Positive Tension — Roosters Brewery in Harrogate, North Yorkshire
Tom Fozard is frustrated.
I’m sitting with Tom and his identical twin brother Oliver (Ol for short) in an office that overlooks Roosters, the brewery they bought with their dad, Ian, in 2011. Founded in 1993 by Sean Franklin—a man who could ostensibly be described as one of modern British beer’s genuine pioneers—it’s been a staple among the beer enthusiasts of North Yorkshire and beyond pretty much ever since.
Photography by Matthew Curtis
But that’s not quite how Tom sees it. Caught in a weird limbo that exists between Britain’s heritage-laden family brewers that can claim decades, if not centuries, of brewing tradition, and the slick, self-confident modern beer brands that emerged in earnest around 2010, Roosters is part of a small set of breweries that shares aspects of both camps, but doesn’t quite fit into either.
“Roosters was actually quite a well-kept secret, and probably still is more than I’d like it to be,” Tom says. “We trust in what we do, but to our detriment we’re not out there being all bullish and ramming it down people's throats—especially given the history of the brewery.”
While identical in appearance, bar different hairstyles that mercifully allow you to tell them apart at a glance (Tom wears a smart short back and sides, while Ol sports a longer, floppier cut) the brothers took markedly different paths that led to them running a brewery with their dad. The better you get to know them, the more differences between the twins become apparent: their body language, their mannerisms, even their accents—Ol’s Yorkshire twang is more pronounced than his brother’s. Now in their early 40s, Tom reflects on how he chose a path that led him to university and a promising job in the publishing industry. Ol, on the other hand, tells me how he fell into a lifelong brewing career at the tender age of 18.
“[University] just didn’t appeal to me,” Ol says. “Long story short: I went down to the job centre one day and there was a job going at Daleside Brewery on the other side of Harrogate to where we are now, and that’s where I cut my teeth.”
Despite Tom and Ol going their separate ways at the start of adulthood, circumstance, it seems, had conspired to see their lives remain closely intertwined. Roosters might still be known for its trailblazing founder Sean Franklin, and the beers he created like Yankee—a true Yorkshire icon, and one of the earliest British beers to embrace the use of North American hops. But the Fozards have been at the wheel for more than a decade now, steering their storied, yet still relatively contemporary brand through generational shifts in British beer culture.
The end of 2019 saw them move Roosters from the nearby town of Knaresborough to their present home on Hornbeam Business Park at the edge of Harrogate. This upheaval involved an investment of £850,000 in tripling the brewery’s capacity, and the opening of a spacious on-site taproom that gives a wide-brimmed hat tip to the North American craft brewery aesthetic. It’s immediately evident how dedicated they both are to the brand they now steward—but I’m left wondering how they might take Roosters forward in an era where it feels like people don’t seem to care as much about beer, or breweries, as they did a decade ago.
It’s no wonder, then, that as we continue to chat about the brewery, how the Fozards took it on, and how they continue to push it forward in an increasingly challenging beer market, there’s a little tension in the air.
Part One: The Assassin and the Rooster
In 2009 Tom found himself working at The Old Bell in Harrogate, one of the pubs then owned by his dad as part of a small chain based around Yorkshire called Market Town Taverns. Having been laid off from his job in the publishing industry during the financial crisis of the previous year, money was tight. So tight, in fact, that he’d decided to take up homebrewing so he could still enjoy a few beers at home, and save a little cash in the process.
18 months later Tom landed a job at Beer Ritz, a beer shop based in the Leeds suburb of Headingley. The shop (which sadly closed its bricks and mortar location in 2020) was owned by Zak Avery, an influential figure within the local scene thanks to the promotion of beer from smaller, independent breweries via his blog, The Beer Boy, and a fellow homebrewer. By this point Tom’s homebrewing hobby had escalated. He tells me how he’d begun to experiment more often, and was even double-brewing batches so he could play around with different recipes and combinations of ingredients. He’d also visited the United States a couple of times, including on his honeymoon, so had experienced the strong, aromatic beers being produced by contemporary North American breweries.
In particular, he was struck by the potent quality of a relatively new-to-the-market hop called Citra. The variety was already seeing a small amount of commercial use in the UK, having first been used to create an eponymously-named beer by Peterborough’s Oakham Brewery in November 2009. But supply of this hop, despite its rapid rise in popularity, was still thin on the ground—especially for plucky, ambitious homebrewers like Zak Avery and Tom Fozard.
