So tell me. Why did you start a brewery again?

Believe me, over the last few months that thought has come into my head more than I care to admit! Now, as we launch our beers for pre order, I thought it would be worth sharing a story about how we found ourselves with a nano brewery in our garage.

Our tiny little brewery. Where it all started!

I mean if you ask anyone who owns a brewery, read any articles about owning a brewery, watch interviews with anyone who runs a brewery or listened to a podcast about how to start a brewery the one piece of advice everyone offers up before anything else is DON’T DO IT.

So why have we ignored this seemingly excellent piece of advice? Probably the reason everyone else that starts a brewery does. We’ve got the bug.

Though not the Covid bug I do lay the blame of all of this squarely at it’s door. You see, before any lockdowns I’d never really given brewing beer a serious thought. A few months beforehand Azzie asked me what I’d wanted for Christmas and my reply was ‘I’ve always fancied brewing a bit of beer, my dad did it and I kind of fancy giving it a go’.

Christmas arrived and with it a Wilko malt extract kit. Nice I thought, I’ll look forward to making a bit of homebrew with that. Life gets in the way though doesn’t it? Months later it was still sat on a shelf in the spare room. That was until, much like the rest of the world, we found ourselves sat at home twiddling our thumbs. It was then I figured I should give the kit a go. We threw a load of malt extract in a bucket along with a packet of yeast and hid it in the utility got a couple of weeks.

When it came to tasting it, as far as a malt extract kit goes, it wasn’t half bad really. Little did I know at that point that I was already hooked and what followed for the rest of the year was a few more kit brews and by years end a couple of all grain brews.

Sitting here in September 2023 I find myself a good three years into this mess now. Countless brews later brewing beer has become a constant in all of our lives since the beginning, we’ve not really had a break from it and if I’m honest I can’t say it has been an absolutely awesome journey from the beginning. I’ve found it a ‘little’ stressful, disheartening and wholly fulfilling in varying measures.

You see, it takes a good few weeks for a beer to go from grain to glass and there is absolutely no way of knowing what your end product is going to be like until you take that taste for the first time. That’s a lot of waiting around in anticipation! So when you open that can or bottle or pull the first pour from the keg it is filled with anticipation. What will it be like?

Now I can tell you, the satisfaction you feel when you sip that first beer and it tastes absolutely wonderful is immeasurable. Equally though, when it’s not quite what you expect it can be pretty disheartening.

Take our first batches of Borderlines Brewing beers for example. ‘Meon Pale’ is right up there with one of my absolute favourite beers we’ve ever made. It was exactly what we were looking for in terms of look, aroma and taste. It’s crisp, flavourful and looks absolutely lovely (want to see? It’s the beer we’re pouring in our homepage video).

On the other hand you’ve got ‘Start Me Up’ which has turned out a million miles from what we were pitching for. We had big issues with the cooling pumps during fermentation which prolonged the time the beer should have been in the tank, meant fermentation temps fluctuated throughout and impacted on our ability to cold crash and clear the beer. Ultimately we knew we weren’t going to be getting what we wanted and in the end all those things have impacted the look, aroma and flavour of the beer.

When it comes to things going wrong you have two choices. We could have dumped it and given it up as a bad job. We’ve NEVER done that before. We’ve always drunk everything we’ve made but I’ve got to be honest, because this was a commercial brew we were going to be selling, we came close this time. In the end though we figured we’d give it a chance to see what it turned out like. What we’ve got is not a looker by any stretch and that’s pretty disappointing but when you look past that the aroma and taste make it a really very pleasant beer and so with that ‘Start Me Up’ was born as our one-off pale ale to launch Borderlines.

I guess the gist here is that whatever happens you make the best of it and plough on.

But why plough on? If everyone tells you not to do it, if there is very little money to be made and if it’s stressful and unpredictable why keep doing it? Well I think that’s the main appeal isn’t it? With every single brew we do we learn, adapt and look to improve for next time. I’ve brewed more beers on our smaller kit than I can count and the last batches were the best we’ve ever made because we’d streamlined and refined our process. Now we’re brewing commercially we’ve invested in an entirely new and larger kit that due to cost has been built pretty much from scratch by ourselves. With that we’ve got to expect hiccups along the way. We won’t get it completely right from the start and we must learn and improve. You’ve got to embrace that, accept your mistakes and move on knowing that if you learn it will be better the next time. You’ve got to enjoy it and have fun along the way and of course laugh at your mistakes.

Then, when you taste your next batch and you just go ‘mmmmm’, give it to someone else to try and they go ‘mmmmm’ it’s satisfaction at it’s greatest. It’s a great feeling. Now we’re starting out on our commercial journey I just hope beyond hope that as more and more people taste our beer I hear more ‘mmmmm’s than ‘hmmmm’s! It’s what keeps you going and is 100% why we do it.