• Best Bitter 2025 – Part II: Recap

    I had been holding off writing this follow up post whilst waiting on the competition feedback for this beer. But as soon as this came, we then packed up our entire lives to move home, visited family in Italy, took a city break to Lisbon, and we now have our feet planted back again in…

  • Cream Ale 2025 – Part II: Brew Day & Recap

    Back at the start of January I kicked off 2025 with my first attempt at a cream ale. This was with the goal of having something to share in my homebrew club’s April meet-up which was focussed on the style. You can read my previous post of my recipe development here.  Targets: Volume: 10L PBG:…

  • Rye Farmhouse Session Ale – Recipe Development & Brew Day

    The homebrew club I’m in runs an annual competition focusing on a particular attribute. The range is wide, but the quality is outstanding. Last year was focused on sour beers, for which I entered a rather shoddy oak smoked saison using a mix of Philly sour and a saison yeast to produce low acidity. This…

  • 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,…