Surfing Waves To Brewing: Pipeline Brewing Co

Summary

In this episode, Martin chats with Jonny from Pipeline Brewery about the journey of starting a brewery, the unique identity of their beers, and the challenges faced in the beer industry. They discuss the importance of community engagement, home brewing insights, and the balance between creativity and consistency in brewing. Jonny shares his experiences with yeast management and the future of the UK indie beer market, as well as the exciting move to their new brewery in Newquay.

Buy Pipeline Beer: https://thebeerrep.com/

Chapters

• 0:00 The Birth of Pipeline Brewery
• 2:45 The Unique Identity of Pipeline Beers
• 5:38 Navigating the Competitive Brewing Landscape
• 9:36 Home Brewing Insights and Techniques
• 14:18 Balancing Creativity and Consistency in Brewing
• 17:45 Understanding Yeast: Wet vs. Dry
• 20:37 Favourite Brewed Beer: With a Slight Mishap
• 22:20 Navigating Duty Changes in the Brewing Industry
• 26:16 Low or No Alcohol Beer The Future?
• 28:00 Exciting News: Moving to a New Brewery
• 31:15 Unusual Brewing Ideas: The Slug Juice Story
• 33:00 Final Question and Outro

Transcript

Martin (00:01)
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Beer Rep chats With. Today I'm lucky to be joined by Johnny from pipeline brewery. Johnny, thanks for coming on the show.

Jonny (00:09)
Yeah, welcome Martin. I'm looking forward to this. I love a good podcast, especially sat in the sun like I am today.

Martin (00:15)
It does look absolutely amazing where you are. And obviously you're based in Cornwall, so the weather is absolutely lush. I've got lots of family in Cornwall. It's a beautiful place to go. So we'll just start from the beginning and how Pipeline Brewery came to life and give us a bit of a background on your history.

Jonny (00:30)
Yeah, sure thing. So I'd been home brewing for maybe 10 years before I'd even conceived of the idea of pipeline. Just trying to make beers at home and make them as tasty as I wanted them to be. And I was copying American styles. was signed up to Zymurgy which is an American home brewers magazine. And that kind of really inspired me to make hop forward beers. I'd never dreamt of putting that many hops in beers before. And it slowly...

slowly got more and more available, the hops you could get. So the beers became more aligned to what I'm brewing now. But basically I got persuaded by my mates who were getting free beer from me to start entering competitions. Cause they were saying, look, I've not tasted anything like this before. You really need to get it out there. And so reluctantly, I entered a few home brew competitions and started to do really well at them. Got first place for a lager that we brewed on the national home brew competition.

There was others that we did a brown American brown ale that we we hop bombed it really put a load of hops in the whirlpool and then dry hopped a little bit. The first dry hop I'd done and it absolutely floored all the other competitors and everyone was blown away by it. So I knew I was onto something then and over the years managed to buy a little bit of equipment here and there and set a small brewery up in my garage. You know, it's a familiar thing. I think people just go from homebrew to get a bigger scale, but it's

The hard part is finding premises and going from small batches up to something that's actually commercially viable. I was lucky enough to have a big garage so I could do that in, but soon outgrew that. So five years ago, moved into the unit that we're in now. And during that time we've expanded again and doubled the production from a three hectalitre brew house up to a 12 hectalitre brew house now. And it's still not quite big enough. We're going to...

Martin (01:59)
Yeah, I'm guessing the money as well.

Jonny (02:22)
be looking at expanding more fermenters but we can talk about that later on because I've got got some top news some exciting news you'd have heard it here first but we can chat about that later.

Martin (02:32)
that's brilliant. Yeah. Stay tuned for that one, people. Important news incoming. So why the name pipeline? You know, it's obviously quite a unique name. It doesn't kind of resemble any sort of brewing processes really, like a few breweries. So yeah, why the name?

Jonny (02:42)
Yeah.

Well, it's twofold really down here in Cornwall, surfing is a big, big thing. I love watching surfing. I don't have time to do it anymore. I did surf a bit in my youth, but I was never very good at it.

Martin (02:59)
I did a bit of bodybuilding when I was young. about as far as surfing as I got when I went to Cornwall.

