St Austell Brewery Partners with Student Brewery for Wetherspoon Festival

A popular student-brewed stout is heading to pubs across the UK after a collaboration between Cornwall and the North East brought it to festival scale.

St Austell Brewery has partnered with Stu Brew, a student-run microbrewery based at Newcastle University, to produce 500 casks of its maple and pecan stout, Exam Room Tears (5.5% ABV), for this year’s Wetherspoon Spring Beer Festival.

From Campus Favourite to National Festival

Stu Brew, described as Europe’s first student-led brewery, travelled to Cornwall in February to scale up production of the stout at St Austell Brewery’s headquarters.

The collaboration came after Wetherspoons invited the student brewery to take part in its national festival. The company requested 500 casks of Exam Room Tears, a volume that would have taken Stu Brew more than a year to produce using its own brewing kit.

Stu Brew has a long-standing presence in the Students’ Union-run Wetherspoons on campus, where it operates a permanent keg line and regularly supplies guest cask lines.

To help meet demand, Dr Chris O’Malley, Senior Lecturer in Chemical Engineering and Head Brewer at Stu Brew, approached Georgina Young, Head Brewer at St Austell Brewery. The two had previously met while judging together for the British Guild of Beer Writers.

St Austell Brewery then hosted the students at its historic Victorian site in Cornwall, where beers including Tribute and Proper Job are brewed.

Supporting the Next Generation

Georgina Young said: “Working with the Stu Brew team was a great experience. Exam Room Tears is a fantastic cask beer and helping them bring it to festival scale felt like a brilliant way to support the next generation of brewers.”

Alongside brewing the stout, Stu Brew also used the visit to create a brown ale on St Austell Brewery’s small-batch kit.

For students Kypros Iakovou and Will Tyson, who travelled to Cornwall with Chris, the trip marked their first visit to St Austell Brewery and to Cornwall.

Will Tyson said: “Every brewery is unique, but St Austell really stood out, it was this maze of history, with different layers of the site built up over generations. You could see the heritage all around you while still watching a modern brewery in action. It was a special environment to learn in, and really interesting to see how different brewing on a much larger scale was.”

When Can You Try It?

Exam Room Tears is available in Wetherspoons pubs nationwide during the festival, which runs from 4th to 15th March.