• Best Bitter 2025 – Part I: Recipe Development

    For a long time, I’ve avoided attempting to brew any British ales due to my lack of temperature control. I plan to change this during the early months of 2025, using the cooler ambient temperature to my advantage.  Growing up in the Sussex countryside, I was fortunate enough to come of age just as the…

  • Smoked Ale 2024 – Recap

    For the last couple years it has become something of a Christmas tradition for me to brew a smoked beer for my friends. This started in 2022, when I first tried beers from Schlenkerla and decided to put my own spin on smoked beer using saison yeast along with a mix of Munich malt, oak…

  • Cyser 2024 – Recap

    Cyser – A type of mead that’s made by fermenting honey with apple juice or apples instead of water. The result is a sweet and tart drink that’s both a mead and a melomel. If I’ve learnt anything from this experiment it is that I hate the name cyser. I feel it doesn’t match the…

  • Cream Ale 2025 – Part I: Recipe Development

    Back in 2020 like many people, I took to homebrewing using a popular small batch all grain kit. After knocking out this initial espresso stout, I was hooked and started building my own recipes with help from the book Brew by James Morton. One of my more successful brew days was a California Common. Reasonably,…

  • Field Notes #1 – Dublin 2024

    Last week my wife was on a work trip to Dublin which gave me the great excuse to fly over for the weekend to meet her. I’d never been before but have always had every intention to visit. Whilst many cities can be heavily tied to beer tourism, I can’t think of a city so…

  • Issue #1

    I love how people romanticise their passions. But there is no exact point where mixed, wild, and spontaneously fermented beers grabbed my interest. There was no world-shaking first encounter. A friend didn’t guide me through my first sip of geuze. Instead, as I slowly learnt about beer styles, two things about lambic production stuck with…