How to brew your own beer: 10 things you need to know

Listen to our bonus episode where Jaega shares her three favourite pubs.

How to brew your own beer

1. Make good beer

One of the key things to opening a brewery is to make good beer. It sounds really obvious but we are post the craft beer boom and mediocrity is just not accepted – there’s too much competition. When I started out (in 2012) there were about 10 breweries, and today there’s about 110. That’s just in London.

2. Share skills

I think it's really important to surround yourself with people who have a different skillset to you. At Wild Card, I’m really lucky, we have a trio of great people. My colleague, Andrew, is from an economics background – he handles the money. Will – he’s from sales and he’s got very good taste, so he does all of the sales and marketing. And me, I’m technical and I’m a beer sommelier, so I do product. That’s a really good foundation.

3. Have unique branding

The branding side of the business is really exciting. We decided to trim the core range down to three products and then have a monthly rotation of specials. We release a group of beers at once that are all the same theme. Then we work with a different artist each time. That allows me to tell a story across a wider range of flavours and to work directly with up-and-coming artists. We don’t follow any branding rules. It took us until about two years ago to put our name on the can!

4. Boss the basics

There’s a lot of cleaning in brewing. There’s physically clean – that is ‘would I eat off it?’. Then there’s chemically clean, so that is a caustic, or at home something like washing up liquid. Then there’s microbiological clean. Different parts of the process require different levels of clean and if you get those things wrong, it doesn’t matter how good of a set-up you have, you will get bad beer.

5. Get educated

When I became a beer sommelier, I became a better brewer. So there was a direct link between being able to taste well and being able to brew well. However, I also feel as a woman in the industry, there’s a higher level of accountability. I’ve always found when you’re questioned, it’s very useful to have a recognised qualification.

6. Collaborate

The beer industry is great for collaborating. Often collaborations are not really financially gaining for anybody, it’s more ‘I admire you as a brewer, I want to come and hang out with you and make a beer’. I’m quite lucky that I’ve done some really cool collabs. We did Cloudwater twice. They’re amazing. We did Beavertown a few years ago. I am constantly looking for new people to work with and it’s a really fun way to keep things fresh.

7. Taste is key

Tasting takes practise and anybody can do it. Some people are more sensitive to certain flavours and smells. If someone in your team can pick something out that you can’t, it’s important that you trust their judgment. Beer sommelier training is across all styles, and you really get to know lots of different beers that perhaps the UK is not particularly known for.

8. Make industry friends

It’s important to know other people in your industry because problems arise constantly and your neighbour is going to have had that problem before. We’re really lucky in London, there’s the London Brewers’ Alliance. It basically means all the breweries within the M25 meet up for a drink every two months. Go to the events, learn from others. Your learning is never complete.

9. Build a taproom

I think you’ve got to have outlets to the public, the time has passed when people just have a brewery and don’t have venues. It adds a cash flow to the business. Also the beer is as fresh as possible. Beer comes off the line at the brewery and goes straight behind the tap. So if you have an issue, you spot it first, and it’s so unbelievably fresh and the public love that.

10. Join like-minded groups

There are some great beer groups around the UK. In London, there’s the Crafty Beer Girls. In Birmingham, there’s the Brum Beer Babs. In Glasgow, there’s the Glasladies Beer Society and there’s the Liverpool-based Ladies That Beer. Some members are beer fans and some are doing PhDs in yeast science.