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While tourists flock to the Llyn Peninsula in the summer for its seaside charms, Porthmadog retains its industrial heritage, based on slate, shipbuilding, and railways. The town is still home to the world’s oldest-surviving railway company, the Ffestiniog Railway. Its steam locomotives puff up densely wooded mountain slopes, and past small patches of Celtic rainforest, before emerging into the slate-strewn, moon-like landscapes of the old mining centre, Blaenau Ffestiniog.
Coming out of a six-month winter is disorientating. The Isle of Man stands against the Irish Sea’s worst, proud in the spray like a prow, and while its storms are destructive, the heaviest toll is the grey and the fog. “I feel like we haven’t seen the sun in forever,” says Elizabeth Townsend, one half of Kerroo Brewing Company, which she runs with her partner, brewer Nick Scarffe.
Communal brewhouses with gear-and-pully mash tuns. Brewing rights that stretch back to the Middle Ages. Wood-fired brew kettles and coolships. All this alone is enough to make Zoigl utterly unique. But there’s something more, the essential ingredient that ties everything together: the Zoiglstube. It’s in these traditional taverns that the magical transformation of communal brewhouses and coolships into Zoigl takes place. Without the Zoiglstube, Zoigl is just another Kellerbier.
