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Over the years, it’s gradually dawned on us Brits that there’s a higher purpose to beer brewing than Tennents and Hofmeister* would have you believe. And, as our small nation develops a more discerning palette for malt and hops, this movement has urged the home brewing industry to up its game.

I’ll interject here with a nostalgic anecdote. I remember the first time I tried to brew my own beer; it resembled a plastic hessian sack that conveniently looped onto a coat hook, and promised ‘Twenty pints of delicious, foaming, nut-brown ale.’ Of course, what it actually yielded was twenty pints of the stuff they spray on pig carcasses to dissolve their bristles. Dark, malty, caustic soda. And if you were brave enough to commit it to your digestive system, you’d be rewarded with eight hours of acid burps and horrendous tunnel vision.

Thankfully, times have since changed, and you can now choose from a range of pain-free home brew options. Anything from a simple beer kit, though to all-grain recipes, are all relatively cheap to buy and involve very little suffering in the production/consumption, leaving your oesophageal lining intact. However, more recently there’s been a surge of something even more interesting: Brew-it-yourself kitchens.

Brew-it-yourself facilities aren’t exactly new; Stewarts Brewery in Edinburgh have run their Craft Beer Kitchen for a few years now, and Drygate in Glasgow offer a similar Studio Kit for budding enthusiasts. Prices start from around £250, and may/may not include ingredients. It’s a smart idea, and should appeal to the home brewer whose fermented bilge water is becoming a depressing regularity.

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And this is exactly the ethos behind Krafty Brew, located in Edinburgh’s Bonnington area. They rocked up to the party in December 2014, with head brewer Mike Ward claiming to have been ‘motivated’ by the awful beers his mates were trying to make in their own homes. A brew day with these guys weighs in at a far more affordable £160. That includes all equipment, ingredients, and most importantly, guidance. That’s 150 bottles, working out at just over a quid each. 

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Intrigued by their somewhat baffling turnover/profit viability, I decided to take the tour (a birthday present from my lovely girlfriend @clarkyjen) and then return the following week to brew a double-whammy 300 bottle batch for my nine-to-five employer Tayburn.

First thing to note is that the tour is pretty light – the facility itself is small, and the emphasis centres around learning the ingredients and fermentation techniques, all the while having your glass regularly topped with their vast selection of own creations.

Secondly, this isn’t quite as advanced as Drygate or Stewart’s kitchens. Their beer is brewed using top-end homebrew equipment, rather than scaled-down industrial machines, opting for Braumeister all-in-one systems (eight of). Braumeister are regarded by many as the jumping-off point to semi-professional brewing. They allow you to mash, sparge, boil and hop your brew in one vessel, with precise timing and temperature controls as standard. The brewing equivalent of a one-man-band, if you will. But with Mark Knopfler at the controls, rather than Dick Van Dyke.

A couple of interesting facts we picked up during the tour:

1. They have a clean beer rule, similar to the German Purity Law, that stops any additives from getting into your glass. That means no finings, preservatives or pH adjustments, so although the beers are cloudy, they’re about as healthy as beer can be.
2. They ferment their beers using champagne yeast, rather than ale yeast. This means the fermentation period burns through more sugars than an ordinary ale yeast would, resulting in a drier, cleaner beer, and a slightly sour, refreshing bite that’s typical of this yeast strain.

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The following week, we brewed our own. After some brief discussions, we settled on two beers – a crowd-pleasing and relatively inoffensive IPA, and an American style pale ale, with rabid amounts of hops thrown in. Mike was a great mentor for the session, advising on the styles, ingredients and quantities needed to create a quality brew. He even threw some good anecdotes at us, and pulled a great face when we said we wanted to use eight times the suggested amount of hops in our pale ale.

Our beers will be ready in a couple of weeks, and with any luck, Mike will have ensured we’ll have something more palatable than the esophagus-stripping product of my early-years brewing.

Cheers!

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*Hofmeister: a once-popular cooking lager** from the 1980’s. Memorable for it’s yellow-jacketed, swaggering, cockney bear. Interestingly, the Hofmeister brand featured an emblem of an actual bear, incarcerated in chains, tied to a tree stump and tortured.

**See also Skol and Castlemaine XXXX.

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www.kraftybrew.com/

@KraftyBrew