The Ranges I Know — Ideal Day Family Brewery on Crocadon Farm, Cornwall
One-year-old Otis Rylance has a thing for sticks. Within moments of meeting him, he hands me one for me to enjoy, before immediately demanding we exchange. A theme emerges as this quickly repeats with whittled, knobbly, or otherwise pleasing sticks—one or two are even dyed bright pink with beetroot juice—there is some sort of stick economy at play, and he is its chancellor.
“You need to trade. Oh, no—he wants both,” his mum Nia says. His older brother Rowan was apparently the same when he was younger. “They’re obsessed with sticks.”
Photography by Lily Waite
“Do you remember that Christmas we just got Rowan a pile of different sticks?,” dad James asks Nia. “Deep lockdown; people were disinfecting their crisps. He got other bits and bobs but he was just really pumped on sticks. I don’t want it to be an Oliver Twist realisation like ‘you used to get sticks for Christmas! We ate gruel!’”
We’re standing in a room at the end of a stone barn that makes up Ideal Day Family Brewery, set up by James and Nia Rylance at the end of 2022. Otis is held by his mum and dad, alternately, before being tucked into a baby carrier-cum-backpack.
It is, aside from the explicit and deliberate naming of the fledgling brewery, immediately clear where James and Nia’s priorities lie.The brewery lies dormant on my visit, but it’s busy with the perpetual activity that young children bring. A selection of sticks sit on the squat packaging tank. A tub of beetroot sits with its lid ajar, recently dyed, hand-cut keg badges made from a fallen ash tree sit next to it—with the odd stick dyed alongside for the young arborist.
“Rowan’s going to be furious when he finds out we spent the day at the brewery. Actually, we can’t tell him,” James says. “He wants to come with me each day and just have a ride on a tractor and feed chickens and if he knows we’re here and he’s not—fucking hell.”
***
Ideal Day is one of a number of businesses that make up Crocadon Farm, perched on Cornwall’s southeastern border with Devon, just north of the town of Saltash at the mouth of the Tamar Valley. A self-styled “agrotourism retreat,” Crocadon is a farm-restaurant founded by chef and farmer Dan Cox, who previously worked for noted chef Simon Rogan at L’Enclume in Cumbria and Fera in London. Alongside Crocadon the restaurant and Ideal Day, there’s Crocadon cafe, and on the adjoining farm sits Ripe Cider, and two potters: Olivia Drew and Alice Pemberton.
Set in a central run of low-slung converted stone barns around a well-tended courtyard, and a number of other slightly less hashtag-aesthetic, more utilitarian farm buildings around the site, the various businesses work together in harmony. The hospitality centred ones all invariably use produce from the farm: the restaurant’s whole ethos is farm-to-table; the cafe uses and sells the produce; James uses wheat and barley grown on the farm and various miscellany from the kitchen garden in his beers.
“We're talking about that circle—a really simple example of it is like: wheat is grown here, wheat goes to the brewery, made into beer, spent grain goes to chickens; eggs go to the bakery and the cafe; [a] person sits down with beer and eggs on sourdough,” James says. “Basically, everything's within the farm. But not even just produced on the farm; of the farm and back into the farm.”
On Saturdays Ideal Day and Ripe Cider share a vintage Citroen Hy van to use as their “tap van”. The potters’ work is both used and sold in the restaurant. It is communal and commune-esque without feeling cultish—everyone simply gets along and works together.
“That's the thing that I'd say with Crocadon: there's always little opportunities popping up,” Nia explains. “That's why it works, because someone will say 'oh we're thinking of doing a market day, or we've got this van that isn't being used.’”
““The more I understand it, the more I understand ourselves and what we’re doing. ‘All art is the journey back to the point at which your heart first opened.’””
Rather than objecting to the tap van idea because she sells Ideal Day beer in the café, forcing them into direct competition, former café operator Claire Hannington-Williams encouraged James and Nia to start selling their beer directly to customers.
“It's not this co-op where everything is melded in,” Nia continues. “It’s more just like ‘hey if you fancy this…!’ When we were painting signs, James did some for the cafe. It works because everyone is just hanging out a lot.”
The farm itself is idyllic. I walk with James, Nia, and Otis—stopping for various cry breaks, snacks, and sticks—around the woods that surround the site. We pass polytunnels with farmers tending to produce bound for tables mere metres away; huge banks of ferns (the luscious type that always seem to me to signify either Cornwall or the highlands of Scotland) under swaying canopies; an elaborate chicken coop with perpetually escaping chickens; innumerable raised beds and trellises growing herbs.
We end back in the courtyard, with the pleasant hum of people going about their work and a few visitors sitting in the disappearing sunshine. It’s clear James and Nia feel at home on this very Instagrammable farm, living a modern version of The Good Life with toddlers in tow. And it’s not hard to see why.