Jonny (03:01)
Yeah, ⁓

well, that's probably all I'll do these days. ⁓ My surfboards way too short for me now. You need a long board the age I am. But yeah, surfing has always been something I've loved being part of. And there's a wave out in Hawaii called pipeline, which is when it's pumping, it's absolutely huge. I've never surfed it, but always watch videos of people surfing on pipeline. And I thought, well,

Martin (03:28)
Yeah.

Jonny (03:29)
That's not a bad name for a brewery considering there's a hell of a lot of pipes in a brewery. So let's go with that. And yeah, that's where it came from. Surf, surf break in Hawaii and pipes in a brewery.

Martin (03:39)
Sounds brilliant. That's something that, yeah, definitely an original name and yeah, obviously being in Cornwall, lots of surfing, especially down in got a lot of family down there and yeah, I remember lots of surfing competitions in Newquay. They were great.

Jonny (03:46)
Yeah. Yeah.

Board Masters

on Fistral Beach, yeah, you can't beat it. Amazing.

Martin (03:55)
Yep. Yeah.

So how would you describe the personality of pipeline beers? You know, what sets you apart from from other breweries?

Jonny (04:02)
What sets us apart? Crikey, that's a really good question. All of our beers are hop forward apart from the stouts and the sours. But that's a fairly common thing with other breweries. I'd say what sets us apart? Maybe our branding, our surf ethos that we tend to release beers that have got surfy name. ⁓ We do a series called the Deluxe Series, is, it's a similar base beer, but we change up the hops every time. And that one's always got a car on the label, because my designer's really hot on.

American muscle cars and big cars like that. So he tends to put a nice car on those labels, but otherwise there'll be, yeah, surfing related like tube session is a beer that we put out to a lot of local pubs. We're getting some real traction with that now. I think now that we're established as a decent brewery in Cornwall, we're getting more and more taps in pubs. And that's one of the beers that really sells because it's just got a dude on a surf board catching a lovely barrel on the pump clip.

I think that really aligns with what people want to be drinking when they're down in Cornwall.

Martin (05:03)
Yeah, definitely. mean, obviously you do.

Jonny (05:04)
We'll bring in bit of sunshine

maybe from Cornwall to everywhere else.

Martin (05:07)
Well, yeah, definitely,

definitely relates to your to the beers that you make. They're very, very juicy and, and, and tasty tropical vibes going on with your Hazy's and stuff like that. So yeah, you're definitely bringing the sunshine from Cornwall into your beers, I would say. obviously Cornwall is your home and the location is obviously influenced your brewing quite a lot. ⁓ How does, how does the, how does your community and, and respond to, to the brewery and you know, are they?

Jonny (05:28)
Mm.

Martin (05:37)
fully behind you.

Jonny (05:38)
So St Agnes is a small village, but it's not so small anymore. I think there's the parish is about 6000 people, but the village itself is tiny, but it's such a vibrant place. There's six or seven pubs, so it's a good place to come for a night out and it's taken a while to get established because we've got a big brewery which you would probably have heard of called St Austell Now it own.

going to be sticking my finger in the air and guessing here but I'd say 80 % of the pubs in Cornwall will be owned by St Austell and they don't have guest taps they just don't do it. The closest to a guest beer is something from Harbour which they've got a major share holding in so there's no chance of getting into those pubs and it makes it really difficult to get yourself established locally so what I did was just looked at the national model similar to what Verdant did when they started up just I'd say that they

Martin (06:17)
Mm-hmm.

Jonny (06:30)
probably sent 80 % of their production up the line, up country as we call it. So I just got myself established nationally and that drip fed back into the local community that they'd heard of me. They were able to buy it locally and I think that's how they've started to support me. And now we're getting into the pubs so people can go and get it on draft readily. And we're selling quite a bit locally compared to what we used to. So I think there's traction happening and there's certainly people are becoming

Martin (06:54)
Yeah.

Jonny (06:58)
educated into what modern beer tastes like and what actually it can bring compared to traditional beers which is probably more the core market in Cornwall.

Martin (07:07)
Yes. It's

interesting that you say it's a very common factor about, you know, when a brewery sets up a new brewery sets up and they find it very hard to get access into their local pubs. ⁓ you know, to shout about, know, this is a local brewery.

Jonny (07:19)
I mean...

