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“A beer first brewed in my bathroom”

Jeff Evans looks into the story behind Rooster’s Baby-Faced Assassin

It began in 2011, when Tom Fozard

was brewing beer in his bathroom in Yorkshire and could only fantasise about creating a beer that could be sold commercially and win awards. At the time, Tom was working at the Leeds beer retailer Beer Ritz and doing a little home brewing in his spare time with, as he admits, mixed results. “I’d had a 50/50 success rate of producing beer that I considered to be better than average, but had become frustrated that I wasn’t getting the desired levels of flavour and aroma,” he recalls. “I’d brewed a couple of good porters and the odd pale ale that were acceptable and worth sharing with friends, but what I really wanted was to create a beer that resembled the American IPAs I’d come to love.”

Around this time, his boss, Zak Avery, managed to get his hands on a kilo of highly sought-after American Citra hops that Tom ended up sharing. “At that time, even the pros were struggling to get their hands on Citra,” he says. “While Zak rationed his hops between a number of recipes, I decided to go for bust and concocted a beer that used 95 per cent of my score. Every ounce of hop was used in order to create a juicy IPA that had a relatively restrained bitterness.”

Having committed nearly 500g of such a rare hop to what he felt was a final attempt to create a beer that delivered the end product he’d been searching for, Tom says he was “practically giddy” when he first drew off a sample towards the end of fermentation. It was pretty good. In fact, Tom was so pleased with what he’d created, he offered people the chance to

Where better to enjoy Assassin than at Rooster’s tap?

Assassin is an award-winner in cask

win a bottle on Twitter and was delighted with the winner’s feedback.

Tom decided to call his new creation Baby-Faced Assassin. “I always gave a proper name to every beer I brewed and, with a background in publishing, I also created my own label artwork. Some people believe that Baby-Faced Assassin is so called because I’m a Manchester United fan – one of their former players, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, was given this nickname – or that it reflects my boyish good looks,” he jokes. “As a supporter of Leeds United, this couldn’t be further from the truth and, while I acknowledge that I appear to be younger than I am, the name simply fell into my head as I was walking to catch a bus. I’d been thinking about how the beer was deceptively drinkable and that the ABV could sneak up on consumers if they weren’t careful, so the name also acted like a tasting note.”

The next stage in Tom’s success

story came a few months later. “The opportunity for my family to buy Rooster’s from Sean Franklin presented itself and, following a successful takeover, I found myself living my dream job,” he says. Soon, people who’d tried his original Baby-Faced Assassin started asking when it was going to be upscaled into a commercial product.

Tom felt he knew the answer: “Probably never.” He couldn’t see

Living his dream job – Tom Fozard

“With a background in brewing, Ol has always been mindful that the reason a beer’s brewed is so that it offers enjoyment to the consumer while also being profitable”

how this could be financially viable, given that, even by home-brew standards, the beer had been expensive to make. As he mulled over the good reputation it had built up and the fact that the name was too good not to use, his twin brother, Ol, dampened his enthusiasm even further.

“With a background of working in the brewing industry since leaving school, Ol has always been mindful that the reason a beer’s being brewed is so that it offers enjoyment to the consumer while also being profitable,” Tom says. “When I suggested brewing Baby-Faced Assassin on a commercial scale, Ol wasn’t convinced. He’d tried the home brew and loved it, but recognised that it wasn’t practical. By this point, however, I was adamant we had to at least give it a go, even if only as a one-off.”

What was needed was to rein in the hop bill without losing any of the bold, punchy notes that Citra brought to the party. Experimentation with dry hopping, therefore, as well as the addition of Munich malt to help broaden the beer’s backbone, was the key to the beer going from a 25-litre brew to one that’s now produced in 4,800-litre batches – the first of which was brewed as a one-off under Rooster’s Outlaw brand, at 6.1 per cent ABV, at the end of 2013.

Demand for that initial brew was so

great, and feedback from drinkers and landlords so positive, that Baby-Faced Assassin became part of Rooster’s core range in 2015. That same year, the cask version scooped a bronze medal at the 2015 International Brewing Awards. Numerous other awards have followed as Baby-Faced Assassin has become Rooster’s most popular beer for export, while remaining a go-to IPA in cask, keg and can for drinkers closer to home.

Limited-edition spin-off beers have been released and include New England Assassin (6.1 per cent), Tropical Assassin (6.1 per cent), Double Assassin (8 per cent), Easy-Going Assassin (4.3 per cent) and Barrel-Aged Assassin (6.5 per cent), so the one-time home brew is now a much sought-after brand with its own extensions.

That’s quite a story and, as Tom says, “not bad for a beer first brewed in my bathroom”.