Our birthday isn’t cancelled, it’s just on hold.

THE PRESENT

Five years. Quite the landmark. One we were so much looking forward to celebrating with you all. However, a missed birthday is an easy thing to swallow during these times, with so many people missing out on so much more. As a birthday present to ourselves (one that we’re more than happy to share) we’re introducing our fantastic new website, built by the talented team over at Craftpeak. Why not spend a little time with our Leeloo Birthday DIPA artwork, then delve into our new beer archive? Our birthday isn’t cancelled, it’s just on hold. We look forward to toasting a cold one with you all very, very soon.

TAKE A PEAK

We’ve held a rudimentary website at mondobeer.com since our brand refresh in February 2019, serving as an information source and point of contact. We took the time to see our new direction grow while sourcing the right creative relationship in which to grow a central hub for all of our communications. Following weeks of back and forth with our designers, we’re openly learning as we continue to develop and hone this space you find yourself in. We’re excited to reveal a visual environment in which we can celebrate our beers, our artwork and our amazing team (crew page coming soon), while keeping you up to date with all the goings on here in Battersea.

PACK IT UP

What a baptism of fire we have had during lockdown. If there’s one way to get used to e-commerce, it’s to have your route-to-market draught beer sales taken away. We’ve been forced to adapt, as have so many, during lockdown. With the hard work of a skeleton team and the unparalleled support of our local and loyal customers we’ve managed to operate two web shops, both for national delivery and local collections. A core part of this new website development, following our decision to can beer back in Spring 2019, was to offer a stable, consistent and intuitive web shop experience. While we bed into this new website, expect to see us refocus on a new shop in the coming weeks.

LEELOO DALLAS

The team discussed a number of ideas regarding what to brew for this year’s birthday beer. We’ve always brewed a Double IPA, so the style was pretty much a given, but we thought it would be fun to brew it with five malts and five hops*. Last year’s beer was definitely more of a chewy, bitter, West Coast DIPA, with this year’s following a path similar to last summer’s successful String Theory. We asked Luke to top his fantastic artwork from last year’s Episode Four (our first canned beer in fact) and boy did he deliver. Sci-fi references crept into a lot of our beers during 2019 and once The Fifth Element fell into our thought process (5th birthday and all), while bypassing any unnecessary IP issues, we set Luke to work on an homage to that film’s ideas.

(*OK, it might be 6 hops…)

Leeloo is a DIPA, brewed for our 5th birthday. Extra Pale Ale malt provides the base, Wheat, Oats, Spelt and Rye added for body and flavour. Centennial and East Kent Goldings hops for bittering. Hallertauer Mittelfrüh, Amarillo and Motueka in the whirlpool. Dry hopped with Amarillo, Centennial, Galaxy and Motueka. Fermented with a blend of American and English Ale yeast strains.

RAISE A TOAST (OR TWO)

Join us at 8pm on Thursday 18th June for an Instagram Live first pour of our birthday beer. Hosted by our brewery account @mondobrewing, we’ll be welcoming members of our team throughout the hour to take you through tasting notes of our Double IPA, Leeloo. We did have a birthday party planned and as soon as we know we can party for real, we’ll be sharing that information on our Events page. “Fifth & A Half Birthday” has nice ring to it and completely justifies the opportunity for biannual celebrations going forward, right? Who’d have thought we’d get two birthdays out of all this.

Stay safe.

Words by Tom Harrison.
Artwork by Luke Drozd.