Martin (07:23)
but you can't find our beers in any of your local pubs because they just won't accept them. And that's the big, big problem at the moment. Obviously we've got the, the SIBA Indie beer campaign, which is doing all it can to, you know, bring that to the forefront of consumers, you know, which is independent or which is not. mean, St Austell is a great brewery and they have every right to sell their own beers in their own pubs, suppose, but you'd think that

they'd want to try and help support the smaller breweries as well to come through. Yeah. Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. You know, because everyone starts off somewhere, and yeah, it would be beneficial to, you know, help support the local breweries coming through. yeah, that's a...

Jonny (07:53)
Yeah, that's just not in the business models.

Yeah, the

SIBA independence thing is kind of weird. We had a chat about that locally between some of the brewers and this did come up that Bath Ales are classed as independent, but they're mostly owned by St Austell. So the definition of independent has been tweaked a little bit, I think, in the SIBA campaign. Some of the breweries in there aren't what I would consider independent. They're owned by another brewery.

I think they've manufactured and tweaked it to make it suit because they've got big influence within SIBA, these big breweries. And certainly, St Austell has a huge influence down here. They were gifted a lot of the pub estate when the pub monopolies got broken up years back. And I think the St Austell did very well out of that. It'd be good to look at it again just to make, just to see if this pub Thai model works. I'd like to see them shake it up and force them to have guest beers.

Martin (09:02)
Yeah.

Jonny (09:06)
force them to be able to go to the open market and buy whatever beers the landlord wants to choose to put on his pumps rather than being told he has to buy XYZ at whatever price is set by the brewery.

Martin (09:16)
Yeah, I mean,

the law has been passed up in Scotland, to, you know, have a local guest ale on tap or local brewery on tap. still waiting in the UK, obviously.

Jonny (09:24)
Perfect sense.

Martin (09:27)
Let's move on to a bit about your home brewing ⁓ history. What part of the brewing process would you suggest, aspiring home brewers who want to think about opening up their own brewery, what would you say to focus on recipe wise?

Jonny (09:43)
I'd say the main focus has to be water treatment. Now, we're blessed with soft water down in Cornwall. It's all from surface reservoirs. None of it's from deep underground. So it's pretty much rainwater. There's very little in it. And it gives you a really good base to pretty much brew anything you want. We struggle a little bit more with stouts because our water's not mineralized enough, but we can actually put them in. It's much harder to take things out.

Martin (09:51)
Yeah.

Jonny (10:12)
than it is to put them in. So yeah, I'd say the best thing you can do is get your water tested and really work hard on getting your water profile right. I'd say, for example, there's been a few beers that I've made in the past when I put way too much gypsum in, not enough calcium chloride, and that ion balance was tipping more towards extenuating the hop bitterness rather than the multi-sweetness. And your beer would come out very bitter.

Martin (10:12)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Jonny (10:41)
quite astringent, but if you just change up the water you can come away with a nice juicy profile using the same ingredients, just a little bit of water chemistry, get that right and I think you're away and I think that's what a lot of brewers don't concentrate on, they just kind of go with a standard format and don't really work hard on that. I'd recommend buying a book about water.

Martin (10:57)
Yeah.

When it comes to like, you know, your base, Malt Bill, do you change that much or do you relatively keep it the same and then just change variations of hops or how does that work?

Jonny (11:04)
Hmm.

I would say

they've mostly got the same ingredients but in different proportions depending on what the beer is. We use Simpsons for all of our malt and we have done for years and I love what Simpsons do. I don't think they're taking on any new brewers, they're just at capacity now so we're lucky they've got in there but yeah they do some great malt so we use a low color Golden Promise.

Martin (11:27)
Yeah.

Jonny (11:34)
which just for us just gives you that extra bit of sweetness on the back end and it just allows you to just add a little bit more hops. We use dextrin which is full of unfermentables, again to just build that body. So for us it's all about building a big, thick, juicy body that then will carry the hops and allow the hops to shine. If you've got a thin body, then the beer's lacking in something and the hops don't tend to shine. So we work really hard putting extra malts in.

Martin (11:59)
Yeah.

Jonny (12:02)
which costs you extra money, but I think the benefit far outweighs the cost.

Martin (12:08)
Yeah, definitely. I mean, how much do you do obviously oats and and flaked torrified wheat, what kind of percentage do you add into your beers?

