Running beer is made from a blend of two, three, and four year old spontaneously fermented beers. The worts were made using malted rye and aged hops. They fermented and matured in a mixture of French and American oak barrels, previously used by Bourbon whiskey and Burgundy white wine producers. The finished blend is bottle conditioned to produce fine natural carbonation.

About eleven years ago we visited Boon in Belgium and were delighted to find their geuze in tiny 25 cl beer bottles in the brewery shop. It seemed outrageous to have such a beer in such openable bottles. Needless to say, the remainder of the trip was peppered with tiny geuze portions at every opportunity. Breakfast geuze?

Last year we filled a blend of Running Beer into 375 ml half Champagne bottles for the first time, with the aim of having a more portion size option of our house beer. We’ve come to the conclusion that we only did half the job though, and are delighted to present Running Beer in our lovely 330 ml beer bottles, slowly conditioned in bottle just like the 750s (which we will continue to release Running Beer in too).

Running Beer is the first beer we designed for Mills Brewing. It is the purest distillation of how we make beer. This is blend sixteen. The average age of the beer at bottling was 25 months.

We aim towards a similar flavour profile for Running Beer each time, however we still have no set recipe. The grains and hops are varied for each brew. A variety of worts are produced using traditional turbid mash methods and aged hops, before spontaneous fermentation in different types of barrel. We welcome the natural variation given by the wild fermentation. At the point of blending, our aim is to make the body relatively full for the ABV. This is aided by the inclusion of large quantities of rye grains in most of the brews we use in Running Beer. We also like to include a proportion of beer from relatively fresh oak barrels, to lend a creamy character to the aroma and mouthfeel.