Blog scope

Hi Followers...

Just a short note from the Weird Beard Team.

First of all thanks for following our blog and your interest in our beers and set-up tribulations.

Secondly we are slightly changing the scope of our blog. This blog will no longer carry news of Weird Beard Events or beer launches. For that information please go to Weird Beard News or check out the news section of our website.

This blog will be more detailed content. It will include photo blogs of brewdays and work in the brewery, we may even pop up a video or two. We may publish homebrew recipes of some of our beers . We may discuss the latest hop variety or some daft legislation that government has seen fit to bring in.  Maybe even mention our inability to get Sorachi Ace hops and how sad that makes us.

We hope you will still follow this blog and the news blog for your full fix of Weird Beard goodness.

I'll leave with a last event plug and reminder that we are launching Shark Biscuit our collaboration with the London Brewing Company and Daniel Vane

Get yourself to the Bull on Tuesday 9th October from 7pm . There is a 50p discount on Shark Biscuit for anyone wearing a Weird Beard or London Brewing Company T-shirt.

Oh and check out the great pump clip Dan has put together.

Shark Biscuit

Australian Slang Dictionary defines:

Shark biscuit : somebody new to surfing...

Weird Beard are not surfers but we are pretty new to the professional brewing game. Our first commercial beer is a collaboration with the London Brewing Company and it is a big IPA dry hopped with with the proverbial shit-load of Australian Galaxy hops. Shark Biscuit seemed like an apt name.

We are launching this beer on Tuesday 9th October at the Bull in Highgate.

Look out for a pumpclip designed by co brewer Daniel Vane.

Here are some pictures taken by Bryan during the brew day:

our first collaboration

On Wednesday this week Gregg and Bryan from Weird Beard Brew Co. were invited up to The Bull brewpub in Highgate for our very first commercial collaboration brew. It was decided to brew an IPA with Aussie hops, which we have decided to call Shark Biscuit.

There will be a launch night for this beer on Tuesday 9^th October, at The Bull in Highgate, where you can try the keg and cask versions side by side. There will also hopefully be a few key kegs for sale, contact Dan at the Bull for info.

Full details to follow, but we look forward to seeing you all there.

New Weird Beard News Blog

This is the new Weird Beard news blog.

Check back here for general Weird Beard news, event dates and beer launch information.

Weird Beard Update

It has been a long time since I last blogged. This has been for a number of reasons but mainly due to the day job getting busy, as it always does in July, and pure frustration at the the delays that were besetting us.

Still there has been a load of progress so here is a brief update as to what is going on.

Back in April we had some awesome meet the "not quite yet" brewer sessions at the Strongroom Bar, Egham United Services Club and most chuffingly for us the Rake Bar in their London beer week. All the beers went down well and we got some good publicity and some prominent bloggers said some nice things about us Here, Here and Here. Oh and we got to sign the wall at the Rake, a small rite of passage on the way to the ranks of the professional brewers. We also were invited to Ealing Beer Festival in July where a new prototype Black Perle was unleashed on the public to some excellent feedback even if there was a typo on the label.

We have started revamping our website with our friends at Fuzzy Memes. So look out for a new and improved website launch in the next month or so.

We have also been talking to some cool label designers and illustrators who are working on some new labels for us.

We think they look awesome and you can find out more about Josh and Chris at their blog.

You may notice that our skull motif has developed a personality, He has also earned himself a name. Lup'in (short for Lupulin not after the werewolf teacher at Hogwarts.) Look out for further incarnations of  Lup'in in the near future.

The frustration has mainly come from our inability to find a home. The last place I blogged about here was perfect except for a number of leaks in the roof, about 40 of them to be exact. This coupled with a backing up drain made for quite a wet unit. In fact we have as yet to come across a unit that does not leak in a few places. We gave the landlord a few months to get it fixed but nothing quite worked so we have ended up in a 3rd unit. This third (and hopefully final) unit is also located in Hanwell and There are some photos of it at the end of the blog. We are in the final stages of lease negotiation and hopefully we will be in sometime in September.

We have been assessing equipment options and an order should be placed next week for the first parts. Looks like, after a brief flirtation with tiles, that we will be opting for a heavy duty polyurethane resin floor. So with a fair wind we hope to still be on track to be brewing by the end of the year.

Anyway that is you pretty much up to date now. I will leave you with some photos of the new unit taken by Mike Ellenberg our co-brewery.

 Miserable wet day.