Zak, however, was well connected, and managed to procure a kilogram of Citra from the (now defunct) Holmfirth-based Summer Wine Brewery, of which he gave Tom half. While Zak decided to ration his supply over five different batches, Tom made the decision to throw all caution to the wind, using his entire lot in a single recipe.
“I took my 500 grams and just went all out,” he tells me. “It fermented really well, and, well, it was just incredible. I was really proud of that beer.”
Tom wasn’t the only person who found the beer to be most agreeable. I contacted Zak as a way of fact-checking Tom’s modesty, and he spoke fondly of their time working together, and comparing different batches of homebrew. He also explained how thorough Tom was with his methods and process and that for this beer specifically he was experimenting with a relatively new technique known as ‘hop-bursting’.
This involved dumping the entire-half kilo of Citra into the beer at flameout, meaning the hops were added directly at the end of the boil stage of the brewing process. Citra is a high alpha acid variety, meaning that if boiled it will impart high levels of bitterness, while at the same time subduing its aromatics. The hop-bursting technique—one that is now commonplace in the production of modern, hop-forward beer—sought to avoid adding bitterness, while at the same time preserving Citra’s intense, citrus-fruit character.
“It seemed like complete madness,” Zak tells me. “A couple of weeks later he turned up with the finished beer, which was an absolute triumph. Mind-blowingly good.”
Despite his career in publishing now behind him, Tom still carried the urge to indulge his creative impulses. Instead of just referring to his homebrew by batch number, he would give each finished beer a name, and play around with designing a label for it. Due to this beer having an alcohol content well over 6%, and yet being “deceptively drinkable” it was christened ‘Baby Faced Assassin.’ I ask Tom if this is a reference to the same nickname once bestowed on former Manchester United striker Ole Gunnar Solskjær.
“Absolutely not,” he says. “I’m a Leeds United fan!”
At this point, it’s worth reminding ourselves that Tom is not the brother with a lifetime background in professional brewing. I half expect Ol to poke his brother with a jibe about how good this first batch of Baby Faced Assassin really was, but admits (a little reluctantly, perhaps) it was “knock-your-socks-off great.”
It was only a few months after Tom’s batch of homebrew had sent friends and colleagues into raptures that the Fozards acquired Roosters from Sean Franklin. While they were, sensibly, unwilling to change too much in those early days, inevitably people started asking Tom and Ol when they might brew another batch of Baby Faced Assassin.
After enough nagging from their friends, they made what they assumed would be one more batch, which made its way into 660ml bottles. Tom and Ol thought that might be the end of it, but inevitably people started asking for it again, so in 2013 Tom handed his recipe off to his brother and they started to think about its commercial production.
“Because of the amount of hops in it I said to Tom, ‘if we upscaled that we might as well do one brew and close the doors,’ because we’d be skint,” Ol tells me. “So I tweaked the recipe a little bit, and added a touch of Munich malt into the grist to give it a slightly maltier backbone.”
Under a sub-brand they dubbed ‘The Outlaw Project’ they released a batch of Baby Faced Assassin in cask they thought would finally get people to stop asking for it. But, as you might expect by now, the beer was a huge hit, and requests for more continued to arrive in their droves.
It wasn’t until 2014, however, when Tom and Ol started to look at upscaling Baby Faced Assassin to full commercial production. In August that year they had just paid a deposit on what would be one of the first small-scale canning lines to be put to use by a British brewery. Collectively, the brothers and their dad decided they needed to hit the ground running with a core offering of three beers in can. They opted for Yankee—the Sean Franklin developed flagship-pale ale they inherited when they took on the brewery—a now-discontinued modern American style pale ale known as Fort Smith, and Baby Faced Assassin.
““When you look back on it, it feels like [Baby Faced Assassin] was our line in the sand, without us ever really deciding that should be the case””
Tom admits they were reticent, initially, about upscaling Baby Faced Assassin because of what they’d inherited. Roosters was immensely respected locally, and choosing Yankee to form part of that flagship-trio of cans was an intentional nod to Sean Franklin’s impact. Of the three cans, however, it was Baby Faced Assassin that took off. The rasping, citrus-accented and, yes, ridiculously quaffable for its strength beer found favour not just commercially—where it became the brewery’s most listed, and most exported beer—but at international beer competitions where it also became Roosters’ most decorated.