***
Though James’ start in brewing was perhaps unconventional, it was—in an example of quite sweet synchronicity—a foreshadowing of where he’d end up. There’s a quote James recites but cannot place (and nor can I find its author). “The more I understand it,” he says, “the more I understand ourselves and what we're doing. ‘All art is the journey back to the point at which your heart first opened.’”
“Thinking about the place at which [my] heart first opened; how I got the job at Beavertown was making Evin's son Kai a sandpit,” he explains.
During the second year of his sculpture degree at Chelsea College of Art, James had begun helping out at The Kernel. “He came and he helped and he brought his Jamesness,” founder Evin O’Riordan tells me. When James’ degree came to an end in 2012 and he approached Evin for a job, he regretfully turned him down. When James didn’t take no for an answer, what he was offered was unexpected.
“I said: ‘I need to pay rent, like next month when my student loans run out,’” James tells me. “And so Evin said ‘well, [my son] Kai needs a sandpit, do you want to make a sandpit? We'll pay you for a day's work of making a sandpit.’ And I said ok I'll make a sandpit.”
Later, after making the sandpit, Evin invited James for a beer with a couple of others at the then recently-opened (now sadly closed) Duke’s Brew and Que brewpub and barbecue restaurant in East London. The founder—and shortly thereafter founder of Beavertown Brewery—Logan Plant—came over to chat to them: “There was this amazing moment when they were introduced,” Evin says. “Suddenly, they realised they were from the same part of the world, from the Black Country, and they started talking about Batham’s Bitter.”
Shortly thereafter, James somehow secured a job brewing for the fledgling Beavertown: James recalls Evin looking at Logan and telling him “there you go, there’s your brewer.”
“I wanted to go and brew at The Kernel,” James says. “And now here I am, I’ve skipped the job interview, and I start on Monday. Because I made a sandpit for Evin’s kid.”
James stayed at Beavertown for two and a half years, beginning as assistant brewer, then head brewer, and leaving as head of research and development. There he created the (original, albeit now much changed) recipes for Beavertown’s two most widely-known beers, Gamma Ray, and Neck Oil, as well as numerous others including Black Betty, Heavy Water, and Imperial Lord Smog.
In 2014 he moved to Redchurch Brewery as head brewer, where he later led the brewery’s mixed fermentation project, Urban Farmhouse. He and Nia relocated to Cornwall in 2017 after James found a role at Harbour Brewing, where he stayed until 2023, leading their experimental Hinterlands project, before moving into a research and development role.
Neck Oil was a beer that meant a great deal to James, but its popularity came at a cost. “That was the beer that made everyone go “Fuck. That beer!”,” he says. “And then that became the beer and we just made that.”
We’re walking down a muddy path on a wooded hillside that makes up part of the farm’s grounds; Otis has begun crying and is quickly placated with a cherry tomato. I ask about the younger beer demographic’s seeming demand for a somewhat homogenised product: pale, hazy, hoppy beer, and if, in the future, demand for a hoppier, juicy Ideal Day pale began to grow, would they focus on that?
“I was sad that I lost a beer that I actually really loved,” James says. “I just liked how it tasted and it was kind of my baby. In some people's eyes it's much better now and in different people's eyes it's much worse. I'm really proud of what that beer did, but then I have very mixed emotions about it. I don't think I ever want that again.”
James’ broad experience at a number of breweries has, evidently, shaped the way he and Nia wanted to approach opening their own brewery. His brewing experience has honed skills and resulted in a diligent and thoughtful brewer, but Ideal Day feels radically different to the majority of breweries in the UK industry today.
“We've got into these habits of making beer in a certain way and selling it in a certain way,” James says. “For example, pump clips: everyone has got that same disposable, redesigned-every-single-time pump clip that just goes on the front, and it's the exact same size and shape; all I can see is piles and mountains and universes of plastic discs in landfill. Some people say ‘don’t piss people off by making something different.’ I'm just gonna make something different.”
But the decisions he and Nia have made are not simply due to noble desire to be less wasteful, or reimagine the whole industry. In part, they’re circumstantial: two young parents with a mortgage opening a small business with no investment simply don’t have the resources to open a conventional brewery.
“We used to have choices because we used to spend shitloads of money,” James says of the industry at large. “We used to blow that money up the wall at every single idea: we'd have a taproom; we'd have a canning line; we'd have an events team at every festival; we'd pay to play; we’d do all these things. And that's gone—for us at least. You have to be more resourceful and I'm way more into that. ”
Money isn’t the only factor, either, and nor is it the only difference between this small corner of Cornwall and the forests of stainless steel in James’ previous breweries.