 But of course I'm still in shorts

 Idiot previous tenant could not drive forklift (holes in wall at top of picture)

 Has decent height again.

 Mezzanine already in place and they even cut a hole in the wall for us.

And left us a bike in the back.

The Rake Bar - 22nd April 2012

The last venue on our April meet the "not quite yet a brewer" tour is the one that is making us the most excited. The Rake Bar has been a London craft beer staple for 5 years and we feel privileged to be asked to come along in their London beer week.

So Sunday 22nd April at 3pm we will be offering samples of 3 prototype beers.

Our Single hop series has reached number 9. This series is more of a learning experience for us and is a good way to find out the ins and outs of hops we are not that familiar with. However they do tend to produce some good beers. Junga is a Polish hop and here it is married with a simple malt base and clean yeast to show it off to its best effect. Quite subtle compared to some of our beers but clean and refreshing, would be a good beer for a hot summers day.

 Next up is our Sunshine Saison. Saison seems to be the in beer style at the moment. We add some Munich malt to give a slightly orange golden colour, where many saisons are a pale yellow straw. The French saison yeast we use seems to eat just about everything you put in front of it to give a dry spicy base on top of which we have added some additional spices and some hops that have a lemony edge to them (Pacific Gem and Sorachi Ace).

Finally we have Fade to Black. I don't really want to get into a fight over what style of beer this is...all I will say is that it has a complex grain bill including some rye and an almost as complex hopping schedule, topped off with a load of dry hops. My love of Sorachi Ace is known to some and it shows some of its most complex nuances here with hints of coconut, and sticky sweets from your childhood. 

So if any of these beers appeal, do come and see us at the Rake on Sunday afternoon, taste the beers and tell us know what you think.

Hops and starting core range of beers.

So my recipes use expensive and hard to get hold of hops...

The hop merchants have none of these hops left this year...

We should, however, be able to get most of the hops we require when the respective harvests from NZ and and the USA arrive. This means no Citra, Sorachi Ace or Amarillo until 2013, no Pacific Gem until June/July and probably no Nelson Sauvin at all. This make me want to cry.

Nelson is my favourite hop at the moment and South Seas Pale relies heavily on a load of Nelson dry hopping.

So why are we struggling to get the Nelson Sauvin hop? Well, like me, every other brewer it seems likes this hop too. Charles Faram have a consignment of it arriving in the middle of the year but every brewer and his dog have put in a pre-order for it. Charles Faram will allocate these hops based on previous orders of the Nelson Sauvin hop.  This is quite reasonable in my view - you can't have established brewers/beers not getting their hop for some new upstart ... I like Kipling too! If this continues year upon year though it is a bit Catch 22 as new brewers will not be able to get any so have no track record so will not be allocated any etc...

So I have committed £1000 of our start up money to pre-order 65Kg of this most wonderful of hops, which is enough to brew South Seas Pale once a month for a year. If I get 10% of this I will be happy, 25% overjoyed and anything above 50% I'll fall off my chair in delirious fits of giggles.

So what is happening to our other core beers...in fact, what are our planned core beers? Time to divulge a bit of information.

South Seas Pale, a 5% or so pale ale with Pacific Gem and Nelson Sauvin, will be replaced by another pale if we can't get the Nelson.

Five O'Clock Shadow a 7% or so IPA now reformulated to have Apollo Summit Cascade and Columbus (all American hops that can be sourced at the moment)

Sunshine Saison a 6% dry Belgian style beer with lemony hops, (Pacific Gem to start and Sorachi Ace from the new year), a few interesting spices and a French Saison yeast.

Decadence Stout a 5% full bodied stout crammed full of interesting grains.

After the new year:

Fade to Black a 7% Cascadian Dark Ale. This is the beer that has the Sorachi Ace, Citra and Amarillo.

We will be casking the stout and the pale ale.  Everything will be available in bottles and hopefully we will getting out some kegs of the Saison and IPA.

If this interests you you can sample some of the prototypes at the Rake Bar on Sunday 22nd April. We will have Sunshine Saison (as it should be) and Fade to Black. We will also have a single hop Junga Pale ale. There will be more details in another blog including times etc.

New artwork for Fade to Black and Sunshine Saison below. Feedback is as ever welcome.

Bye Bye TfL Hello Hanwell. A Brewery Update.

