Original Gravity Magazine
Original Gravity — styled Original Gravity% — was a free, independent British magazine about beer and brewing, created by the journalist Daniel Neilson at the end of 2014. Described as the first free independent craft beer publication, it was a bimonthly magazine and website dedicated to real ale and craft beer, distributed free through quality pubs, bars and bottle shops in the major cities of the United Kingdom. Neilson's vision was for a different kind of beer magazine: one that read like a slightly more knowledgeable best mate, full of interesting, readable stories that appealed to both beer novice and expert. In 2017 the award-winning beer writers Adrian Tierney-Jones and Pete Brown joined as editor and editor-at-large, and the team set itself the ambition of becoming, in its own phrase, the New Yorker of beer. The print magazine paused in late 2019, when its twenty-third issue failed to reach the advertising surplus the team required before printing; a statement in December 2019 described the break as temporary. The magazine's makers also produced the monthly podcast Original Gravity Radio.
Creation and founding vision
Daniel Neilson created Original Gravity at the end of 2014. Neilson was an experienced journalist and editor: he had edited more than twenty guidebooks for Time Out, including its Buenos Aires guide, in a city where he lived for more than five years, written for newspapers and magazines including The Guardian, The Observer, National Geographic Traveller and Songlines, and edited the hillwalking magazine The Great Outdoors. He was also, by his own publisher biography's cheerful admission, a hopelessly amateur home-brewer who made up for a lack of skill with enthusiasm. The CAMRA shop's author page summarised his role plainly: journalist, magazine editor and publisher of Original Gravity%, the first free independent craft beer publication.
The founding idea was tonal as much as commercial. Pete Brown's later account of the magazine recalled Neilson's vision of a publication that felt like a knowledgeable friend rather than an instructor — readable stories for the novice and the expert alike. The magazine was singled out for its design, by Adam McNaught-Davis, whose portfolio described the project as the leading supportive publication for a booming United Kingdom craft beer scene, distributed every two months across the main watering holes and bottle shops in the major cities of the country.
The free distribution model
Original Gravity was free to pick up in the venues that stocked it, and that fact determined everything about its economics. As the team's 2019 statement explained with unusual candour, the magazine was distributed to quality bars and pubs and was free to readers, so every penny of production costs had to be met by advertising. The writers the magazine commissioned were paid. Only when an issue had raised enough advertising to show a surplus did the team press the button to print — a discipline that kept the magazine solvent but left it exposed when advertising proved hard to raise.
The model suited the subject. Craft beer is discovered in pubs and bottle shops, and a free magazine waiting in those venues reached drinkers at the moment of choice, while offering brewers and venues an advertising channel to a self-selecting audience of enthusiasts. Distribution beyond London — to the main watering holes and bottle shops of the major cities — made it a national publication, even though its editorial roots were in the capital's beer culture, and its website carried the magazine beyond the reach of the print run.
The editorial team grows: 2017
Producing a quality print magazine consistently proved, in Pete Brown's words, too much work for one person. At the start of 2017 Neilson brought on board two of Britain's best-known beer writers: Adrian Tierney-Jones as editor and Pete Brown as editor-at-large. Tierney-Jones, a specialist in beer, pubs, food and travel whose work had appeared in national newspapers and in beer publications in Britain and the United States, was an experienced beer judge and chairman of judges for the World Beer Awards; Brown was one of the most prominent popular writers on beer and pub culture in the country.
As a team of three, they raised the magazine's ambitions further, setting the deliberately unreachable goal of becoming the New Yorker of beer. Brown's assessment was that they made big strides towards it, introducing fresh and talented voices to beer writing — writers with real, human, engaging, often moving stories to tell. The ambition signalled a literary direction: beer as a subject for storytelling about people, places and work, not only for tasting notes and technical appraisal.
What the magazine covered
Original Gravity described itself as dedicated to everything related to great beer, whether real ale or craft beer — a deliberately broad church at a time when those two cultures were sometimes portrayed as rivals. Its pages mixed brewery stories, pub culture, brewing history, travel and personal essays with news and reviews, all aimed at the curious drinker rather than the trade. The tagline used in its earlier years summed up the promise: good news for people who love good beer.