“Simplicity is hugely important because we haven't got a spare second: as soon as I've done everything I need to do here, I'm straight in the car, straight home, and straight to bath time or straight in and Nia's had the boys all day so she's just completely frazzled,” he explains. “We could have made any decision, gone anywhere, and found any amount of money we wanted… to going completely back to: we've got no cash and the world has now completely changed. It's changing quicker than we really understand it and we've got this tiny space. This is us now.”
***
What James is doing is, to some degree, antithetical to how he brewed toward the end of many, if not all, of his previous brewing roles. None of Ideal Day’s beers are particularly to or of a style—very deliberately so. They are, until the imminent launch of Field Beer in bottles, only available in keg, sent out individually, with a hand-finished and stamped keg badge cut down from whatever nearby tree recently fell. They taste of James and Nia’s intent, of railing very, very gently against homogeneity and mass-production.
It is not surprising to me that the brewer who created what is probably the UK’s most recognisable “Craft” beer is brewing the equivalent of cottagecore beers from regeneratively-grown and heritage grain and hops from a single farm in Herefordshire (until stock runs out after hop merchant Brook House Hops closed in 2023). Yet these, despite somehow feeling ever-so-slightly archaic, are some of the more exciting beers I’ve had in years.
We leave the brewery with a bag full of 330ml brown glass bottles unlabelled and unidentifiable but for a number written in sharpie on the cap. James later texts me after consulting a spreadsheet to let me know which is which. Each beer produced at Ideal Day is elegant and nuanced, with distinct traditional influences both British and continental, particularly in terms of James’ evident Belgian influences.
First Steps—named for Otis’s first tentative wobbles—is better than any saison I’ve had in some years. It’s a beer that makes me proud of its creator: sharp without being bracing, complex enough to draw me in again and again, but enjoyable enough to merely sip. Field Beer—“this thing that I still haven't worked out the language to describe: part British pale, in terms of everything in it is British, part saison, part Kveik; it's really dry, but quite weirdly juicy,” James says—is reminiscent of De la Senne Taras Boulba (appropriately, given that’s a Belgian beer with British aspirations) with an aroma of heather honey, pear, and straw, and a palate full of lemon and hay.
“I feel a lot of the time I'm making the same beer over and over again,” James says. “ They're all the same ingredients. Often they're similar yeasts: all expressive, high fermenting strains. They all use the same grains—we basically don't have any specialty grains of any sort; we use Red Lammas (wheat), [we’ve] got some barley, and the heritage grains from Crisp.”
Whereas James’s roles first at Redchurch and then at Harbour were to—at least in the beginning—brew experimentally with all manner of exciting and envelope-pushing ingredients, his intentions have once more become simplified. Though not as simple as brewing one pale ale time and time again.
“When you revisit something, it's never as organic as the first time you do it,” Evin says. “I've had these conversations with James: where he was at Beavertown brewing Neck Oil and Gamma Ray, once he felt he had the recipe dialled in and precise, then it became a chore. In the sense that there's no more love and excitement and wonder at that moment.”
There is a huge amount of creativity at play in Ideal Day—and not just in James’s recipes and beers. The brewery itself has no drains, so everything must be wet-vacuumed from the floor, and due to the gravel driveway there is no way to bring in or send out heavy pallets stacked with kegs and bottles. The brew kit is small and rudimentary, and the fermenters are third-or-fourth-generation, acquired from Newbarns Brewery in Edinburgh. These restrictions form a huge part of the brewery’s identity, and force creative workarounds that an identikit store-bought brewery would not; a boon rather than a hindrance.
“While the brewery is certainly a little more difficult to make wort on than an off-the-shelf shiny stainless steel kit, I wouldn't say as a blanket that it makes life harder,” says Topher Boehm, co-founder and brewer of Australia’s Wildflower Brewing and Blending, whose own wooden mash tun was custom-built for the brewery’s own specific purpose, and who was due to collaborate on a beer in summer 2023 before Topher’s travel plans unfortunately prevented the trip to Cornwall.
“It is in having some boundaries for ourselves as humans that we can begin to find a sense of peace,” he continues. “In limiting our options, so to say, I think we are led to find out who we are and what we do. By taking away options of other types of fermentations, or for a person limiting when work finishes and home life begins, for example, we are in a way making our lives simpler.”
In our time spent together, James and Nia speak incredibly favourably of what may to others appear to be frustrating barriers. “Our restrictions have formed us,” James says. “We make an active thing of not wanting to lose that. I think understanding that those are the things that have made us, that the restriction is the thing that's made us and made our beers taste a certain way.”
“I suppose there's different types of restrictions,” muses Evin. “There's physical ones that maybe you can't get around without wholesale changing everything. Then there are some choices which are more principles, or philosophical positions, or beliefs, or whatever you might call them. It's a question, I suppose, whether you see the restrictions as the important bit or whether they're the result of decisions you've made. The restrictions can make you more creative, because you take a position and you obviously learn ways of dealing with that.”
