about
| Singular beers, unfined and unfiltered, brewed by hand in Old Heath, Colchester between 2016 and 2025 (commercially). I suppose I could have called them ‘artisanal beers’ but I didn’t. I knocked down a leanto at the back of the house and had a dedicated brewhouse built. I had one insulated walk-in coldstore with an aircon rigged to get the temps down to 10c. And a smaller insulated FV room with an aircon rigged to keep fermenting beer at 18c.
In my early days of commercial brewing I sold casks, bottles and cans to trade, which was fun, and began looking to upsize. During COVID I set up an online shop, so that I could sell bottles direct at a time when there wasn’t much option for selling casks. But thanks to Farage, Truss and Putin, the consequent mahoosive price increases for bottles, labels, cardboard boxes, electricity and just about everything else, reduced margins on bottles to virtually nil. So in my final years of commercial brewing I put all my beer into casks which went to nearby pubs and beer festivals.
The last cask, brew #200, appeared at the Colchester & NE Essex Winter Beer Festival at the end of January 2026 and was appropriately called ‘Omega’. And after four or five months I managed to extricate myself from the clutches of the HMRC. Plans to return to homebrewing (I was a homebrewer for six months before going commercial) have not materialised. |