If Roosters was built on the back of Sean Franklin’s legacy, then it was Baby Faced Assassin that ushered in the beginning of the Fozard era. When it comes to that legacy there’s a definite sense of stewardship, which is why you’ll always find Yankee on the hand pulls in the taproom, and on the bar at pubs across Yorkshire.
But there’s also a sense that—in terms of identity—it's something of a burden, perhaps aggravated by Tom’s inherently creative instincts and desire to do things his own way. Roosters was never going to be a blank canvas for the Fozards, but Baby Faced Assassin, at least, gave them a fresh set of paintbrushes with which to depict the brewery's influence on beer and brewing in the United Kingdom.
“When you look back on it, it feels like [Baby Faced Assassin] was our line in the sand, without us ever really deciding that should be the case,” Tom says.
***
In the late 1970s Sean Franklin had the grand notion of relocating to the Pacific Northwest and buying a vineyard. He travelled to Oregon, where he immersed himself in American wine culture. But what he discovered there would see him on a different path entirely: a hop variety called Cascade. In 1980 he founded Franklin’s Brewery, located in a shed behind the Gardener’s Arms in Bilton, a suburb on the north-side of Harrogate.
This was a turbulent time for small breweries. The market was still dominated by ‘The Big Six’ brewers of Whitbread, Scottish and Newcastle, Bass Charrington, Allied Breweries, Courage Imperial, and Watneys. It was difficult for a microbrewery like Franklin’s to gain any real traction, and so in 1986 he reluctantly sold it. It seemed his intention to introduce the bold, fruit flavours inherent of this cherished hop variety to British palates was at a premature end.
Then, in 1989, the government introduced a new set of laws known as ‘The Beer Orders’ with the explicit intention of breaking the stranglehold the Big Six had on the British beer market. It meant that no brewery was allowed to own more than 2000 pubs, and that landlords were able to list guest beers outside of those produced by the brewery which owned their establishment. The intention was for these large brewing concerns to relinquish their vast estates of public houses, freeing up the market as they did so. However, it had the opposite effect, with these companies instead opting to sell their breweries and concentrating on building a portfolio of hospitality businesses, eventually giving rise to the large PubCos of today.
A saving grace of the Beer Orders was that they allowed more flexible access to market. Suddenly the notion of running a microbrewery became more commercially viable. In 1993, after several years working as a local taxi driver, Sean Franklin decided to have another crack of the whip and opened Rooster’s Brewing Company, this time in the neighbouring Harrogate suburb of Starbeck.
“Roosters’ beers were very similar to the Franklin’s ones they replaced,” Paul Mudge, a member of the Stafford and Stone branch of CAMRA, tells me. “[The] hops resembled lychees, not the grapefruit of ‘new world’ hops in more recent decades.”
Franklin’s life, and his significant influence on the course of British brewing is well documented in the 2014 book Brew Britannia by Jessica Boak and Ray Bailey. It tells of how he grew up in Harrogate, and took a job in the wine industry in his 20s, which saw him move to London, and eventually the wine communes of Aloxe-Corton in Burgundy. In 1974 he enrolled at the Institut D'Oenologie at the University of Bordeaux to study a degree in oenology—“all aspects of winemaking, except the cultivation of grapes,” the chapter on Franklin reads.
Boak and Bailey wrote of how Franklin absorbed the teachings of one of his professors, Émile Peynaud, a significant figure in wine, and considered by many to be the forefather of modern oenology. It was Peynaud who instilled in Franklin the urgency of working with fresh, high quality ingredients—so that only the best flavours are captured—and that fermentation was carefully controlled in order to achieve the best possible results.
It was also likely that Peynaud’s influence gave Franklin the ability to consider Cascade in a different light to the often derogatory way it was conveyed by many British brewers during the 1980s. Although it was designed to mimic English varieties such as Fuggles or Goldings, it was far more aromatic, and was often referred to as “catty”—a depreciative term meaning its aroma is reminiscent of the scent marking produced by a male cat. Thanks to his training, Franklin was able to break down the complexity of Cascade, instead interpreting it using positive descriptors associated with fruit such as gooseberries, or grapefruit.
Caroline Schwaller, a CAMRA member who now resides in Kendal, Cumbria, fondly remembers meeting Sean Franklin in the 1980s and how he advised on wine buying for her family’s restaurant and wine bar at the time. She became a regular visitor to the Gardener’s Arms while he was operating Franklin’s Brewery, and remains in touch with him to this day.
