The day after Christmas is typically a super-slow time for breaking news, especially in beer. Man drinks nine spiced Christmas ales! Tune in at 11 to hear about his hangover cure — leftover ham!
But on Dec. 26, a tantalizing post appeared on the BeerAdvocate forum. During a recent shopping trip, a North Carolina beer drinker found a 6-pack of Newcastle Brown Ale, an easygoing British classic bearing an iconic blue star on its label.
Lagunitas Brewing, the U.S. subsidiary of Newcastle’s parent company, Heineken, had been producing a different, more assertively hopped version for the American market. However, for the first time in half a decade, the beer appeared to be brewed in the U.K. according to its original recipe and exported to the United States. (The words “imported from England” on the label were a big clue.)
“This is the real deal U.K. version,” they wrote.
Knowing better than to trust an anonymous internet commenter, I contacted Heineken to confirm. In spring 2024, Lagunitas shuttered its Chicago brewery, winding down domestic production of Newcastle Brown Ale. That move led to production returning to Heineken’s Tadcaster brewery in northern England. Fresh batches of the smooth, caramel-kissed brown ale floated across the Atlantic Ocean late last year and landed on store shelves.
“We’re bringing back the original recipe,” says Adena McMahon, director of innovation at Heineken USA.
Several decades ago, Newcastle Brown Ale was among America’s most influential imported beers, introducing drinkers to a broader world of flavor and inspiring many to embark on a career in craft brewing. The brand’s switch to the original recipe is like an old friend returning to greet you at a beloved bar, changed by a winding journey but right back where they belong.
The Winding American Road of Newcastle Brown Ale
Newcastle Brown Ale has had a rocky last decade-plus in America. In 2013, activist Vani Hari, a.k.a. the Food Babe, publicly pressured Heineken to remove caramel coloring from the beer. Two years later, the brewery dropped the coloring and resumed using roasted malt for the dark tint.
In 2019, Heineken shifted Newcastle production from the Netherlands, where it was made for export to America, to Lagunitas’s brewery in Chicago. To reignite flagging sales, Heineken tasked Lagunitas with reformulating the brown ale, incorporating citrusy Centennial and piney Chinook hops to appeal to contemporary craft beer drinkers.
“Colonel Porter admitted that they had varied the recipe so much over the three years of trials that rivals had been thrown off the scent.”
“At the time, hop-forward beers were becoming popular among beer lovers,” McMahon says. “We saw an opportunity to meet consumers’ preferences, which were drastically shifting.”
The revamped recipe was as well received as Crystal Pepsi. Newcastle Brown Ale fans weren’t clamoring for more hops, and most craft beer drinkers could care less about brown ales — especially during the height of the hazy IPA craze. “The original recipe was incredibly beloved, which ultimately challenged the rollout,” McMahon says.
The brand took on collateral damage.
“I don’t remember my first Newcastle, but I remember my last one after the recipe change,” a beer drinker messaged me on Instagram. “Drank like bitter syrup. Really upsetting. Stopped seeking it out after that.”
Tinkering with a time-honored brand is tough.
“People wanted that beer, the OG,” says Jeremy Marshall, the Lagunitas brewmaster who helped spearhead the recipe revamp. “So seeing it back now, brewed in Tadcaster where it belongs? That’s a win for everyone. And honestly, I sleep a little better knowing there’s one less angry Geordie in America ready to hunt me down over recipe tweaks.”
Newcastle’s Recipe Evolves Over the Years
The recipe and ingredients for Newcastle Brown Ale have rarely remained static. It originated in 1927 at Newcastle Breweries in Newcastle upon Tyne in northern England, where assistant brewer Lieutenant Colonel James Herbert Porter spent three years working with chemist Archie Jones to develop an agreeable brown ale packaged in bottles.
The beer was advertised as “just the right strength … not too heavy for summer drinking, yet with sufficient ‘body’ to satisfy the man who likes good Ale and knows when he gets it.”
The brown ale was a success from the start — winning awards, commanding a premium price, and sowing confusion among competitors. According to the “Oxford Companion to Beer,” “Colonel Porter admitted that they had varied the recipe so much over the three years of trials that rivals had been thrown off the scent.”
