Two brothers, a seaside town and a brewing site older than both.

Adnams is the brewery of Southwold, a small seaside town on the Suffolk coast. English Wikipedia records that brewing on the site goes back to 1396, when a woman named Johanna de Corby is recorded as brewing there, but the company dates itself from 1872, the year the brothers George and Ernest Adnams bought the Sole Bay Brewery. The business was incorporated in 1890, and English Wikipedia notes that it has remained independent ever since; the Adnams Charity was set up in 1990 to mark the centenary of the public company.

The brewery stayed in the town. Its yeast, English Wikipedia says, came from Morgans brewery in Norwich in 1942, and horse-drawn drays delivered beer to Southwold’s pubs until 1953, returned in 1970 and finally stopped in 2006, BBC News reported that September. The brewhouse was fully re-equipped in July 2006, and the same year Adnams opened a new distribution centre in neighbouring Reydon, designed by Jeremy Blake and topped with a planted green roof. The company received the Queen’s Award for Enterprise for sustainable development in 2005, the London Gazette recorded.

The family name stayed at the top for more than a century. According to a company announcement of September 2024, Jonathan Adnams joined the business in 1975, joined the board in 1988, became managing director in 1997 and chairman in 2006, and was awarded an OBE in 2008. Adnams also won national recognition for its beer early on: English Wikipedia records that Adnams Extra was named Champion Beer of Britain at the Great British Beer Festival in 1993.

A clock jack, a painted range and a cask ale called Southwold.

The oldest piece of the Adnams identity is a figure called Southwold Jack. The company says he is a replica of a clock jack in the town’s St Edmund’s Church, just behind the brewery’s fermentation building, where the original strikes a bell to mark the start of a service. Adnams says Jack is its oldest trademark, chosen in the early days to show where the beer comes from; he has appeared in the corporate logo, stands on the brewery wall overlooking East Green, and is now the emblem of Southwold Bitter.

That beer was itself renamed. English Wikipedia says the session bitter long sold simply as Bitter became Southwold Bitter and was repackaged in May 2011. Design Week reported in May 2011 that the Brighton design studio CookChick had redesigned Broadside and then the bitter, with new pump clips, take-home packaging and point-of-sale material, adding what the magazine called historic character.

The same studio returned for a larger job. In March 2024 Adnams announced a redesign of its core beer range across kegs, casks, bottles and cans, rolling out from 2 April, The Morning Advertiser and Food Manufacture reported. The work was done by CookChick with the local painter Vanessa Sorboen, whose painting the team had seen in The Crown Hotel in Southwold, and each beer was given its own original painting. Jess Turner, the company’s head of brand, told the trade press that the range needed stronger brand recognition to help customers shop across it, while head of production Fergus Fitzgerald spoke of a sense of place and a connection to where the beers are made.

The beers behind the paintings are long-standing. English Wikipedia lists Broadside as the brewery’s premium bitter and Ghost Ship as a pale ale introduced in 2004 as a seasonal and brewed all year from March 2012; an alcohol-free Ghost Ship followed, and in its results for 2024 the company called it its leading low and no-alcohol pale ale.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all British beer names: Fuller’s, Greene King, Adnams, BrewDog, Theakston, Old Speckled Hen and Shepherd Neame. Beer brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family brewers that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a pub bar.

A beer brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a pump clip, a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its brewing or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its beer is actually brewed and packaged.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its beer is brewed and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A distillery, a funding review and a company that stayed its own.

Adnams has made spirits as well as beer since November 2010, when its Copper House distillery began working in Southwold with a copper pot still and rectifying columns, the Eastern Daily Press reported; The Spirits Business reported in March 2015 that two more pot stills had been added. The distillery makes gin, vodka and whisky, and the company’s announcements refer to its gin as Copperhouse Gin. In March 2019 Adnams launched its first cider, Wild Wave, the East Anglian Daily Times reported.

The last few years have been about funding and leadership. In February 2024 the company appointed advisers to explore funding options, Food Manufacture reported, and in April 2024 it played down press talk of an outright sale, saying its intention was to raise capital from a third party and/or sell freehold assets. Its interim statement of September 2024 said the proposals received had not been attractive enough to pursue and that the review continued. Jenny Hanlon, previously finance director, became the company’s first female chief executive on 1 July 2024, and Jonathan Adnams stepped down as chairman in September 2024, when the company said his family remained a significant shareholder. Simon Townsend served as interim chair and was confirmed as chair on 2 April 2026. In its results for 2025, published in May 2026, Adnams plc still described itself as a Suffolk-based premium drinks producer and hospitality group, reducing debt by selling non-core assets while working through what it called a commercial turnaround plan.

For a design guide, Adnams shows how a clock figure from a church tower, a town name on a bitter and a set of commissioned paintings can hold a regional brewery’s range together for well over a century. Compare Greene King, the brewer in Bury St Edmunds, and Fuller’s, the London brewery at Chiswick. For this guide we use Sole Bay blue, copper and cask cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Adnams’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.