A long time has passed since we tried to get a lease from TfL. Lots of banging heads against walls and explaining to  people that we were waiting for TfL and that we should hear back from them again soon. The romance of a railway arch and huge floorspace for small amount of money could only hold our interest for so long with TfL making life so very, very difficult. This is why I would not recommend TfL to anyone looking to start a brewery:

Loads of red tape to fill in...5 page application form for lease.
We had to provide credit checks and they also then went and had us credit checked....What is the point of this?
Lease application received by TfL in January. Still waiting for heads of terms in April!
They have told us that the directors will have to provide personal guarantees (not sure what then is the point of having a limited company).
A 20 page document every time you had wanted to do any changes to the premises.
Requirement for TfL approved contractors to do anything and everything.
Even getting a viewing is a painful and long drawn out process, we had at least one veiwing cancelled while 45mins into travelling to get there.

In hindsight, it makes me wonder why we wasted two months waiting for them.

Still, we have found a new location, in an industrial estate beside the Grand Union Canal just south of Hanwell. We have almost agreed heads of terms and with a bit of luck we should be in there in a month.

It has a slightly smaller footprint but much better set up for a brewery.

5M high ceilings throughout allowing more vertical storage or very big fermenters if expansion is required ...We are going to need a forklift.
Does not need a new roof.
Lots of natural light.
No damp this time.
Good access to drainage.
TfL not the landlord.
15 mins closer to my house.
Proximity of a good real ale pub. (The Fox in Hanwell)

Some pictures and a possible plan of new brewery. Photos were taken by Mike from Ellenberg's Brewery.

The Strongroom Bar

Next chance to get hold of our prototype beer is at the Strongroom bar's London beer festival on Thursday 19th April.

We will only have 1 beer available. Five O'clock Shadow. An American Style IPA. The malt base is pretty standard with Pale, Munich and light crystal. Plenty of bittering hops (Citra, Summit, Columbus, Centennial and Nelson Sauvin).  There are no late aroma hops but it is dry hopped at 6g/litre with the same hops as the bittering hops. This beer went down well at the Egham Beer festival and this should be a chance for a few more people to get their paws on it.














We will be there from 6:30 on the Thursday evening to hand out samples. Free beer is sure to go quickly so get there early.

We will also be at the Rake Bar in Borough Market on Sunday 22nd during the afternoon...another blog to follow with details.

Prototypes for April events.

Readers of this blog will already know that we are sending some prototypes to 3 events in April.

We will be at  the Egham Real Ale and Cider Festival on Thursday 5th April at 18:30. Both Bryan and I will be there to pour the following beers...

South Seas Pale is quite a pale beer with a simple malt bill with Pale and Vienna malts and Pacific Gem and Nelson Sauvin hops. The Pacific Gem adds a slight lemon character and the Nelson Sauvin packs a punch of gooseberries and elderflowers. A very refreshing beer that belies its strength.

 Five O'Clock Shadow started as an experiment in dry hopping. Malt base is pretty standard with Pale, Munich and light crystal. Plenty of bittering hops (Citra, Summit, Columbus, Centennial and Nelson Sauvin).  There are no late aroma hops but it is dry hopped at 6g/litre with the same hops as the bittering hops. While this was an experimental beer it has gone down well and will certainly be made again, perhaps with some tweaks.



Decadence Stout is one of the longer standing recipes. It started with 10 types of grain but was soon rationalised to "only" 8. Hopped with Chinook, Fuggles and East Kent Goldings it has solid bitterness but the malt base is the star. A higher then normal mash temperature gives a full mouthfeel, but the large amount of roasted barley keeps it from being too sweet.

So come along and say hello on the 5th. Test our beers and give us some feedback.

First exposure...Second exposure...

Those who follow the blog will know that we had some beers available at the Real Ale and Rocking Blues Festival at the Sebright arms last weekend.

Things did not go exactly to plan. The Sunshine Saison did not carbonate properly, and you can't release a flat saison now, can you? Hopefully it will get there and we can release it in a few months (or ideally weeks) time. So a late replacement with another single hop beer Summit to go along with the Rauchbier "Smoke" and Single Hop Citra.

Fortunately this was a good replacement and we have had some really good feedback on the the beers entered, including this excellent review at the Scavenger Gourmet. Frankly, I nearly fell off my chair when I read this review; to be compared to the Kernel at our stage of development is really pleasing as Evin and the boys are a big inspiration to us. However, feet back on the ground for a moment, it does set the bar rather high in people's expectations and we are going to have to work our socks off to live up to our first review.

