Jump Ship rides alcohol-free wave to brewing freedom
Scottish brewer jump-starts growth in booming low- and no-alcohol beer industry
Drive about half an hour from Edinburgh into the undulating agricultural landscape of Midlothian, and you soon arrive at Rosemains Steading, tucked down a farm lane.
The steading is part of the Preston Hall estate, which has been in the Callander family since 1789. Its livestock stables were converted into workshops in 2021 and are rented to small businesses, including a coffee roaster and a classic car restorer.
This is hardly the most obvious place to come looking for a brewery. Yet it’s also the location for Scotland’s first no-alcohol brewery: Jump Ship Brewing, founded in 2019 by Kent-born marketing consultant Sonja Mitchell.
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Inside the building Paddy Fowler and Iain Mooney, two of Jump Ship’s six employees, are preparing the next batch of “Stokers Stout”. Steel tanks are filled with the brewery’s flagship “Yardarm” ale, which makes up just over half of total annual sales of about £300,000, much of it online.
Moving to Rosemains in early 2024 was a key move, giving Jump Ship the freedom to decide what it brews and when, so that it can better respond to consumer demand without being shackled to previous contract brewing arrangements.
On-site biomass and solar panels
“We’re a lot more flexible,” says Fowler, a 31-year-old home brewer and pharmacology graduate. “We've got a smaller brew size here so the amount we produce in one go is smaller than it would be at those [contract] sites, which means that when the demand comes in, we can react a lot better.” In addition, an on-site biomass facility and solar panels mean the brewery’s electricity is not only free from the volatility of grid pricing but is also renewable.
Jump Ship also experiments with the creation of smaller batch beers which like Yardarm have nautical names that make a nod to Mitchell’s enthusiasm for sailing – and the beer drinking that often comes with it. The team will have four to six special beers on the go at any one time, using a range of hops sourced from countries like Germany, Slovenia and Australia. One of the latest is a version of the “Dazzle Ship” range of IPAs using the Azacca hop from North America, which adds aromas and flavours of mango, papaya and grapefruit.
Jump Ship exists at the frontier of a market for low- and no-alcohol beer that continues to grow fast. Low- and no-alcohol beer sales in the UK are set to hit £251 million this year, 17 per cent higher than in 2024, itself a year in which sales grew by 20 per cent compared with 2023, according to market research company Mintel. More people reduced their alcohol consumption in the year to April 2025 than in the year to May 2022, driven mostly by a desire to improve health – a factor that has also hit consumption of Scotch whisky.
Mitchell started the company at a stage in her life when various things combined to spark the idea of Jump Ship, so named to indicate the pivot from a career in marketing, including some years at Unilever, and an invitation to consumers to “jump ship” from mainstream drinking culture.
“I came at it as someone who loves craft beer and had bad hangovers and three small children. I just didn't want to give up on drinking the beer that I enjoyed. And I just thought, why doesn't Scotland have a good, alcohol-free beer?” she says.
“We did ‘dry January’ in 2018 and sat around the table with husband and some friends trying different ones and I just thought, you know what? I could do this. I also loved the challenge of overturning 10,000 years of brewing history where the purpose of beer has been to be alcoholic.”
Yet the route to brewing freedom for Jump Ship has not been plain sailing.
Lucky break
At the start, getting the precise combination of hops, malt and yeast to produce 0.5 per cent maximum alcohol content with the right flavour was hard. The brewer with which Mitchell had contracted pulled out the day she went live with her first crowdfunding campaign. Luckily, a chance appearance on BBC Radio Scotland to discuss minimum alcohol pricing policy generated interest from another brewer, and Mitchell was back on track, launching Jump Ship on the Dry Drinker website in January 2020.
A month later, Covid hit. “So I put a PayPal button on my website and started delivering beer around Edinburgh on a Thursday afternoon with the children and the dog in the car,” Mitchell says. Yet the pandemic had a silver lining: people started turning to no-alcohol drinks. Then, in 2021, Yardarm was awarded best no- and low-alcohol lager in the World Beer Awards.
Being a female founder has come with challenges when it comes to fundraising. “I don’t think a man has ever had his business described as ‘a lifestyle business’, which is something I’ve been faced with when I’ve explained that I’m balancing a business with raising a family,” Mitchell explains, echoing the “unconscious sexism” cited in the 2023 Pathways report on women in entrepreneurship by Ana Stewart, now the Scottish government’s chief entrepreneur.
Nonetheless, a crowd-funding round on Republic Europe that ended last month netted over £300,000 in fresh funding, some of which will go on expanding marketing beyond social media and email lists. Competition is emerging from other no-alcohol producers including Edinburgh-based Days Brewing and Black Isle Brewing, near Inverness.
Yet Mitchell is unfazed, arguing that the market is still growing and therefore far from mature. “I think we'd easily get to 10 per cent share in the UK over the next 10 years,” she says. “Consumers are still very much in discovery mode. It's not like people have found their favourite beer yet.”
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