Glasgow 850 Summer Series

2025 is a big year for Glasgow as we mark the city’s 850th birthday. 

To celebrate this important milestone, the Glasladies Beer Society is teaming up with a number of local breweries to create the Glasgow 850 Summer Series. 

This is a collaboration with a number of Glasgow based breweries to brew something that celebrates the rich heritage of the city. 

Dookit Brewing Co.

Mains Brewing

Mother Tongue Brewing Co. 

Overtone Brewing

Shilling Brewing Co.

Simple Things Fermentations

Each of the participating breweries will be creating a beer that is their own interpretation of a “Summer Ale”. 

A unique feature of this collaboration series is that all the beers will carry the same name. St Enoch: Mother Glasgow pays tribute to a woman who, in spite of being the figurative matriarch of our city and one of its patron saints, has mostly been ignored and forgotten by the public. 

St Enoch, who started her life as Princess Theneva, was the daughter of the King of Goddoddin, a region which is now Lothian. She became pregnant after being raped by a suiter and her father decided that the best way to solve this “problem” was to tie her to a chariot and launch it off a cliff. When she miraculously survived that, he then branded her a witch and cast her adrift on the Forth River in a small boat. Washing ashore in Culross, she was given sanctuary at the abbey of Bishop Serf and there she gave birth to a son who she named Kentigern. The boy, nicknamed Mungo (dear one) by the monks, grew up to be a priest who established a settlement on the banks of a spring. Over the years, the settlement expanded and eventually became the city of Glasgow. 

The story of St Enoch is that of how one woman’s determination to survive despite all odds, led to the foundation of the city our group calls home. 

Part of the proceeds from the Glasgow 850 Summer Series beers will be donated to a local charity Refuweegee. 

Founded in 2015, their aim is to provide a warm welcome to forcibly displaced people arriving into Glasgow. The charity strives to enable the existing community to extend the friendly welcome that Glasgow is renowned for, by providing newcomers with welcome packs of essential supplies and organising community events to help with better integration. 

In keeping with our group’s underlying principle of being a safe space for those who may otherwise feel excluded, we chose to support the work that Refuweegee does to drive home a point that “People Make Glasgow” and that everyone is welcome here. See here for more about Refuweegee  https://www.refuweegee.co.uk