Anyway, next thing to talk about is the latest chance to taste some more of our beers. We will be trialing 3 new prototypes in an informal "meet the not quite yet a brewer" event at the Egham Real Ale and Cider Festival on Thursday 5th April at 18:30. This is taking place at Egham United Services Club.

Definitely on show will be:

South Seas Pale which is full of Pacific Gem and Nelson Sauvin.

Five O'Clock Shadow, an IPA which has only bittering and dry hops, but loads of both.

Also possible options will be "Defenestration" a bottle conditioned Lager, "Decadence" Stout and "Fade to Black" a Cascadian dark ale. 

Hopefully we will see some of you along to say hello. Comments on branding as ever welcome.

Getting beer out there....EARLY!

Sometimes I think we are getting ahead of ourselves. We have a social media presence or two, T-shirts and hoodies available online and  a basic website...but no beer for anyone to try.

Yes, I have been handing out bottles of potential recipes to lots of people and getting some good feedback that will help us when it comes to going live. However, thanks to a couple of innovative publicans and event organisers, we have a chance to get a very small amount of prototype beer to the general public.

The first event is on Saturday 10th March at the Sebright Arms, at their Real Ale and Rocking Blues festival.

The Sebright Arms is a new establishment in Bethnal Green, open about 3 months and focusing on London beer. The landlord Charles is passionate about running a good pub and serving good beer and currently lets his kitchen out to Lucky Chip one of the best burger-makers in the capital. He has been kind enough to offer to showcase a very small number of bottles of some of our prototypes.

Two beers that should be available are:

plus one more as yet to be determined, perhaps a Summit IPA or Defenestration C-Hop lager.

As we are not legally allowed to sell these beers (yet) they will be given away on a first come, first served basis. If you are going to be at the festival, we can get beers set aside for bloggers and beer writers who may be interested, so drop me an e-mail.

Details of the second event in April are to come soon. There may be a bit of "meet the potential brewer" action as well at this event and hopefully a wider choice of beers (and some more of them!).

The Evolution of Weird Beard's Branding.

One of the first things to consider when starting a brewery is the branding and marketing of your beer. It is right up there with brewing good beer and balancing the books and other things you really want to do well.


Marketing  is the way that the general public get to know about your beer. For a small brewery this means Facebook, Twitter, a website, beer blogs both your own and through other people (why do you think I'm writing this?), meet the brewer events etc. For big breweries it involves aspirational TV adverts and sports sponsorship. Marketing is a strategy and perhaps in another blog I will get into it in more detail, but I want to go on to talk about branding.


Branding is a subset of marketing and is most important at the point of sale. Many punters, in the absence of any prior knowledge about the beer, will pick an interesting looking pumpclip or a good looking bottle. What better way of marketing your beer then to have people buy it, try it and talk about it?


So what branding have we got at Weird Beard Brew Co? Well as you will see the branding has evolved somewhat from fairly basic beginnings.


The first thing was the name. This was an incredibly difficult thing to get agreement on. Weird Beard has had a few people involved with the project over the year or so we have been thinking about it.

We have a file with over 75 possible names in there that we considered. Some of those that got more than 10 seconds of thought are below:

Second Chapter (People may remember Tony Lennon @tony2taps tweeting about this)

Rhythm and Brews

Weird Beard Brew Co

Square Mile

Great Fire Brewing Co

The Craft Brewery (to annoy all the people who don't like the name craft beer)
Artisan Beers

Studio 56 Brew Co

Happy Bat (Yes Stig @thehappybat was involved as well)

Big Smoke

South Bank

Thames Brewery

Borough Brewery

Another Brewing Company ("can I have another beer please?")

Elephant's Trunk

New Agenda

SE1

Inner City Brew Co

Urban Brew Co

The 4 Idiots that can build a brewery but not think of a name brew co.

HELL FIRE!

We gave those in bold a bit more thought but it was only when it was down to Bryan and myself that Weird Beard Brew Co came out as a clear favourite. This was helped by Bryan going out and with the help of a mate designing a logo that worked:

Armed with a logo it was easy for me to dive into Photoshop and start designing beer labels for our homebrew beers. The font is sometimes know as Tim Burton but also the freely available as Trinigan FG and made for good title text.

The goal was for simple and striking. First feedback was writing text telling drinkers to store the beer upright should not be written vertically! Also note my (bad?) habit of replacing letters with clip art.

A few tweaks later, we had this. A version of this label had won the label competition at the LASECB Festival.  Feedback on this label was good, but a few people complained about amateur look to it. The black and white printed at home look to be exact. Looking back I am not sure I agreed at the time but certainly do now. However a retro label may be in order if we do this beer as a special.