Newcastle Brown Ale was originally a blend of two beers — a lower-alcohol amber ale and strong dark beer — before brewers switched to a single recipe. Taxation and World War II ingredient shortages led to the brown ale becoming lower in alcohol and lighter in color, according to beer historian Ron Pattinson.
No matter its specific formulation, “Newkie Brown” thrived as a widely loved working-class beer that was also embraced by university students. The beer hit its U.K. sales peak in the early 1970s; import sales in the U.S. accelerated in the mid-1990s and early 2000s as Newcastle helped introduce beer drinkers to flavor, serving as a crucial stepping stone to craft beer.
“When I lived in Reno, Nev., my roommate and I would go up to Lake Tahoe. Because the lake is always so cold, it served as our cooler. I don’t remember drinking Newcastle at any other point in my life.”
“This was my gateway beer,” says Emma Christiansen, the author of “Hard Seltzer, Iced Tea, Kombucha, and Cider.” “My college crush handed me one at a party and said, ‘Here, you’ll probably like this one’ after I turned up my nose at whatever was in the keg. He was right! That crush is long gone; my love of beer is forever.”
A Newcastle Brown Ale helped drinkers look beyond light lagers. “This was definitely the first beer I enjoyed; I can trace it all back to having my first Newcastle at a TGI Fridays in Florida, like, 18 years ago,” says Justin Guerin, brewer and illustrator at Brewery ARS in Philadelphia.
Drinking a Newcastle Brown Ale felt like a classy choice in late-1990s America, a widely available marker of perceived refined taste. “You could be a young drinker and feel a level of sophistication,” says Ari Miller, a chef and writer.
Brewers also loved Newcastle Brown Ale, with many tracing their brewing journeys back to it.
During high school in the early 2000s, Jonathan Newman and friends had a standing tradition of Newcastle Friday. Armed with a decent fake ID, “we’d grab a sixer of Newcastle and drink that before the cheap beers set in,” says Newman, brewmaster at the Virginia Beer Company in Williamsburg, Va. “I wouldn’t be where I am without Newcastle Brown when I was 17.”
Ryan Frank, the head brewer at Headlands Brewing in Lafayette, Calif., brewed his first batch of homebrew as a brown ale. “Newcastle sparked that inspiration,” says Frank, who has since brewed a version of that recipe at various stops in his professional career. “Newcastle shaped my interest and direction in beer.”
An Eye-Opening Beer Becomes Overlooked
The summer after my sophomore year in college, when I was still 19, I spent a summer living in London and working at an outpost of the Great American Bagel Factory. Seriously. This was 1998, which meant I went to loads of raves and pubs, legally drinking my way through all the canonical British beers.
I fondly remember one night at a cheery pub where I bumped into two kids my age wearing oversize sunglasses and colorful, disco-worthy polyester shirts. They were on a spending spree financed by the theft and sale of electronic goods and had just thrown a TV out of a hotel window. In celebration, or maybe just mania, they bought me a pint of Newcastle, then another. I spent the night savoring the lovely ale, which tasted of caramel, sweet malt, and, given the company, a bit of nuttiness to boot.
Newcastle tasted nothing like the Natural Ice we bought by the 30-pack back in college. I sought it out when I returned stateside, but soon IPAs, barley wines, and other craft beers caught my attention. In America’s adrenalized era of over-the-top beer, brown ales slowly faded from the spotlight. Newcastle Brown Ale became part of beer drinkers’ origin stories, embraced in youth and overlooked in adulthood.
“When I lived in Reno, Nev., my roommate and I would go up to Lake Tahoe,” a follower DM’d me on Instagram. “Because the lake is always so cold, it served as our cooler. I don’t remember drinking Newcastle at any other point in my life.”
I can’t recall the last time I bought a Newcastle Brown Ale — or any brown ale, for that matter. A good, widely available brown ale is hard to find. But in America, brown ales were key counterpoints to mainstream light lagers. Perhaps Newcastle Brown Ale can find its footing as the inverse of IPAs and other intense beers, a new role for a new era of beer drinking. Next time I see a 6-pack, I’m grabbing one.
“There is a huge opportunity for non-IPA imports,” McMahon says. “We want Newcastle Brown Ale to reclaim its place among the most loved brown ales.”