“It was a joy to shadow him at wine tastings,” Caroline tells me. “He trained my palate and helped me to find my own vocabulary for tastes and flavours.”
Brew Britannia also speaks of Franklin's reclusiveness (despite numerous attempts, I was not able to contact him for the purposes of this article) and his modesty. It’s apparent, speaking to those who knew him, that he does not consider himself to be a trailblazer, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. He was almost certainly not alone in pioneering the use of North American hops within the UK. Brendan Dobbin of Manchester’s long-defunct West Coast Brewing Company was also blazing this trail, alongside Dave Wickett of Kelham Island Brewery, formerly based out of the Fat Cat in Sheffield.
“Sean was quite straightforward once we'd made contact. Mostly he was a bit embarrassed to be treated like a great authority or legendary figure. He was at great pains to credit others wherever he could,” Boak and Bailey tell me of their interactions with him, which took place in 2013. “He also described himself as an introvert and he was certainly fairly quiet and thoughtful in our conversations—although certainly passionate enough when he got down to actually talking about wine and beer.”
The legacy of the ‘pale and hoppy’ ales that Sean Franklin and his generation of brewers introduced to drinkers can still be found with relative ease. Beers like Brewers Gold from Pictish Brewery in Rochdale, Harvest Pale from Nottingham’s Castle Rock, or Amarillo from Crouch Vale Brewery in Chelmsford, Essex are fine modern examples of the style. It is, of course, also available via Roosters Yankee, which is still the brewery's flagship, served on cask, to this day. Slightly less pale than the previously cited examples, you might say it has accents of lemon zest and orange pith, with a soft biscuit character in the mid-palate, followed by a sharp, mineral finish. But halfway through your second pint you’re more likely to think: “by ‘eck, this is gorgeous.”
It’s a beer that Tom Fozard can’t escape from, whether he’d like to or not. He recalls a 2016 visit to the Craft Brewers Conference, held that year in Philadelphia, and arriving at a bar where Garrett Oliver was hosting a beer tasting. Eyeing the logo on Tom’s shirt, the Brooklyn brewmaster paused, mid-sentence, and announced to the at-capacity crowd that he was going to tell them a story about Roosters.
“It was lovely, and I didn’t know what to do with it,” Tom says. “Basically [Garrett] said: ‘you guys need to understand the importance of Sean Franklin and Roosters Brewery, because he invented the Session IPA’.”
Part Two: The Letter
About 18 months into his four and a half year stint at Daleside Brewery, Ol Fozard wrote Sean Franklin a letter. It was 2001, and Ol had asked Sean if there were any jobs going at Roosters, which that year had relocated to the nearby town of Knaresborough. While Franklin didn’t have any work available, he wrote back to Ol and invited him out for a beer, saying he’d be happy to offer him some career advice.
“I remember meeting him because it's the first time I’d been to a pub and seen someone drink two halves of different beers at the same time,” Ol says. “He was seeing different styles and tasting them. Configuring his palate, if you will.”
After working for Daleside, where he completed a brewing apprenticeship, Ol would spend a further six years brewing for Copper Dragon in Skipton, North Yorkshire. Here he learned the routine and consistency of production brewing. As he drew towards the end of his time there, a number of things began to come together for the Fozards: Ol’s decade of brewing experience, Tom’s persevering enthusiasm for all things creative, and their dad, Ian, deciding to sell his stake in Market Town Taverns. About six months before they’d be handed the opportunity to take on Roosters, the three of them talked about starting a brewery from scratch.
Although the impending purchase of Roosters wasn’t intentional—at least not immediately—it was almost certainly serendipitous. Ian had promised the shareholders of his 15-strong pub estate an exit, and after 13 years he was ready to give them one. In 2011 he sold the business to Isle of Man-based hospitality estate Heron & Brearley for an undisclosed sum. By divine coincidence, Sean Franklin and his wife and business partner Alison were ready to retire. They had also heard on the grapevine that the newly-minted Fozards were thinking about starting a brewery of their own. Sean approached them to ask about taking on Roosters, and the rest, as they say, is history.
“After some tricky negotiations we agreed the deal,” Ian tells me. “It was fortunate that, having sold Market Town Taverns, I could afford it!”
It wasn’t a simple handover, however, with Sean agreeing to stay on as a consultant for eight months. Before he took over as head brewer in earnest, Ol spent this time shadowing Sean at the Knaresborough brewery, and learning an approach to brewing that was different to what he experienced at Daleside and Copper Dragon. By now an accomplished technical brewer, under Sean Ol saw first hand the ingredient-and quality-focused methods that had in turn been instilled into Sean by Émile Peynaud decades ago.
