We meet a brewer with a passion for the cause and find out why the whole leaf hops that they use are the way to go.
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00:00So we're here at 52 Degrees, hello John. Hiya. You're Chief Brewer? Yeah, Head Brewer,
00:05yeah Chief Brewer, General Dogs Body. How long you been involved here then John? Now it's coming up to
00:13two years, three years. And you do quite a few brews here, do you just want to take us through
00:21to, you've got a little brewery shop at the end, shall we walk through and you can show us what
00:24you've got. Just finished mashing in for a beer called Nymph, that's the rye beer that we do.
00:30So how many different beers are you doing here? We've got a core range of about three beers,
00:36two are on the boat, we've got bottles here as well, the Lady Godiva and the Blonde.
00:43And we do a glitter. So yeah, go on, so you've got your Lady Godiva, we've got the
00:53Backyard Blonde, Kingmaker. Yeah, we've got Kingmaker which is an amber ale, it's quite strong,
01:01five and a half percent. Most of our beers are around four percent marks, that seems to be the
01:05sweet spot for most cask beers. Most of our beers are very drinkable, so we try not to make them
01:12too strong, but so they've got plenty of flavour. So the kind of characteristics of a lot of our
01:17beers is they're well hopped, so they've got lots of flavour. So we make them all ourselves here
01:24using fresh malt and we do a variety, we do a stout called Devil's Horse, we do quite a wide
01:32range of pale ales because they seem to be the most popular. So we do various
01:43styles and various hops, we use American hops, we use English hops and sometimes we've used
01:50Australian and New Zealand hops in the past as well. But the most popular ones are the pales.
01:58And you can find your drinks in bottles, you can find them in pubs, all over the Midlands yeah?
02:04Yeah, mainly East and West Midlands. We deliver to pubs as far north as Nottingham Derby
02:13and down to Warwickshire. What about over Shropshire? Shropshire yes, we do Shropshire and Telford
02:19and all around there as well. And most of our business is Cascale, fresh Cascale, but we do
02:28do bottles as well. We serve a wide variety of pubs, wet pubs, gastro pubs, we serve also
02:39the boat just down the road, the Michenasar restaurant, they have bottles as well.
02:46It's increasingly difficult isn't it? I mean pubs are struggling but it's difficult to,
02:52they've kind of got a lot of these big breweries, they've kind of got the monopoly haven't they? So
02:56you're saying that as an independent brewer it is difficult to kind of, you know, if people are
03:00saying well hang on I've not seen that in my local pub, the chances are it's owned by a major brewer
03:05and they want their own beers to sell. Yeah, the big brewers have increasingly gained a stranglehold
03:12over, especially their estates, and made it more and more difficult to get beers on the bar
03:17independently brewed, like ourselves, onto the bar. There's less and less room for the
03:25landlords and landladies to come and get, to have our beers on the bar, there's just less and less
03:32space there now, and you know there's this indie beer campaign that's been run to try and raise
03:39awareness of if people, because a lot of people do want to support small independent, especially
03:46local breweries, but the awareness isn't there to know whether a beer is an independently owned
03:54beer. So a lot of people, when they did the survey they found that, you know,
04:00the corporate brewers had successfully bought out and produced their own branding
04:07of craft beers that people thought were independent beers, which obviously weren't.
04:11That's it, if you get to your local, you might see four or five beers, all different
04:16named breweries, but actually behind the scenes quite often, you know, they can all be
04:21made by the same people, can't they? So, you know, you guys here are a true independent brewery.
04:28Yeah, so, I mean, hopefully, yeah, we'd like to, well, I don't know what to say really, because, I mean, hopefully we could do with help
04:39in terms of legislation, to help us, to make it easier for us to get it on the box,
04:44but we're finding we're being squeezed more and more and it's getting increasingly difficult.
04:49So the brand 52 Degree Brewing, where does that come from? That's obviously something to do with
04:54the process, I take it 52? 52, you'd have to ask Malcolm really, the boss, but he came up
05:01with it, 52 Degrees, because we sit on the 52 Degrees latitude, so that's where that came from.
05:11So the 52 Degrees latitude goes all the way right across the Midlands. Got you, and that's
05:17that's a name we'll possibly be seeing more of in the future, isn't it? That's a name you're
05:21going to kind of be pushing forward. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's a number, we do, it is a brand
05:28that we produce beers under, but also part of the part of 52 Degrees is also the Warwickshire beer.
05:36Yeah, Warwickshire beers, the Backyard beers, and also the Grasshopper beers as well,
05:42under that banner. We're situated here in Brownhill, so can people rock up and buy
05:46bottles from here then, is that how it works? Yeah, I'm here most weekdays,
05:52probably best times to come are usually between nine and three o'clock, that's probably when,
05:59because before that I'd probably be busy in the brewery, but I mean, if the shutters are up,
06:06I'm around. You're around, and it's on the gatehouse trading estate? Gatehouse trading
06:10estate, Litchfield Road. Got you, good stuff. Just Litchfield side of Brownhills. Get yourself
06:14down then guys, we've got some lovely little gift packs there, mini kegs, mini barrels. Yeah,
06:19we do five litre mini kegs, we condition those, so they're just the same kind of beer that you
06:26would get in a cask, but it's something you can, that's portable and you can take home,
06:30and they'll last in the fridge for a week. Once opened, they last a lot longer before they're
06:37open, so yeah, and obviously the bottles and everything have got a longer shelf life.
06:43Awesome work John, well done. All right.
06:52And here's the rye grain. The rye, yeah.
07:08So what's happening here then John, at this stage? I'm mixing the hot water and the crushed
07:24malted barley, yeah, and that smell you can get is the lovely malt smell that you get in Birmingham
07:32and Edinburgh and anywhere we get these big breweries, you get that lovely malted smell.
07:42So what we're doing now is we're going to try and achieve a specific temperature for this beer,
07:48yeah, that gives us the mix of sugars that we're after, okay, that we'll see that will affect the
07:55flavour, the mouthfeel, yeah, in the end of the beer. So John, you were saying what one of Conor's
08:01special things you do is the hops? The hops, yeah. So we're quite unusual in that we use the
08:09unprocessed whole leaf hops, yeah, which again imparts a certain characteristic and certain
08:18subtleties and nuances to the beer that you don't necessarily always get with the palatised version
08:24of the hops. So this is what you find in, I've got you, so this full leaf hop, that's what we call it,
08:30yeah, and if they get ground up and pressed into pellets like that, yeah, that obviously makes
08:38them easier for packaging, yeah, and gives, it helps with shelf life definitely, but that processing
08:45you do lose, I think you lose a certain subtleness and some flavours with that,
08:52but it, palatising works really well with the very punchy American hops, yeah, but with the
08:58British hops, in my opinion, you don't get a good a product as you do with the,
09:05with the, keep it, just keeping them unprocessed and those dried whole leaves.