Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of this week were spent doing the three day "start up brewing" course at Brewlab in Sunderland. My brother a friend and I had booked the course in January, a decision we'd based around a desire to start up a brewery project of our own and make the kind of beer we want to drink.
Monday morning started early, we needed to be in Sunderland for 9.30am so we were off by 6.00am to pick up in Brighouse before making our way up the A1. Obviously 6.00am starts will be something I'll need to get used to if I want a future in brewing but it felt very early to me especially as the clock had only just gone forward the night previously.
We made it to the location for the course in Sunderland with 10 minutes to spare and settled into the classroom to meet our fellow 'would-be' brewers also on the course. There were about 20 people on the course, all at different stages of planning their future in brewing; some nearly ready to start up, some toying with the idea, some just investigating but all with a shared love of beer. It was nice to see that the students weren't all men either, with about 30% of the students female.
Mondays course was split into a number of different modules, starting with a brief overview of the brewing process, followed by brewery design and layout, and Ingredients, water and yeast. After lunch we covered Ingredients, malt and hops, and then finished the afternoon with a useful session on business start up. By 5pm we were all ready to get stuck into some proper R&D and so headed with the tutors to Fitzgeralds to sample some local beers. I was pretty tired by this point and not feeling particularly sociable but joined in a few conversations and relaxed a bit after a few pints. We ended up over the road in the Wetherspoons for some food and a pint or two from the surprisingly poor selection on offer.
Tuesday started with a frantic march across town to try and get to the business centre on time. The mornings subjects covered the brewing processes in more detail including Recipe formulation , fermentation and racking, fining and beer conditioning amongst others. The tutors were very knowledgeable and accommodating but went into the science a little bit too much in my opinion especially considering the length of the course. They often went off rambling on chemical reactions/processes etc.. when a simple explanation would have sufficed. Having said that everyone's queries were answered (eventually), it was all good solid stuff, and a good insight into what the longer courses Brewlab offers would entail.
I wasn't particularly looking forward to the the afternoons subjects: Marketing and publicity and Tax and Excise/Profit and Loss but was surprised at how interesting they were. These modules served to bring home the reality of running a brewery and as the tutors said themselves; their job in some ways is to put you off starting a brewery so you won't go into it without realising the pitfalls, hard work and difficulties every start up brewery faces.
5.00pm saw us off with the tutor for more after course R&D (ha, ha), and this time we walked the short distance to the Clarendon on Bull Lane, a pub which while not officially a "brewerytap" enjoys a symbiotic relationship with the small 2.5bbl brewery which operates in the cellar. This was much more my sort of pub, good beer (well some of it), traditional in every sense of the word and with no pretences. Everyone was starting to relax a bit now and as we got to know our fellow course mates better, the conversation and drinks started to flow.
The final morning of the course, and the plan was a 7am start, to walk across Town, get some breakfast and be at the business centre in time to meet our minibus at 8am. Unfortunately nowhere in Sunderland city centre is open before 8.30am, which along with the number of unused retail units is an obvious symptom of the unmissable decline which permeates the whole city. Newcastle this is not.
We were all feeling a bit worse for ware but looking forward to the days itinary of brewery tours/visits. 1st up was a visit to the Bull Lane Brewery we had been in less than 24hrs earlier. This was the smallest brewery we were to visit, a 2.5bbl set up and a real working brewery, with a minimum of modern efficiencies. What really struck me though was the enthusiasm and love for brewing of the brewer (whose name i can't remember embarrassingly).
Next stop was Wylam Brewery a successful rural brewery based in old farm buildings about 30 minutes away in the minbus. Our tutor Chris did the tour and explained how the brewery had evolved from a 5 bbl set up a few years a go into the large and very busy 20bbl set up it now was.
It was useful to see how the brewery had made use of the space it had and the ingenuity they'd employed to help with brewing processes (a reccurring theme on many brewery visits i've been on)
The last brewery tour was another 45 minutes away at Allendale Brewing Company, where Tom Hick has set up a succesful brewery after completing a masters in brewing at Sunderland University. I've had Allendales beers before and always liked them and they were one of the first breweries to list on myBrewerytap. An informative Q&A session with Tom followed and we got a good feeling for the challenges the brewery and its local pub face in the current climate.
After returning to the business centre the last module of the course was a flavour and beer quality assessment session, which saw us learning about different aromas/tastes and studying how to identify 'off' characteristics of beer . This was a really great way to finish the course, and probably the module I enjoyed most.
All that remained after receiving our certificates (woo!) and swapping email addresses was to make our way across town, gather our belongings and make the journey home down the A1 to Yorkshire.
In summary I would say that this is a course anyone who wants to take their interest in beer to the next level would thoroughly enjoy. The Tutors were knowledgeable, varied in opinion and engaging, and i left feeling like I'd had a lot of questions answered.
We now have a much clearer idea of what is involved in brewing and how we are going to approach our project.
Watch this space!
Brewlab course details are available here
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