Bishop Nick

The Ridley family's connection to Essex brewing stretches back to 1842, making Bishop Nick a continuation of one of the county's longest-standing brewing lineages. The brand name is a tribute to a family ancestor: Nicholas Ridley served as Bishop of London in the sixteenth century and was martyred for his beliefs in 1555. That history runs through the brewery's identity, which describes its output as sacred ales from Essex.

The alcohol-free range centres on a single pale ale, launched in 2021. Rather than removing alcohol from a finished beer, Bishop Nick brews it using a yeast strain that does not fully ferment the sugars in the wort. In conventional brewing, yeast consumes available sugars and converts them into alcohol and carbon dioxide; by using a yeast that stops this conversion before it completes, the brewery keeps the beer at 0.5% ABV from the outset without any dealcoholisation step. The result is a pale ale whose flavour profile is built from the grain up rather than stripped back in post-production.

Bishop Nick operates as a family-run micro-brewery, and distribution covers the brand's own online shop, a brewery shop in Braintree, and specialist alcohol-free retailers. The AF offering is intentionally narrow: one pale ale, independently produced, from a brewery whose primary identity sits in traditional cask ale. Sober-curious drinkers who want a heritage-backed, independently made pale ale with a genuine production story will find Bishop Nick stands apart from contract-produced equivalents in the specialist AF market.