Hogs Back Brewery Tour
As part of our Things to Do series we bring you the Hogs Back Brewery Tour in Tongham, Surrey — if you're camping or walking nearby, it's well worth a visit. Brewery tours are run at selected times five days a week for £10, and booking is highly recommended. The brewery is a small craft brewery in Tongham, Surrey. It was formed in 1992 and today produces 57,600 pints each week. Hogs Back are most known for their beer "TEA" ("Traditional English Ale"), an award-winning English ale with a deep gold colour.
The brewery tour starts in the Hogs Back Brewery Shop, where you're presented with a half-pint Hogs Back Brewery glass for your tasting — the glass is also yours to keep. The first beer we sampled was HBB Hogs Back Bitter, and while we drank this our guide for the afternoon explained the ingredients of beer, we sniffed the malt and hops, and heard about the process. There was no shortage of sampling, with 5 large jugs between 20 of us — that meant at least a pint, maybe two, of each beer.
The tour continued around the rest of the small brewery, stopping off in the mash room, the fermentation tanks, the boardroom and the cask room. In total across the tour we tasted 4 different beers: Hogs Back Bitter, TEA Traditional English Ale, Hop Garden Gold and Rip Snorter.
Our visit was in mid-November, as the brewery was going through a rebranding, so it was especially interesting hearing about the new logos, changing trends among ale drinkers, and the fortunes of the brewery.
As all good tours should, ours ended back in the brewery shop, and what a shop it was — as well as a full range of Hogs Back beer, there's an impressive selection of both British and international ales on offer, brewery fayre, clothing and other products like cakes, mustards and sausages, all made with Hogs Back beer.
In all it was a fantastic tour lasting just under 2 hours — great beer, an informative, insightful and humorous guide, and a great shop. Even if you can't get a booking on the brewery tour, the shop alone is well worth a visit.