““I think there’s an element of romanticism in what he does that I envy; he manages to carry it in a way that is inspiring.””
All of Ideal Day—the tiny brewhouse, the gravel drive, the baby carrier by the fermenter, the 9PM mailers, the regenerative agriculture, the arguably unfashionable beer styles, the very lack of adherence to beer styles, the two young parents setting out on their own—is wrapped up in idealism. It’s right there in the name. It’s not a surprise, given that in past roles James set out with ideas of development and experimentation only to be frustrated at a requirement to play the part of production brewery, that this challenging yet idealised project has sprung forth and that James and Nia are, if a little sleeplessly at times courtesy of the boys, revelling in it. They were never going to brew hazy pale ales in a railway arch or industrial estate in some bustling city: it’s not who they are.
“I think there's an element of romanticism in what he does that I envy; he manages to carry it in a way that is inspiring” Evin says. “I think the world teaches most people that the brute realities of existence are such that you have to get with the program, you have to be more efficient, you have to brew something that your audience wants you to make, rather than what you want. All of these things that start to dictate how to do something efficiently and sell more. He just seems to be happy making beer; for James, it's enough to make beer.”
***
The beers James was brewing under Harbour’s Hinterland Project—at which point he and I first met—were nuanced and delicate, thoughtfully considered and indicative of a clear understanding of both technique and flavour. I still remember Foudre 2: a mixed fermentation sour beer finished with lemon verbena, lemon balm, and lemon thyme from the brewery’s “farm-to-glass” herb garden. There runs a clear thread between that beer and its contemporaries, and what James and Nia are doing under their own banner.
“For a few years now my goal has been to be on a farm, brewing with ingredients I’ve grown myself and, realistically, that’s something I can’t do in London,” James told Good Beer Hunting of leaving Redchurch and moving to Cornwall in 2017. “I grew up on a family farm, and the countryside is where I’m at my happiest and most creative.”
““It always felt like ‘what’s your choice? Kids or a business?’” And that’s why I want it to be a family brewery, so that it has to be part of the family.””
We’re drinking an expertly balanced wheat beer poured from a single tap atop the café’s counter—brightly phenolic but not aggressively so, fluffy of body and head from the Red Lammas wheat grown on the farm, with crisp and zippy lemon finish. Sitting at a wooden bench with three quarters of the Rylance family a sense of inevitability emerges tracing Ideal Day’s trajectory. It may not always have been this farm James and Nia would end up on, but I feel that the blueprint was of this shape all along.
In a previous job working for a designer nearby, Nia saw how it could be possible to run a business and a family while compromising on neither—something that so often feels impossible for young or aspiring mothers. “It was the first time I'd seen someone run a business and their family just be there all the time,” she says. “I just didn't think it was really a possibility: it always felt like ‘what’s your choice? Kids or a business?’” And that's why I want it to be a family brewery, so that it has to be part of the family.”
“We're all getting older,” James says. “A lot of people when this all kicked off—10, 15 years ago—were fresh-faced and younger, and you know, footloose and fancy free. I think it just felt like a really natural thing for us, having a kid—I think it became, it is, our complete world. So the brewery slotted into that.”
The descriptor “family brewery” made sense, too. Inspired by the likes of Suarez Family Brewery, a “mom and pop production brewery” in Upstate New York and Wildflower Brewing and Blending in Sydney, James loved how both encompassed something really special. “It just so hit me that it's small, and it's beautiful. And it is hard. And it's all encompassing, but you let it wash over you. And you just have to just be in it.”
There is an element of reclamation, too, however: whereas the USA may have quaint tropes of mom and pop shops, “family brewery” has very different connotations here. Some of the largest independent or regional breweries in the country are family breweries, the “family” in their title denoting lineage or dynasty, rather than something more immediate and indicative of how the young brewery operates.
“It sounded right, you know—we're a family with a brewery,” James says. “And I think it's also a pre-emptive apology to everyone who the beer might not reach on time: we once did a mail-out Friday at 9pm with a new beer release, because we’d just finished bath time and Otis had kicked off. Who does a beer mail out on a Friday night, with everyone in the beer industry busy or working for the next two days.”
Ultimately, for James and Nia, the idea is not dissimilar to how those regional family brewers may have begun, though on an infinitesimally smaller scale.
“Hopefully this is the only brewery we ever do,” James say. “Hopefully, if the boys want to run it when they're older—fucking great. I want to be the old bloke in the corner fixing a pump. When someone's being shown around like ‘who's the old bloke in the corner pottering around?’ ‘Oh, it's the guy who founded it and owns it and stuff. Don't worry about him. He's just old.’ I want to be that guy.”
