Roger Ryman was a brewer who stood out from the crowd. He brewed exceptional beers and he boosted the fortunes of St Austell Brewery in Cornwall by turning Tribute and Proper Job into brands that found acclaim with drinkers far beyond the West Country. Roger, who has died aged 52 of cancer, spent more than 20 years at the Cornish brewery.
His predecessor once said beer sales “fell off the cliff” at the end of the summer when visitors left Cornwall. To survive in the keenly competitive brewing industry, Roger joined forces with James Staughton in 1999 to take the brewery’s beers to a wider audience. Staughton was the new managing director at St Austell and, as the great-great grandson of Walter Hicks, who had founded the company in 1851, he had a mission to stop the brewery quietly declining and even closing.
The turnaround started in spectacular fashion. Roger produced a beer called Daylight Robbery for the total eclipse of the sun in August 1999. He expected there would be brief interest in the beer but, he said, “it went ballistic”.
The beer became St Austell’s bestseller and in 2001 it was renamed Tribute to honour Cornwall’s mining communities. It soon accounted for 70% of the brewery’s production – and that production soared. Before Roger arrived, St Austell had brewed three times a week. The demand for Tribute saw three brews a day going through the plant and by 2010 St Austell was producing 60,000 barrels a year.
Roger was born in Leeds, where his parents, Mary (nee Sisson) and Donald Ryman, were a university lecturer and a school teacher. The die was cast when, aged 14, Roger bought a home-brewing kit from Boots and developed a passion for making beer. He studied agricultural science at Newcastle University and went to work as a laboratory technician at Newcastle Breweries.
He then took time out to travel round Canada where he met and married Toni Hay in 1993. They settled in Edinburgh, where Roger studied for a master’s degree at Heriot-Watt University’s Institute of Brewing and Distilling. He joined Maclay’s Brewery in Alloa in 1996 and three years later made the long journey to Cornwall to take up the head brewer’s post at St Austell.
After Tribute, Roger soon had a second bestselling beer to his name when he introduced Proper Job IPA in 2006: “proper job” is a Cornish expression for a task well done. The beer was the result of a visit Roger made to the Bridgeport Brewery in Oregon in the US whose own IPA had won several awards. Roger was inspired to develop Proper Job, using three American hop varieties.
He was a passionate devotee of England’s finest malting barley, Maris Otter, but to avoid trucking supplies from East Anglia he persuaded local farmers to grow the grain exclusively for St Austell. Cornish Gold, as the variety was named, gives a notable fresh biscuit flavour to the beers.
Roger developed a second collaborative beer with the New Riga Brewery in Moscow. Black Square was his interpretation of a Russian imperial stout, the type of strong stouts exported in the 18th and 19th centuries to Russia and the Baltic States. The beer is aged in bourbon barrels before being released.
Roger brought the same vigour and attention to detail to a lager called Korev: its name is Cornish for beer. He was determined to produce an authentic German-style beer and installed new equipment to properly brew, ferment and store Korev. He imported lager malt and three German hops.
Roger’s last major task was to design and install a new brewhouse for Bath Ales’ Hare Brewery at Warmley, near Bristol. St Austell bought Bath Ales in 2016 and spent £5.5m on a state-of-the-art brewery that can produce both ale and lager. He was a brilliant communicator as well as a brewer. I was a member of the press party he showed round the new site, explaining with passion and simplicity the brewing process and the difference between ale and proper lager.
Roger, promoted to director of brewing, spread the word about his beers at Camra beer festivals and other events. He won many awards in international and domestic competitions and was twice named brewer of the year: by the British Guild of Beer Writers in 2006; and the all-party parliamentary beer group in 2009. In his spare time, he was a keen hiker and a “gig rower” in the Cornish six-oared vessels that can also operate as lifeboats.
He is survived by Toni, who is the brewery office manager at St Austell, and by his father and two sisters.
• Roger John Ryman, brewer, born 2 June 1967; died 28 May 2020
