The Adnams day: brewery, distillery and 113 stairs

Adnams bought the Sole Bay Brewery here in 1872, the site had been founded in 1818, and the company says brewing is documented on it back to the fourteenth century. Today it brews and distils in the middle of the town, and it runs the public tours this guide covers, including the one up the lighthouse.

Everything starts in one courtyard

The single most useful practical fact is that all three main tours depart from the same place: the Adnams Tours Centre, in The Swan Courtyard on the Market Place, reached through the archway beside The Swan's entrance, postcode IP18 6EG. Not from the brewery gate. Not from the foot of the lighthouse. People turn up at the lighthouse and have to walk back.

The lighthouse tour

Southwold's lighthouse is the one that turns up in every photograph of the town, because it does not stand on a headland. It stands on St James's Green with houses and the Sole Bay Inn pressed against its base. Trinity House commissioned it in 1890, it was automated and electrified in 1938, and it is still an operational aid to navigation rather than a decommissioned monument.

The tour lasts about an hour and involves climbing 113 stairs with no lift, which is the honest limiting factor. At the top there is the sea one way, the town roofs and the greens another, and the marshes and Buss Creek inland. Prices verified in August 2026 were 15.50 pounds for an adult and 11.50 pounds for a child aged 7 to 17, with reduced school rates of 10.00 and 8.00. Everyone leaves with a ten per cent voucher for the Adnams stores, which is a reasonable prompt to walk on to Drayman Square afterwards.

The brewery tour

Ninety minutes, 27.50 pounds, over-18s only. It follows the modern brewhouse from grain to glass and finishes with a tasting across the range, from pale ale and lager through stout, bitter and barley wine, all brewed on the Southwold site. You leave with a voucher for a free memento from the Southwold store.

What makes it better than most brewery tours is the scale mismatch. This is a genuinely industrial operation running inside a residential street plan in a town of under a thousand people, and the tour does not pretend otherwise. On a brewing morning the streets around East Green smell of malt, which is not a marketing line, it is just what happens.

The distillery tour

Same length, same price, same over-18s rule, same departure point. The Copper House Distillery is on the brewery site behind a glass frontage you can see the columns working through from the street, so you can look at it without booking anything.

The point of difference is that Adnams distils its own base spirit here from barley and other grains rather than buying neutral spirit in, then redistils it with botanicals for the gins. The tour makes that chain legible and then moves to the tasting bar for five Adnams gins and the Longshore vodka. Panoramic windows give a view over the town on the way round. If you have to choose between the brewery and the distillery, and you should choose rather than doing both in a day, pick on whether you would rather understand fermentation or distillation, because the tasting at the end of each is generous.

Longer experiences

The same tours centre runs a whisky experience, a cocktail discovery masterclass and make-your-own-gin sessions, where you spend a day distilling your own bottle. These are longer and cost more; check current prices and availability on the Adnams site rather than working from a figure quoted elsewhere.

Building a day around it

Tours book out in summer and over bank holidays, so fix the tour time first and arrange the day around it. A workable shape: breakfast at Two Magpies on the High Street, which opens at eight and is one of the few early doors in town; a mid-morning lighthouse climb; the brewery or distillery tour at lunchtime; then walk it off down Ferry Road to the harbour.

Afterwards, the Sole Bay Inn on East Green is the Adnams brewery tap and pours the widest cask range in the town, sitting directly under the lighthouse you have just climbed. It does not take table bookings, nor does the Lord Nelson on East Street, which describes itself as the drinking pub in Southwold and means it. For the shop rather than the pub, the Adnams store and cafe at Drayman Square carries the full beer, wine and spirits range, and that is where the voucher gets spent.

One caution

Prices and departure details in this guide were taken directly from Adnams' own booking pages in August 2026. Tour pricing changes; check the current figure at the point of booking rather than turning up with this page open.