“What’s your local ale, Punk?”

“Er… Wrexham Lager?”

Genial laughter rippled around the table, followed by the interrogators ooh-ing and aah-ing over their pints of Theakston’s Old Peculier. I held onto my Holsten Pils. I was in the Lake District with my college’s mountaineering club, and we were in a pub that seemed to have been cut out of rock. I was 19. Some of the older lads, mainly from Yorkshire, were into cask beer and one always had a Good Beer Guide for our various weekend trips. Hence the good-natured question. My nickname wasn’t a big mystery, by the way, I was a punk.

There was no local ale in my hometown of Llandudno, a tourist town on the Welsh north coast. When I started visiting pubs the beers available were usually from northwestern English breweries such as Greenall Whitley, J.W. Lees, and Robinsons. I stuck to lager. The latter two had (and still have) a collection of pubs in the area. Anecdote has it that because brewery workers holidayed in North Wales the breweries decided they would buy pubs so that their staff could continue to get the beers they usually drank.

I thought about this story as, much more recently, I walked along Builder Street in Llandudno on a blustery autumn day. As the name suggests, this street, which faces the railway tracks that lead to the end of the line at Llandudno station, is not residential.

I passed a small dilapidated building next to the former slaughterhouse and took a photograph. Here my father had an engineering business in the late 1960s, which failed miserably. We also got the family dog, Brutus, from the slaughterhouse—he was a mutt who was going to be put down and was adorable. In my teens, I lived a couple of streets away after my parents’ hideous divorce while both primary and comprehensive schools were (and are) just up the road.

A couple of hundred metres on I turned into a small industrial estate, which is home to Wild Horse, one of Wales’ most exciting breweries. What makes them so special is that they are deft exponents of the ever-popular hazy, juicy pales that the likes of Deya and Polly’s (the latter also North Walians) have made their name with; they make some pretty handsome saisons as well. These juice bombs might now be ubiquitous throughout the UK but not everyone gets it right, as all too often I get a chalky finish that reminds me of aspirin.

This is not the case with Wild Horse, and it thrills me that Llandudno finally has a brewery such as this. As I approached the brewery I couldn’t help feeling a warm glow about having a personal history and remaining link (family members still live here) with the town that is home to such a vital brewery.

A train clattered by as I entered a functional industrial landscape with stainless steel vessels lining the walls, a space of edges and coils, machines and hoses, angles, corners and brickwork both painted and bare. One of the brewers stood on the cherry picker-like people lifter at the top of a fermenting vessel. Some CO2 was released, sounding like the screech of a particularly ill-tempered owl. I also spied a mill waiting for tomorrow’s brew.

According to head brewer Chris Wilkinson, who was showing me around, “having our own [grain] mill is to do with freshness, and it controls quality rather than having bags hanging around—I believe in having the best raw materials and treating them with respect.”

Ever since Dave and Emma Faragher opened Wild Horse in 2015, it has been building up a name for its exemplary beers, such as the crisp and refreshing Czech-style lager Buckskin, and its succinct session IPA Nokota. Along with specials such as the spicy saison The Serpent and The Worm, and the spirited IPA Nokota Shuffle, the beers that Wild Horse make are elemental in their appeal and wring out a drum-beat of pleasure on the palate.

Wilkinson joined the brewery in 2016 and was its first employee, becoming head brewer a year later. He began working life as a journalist in the northwest, but homebrewing was his passion, and, according to Dave, it was his saison that got him the job. Wilkinson cites trying Cloudwater’s beers at the inaugural Manchester Beer Week in 2016 as the Damascene conversion that made him change his ideas of what beer was and could be. So you can imagine how excited he was at the end of 2020 when he collaborated with Cloudwater for their Indie Spotlight series with the West Coast IPA, Magic Hour.

“This collaboration came about as a direct result of the relationship between myself and Chris,” Cloudwater’s Marketing and Engagement Manager, Connor Murphy, tells me. He trained as a journalist at the same time as Wilkinson and knew him through a mutual friend in journalism. During 2020, the pair of them had kept in regular contact, mulling over the challenges both Wild Horse and Cloudwater faced as a result of the pandemic and how they could change things to get through it.

““I think a lot of people locally thought we were mad for not making cask beer.””

— Dave Faragher, Wild Horse Brewing

“Since Wild Horse didn't have the kind of direct-to-customer sales platform that would allow them to get their beer out far and wide, we offered to help them by listing some of their beer on our own webshop,” Connor says. “It went down incredibly well with our customers and the relationship has grown from there, starting with the first collaboration between the two breweries, Magic Hour, which was brewed in Llandudno.”

Talking to Chris, you get a sense of the care and attention he gives his beers. Words are deliberately chosen and—when he describes how the brewery’s best-selling flagship Nokota was designed—you are back in the moment when he and Faragher realised the brewery had found its unique voice.

“We were looking to tap into a new, seemingly insatiable demand for New England-style beers as well as fill a gap in both our range and the local and regional market,” he says of Nokota. “As recently as 2018 NEIPA was not the dominant style in craft that it is today, but those soft and hazy beers were really drawing a lot of people into craft beer, and turning the heads of those who were already drinking modern beer.”

