“Hi I’m Gareth Lee, the master brewer at Loch Leven. I’ve been brewing beer for more years than I want to own up to.
Loch Leven is a great place to brew great beers. It’s a majestic location with the finest soft Scottish water. Ideal to bring out the individual tastes and character.
I hope you enjoy drinking our beers as much as I enjoy brewing them!”
Being canny Scots our brewery was bought second hand from a local brewery (the original Loch Leven Brewery) whose owner decided to turn his hand to dentistry instead.
It has a 4 barrel brew length and we can brew up to 5 brews each week.
We brew using traditional methods in a mash tun followed by wort kettle/hop strainer. Our beers are truly small batch and handcrafted, we still dig out the mash tun and have to jump into the wort kettle to remove the spent hops! We give away our spent grains from the mash to a local deer farmer.
Wherever possible we source local ingredients. We use the finest Scottish water collected in reservoirs from the hills around the brewery. Our malt is sown,grown and malted in Scotland and we believe we were the first brewery to be able to make this claim. We use whole hops grown in the UK and a few from Scotland when we can get a hold of them.
Our primary focus is selling cask beers as this is the most sustainable (no filtering or pasteurisation) but we recognise that our customers need both bottles and kegs. Both of these are cold filtered and not pasturised. (unlike the majority of big brewers.)
When we started out we went to great lengths to try to make great beers that are gluten free and vegan friendly but most importantly liked by all. We are partially along this journey: our cask beers are gluten free and our keg and bottled beers are now gluten free and vegan friendly.