“The decision making, the dedication, and everything Sean considered really just kind of opened my eyes,” Ol says. “His palate was incredible. There were moving parts in every single brew, and if he wasn’t happy with the temperature, or the level of calcium in a particular beer then everything changed quickly.”
Ol admits he found it all a little daunting at first, but was fascinated by the methods he was now experiencing first hand. Sean must’ve seen something in Ol, too, because after three months they switched roles, with Ol now leading the brewing. Crucially, they didn’t tell anybody, so Roosters’ regulars simply assumed they were still drinking beer that had been made by Sean. Ol describes Yankee as having “a cult following in the trade” and that some customers had already decided the beer wasn’t going to be as good as it used to once the Fozards took over.
““Basically [Garrett Oliver] said: ‘you guys need to understand the importance of Sean Franklin and Roosters Brewery, because he invented the Session IPA’.””
“It wasn’t until the brewery actually changed hands that people started saying ‘oh, the quality’s dipped, we can tell Sean’s not brewing it any more,’” Ol says. “So we said: ‘why didn’t you tell us a few months ago when he wasn’t brewing it any longer!’”
The changes made by the Fozards were done slowly and considerately. Tom gradually started tweaking the branding so that it became more contemporary, but still gave a nod in the direction of Sean Franklin’s homemade designs. Ol began updating the brewery equipment, while also introducing new recipes, including the aforementioned Baby Faced Assassin. They understood that whatever they were going to do, not all of Roosters’ existing customers would be happy, so they quietly went about the business of running the brewery as best they could.
The biggest wholesale changes wouldn’t come until they moved the brewery back to Harrogate in 2019. This was when Ol designed and commissioned the Burton upon Trent-manufactured 5000 litre system Roosters use today. To the naked eye, it's every bit as typical as the systems you see in modern breweries: four vessels, consisting of a mash tun, lauter tun, boil kettle, and a whirlpool, met by several cylindroconical fermentation vessels stacked neatly together inside Roosters’ 10,000 square foot production space.
Amid rows of shining stainless steel, however, is something that catches my eye—the ruddy brown glint of copper. Here, quite unexpectedly, exists a single copper pipe, roughly a metre in length, that feeds freshly brewed wort from lauter tun to kettle. Its inclusion here feels deliberate enough for me to ask about it, and as it happens, there’s more than a hint of superstition behind its existence.
The story goes that, back in the 1960s when Leeds’ storied Tetley’s Brewery installed its then-new brewing system, they suddenly started experiencing issues with fermentation, and nobody could figure out what was going on. Inside the old system was a calandria—a tubular heat exchanger that heats wort quickly, enabling it to be boiled vigorously—with a lid to prevent hot wort from spraying in brewers’ faces.
The boil, as Ol explains, would hit this copper lid and then come back down. Eventually, one of their brewers realised this was missing from the new system, and so they retrieved a piece of copper from a skip and hung it in the middle of the kettle. Fermentations then, miraculously, started behaving normally, and this was attributed to the wort interacting with trace elements within the copper. Alchemy, in action.
When Ol started working under Sean at Knaresborough, he noticed a drainpipe with a bit of copper piping, with “loads of perforated holes in it.” Trusting in this superstition—which may or may not have been passed on to him directly by Sean—when it came to designing the new Roosters brewery he measured this bit of their old kit, and ensured the new one had the same surface area of copper for freshly brewed wort to pass through. Whether this was wisdom or superstition, we’ll never truly know.
“From day one, the first brew we did, it fermented as we expected,” Ol says. “To this day I don’t know whether it was down to the copper or not, but I’m glad I did it.
***
On a sunny day in June 2023, Tom, Ol and Ian Fozard are gathered together at Roosters Brewery to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their brewery's founding. To do so they’re holding their first ever invitational beer festival, named ‘Suds With Buds’.
Across the production floor—which has been transformed into an impromptu festival space—beer is pouring from a wide range of contemporaries, including Cloudwater in Manchester and Cromarty in Scotland. From the USA, Orange, California’s Green Cheek is sidled alongside Colorado’s Odell Brewing Company. The IPA of the latter, Tom says, was a huge inspiration for that first batch of Baby Faced Assassin.
