As I approached the closing months of my undergraduate degree, I was faced with a question that all students, particularly Philosophy students, must grapple with; what on earth do I do now? With neither the prospect of further study nor signing up to some soulless graduate scheme really tickling my fancy, I decided there was only one thing for me to do; set up a music production company. Easy right? Over my time at uni, I had put together a rudimentary recording studio in my flat, so all I needed to do now was turn on the creativity, fill the world with beautiful music and try not to lose count of all the money as it flooded in. Well, two Christmas songs and not a lot else (certainly no money) later, I was faced with that very same question again. As was Jack, my friend-since-kindergarten, musical-collaborator, flatmate, and now business partner. Sharing my disdain for all things soulless, Jack had made had an impressive commitment to part time retail in the pursuit of a greater good some time in the future. Indeed, this was a commitment that I had also made, having started working in a wine shop during the last year of my degree.
During the time music began to fade away, Jack and I started experimenting with homebrewing. I can still remember the excitement surrounding our first brew (well, it was only a year ago!) even though at this stage we were using kits, so all this amounted to was emptying a can into a bucket and adding water. Something about this awoke the crafts man in me, and I quickly began researching how to make beer properly. As it turns out, all you really need to do this is a cool-box and a tea urn, and before long we were churning out brews on a weekly basis (much to the annoyance of our mortgage broker flatmate). I wish I could say it was an instant success, but truth be told, the first couple of batches were so bitter they made you want to chew your face off.
It was with our third brew that things began to get interesting. We decided to have a go at a Porter, a traditional dark beer that once dominated the London beer scene. The brew went well, and that evening we went to the book launch of Melissa Cole’s ‘Let me tell you about beer’ for some free drinks courtesy of my sisters employers (she works for a publishing company). At this event, we ended up sharing a number of pints with TV’s Oz Clarke, and promised him that we would give him a bottle of our freshly brewed porter. As it happens, working in the wine trade has its perks, and a few weeks later we were presented with the perfect opportunity make good on our promise, by smuggling a bottle of beer into a wine show. His review was overwhelmingly positive, to the point of the surreal. Having a top critic and TV personality dissect your creation is a strange experience, especially when they seem to be genuinely enjoying it. This was enough for us to start thinking about brewing seriously, and really was the beginning point of our project.
To cut a long and exciting story short, through a series of beer hijacked wine tastings, chance meetings and many beer inhibited ‘meetings’, we have well and truly landed on our feet. We now have two additions to our team; a head of distribution with close working relationships with an endless number of top London venues, and a head of marketing who holds a similar title at a rather large soft drinks company. This time I’m optimistic.
One striking difference between our efforts in the music world and those in the beer world is that people seem to be for more receptive to our beer than our music. Now this could be simply because our beer is much better than our music (whilst our beers are able to stand up against some of the Craft Beer pioneers such as The Kernel and BrewDog, its fair to say that our voices would struggle to trouble a tone deaf cat on an off day), but I suspect the real reason runs deeper. Perhaps it is because we hold music a bit closer to our hearts than we do beer. Its more personal to us, whereas beer is inherently about sharing and sociability. Perhaps we feel our choice in music more accurately reflects the sort of person we are, and that we are more likely to be judged on it than our choice of beer. As such, we may be more tentative about giving our support to un-proven, amatuer projects, for the fear that it reflects badly on our tastes. Or it could be that whilst every man and his singing dog has probably at some stage fancied himself as a bit of a rock-god, its relatively rare that you find someone setting up their own brewery. So perhaps novelty has something to do with it.
Whatever the reason, we have found that at every step of the way so far people have been extremely interested, and in most cases offered help (or money, another striking difference!) wherever they can. (This is, of course, with the exception of a few cynical CAMRA members who seem to fail to take the Craft Beer movement seriously. What are they scared of?!) We are extremely grateful to the brewers who invited us into their breweries to show us how commercial brewing works, the pubs that have let us put on tastings, and of course to everyone who has offered us money to help get the project off the ground. This sort of reception has really shaped our vision; to create not just a brewery, but an open forum of education, exploration and sensory excitement available to all. Yes, we are beer geeks, but we don’t want to be exclusive. If you want to enjoy our beers without thinking too much about them, then go ahead, and thanks for choosing our beer. But if you do want to geek out, then there is a whole world for you to immerse yourselves in, and we would love to be a part of the curation of your exploration.
So here we stand, on the advent of our first commercial brew. The road ahead is uncertain, and getting more blurry with every drink, but it is certainly exciting. I shall keep you posted along the way, and hopefully share a beer with you at some stage too.
Oh, and the name of the brewery; Anspach & Hobday.
Cheers,
Paul
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