Meet Wild Hive 🐝

When the women at Side Launch sat down to conceptualize our brew for International Women’s Day, we didn’t want to just make "a beer." We wanted to make a statement about where we come from.

From our lead brewers to our finance and marketing teams, the conversation kept returning to a single question: Who were the first brewers?

The answer took us back centuries, long before the hops defined brewing, to a time when brewing was a sacred, domestic craft held almost exclusively in the hands of women. To honour them, we had to go back to the beginning. We had to brew a Gruit.

Why the Gruit?

For centuries, "Alewives" and "Brewsters" were the guardians of the kettle. They didn’t rely on a single plant; they relied on their knowledge of the land. They foraged for "gruit", a blend of herbs, bittering roots, and wildflowers like yarrow, bog myrtle, and ground ivy.

Brewing was a woman’s way of providing for her family and community. However, as brewing moved out of the home and into the hands of guilds and commercial enterprises in the 15th and 16th centuries, women were systematically pushed out. The transition from herbal Gruits to hopped beers wasn't just a change in flavour. it was the moment brewing became "business," and the women who invented the craft were sidelined.

Restoring the Legacy

Wild Hive is our way of reaching back through time to shake hands with those original Brewsters. We chose a Gruit style because it represents the herbal, intuitive, and resourceful spirit of those women.

In keeping with that tradition of foraging and local ingredients, we’ve crafted a profile that feels both ancient and alive:

We used Yarrow, a traditional gruit herb, to provide a soft, botanical bitterness, Wild bergamot and golden honey bring an aromatic, layered sweetness, and the modern innovation of juicy blueberries. 

This project was a collaboration by the women of Side Launch. We started at the very beginning, researching the history, debating the botanicals, designing the can and finally, getting into the brewhouse to bring the vision to life. From the initial spark of the idea to the final packaging, every step was led by the women who keep Side Launch moving forward every day.