The festival crowd ranges from people in their early 20s to those in their late 60s. Men, women, and families have come together to celebrate three decades of this compelling brewery: bands take turns onstage in the beer garden, filling what is ordinarily a busy production space with music and energy, putting a smile on everyone’s face as they work through the incredible array of beer on offer. It feels as though half of Harrogate has turned out for the event. If Roosters is indeed a “well kept secret” as Tom insists, it’s one that’s well shared amongst locals.
“The fact the brewery is nestled on my doorstep is incredibly exciting, and it really helps put Harrogate and Yorkshire on the wider map as a beer destination,” Rachel Auty tells me. Rachel is well known within the local beer community, having organised Harrogate Beer Week since 2021. She also runs the annual Women On Tap event, which celebrates and empowers women working in the beer industry, and aims to break down the stigma that remains around women and beer.
Rachel confesses that when she saw the scale of the Rooster’s taproom she was worried whether they'd ever be able to fill it. While only about 20 minutes from Harrogate town centre, it's a destination that requires a bit of intent to visit, as the less-than-glamorous surroundings of Hornbeam Business Park don’t see much passing trade. Tucked into a corner amid an estate of various, plain brick, steel roofed, identikit warehousing, there’s little to distinguish Roosters from the other buildings surrounding it, bar the modest signage that hangs above the taproom entrance.
Despite this innocuous exterior, the taproom inside makes generous use of the space, which stretches from the front door to the far side of the building. From one end to the other are long, beer-hall style trestle tables and benches, with seated capacity for more than 150 people, plus a private bar upstairs and the beer garden. A well-stocked bar is immediately to your left on arrival, the US-heavy aesthetic balanced by no fewer than eight hand pulls serving fresh cask ale. Yankee and Baby Faced Assassin are always available, accompanied by a range that varies from porter to lager, and everything in between.
Most importantly, it’s a taproom in the most genuine sense, situated directly next to the production floor, separated by a giant plate-glass window which gives you full view of the brewery. Drinkers genuinely feel like they’re a part of the action here, rather than drinking in a tacked-on space in an associated building. Whether it’s for a quiet(ish) pint at 5PM on a Friday, or for a bustling festival like Suds With Buds, it’s a space that has, thankfully, found its audience.
“You feel part of the mechanics,” Rachel says. “As most beer lovers will attest, there’s always something special about drinking a beer right next to the kit on which it was brewed.”
The festival feels necessary somehow—a celebration not just of Sean Franklin's considerable legacy, but how the Fozards have slowly yet mindfully moulded the brewery into their own image over the past 10 years. You could also argue they owe as much to fortune and good timing as they do the history of the brewery itself. It’s a running theme at this brewery, as in 2024, serendipity, it seems, was not done with them yet. When Eric Lucas, then owner of Ol’s first employer Daleside Brewery decided it was time to retire, it was the Fozards who stepped in not just to take on, but maintain another cherished local business, as it joined the Roosters stable.
“It just made sense,” Ian tells me. “We’re really proud that we’ve kept the business going as a separate entity, and protected all the existing staff.”
Tom is a little less pragmatic than his father. Even as we wrap up our conversation he speaks again of how he might’ve enjoyed the opportunity to build a brand from scratch, without the burden of responsibility for any sort of legacy. Roosters are not and will never be shiny and new, Daleside even less so. But neither do they have 100 plus years of heritage or, indeed, a pub estate to lean on and support themselves when the going gets tough. They are British brewing’s middle child, an awkward position to inhabit, yes, but one that still commands a certain level of respect—as Sean Franklin’s influence clearly demonstrates.
I remain convinced that Sean Franklin should be celebrated as one of the most important figures in British beer history. More importantly, however, the Fozards know and—perhaps, some of the time, a little reluctantly—cherish that. Maybe in another 10 years time it’ll be their turn to be revered, and we’ll be discussing the lasting impact this family has had on preserving British brewing culture.
From what I’ve seen, this feels like the right place and the right time for the Fozards. Despite the tension I noticed, I also saw that they have an innate understanding of their place—and more importantly, Roosters’ place—in the annals of British beer. And after all, what good is any kind of legacy without respect?
“The day the keys were handed over I still had that letter from Sean,” Ol tells me as we make our way from their office down to the taproom, where fresh pints of amber-gold Yankee, topped with generous, two-finger heads of foam, are standing sentry-like atop the bar. “So I framed it and gave it back to him.”
