Hop Back Brewery
John Gilbert, one of the early-1980s microbrewing pioneers and former head of the Battersea and Brixton Brewery in London, bought the Wyndham Arms in Salisbury in 1986 and brewed there from 1987. The laughing face of Dionysus carved above its door became the logo. In 1992 brewing moved to a 20-barrel plant in Downton, just south of the city. Summer Lightning, first brewed in 1988, is the flagship, joined by a monthly calendar of seasonal ales.
Beers by Hop Back Brewery
15 beers
← scroll to see all 15 beers →
The recurring character behind the beers
Hop Back Brewery brew across 4 style families.
Across these 15 beers, 4 notes keep showing up:
Four notes carry across the range. That's a tight house style — most breweries in the catalogue share just one.
Compared with the wider catalogue of similar styles:
They stay close to the peer baseline on their recurring notes.
How we measure this
Two thresholds are at work here:
- The signature list shows notes that recur in at least 6% of this brewery's beers. A low bar — enough to flag a pattern, not high enough to call it an exclusive trait.
- The peer comparison below shows only notes where this brewery's coverage differs from similar breweries by at least 20 percentage points. A higher bar — enough to call a real difference, not a nudge.
A note can appear on the signature list without appearing in the peer comparison: it recurs here, but similar breweries do the same thing.
Similar Breweries
hopIQ exclusiveBased on style overlap and flavor profile
About Hop Back Brewery
John Gilbert, one of the early-1980s microbrewing pioneers and former head of the Battersea and Brixton Brewery in London, bought the Wyndham Arms in Salisbury in 1986 and brewed there from 1987. The laughing face of Dionysus carved above its door became the logo. In 1992 brewing moved to a 20-barrel plant in Downton, just south of the city. Summer Lightning, first brewed in 1988, is the flagship, joined by a monthly calendar of seasonal ales.
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