We would like to wish you all a peaceful and joyful Christmas. We hope you will be able to enjoy it with your loved ones, eating (too much) good food, relaxing beside a warm fireplace. Our wishes especially go out to those of you who for some reason are having a hard time and are finding it difficult to get in to the Holiday season spirit. Better times are coming.

We’ve said all along that we will strive to have a commercial version of Cockfosters ready during the end of this calendar year (2012). At this point we see no reason as to why this would not be the case. During the period from now until then a few select people will get a bottle of this product for evaluation purposes. We also would like to point out that although we are optimistic about meeting our own set deadline we will not release Cockfosters or any other product for that matter if we are not fully satisfied with the taste or concept of the product in question. We do not feel that it would be right towards our customers or our business plan to haste in to something.

Having said that, as previously stated, we feel that we will meet our deadline.

In the first stages of our lifecycle our products will for understandable reasons only be available locally and discussions are ongoing on different levels with local free houses.

We have a plan in place for different scenarios that includes a rapid expansion but of course mainly for the implementation of hard work for years to come.

As long as all of you are waiting for a taste of what we are creating we’re trying to keep ourself and yourself busy with different social media activities so that the time will seemingly pass a little bit quicker. These activities include competitions of different types, and we are also in the process of releasing our own webshop where a few items will be sold worldwide to supplement the spreading and building of our brand. (The stuff we’re making available is really cool.)

Have a great week everybody!

Best regards,

The Brewers

For those of you familiar with Fantasy Football you know the procedure. You just log in to fantasy.premierleague.com and use this code to join the league: 992767-288470.

If you are new to Fantasy Football you can read more about it on the fantasy.premierleague.com website, but the whole thing is pretty straight forward. You create an account (free), pick your team from existing players in the Premier League, join our league and when your players play well, score goals etc. in ‘real life’ you will get points, and when the season is over in May the overall winner (at least) will be presented with a Challenge Cup trophy and a fantastic goodie bag filled with official merchandise from Jacobstads Breweries.

In addition to this we will at the end of each month give each of the teams in our league the chance to win a stylish Cockfosters Premium Bitter t-shirt, to wear with pride in any walks of life. This will be in the form of a traditional lottery where the winner will be announced on our Facebook page and on the official Challenge Cup Forums on the first day of the following month.

Joining is easy, competing is hard. It takes some knowledge of the game and the players, and then of course a wee bit of luck.

May the best man/woman win!

Best regards,

The Brewers

Visit fantasy.premierleague.com and get in the game!

First of all, let’s present ourselves. We are Daniel Löf and Markus Holma, two guys aged 29 and 27. Daniel has been studying economics and marketing and Markus is an engineer. We’ve both had a passion for great ales. Not so much to consume it in large quantities, but more with a focus on the taste, the ingredients and what makes a great brew. We’ve been into brewing for a couple of years and this is a business idea we’ve been developing for about two years.

We don’t claim ourselves to be expert brewers, but we do believe that we know what great ale should taste and look like. We also believe that there is an opportunity and a gap in the Finnish market for a product of this caliber. As we have been planning this for a couple of years it is only in recent weeks our marketing department has slowly started to visualize our ideas. This mainly in the form of a new website.

We’ve been blown away by the positive response from all you people out there. Clearly, great ales mean as much to you as it does to us, and we thank you for all your kind comments and e-mails.

Understandably some of you have asked whereabouts our products can be found to purchase, and many of you have also asked about the Cockfosters shirt.

As we are in the process of fine tuning the recipes we stand before an existing and very challenging time in our breweries short history. During the summer a select few will get a chance to try out our Cockfosters Premium Bitter in the form of a pre-release version. We expect to have our Cockfosters brand represented in select pubs/restaurants across Scandinavia by the end of this year.

We are under no illusions as to the size of the task that lie ahead when we take our idea to the next level, but we are optimistic and do our homework thoroughly and as the saying goes: ‘Good things come to those who wait.’

We will also keep you updated about our progress here on our website and there are lots of more exciting things to come just around the corner.

We want you to be a part of this journey right from the very start. If you’ve got any questions please feel free to comment them under this article and we’ll be happy to answer them as quickly as we can.

For the love of handcrafted real ale.

Warm regards,

Daniel Löf & Markus Holma
Brewers at Jacobstads.