The magazine's wider activities showed the same community spirit. In September 2015 Neilson joined the comedian Ed Byrne at the Saffron Brewery to brew a beer together: the result, Humour Me, was a harvest gold ale at 5.5 per cent ABV, made in a very limited edition and sold through the magazine's Curious Beer Club, through Ales by Mail and direct from the brewery. A magazine that brewed beer with its readers' favourite comedians, and ran a beer club for them, was practising the conviviality it wrote about.
Original Gravity Radio
The magazine extended into audio with Original Gravity Radio, a monthly podcast from the makers of the magazine, dedicated to craft beer news, views and idle gossip. Each episode typically followed a set format: The Mash, covering news, views and gossip; The Feature, a great interview or outside broadcast; The Essay, an in-depth look at a fascinating topic in the beer world; and Tasting Notes, in which beers were opened and enjoyed. Editor Daniel Neilson presented, joined by contributor Ant Miller.
The podcast's structure mirrored the magazine's own mixture — news, long-form feature, reflective essay and drinking — and gave the title a voice between bimonthly issues. It also documented the personalities of British beer culture in conversation, complementing the print magazine's essays and interviews.
The craft beer context
Original Gravity appeared at a particular moment. In the mid-2010s the United Kingdom's craft beer scene was booming: new breweries were opening across the country, specialist bars and bottle shops were transforming city drinking, and a generation of drinkers was approaching beer with the curiosity once reserved for wine. Designers, writers and publishers responded — McNaught-Davis's description of the magazine as the leading supportive publication for that boom captures its role as the scene's friendly chronicler.
A free, well-designed, story-led magazine was a natural product of that moment, and also a fragile one. The same years saw print advertising under pressure across publishing, and a title wholly dependent on advertising, with no cover price or subscription income, carried that risk undiluted. The magazine's history is therefore part of the history of the craft beer boom itself: its energy, its creativity and its exposure to changing economics.
The print pause of 2019
In a statement published on 6 December 2019, Pete Brown announced that the print format of the magazine was taking a break — a temporary one, the statement insisted. Original Gravity number 23 had been due to drop in September, but it had not hit the required advertising surplus, and under the team's self-imposed rule the issue was not printed. Achieving the necessary advertising revenue, Brown explained, had been getting increasingly difficult.
The statement was notable for its transparency about the economics of free publishing, and for its pride in what the team of three had built since 2017. It closed the magazine's print story, at least for the time being, on the team's own terms: rather than cut the quality of what readers received, or print at a loss, they stopped. No subsequent print revival was announced in the sources documenting the title, and the magazine is accordingly described in the past tense in this profile.
Design and reputation
From the beginning, Original Gravity was singled out for its design. The visual identity created by Adam McNaught-Davis gave a free magazine the look and feel of a paid-for quality title — a deliberate statement that the subject deserved the treatment. Within beer writing, the magazine's reputation rested on the calibre of its contributors and on its literary ambition: to prove that beer, pubs and brewing could sustain the kind of long-form, human storytelling associated with great magazine journalism.
Its contributors' standing reinforced that reputation. Tierney-Jones's and Brown's names signalled to readers — and to advertisers — that this was a publication written by people who knew beer deeply and wrote about it for national audiences. The fresh voices the team introduced broadened beer writing beyond its established circle, a legacy that persists in the writers' subsequent work across the British beer media.
Legacy
Original Gravity demonstrated both the possibilities and the limits of the free, advertising-funded quality magazine in the craft beer era. For five years it put well-written, beautifully designed beer journalism into the hands of drinkers in the places they drank, at no charge, and paid the writers who produced it — an achievement worth recording in a trade where free content is often expected to be freely produced, too.
Its back issues, its website and its podcast episodes remain a record of British beer culture in the second half of the 2010s: the breweries, pubs, people and arguments of the craft beer boom, captured by a small team that aimed, cheerfully and deliberately out of reach, to be beer's New Yorker.
