweries must also show that they’re working on inclusivity and representation, beyond posts on social media.

“They've pushed the frontiers of beer styles and production, and they now need to do it with this,” she adds. “It feels like lots of smaller breweries are trying to carry this forward. But we don't have the followers, the people who look up to us like beer gods.”

***

It’s true Nomadic may not have the profile of some Leeds beer brands; the brewery can produce about 2,000 pints per week, while neighbours like Northern Monk and North Brew Co. have more than 20 times that capacity at their own facilities. But impact on the industry isn’t measured by production volumes alone.

“They’re nice, local, honest people, doing things on a small scale, but really well,” says Beth Templeton, who manages one of Leeds’ most beloved pubs, Whitelocks Ale House. “Their beers are always really popular, they’re definitely known in Leeds for doing really good cask beer. They’re staples on the bar here.”

Beth was part of another Nomadic collaboration, when Katie invited female staff from Whitelocks and sister pub The Turk’s Head to brew for International Women’s Day in 2019. The result was Huitaca, a 6.8% Baltic porter named after a South American goddess of art, dance, music, witchcraft, sexual liberation and the moon.

“We were really proud of it, because we all love beer and it’s a big thing for us to get women involved and feeling just as valued as men in the industry,” Beth says. “Katie didn’t want us to do a stereotypically ‘girly’ beer, and I really like that we ended up doing a baltic porter. People loved it and it was a big talking point; [customers] asked about the name and we’d tell them the story.”

Beth says that while many breweries employ “amazing” female staff, few in Leeds and Yorkshire are run by women.

“A strong female person in charge of a brewery is something we love and value,” she concludes. “Katie’s really smashing it.”

Katie’s efforts have extended to other issues affecting the industry, too—last year she poured away gallons of beer in front of the press to call for more government support for pandemic-hit breweries.

In turn, it appears many beer fans wish to support Nomadic. When the brewery’s sole delivery van—lovingly named GeeGee by staff—rattled to a halt last summer, covid-impacted cash reserves meant a replacement seemed out of reach, which put the future of the business in jeopardy. However, a crowdfunding campaign saw more than £13,000 pledged in under five weeks, allowing the team to get their beer onto taps across the country again.

Looking ahead, Katie summarises the plan as “keep producing good cask”, and when I run through the list of wider initiatives her brewery has been involved in, she offers a simple response.

“It’s just being part of the community. That’s what beer is.”

And for anyone who wants to work in brewing, but feels they may not fit established industry stereotypes?

“Go for it,” she says. “Keep applying for jobs. It might be that you start off cask washing, but just keep trying. And if anybody tells you that you can’t, they’re lying.”