A Little Creatures and Camden brewer and a partner from Tasmania.

Lost and Grounded Brewers is a lager-led brewery on Whitby Road in St Anne’s, Bristol, founded by Alex Troncoso and Annie Clements, who are partners in business and in life. Companies House records the company’s incorporation in October 2015; the brewery itself says it was established in July 2016, and The Brewers Journal says it opened for business in the summer of that year.

Troncoso arrived in Bristol with a long brewing career behind him. Good Beer Hunting reported in October 2017 that he was born in Guatemala and raised in the United States, studied engineering at the Colorado School of Mines, and then spent about eight years at Little Creatures in Western Australia, rising from shift brewer to head of brewing development, before two and a half years as director of brewing at Camden Town Brewery in London. Clements comes from Tasmania, where, the same article says, the two first met.

They did not start small. Robin Eveleigh wrote in Ferment, the magazine of the beer club Beer52, that the couple put in their life savings and brought in former Little Creatures colleagues as silent partners. The brewery says it runs a brewhouse from Krones, the German engineering company, and Good Beer Hunting described it as a 25-hectolitre “Microcube” system, only the fourth of its kind that Krones had built.

The name was chosen with the same care. Troncoso told Good Beer Hunting that the company calls itself “brewers” rather than a brewery because “it’s about people,” and summed up what it wanted to be in four words: “humble, inclusive, clever, and raw.”

A hippo, a globe and an illustrated landscape.

Annie Clements shapes the brand’s look: Bristol24/7 described her in 2021 as the company’s “co-founder and creative lead.” According to Ferment, she chose an illustrative style rather than the highly stylised graphic design used by many newer breweries, and Troncoso calls the approach “friendly and curious.”

The emblem is a hippo carrying a globe. Troncoso told Ferment that the hippo is “a humble creature” that “just gets on with his day,” but also “a bit of a dreamer,” and that if you work hard enough you can carry the world.

The best-known label is Keller Pils, whose artwork was originally illustrated by Alexia Tucker, Bristol24/7 reported in July 2021. That summer the brewery marked its fifth birthday with a mural on the once-grey front of its Whitby Road building: painted over about four days by Ollie Gillard of Gage Graphics, assisted by a friend, it reinterprets the Keller Pils artwork and sets the brewery’s logo against a backdrop of mountains.

The illustrations have also been examined by the Portman Group, whose code covers the naming, packaging and promotion of alcoholic drinks in the UK. In a decision dated 14 November 2019, its Independent Complaints Panel did not uphold a complaint about Keller Pils: it noted the label’s muted colours and matte finish, a hippo in a rowing boat that was “relatively small within the overall image,” and an overall retro impression with a stylised landscape. In a decision dated 30 January 2020, it did uphold a complaint about Running with Sceptres, finding that the can’s prominent cartoon animals, shown smiling, gripping sceptres and walking on their hind legs, gave it a particular appeal to under-18s under rule 3.2(h) of the code.

The brewery said it would not change the design. Clements told The Morning Advertiser in March 2020 that the branding was “no different to the multitude of other brands on the market that utilise an artistic style,” and the Bristol East MP, Kerry McCarthy, called the ruling “the result of a misapplication of the rules through a flawed process.” The paper reported that a retailer alert bulletin asked licensees not to order the beer in its existing packaging after 3 June 2020.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all British craft brewers: Camden Town Brewery, Thornbridge, Magic Rock, Siren Craft Brew, Tiny Rebel, Harviestoun and Lost and Grounded. They began as small, founder-run businesses, but they have travelled very different roads since — some remain in their founders’ hands, while others have been sold, licensed or bought back.

Camden Town Brewery was founded in London in 2010 by Jasper Cuppaidge, in railway arches beneath Kentish Town West station, according to English Wikipedia; AB InBev has owned it since 2015, after a sale announced that December. Thornbridge brewed its first beers in 2005 in outbuildings at Thornbridge Hall in Derbyshire and opened a larger brewery in Bakewell in 2009, English Wikipedia says. Harviestoun was started by Ken Brooker in a farm barn near Dollar, in Clackmannanshire — in 1983, English Wikipedia says — and moved to Alva in 2004; Caledonian bought it in 2006, and in April 2008 long-standing shareholders bought it back to keep it independent, The Morning Advertiser reported.

Magic Rock was founded in Huddersfield in 2011 by Richard Burhouse. The Australian brewer Lion took full ownership in 2019, Lion’s UK business passed to Odyssey Inns in 2022, and in January 2025, after administrators were appointed and the Huddersfield brewery closed, Keystone Brewing Group took an exclusive licence to produce the brand, Just Drinks reported. Tiny Rebel was founded in Newport in 2012 by the brothers-in-law Brad Cummings and Gazz Williams and moved its brewing to Rogerstone, in Newport, in 2017. Siren Craft Brew was set up in 2013 by Darron Anley at Finchampstead in Berkshire, and in April 2026 Anley told Beer Today that it was “still independent.” Lost and Grounded was founded in Bristol by Alex Troncoso and Annie Clements and says it was established in 2016.

A brewery’s identity is carried by its pump clips, cans and labels as much as by its beer, and those can outlast changes of owner or even the brewery itself. 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 packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Lager every week, and a gold for the flagship.

Lager has been at the centre from the start. In 2017 Good Beer Hunting listed the early range as Keller Pils, an unfiltered, German-inspired pilsner; Running with Sceptres, a lager hopped with American varieties; Hop-Hand Fallacy, a Belgian-influenced farmhouse ale; and No Rest for Dancers, a dubbel sold as a red ale. Ferment describes Apophenia as a Belgian-style tripel, and in 2025 The Brewers Journal named Extra Nice and a Helles among the brewery’s more recent beers.

The company says it brews lager every week of the year, sources its malts from Germany and Belgium, leaves its beers unfiltered and has been a Living Wage employer since it opened. Will Hawkes reported in Pellicle in 2020 that Troncoso blends two pale lager malts, one from Bamberg and one from Belgium, to keep Keller Pils consistent from batch to batch, with fermentation and maturation in tanks large enough for six batches.

The flagship has an award on the competition’s own record: the official World Beer Cup 2023 winners list, published by the Brewers Association, gives the gold in the Kellerbier or Zwickelbier category to Keller Pils from Lost and Grounded Brewers, Bristol.

Companies House lists Lost and Grounded Brewers Ltd as an active company and records no single person or company with significant control over it; Alex Troncoso has been a director since the company was formed.

For a design guide, Lost and Grounded shows how a brewery built around lager can lead with illustration rather than graphic design: a hippo with a globe, a stylised landscape and muted, matte colours. Compare Little Creatures, where Troncoso brewed in Western Australia, and Camden Town Brewery, where he ran brewing before moving to Bristol. For this guide we use pils teal, mountain blue and matte cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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