Jonny (12:19)
So with the oats,

we'll add at least 20 % oats, sometimes more. So that be it flaked oats, which is just like porridge oats really, just on a bigger scale. And malted oats. So Simpsons do this lovely malted oat, which comes with the husk, which is really useful when you're using oats. Cause if you don't have the husk, you get a chance of getting like a porridgey mash that sticks and ends up stuck. Yeah. So you just have a very, very slow drain off. So we use.

Martin (12:41)
Stuck's sparge and all that.

Jonny (12:46)
these malted oats which gives you the oaty flavours but doesn't make it into a glutinous mess so that's really helpful we don't have to use rice hulls which is a fairly common thing to try and solve that problem but by using these malted oats we get away with that we don't use torrified oats or torrified wheat we just use flaked wheat or wheat malt in varying proportions yes I think

Martin (12:51)
Yeah.

Jonny (13:11)
We're not doing anything different to anybody else, we're just getting the water profile right and get under the experience. You know what hops go with each other and if you want a juicy one, Citra and Mosaic, you can't really go wrong.

Martin (13:23)
Yeah, would it be obviously beneficial for home brewers to experiment with single hop variations, just to know what they're kind of what hops flavours and what they're doing and just

Jonny (13:29)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, if you're going to start experimenting on a homebrew level, the best bit of advice I can give you is just change one thing at a time. And that will give you insight into what that change is done. If you're changing two or three different things, you're not going to know what it was that made the difference. So for example, you change your base malt to a different malt and just see what the difference is against the same recipe. Just do one thing at a time and incrementally you'll find, okay, so adding

this does this or that does that and it gives you a better understanding of what you're changing.

Martin (14:06)
Yeah, definitely.

Yeah, great insights there. So obviously, it's very a competitive market. You know, craft beer and all these hazy pales and everyone's competing to get their beers out. How do you balance creativity with consistency?

Jonny (14:22)
I think we're always consistent with what we do. If the beer's not up to scratch, it goes down the drain, end of. We don't do that very often because we've got experience now. been doing this from this unit for five years now. think the last beer that went down the drain was one, it was completely user error that we'd used a wet yeast as opposed to a dried one. And it's totally my fault. I had to be at Verdant for a...

for an event at Verdant and I'd rushed to the end of the brew day and hadn't oxygenated the wort. So if you're using a wet pitch, you need to make sure there's at least 12 parts per million of oxygen dissolved in your wort before you pitch a yeast. And that, that got forgotten about. So over the weekend, came back in and this beer was not really doing anything. It was just still sat maybe one or two points below its pitching gravity, but it hadn't gone anywhere. And I quickly realised what I'd done.

so chucked in some dried yeast, but the flavour profile of this beer had gone way out of spec. We sent it off to the lab and there was a couple of things in there that had taken over rather than the yeast getting chance to.

sit there and take over and reduce the pH so I think some bacteria had got in there they couldn't tell me what it was but it just changed the profile of this beer and we hadn't dry hopped it at that point so to throw it down the drain was not not quite as heartbreaking as it is when you've thrown a thousand pounds worth of hops in a beer but you know if you've just got to accept that mistakes happen and if the beer isn't up to scratch it's much more harmful to your reputation than

Martin (15:39)
Mm.

Yeah, but obviously.

Jonny (15:57)
you know, to send out a beer that's faulty and not up to people's expectations than it is to throw it down the drain, write it off, start again. I'd much rather do that every day.

Martin (16:07)
Yeah, definitely. I mean, you're talking about oxygenating the wort What process does that involve?

Jonny (16:11)
Hmm.

So as the wort goes from the brew kettle after it's been boiled, it goes through a heat exchanger to chill it down to fermentation temperatures. So you're dropping it from 80 degrees down to 20 or 18. And once you've got it cold, it's going out of the heat exchanger into your hoses and into your fermenter. And in line in that hose, there's called, it's a carb stone. So it's basically a stone.

micro porous coating on it which allows the oxygen just to come out in tiny little bubbles and by the time it's reached the fermenter it's dissolved into the wort flow and so you end up with the right calculations. You do it for about 20 minutes on our system and it gives you 12 parts per million of oxygen which is ideal for yeast growth. That's essentially what you're trying to do. If you pitch the yeast as it is

Martin (17:03)
Awesome.

