After a dalliance with an online shop during COVID, I’m now putting everything into cask and you’ll find casks at nearby pubs and beer festivals.

My beers are unfined and unfiltered, and vegan.

My beers are brewed by hand, using gravity rather than pumping the beer between vessels. From coming from the water supply the beer will travel only a couple of metres in food grade tubing through three stainless steel vessels on its journey to cask or bottle. I use top-quality Maris Otter Pale Malt for my base malt. When flavours are needed it is from fresh ingredients rather than extract : I’ve used vanilla pods, freshly ground coffee beans, cacao beans, fresh mango, fresh ginger, coconut flakes, liquorice root, local honey (Dutch Quarter in Colchester and Abbots Hall Farm at Gt. Wigborough), and rhubarb (next door’s garden) in brews to date.

The only chemicals I use are for treatment to the water (acid to treat the hard water and powdered salts to get the mineral balance right) as you wouldn’t really want beer brewed with untreated tap water. I use Irish Moss (a seaweed) at the end of the boil to clear the beer, and I benefit from being a smaller scale brew in that I can use an immersion chiller to cool the beer to fermentation temperature in the kettle, which means that a whole lot of protein and hop material sinks to the bottom of the kettle before transfer, rather than ending up in the fermenter and needing finings to clear the beer.

Brewers sugar or demerera is used to get the beer to carbonate in the cask or bottle. I don’t use CO2 at all in the brewery (a good thing as it’s bluddy expensive now) and there’s a whole heap of ‘sh*t and stuff’ that bigger breweries can use during the brewing process that I don’t use.

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Get in touch by email : mark@watsonsbrewery.co.uk or mobile 07804 641267.