As you may well be aware, these are getting to be expensive times for independent breweries like us with the decreasing value of the pound, a shortage of some hop varieties, more competition and increased beer duty.
Whatever your view on Brexit - we’re not even going to get into that one! - the pound has taken a bit of a whack, which means buying all the hop varieties we know and love from Europe, America and elsewhere has become more expensive. At the same time the worldwide hop crop has been hit by a bad harvest and there are more and more UK breweries who want to buy something there is not very much of.
Sadly, this all means that when we got the price list for our hops back in January the price per kilogram had risen by 70% in many cases. With the margin on selling a cask of beer already pretty tight, we don’t really have any choice but to pass some of this onto our customers. 
With cask beer becoming such a tough market, we’ve also taken the chance to rationalise the range and look at what it makes sense to offer. The good news is that we’ve also added a couple of other permanent additions to the range.
From now on our cask traditional range will consist of Eden Best and Eden Gold, which will be available all the time. Also on regular release will be Eden Pale, an easy drinking 3.6%ABV blonde made with fruity Slovenian Styrian Wolf and German Bavarian Mandarina.
This will be joined by Eden Cracker. Lots of you will already know Eden Cracker, which has been brewed and released in different parts of the country under the guise of Patterdale Terrier, Cumbria Cracker and Dufton Pike Ale. This is a classic English ale brewed with English Challenger Hops and Maris Otter and Crystal malts which has proved very popular in its various different incarnations.
Eden Fuggle and Blonde Knight will be available as limited release, with the price of 
all our traditional cask beers rising by about £2 a cask.
In the Hop Forward range we will continue offering Atomic, Dynamite, Thunderbolt and Rocket in cask. However, as these are - as the name implies - extremely highly hopped, often with varieties from overseas, the price of a cask will increase on average by £5.
The prices will go up in May and a detailed price list will be available soon.
Of course we don’t want to put our prices up, but when the raw ingredients are getting so expensive alongside all the other increased pressures there isn’t really much choice. We have to try and make some money after all! In any case the increases are below the 70 per cent hike we are having to absorb at our end.
We hope you’ll understand and, as always, if you want to talk anything through with us then please get in touch.
