We look at the brown bottles displayed on the table, some open, some yet to be explored, one with a head pouring out of the top like Vesuvius in full flow, and my colleague makes a pertinent observation. “You know, there’s more variety here than you find in any pub in Cornwall.”
With three or four honourable exceptions, he’s right. It’s Friday in Truro and it’s home brew night. As well as tasting the attending brewers’ bottled offerings, there’s a chance to see Dave Willmot and Frances Williams, of Granite Rock Brewery and Home Brewing Supplies, put on demonstrations of boils and sparges, with help from Dave’s daughter Rosie and her friend Adam. There are vessels steaming away on the deck of the Compton Castle boat, in permanent dock on Lemon Quay.
Granite Rock has organised the evening in association with bottled beer shop the Beer Cellar and this is the second meeting of the mid-Cornwall home brewing fraternity. Much of the conversation revolves around some very honest reviews of each others’ beer, but there’s talk, too, of brewing methodology, equipment, bottling and labelling, and it soon becomes apparent that most of these people have more brewing passion — and knowledge — than some professional brewers I’ve encountered.
Home brewing has always been with us, in the background, perhaps something of an arcane hobby in most people’s eyes, but in recent years it has really taken off again. Because many of today’s most successful new brewers have graduated from a home brewing background, more and more amateur enthusiasts are realising that it is something that anyone with a degree of recipe following skill can have a crack at.
Success, of course, is not guaranteed. But modern equipment, the growth of video instruction on YouTube, and the availability of exciting hops and malts that wouldn’t have been heard of when my father, for instance, had a plastic bin bubbling in the airing cupboard in the 1970s, have all contributed to the boom in home brewing. And the big name craft brewers, such as BrewDog, destined to be forever labeled ‘maverick’, have cultivated the image of the brewer as hipster artisan.
On Friday in Truro I was the wide-eyed observer, tasting a delicious tripel, full-bodied dunkel wheat and a delightful ginger ale with subtle spicing dancing on the tastebuds. I have resisted home brewing up to now, always saying I am too busy drinking other people’s beers — which I am. But I may yet get drawn in. I can follow a recipe, I can tell what sort of hops and malts should work together. And there’s that space in the garage. Hmm…
