Home(Brew) Is Where The Heart Is Jonny

image Brad Evans

Home(brew) is where the heart is

Award-winning beer writer and founder of the Craft Beer Channel Jonny Garrett eased his craving for cask beer during lockdown by cranking up his homebrew kit. And the results have turned him into a homebrew evangelist. Here he shares his experience of perfecting the recipe for the iconic Five Points Best…

Five Points Best Bitter 20l homebrew recipe

Ingredients

3.5kg Simpsons Low Colour Maris Otter 150g Simpsons Wheat Malt 150g Simpsons Amber Malt 150g Simpsons Crystal Medium Fuggles 150g Whole Hops WLP013 London Ale Yeast (1 pack)

Method

Original Gravity: 1.043 Final Gravity: 1.011 ABV %: 4.1% IBU: 29

The Mash

Temperature °C: 67 Length (mins): 60

The Boil

Boil time (mins): 60

Additions and timing:

40g Fuggles @ 60 minutes 30g Fuggles @ 15 minutes 80g Fuggles @ Flameout

Yeast: WLP013

Fermentation temperature/ steps:

Pitch at 17C and ferment with WLP013 at 19C. Diac rest at 21C for three days close to FG. To prime in package (bottle or bag-in-box) aim for 1.8 vols.

“Like many things in life, we can blame lockdown for my obsession with homebrew. When the pubs and taprooms shut, the thing I missed most was a perfectly kept cask ale. For all the innovation and exploration of modern craft brewers, cask ale is the one thing that’s impossible to replicate at home. Or so I thought. I’d had a Grainfather all-in-one brewing system for many years, bringing it out on empty weekends to play around with hoppy pales, but I’d never really considered myself an actual homebrewer. So when I dusted it off and buffed it up to sate my need for the woody taste of Fuggle with a homemade Best Bitter, I had no idea the journey it would take me on. Using Five Point’s increasingly iconic Best recipe and with plenty of time on my hands, I went all in. I sourced Fuggle directly from Hukin’s Hops in Kent, interviewed Five Points head brewer Gregg Hobbs, and finally invested in a refurbished handpull that I clamped onto my coffee table to the amusement and/or horror of my wife. To my surprise the beer was excellent – with brown toast, caramel, red berry and dry hay notes – and it poured like a dream through a sparkler. Its perfect conditioning aligned with the six-person outdoors rule too, so I invited a few friends to come and sit on my flat’s stoop for a few precious pints of cask. For the first time I had the joyous feeling that brewers talk about – working hard to produce something that literally brings people together and puts a smile on their faces.

It was that feeling, along with the satisfying feeling of having a beer in mind and literally being able to bring it into being, that got me hooked. Since then I’ve brewed countless batches of different beers, with many of them turned into epic homebrew stories on my YouTube page, the Craft Beer Channel. There’s been Pumpkin Porters, Belgian Dubbels and Hopfenweizens. I’ve brewed New England IPAs, West Coast IPAs, Red IPAs, Mountain IPAs and even a 10.2% Pastry Stout that I poured on nitro and then through a slushie machine. Like the Five Points brew, all of them were collaborations with amazing professional brewers who helped with recipes and processes that I worked to convert and make work at home. Each time the technical challenge and the wonderment felt by those who tasted it has spurred me to try more outlandish and difficult brews.

And so I went from part-time homebrewer to someone who wouldn’t rule out becoming a commercial one – a journey I think thousands of people have taken. In fact, it’s unlikely you’ll find a brewing team in the UK that doesn’t include a former homebrewer. With only a few professional brewing courses on offer, it is perhaps the most likely way someone will get into the industry. As a hobby that also has a very direct professional vocation, it’s also inevitable that some will decide this is what they want to do with their days. While the processes and recipes aren’t always directly scalable to commercial kits, the skills you bring with you are. The American craft brewing scene was ignited by passionate homebrewers taking their hobby pro. Both Brooklyn Brewing and Sierra Nevada Brewing were founded by avid homebrewers – and in fact by homebrewers obsessed with British style ales. So it makes sense that many of the UK’s most celebrated new breweries are owned by people who started with plastic buckets and brewkits in their kitchens – Verdant Brewing Co, Elusive Brewing, The Kernel. Even if they aren’t owners, the brewhouses are often headed by homebrewers – Track Brewing, Wild Card, even North Brew Co, a previous SIBA Brewery Business of the Year.

This list of award-winning breweries also illuminates another important impact of the UK’s burgeoning homebrew scene. Not only does homebrewing incubate brewers of the future, but the adventure of the hobby has the important effect of bringing new passions, ideas and diversity of styles to the scene. You only have to look at a few homebrewing forums to see the amount of experimentation and forward thinking going on at home, on small scale systems, to see that the future of beer is very much in the hands of the homebrewers. Encouraging them and offering them support, like I have received from so many of the world’s best breweries on my journey, is vital to the continued innovation we’ve seen over the last two decades.”

“Like many things in life, we can blame lockdown for my obsession with homebrew."