Why Do We Brew?

In most respects owning and running your own micro brewery is like most business - hard work. Throw in two teenage children along with their busy social calenders and life can be interesting to say the least.

Also throw in that brewing revolves around a micro organism with no brain (but a seemingly wicked sense of humour) - yeast. It is this fickle fellow that means regular trips back to work to check, skim and chill the fermenting beer as required.

It is the same fellow that demands tender loving care during the early hours of the morning or decides to stop working on a whim just when things are getting really busy and we need the beer quickly! It is also the reason why beer can have a wonderful fruity taste that is fairly unique to each individual brewery which uses liquid fresh yeast, as opposed to dried yeast.

Strains of yeast adapt to their environment very quickly. If you acquire some from a brewery and use it a few times in your own it will soon have its own characteristics, such as flavour and the speed of fermentation. If you returned it back to the original brewery and they were to brew with it again, their beer would taste quite different.

The other two main ingredients are malted barley and hops. These offer such a great variety of flavour, aroma and colour possibilities. The number of different beers it is possible to produce is endless.

It is this and seeing people enjoying the beer that makes it all worth while.