Again the attempt was to be simple and striking. I guess you can see Marble and Otley influences in this especially, although others have mentioned James Bond. Another change was to lose the fancy font for much of the writing, making it easier to read and allowing us to put it in a smaller font giving more space.

Trying (and failing) to move away from the James Bond look. I thought how I could remove the Circle with a dark background. Make a negative of the logo? Perhaps but instead I found some interesting wallpaper and gave this a go. I really like the effect of these two labels and they make a coherent pair. Now I just need to convince Bryan that a Rauchbier seasonal (and a chipotle rauchbier) will sell well. I also think smoke and fire would translate to T-shirts very well.

Get picture of hops; crop to size; add overlay with 75% opacity; get something quite interesting. Can easily be changed in colour for others in the series.

Final tweaks to date. I added a dummy barcode and in response to other feedback reversed the brewery name and beer name positions. Not 100% sure if this is an improvement. Strangely I did not want to use Redpenguin or Dredpenguin as a brewery name but a beer name....that is a different matter.


Is it better to have the beer name prominent or the brewery name?


I'm sure that the branding will continue to evolve. Any and all feedback is welcome and I will of course do a follow-up post closer to launch time with our launch range of beers and labels.

What are we taking on....?

So here is a bit more info about the proposed brewery location. All photos taken by Mike from Ellenberg's Brewery and reproduced on here with his kind permission.

Located under the tube line between South Harrow and Rayners Lane.

It has two levels under the arches and a large single storey shed out the back. 3000+ sq ft altogether

Surrounded by car MOT and service places who have made a bit of a mess. Still - interesting theme for the beer garden...

No electricity at the moment as someone has nicked the fuses.

Some issues with damp....

But someone left us a conservatory inside!

The toilets need a bit of a clean.

All very dark in the shed as they boarded up the windows...

...but plenty of space.

Upstairs is in reasonable condition.

These are our plans done in high tech Excel.

A lot of work to be done, including a new roof on the shed as it is rusted through in many places.

More photos below.

Where We Are At!

Having done the philosophising in the last post, this will set the picture of where we are at with Weird Beard Brew Co. 

We have formed a company, two major share holders Gregg  @dredpenguin and Bryan @WeirdBeardBryan.

We have a logo, a website and a deal with some guys doing T-shirts.

We have award winning homebrew recipes (I wonder if they will translate well into commercial ones...bloody hope so, it is a core part of the business plan!)

We have agreed to share premises with another LAB member who is starting Ellenburg's Brewery, reducing our capital expenditure and running costs. Hopefully there will be plenty of other benefits and not too much competition as we brew quite different beer styles.

We have found a potential location with the right amount of space and most importantly at the right price. It is in NW London and there are no other breweries near. It has some down sides. It is not in the most trendy part of town, nor is it surrounded with a plethora of craft beer outlets. It needs a new roof and a lot of TLC and a damn good makeover. However the good outweighs the bad and this is probably going to be the subject of another blog at another time.

We plan to brew beer that is modern and eclectic, using hops from every corner of the world (if we can get them), that match well with food and should appeal to CAMRA member and crafterati alike.

We plan to use all means of dispense, except perhaps cans. And avoid, like the plague, any craft vs cask fighting.

We hope to succeed!

Why start a Brewery?

Starting a brewery. Well, why indeed?

Investing money in the current economic climate is a bad idea. Isn't it?

Setting up in an industry that is ravaged with high duty and is likely to be hit harder as the years go on has to be a mistake. I mean, come on...

Making a beverage that is pilloried in the media, demonized by the press and ignored by mainstream food programmes is not the way to make your fortune. Get a grip son!

Ah but...

If you can start a successful business in a depression then you can be happy when the good times roll around again. Well...

Even with the duty increases the artisanal cask, keg and bottle beer sections seem to be doing well. I'll give you that.

What better way to change opinions of beer than to get out there, make a great product and show to people it is not all about swilling down 10 pints of lager. But I like swilling lager at the cricket club!

The sense of community that has built up around beer especially in London with new breweries and bars opening on what seems like a monthly basis; the freely offered advice received from London brewers; the encouraging words of bloggers; and the joy of making beer that puts a smile on someone's face. OK, OK you had me at Starting a Brewery

This blog will hopefully detail some of the ups and no doubt downs of the birth of Weird Beard Brew Co