While designing the beer’s recipe, he realised he finally felt ready to answer a question that had been nagging away at him: what makes a Wild Horse beer a Wild Horse beer? With this crucial question in mind, he sat down and considered the different elements that underpin the design of a new beer.

“There’s an expression of personal preference, of course,” Chris says, “plus a desire to replicate and then develop what is already being done and, almost by extension, it’s also important to listen to the drinkers, but I didn’t want to just copy what was being done.”

He obviously succeeded as the result was a beer that he felt had a dryness and bitterness not usually found in most East Coast-style beers, but to his mind gave a luscious drinkability.

“This dryness and bitterness is an expression of personal preference,” he adds, “and something I consider a house character that I work into the majority of our beers.”

Several years after its first introduction, this light golden gem remains a beer that sings on the palate like a choir at an Eisteddfod (a festival of music, art and poetry particular to Welsh culture). There is grapefruit and ripe honeydew melon on the nose, followed by a sweet orange note at the front of the palate, then some light tropical fruitiness, a bittersweetness and a finish that shows off a dryness and a bitterness. It’s a very satisfying beer, of which I have drunk several at Llandudno’s micropub, TAPPS.

According to Dave Guinn, TAPPS’ owner and licensee, the brewery’s bestseller in the bar is Buckskin, though Wild Horse’s beers account for 30% of the bar’s sales.

“All of their beers are popular,” Dave tells me, “and I’ve enjoyed their beers from the off which is why they have always had two dedicated lines in TAPPS and we are looking to increase that to three in the new year. My go-to beer of choice in TAPPS is Buckskin, and a lot of customers love it too so it’s there to stay.”

***

Despite being proud of Wild Horse’s location in Llandudno, it is not a place I have lived in since leaving for college. I have a mixed relationship with the town, despite long-standing family links. Growing up there all I wanted to do was leave for London, but I came back often, usually, much to my mother’s annoyance, spending a lot of time in the pubs.

I can still recall sometime in the late 1980s going with my close friend Keith to the King’s Head (the oldest pub in town) and both of us falling like a wolf on the fold after discovering Draught Burton Ale. That was a good beer memory, but it was only about 15 years ago when what we used to call microbreweries made themselves known in the area. There was Conwy Brewery, Great Orme (originally based in the Conwy Valley), and Purple Moose in Porthmadog. All were traditional breweries focusing on cask and perhaps this was what motivated the Faraghers when it came to setting up Wild Horse.

“When we started in 2015 there were plenty of other breweries in North Wales,” Dave tells me. “But most were traditionally focused—cask was king and ale in a keg was a strange/confusing thing for most publicans.”

“We wanted to bring what we had tasted in North America to the people of North Wales and we felt the best format to do that was in keg. I think a lot of people locally thought we were mad for not making cask beer and it certainly was a challenge in the early days but long term it has proved massively successful.”

““The beers that Wild Horse make are elemental in their appeal and wring out a drum-beat of pleasure on the palate.””

Another way in which Wild Horse has made itself known in the wider beer world has been a series of collaborations with the likes of London’s Brick, and Scotland’s Fallen (the latter of which sadly closed down in April 2022). This particular relationship resulted in a beer released to celebrate the famous ‘Three Peaks’ challenge, where Snowdon, Ben Nevis and Scafell Pike are climbed within 24 hours.

Brick contacted Fallen (Ben Nevis), Wild Horse (Snowdon) and Hawkshead (Scafell Pike) to brew three beers as well as organising teams from each brewery to tackle the three summits. The beer Wild Horse produced with Brick was named Summit Fever; a potent and punchy IPA.

This led to a further collaboration with Fallen, this time a rich imperial stout, a decision, which according to former Fallen brewer Ritchie Duncan, now at Harviestoun, was an easy one.

“They already had a reputation for brewing big juicy IPAs and people love our stouts so we decided to draw on each others’ expertise by brewing an imperial stout—884—at their brewery and a double hazy IPA—Super Elevation—at ours,” Ritchie tells me. “I went down to Llandudno for the brew day. They have a beautiful looking brewery which has a really nice family-run feel to it as well.”

And then came COVID. This, inevitably, was a difficult time with the team being furloughed and Dave and Emma fulfilling online orders, doing home deliveries and stabilising all the beer that they had in tank—which was destined for keg—and wondering what to do with it.

“After three weeks of lockdown we started bringing staff back as the response from our local customer base was phenomenal,” Dave recalls. “Cans were selling out, I couldn’t fill mini kegs fast enough and the demand for home delivery and click and collect surpassed all expectations. It was a silver lining during COVID.”

The future is unwritten, but for the moment Wild Horse is growing in sales and capacity, with an increase in the latter planned to be at least 25% in 2022. New tanks will be installed alongside a faster canning line, while Wilkinson says that barrel-ageing is something they have thought and talked about, although there are no immediate plans. For Dave, a taproom is on his bucket list.

“Not because I want to run a pub,” he says emphatically, “but because I really want to create an amazing beer-centric space for our customers to enjoy. I feel that maintaining that connection with our local customers is extremely important and so a taproom needs to be part of our longer-term plans.”