h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The best laid plans of mice and men, will get remade again and again.

True Fact.


So, I've had a couple of dodgy batches recently. The fermenters I was using just weren't up to the job and the beer was oxidising before I could get it bottled, as I was also waiting on getting bottles in from another brewery.

This has all now changed.

Over the last week or so, I've been installing insulation panels in the garage, so the whole brewery will be temperature controlled. I've also bought some reconditioned air-tight plastic keg drums and have just finished converting them into fermenters. I've recently also bought a pallet load of bottles, which should keep me going for a while, and a load of ingredients. This may sound like a massive outlay, and it kinda is, but it's needed.

I've recently started to get attention for my beers, they've been constantly well received and I'm now getting orders for casks for beer festivals all over the country, helped no doubt by a recent article in Time Out that listed one of my beers as one of the seven best in Greater Manchester. There's 70 breweries here, so that should give you an idea of how many beers there are. Not bad for England's smallest commercial brewery.

The one small problem with all this is that I currently have no beer to sell. Which is why I've been sorting the brewery out ready to start brewing in bulk, constantly, until I either run out of space to store it all, or get so rich from the constant sales I can buy a bigger brewery, or just employ someone.

Either way, I'm sitting in the brewery yard with a glass of rather nice beer, a bbq crackling away, and mild panic that things are getting out of hand very quickly.

And you just had to start this commercial endeavor AFTER I was there a year ago.

Cool old Guy with some
"The 'couple of dodgy batches' sounds not very good, the evolving and adaptation of the proces sound great.

As long as the biggest problem is just where to store a pallet of empty bottles

"

You're too modest to post the link!

http://www.timeout.com/manchester/blog/seven-great-beers-made-in-manchester

And congratulations!

Cheers all!

Just been working out what I need to brew and when, and we worked out I need even more fermenters!

Following today's revelation that Doom Bar's actually brewed in Staffordshire, can you confirm that your beer is authentically Mancunian?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-33175395

Technically it's Greater Manchester as Prestwich is in the Bury metropolitan district rather than Manchester.

But that's splitting hairs

I guess I'm not paying enough attention to the mega-breweries. I thought it was still called "Miller-Coors". It is getting ever more difficult to tell the independents from the Budweiser/ImBev and Molson-Coors behemoths.

It's only reasonably recently that Coors bought Sharps. And to be honest, I don't blame Sharps for selling up.

If a massive brewery offered me a load of money to expand into a huge shiny brewery and use their international distribution network, in exchange for them taking the lion's share of the profit, I'd probably think for as long as it took me to finish my pint before agreeing to it.

That's how we end up with Bass that tastes like Aass.

And now a local pub wants my beer for their beer festival at the end of September. Doesn't seem too big a thing, except this is a "tickers" pub. Tickers travel the country to try as many different beers as possible. And the pub wants two 9 gallon casks of my beer. And they want me to do a Meet The Brewer event at it.

This is quite a big thing for a small brewery, because this is a well respected, and well attended pub fest that rarely has more than one beer per brewery.

I think I need to buy some more fermenters.

Make sure you get some honest feedback from the tickers. It sounds like they've tasted a few.

Good luck with it!

The first cask we sent out went to the New Mills beer festival, prganised by our very own Phil. Tickers came from far and wide for it (thanks to Phil's letting them know) and they kept coming back to the bar for second and third halves! Something unheard of.

So I'm hoping it'll go down well, but I'm always worried when I send beer out, that people won't like it as much as I do

Sound like you have things well in hand

Let me know when you get things sorted enough to ship a case to the States



F S

The one at New Mills was good. ..
Speaking as one of the Imports brought in to drink it

Congratulations Pastey! Sounds like your beer really is a success. I'm really happy to hear that.

It may sound like things are in hand, but I assure you I'm going from mild to mass panic and back on an hourly basis

I guess I would do that, too.