Registered with HMRC in late 2016, Watsons Brewery has started small but has big ambitions. Beers in bottles have mostly been found at Two Brews on Crouch Street in Colchester, and casks have appeared at a number of beer festivals in and around Colchester.

A new brewhouse in Old Heath, Colchester, and larger brewing vessels and fermenters are now in place, and Watsons Brewery bottles and casks will be more widely available across Essex, including a select number of real ale pubs and micropubs, from late summer 2017 onwards.

My beers are unfined and unfiltered, brewed by hand by gravity and not using pumps. From coming from the water supply the beer will travel a total of about two metres in food grade tubing through its journey to cask or bottle. Most recipes will be simply water, malt, hops and yeast, with just the odd addition for flavour such as vanilla pods, cacao beans, fresh mango, honey and so forth. The only chemicals I use are for treatment to the water as you wouldn’t really want beer brewed with tap water. Other than that Irish Moss (a seaweed) is used at the end of the brew to avoid chill haze, and brewers sugar is used to get the beer to carbonate in the cask or bottle. And that’s it.

To keep up to date follow Watsons Brewery on Twitter, on Facebook, or sign up to the email newsletter. And check out the reviews on Untappd.

The Beers

As you can see from the list below, rather than having a core range of beers with a smaller number of seasonal specials, I’m producing a wide range of beers, with a few making regular appearances. During building works in the summer of 2017 I concentrated on a few core beers, but the autumn of 2017 will see more new beers being produced.