Jonny (17:06)
it won't, it won't grow and there's not enough actual physical cells in there to carry out a proper rigorous fermentation. Dried yeast, however, on the opposite side of the spectrum, comes already with the necessary structure in the cell walls that it doesn't need to take up oxygen to do its division. So a dried yeast, chuck it in, happy days off it goes. You just gotta be a little bit careful with wet yeast, but there's, there's upsides and downsides to dried and wet, which

Martin (17:27)
Can't go wrong.

Jonny (17:33)
I could go into it if you really want me to.

Martin (17:36)
Yeah, by all means, if you can,

if you can narrow it down to a few minutes.

Jonny (17:41)
Yeah, so the beauty of wet yeast is that as you use it for the first pitch, you can then harvest it, store it for maybe up to a week and then pitch it again into another similar beer. You have to make sure you're slowly increasing the ABV. You can't start with a DIPA and expect the yeast to be healthy at the end of that. You start with a low ABV pale.

for the first generation and just slowly.

amp up the ABV that it's having to deal with, the original gravities until you get to a DIPA size pitch, which is a massive, like 20, 25 kilos of yeast would go in for us. But yeah, what you'll notice is as each generation of pitch, the yeast will improve in its flavour up to a point that you get an absolute.

beautiful beer at Pitch Six. We've never gone beyond Six, we've really struggled to get beyond that. I think some of the breweries might be able to get up to eight or ten, but Six was a sweet spot for us. And that's got two benefits, it saves you money because you've only bought one pitch of yeast, but you're getting a much better beer from going through that process. Now, dried yeast, the benefit of that is it's cheap and it's available, it's in your fridge, ready to go whenever you want. It's got a long shelf life.

Martin (18:54)
Yeah.

Jonny (19:03)
Whereas wet yeast, I'd say you give it a week or two and you need to be using it. But it's the convenience of the dried yeast. It does give you good results and you can, of course, harvest that and go through the same process again. But because it's so cheap, I think people tend to just buy a new pitch every time with dried yeast. You get consistent results, but I don't think you get quite such good beer. So that's the payoff between the two.

Martin (19:19)
Yeah.

Yeah, definitely.

mean, talking about the wet yeast, mean, most people's most breweries yeast strains, the famous yeast strains have been from harvesting at a certain point, I'd imagine, and then just recreating that and, you know, becomes unique to the brewery as well.

Jonny (19:40)
Yes, exactly. There's quite a little bit of mutation. So the cells will mutate over time and each generation the cells will mutate ever so slightly because each division gives an opportunity for this to happen and by the sixth generation it will have mutated to something that is perhaps unique to your brewery and that's when you would isolate it, send it off to your lab and they would then be able to grow you up pitches from that isolate which...

Martin (20:07)
Yeah.

Jonny (20:08)
gather is what Verdant did with their yeast. ⁓ Yes, yes it's a variant of London 3.

Martin (20:11)
It's very, very popular yeast strain, the Verdant.

Yeah, I've used it quite a few times in my home brewing beers. I won't let you know. I won't tell you how they turned out, yeah. So yeah, going on to your beers. What beer are you most proud of?

Jonny (20:20)
Yeah, of course, everybody would.

No.

So I think the best beer we've brewed was a TIPA with phantom called Do Whales Dream. So that was 10 % strongest beer we've made as a a a DIPA TIPA style beer. I think we've done some stouts that have been a little bit more than that, but that was an absolutely blinding beer. We very nearly ended up with none of it. We had to double dry hop that and the first dry hop

blocked all of the pressure gauges and all the relief valves, giving the false indication that the tank wasn't under pressure, which pressure is a dangerous thing in a brewery. You need to make sure that none of your vessels are containing pressure if you're opening them. But to do the second dry hop, well, yeah, yeah. So to do the second dry hop, vented it as you would normally put a small amount of.

Martin (21:16)
Of course, we've all seen the videos.

Jonny (21:26)
counter pressure of CO2 to make sure that oxygen won't go in and just the CO2 will be pushing anything out. Unscrewed the dry hot port and woof it pinged off. There was only maybe two PSI on this tank but it pinged off with such a force that it dented the ceiling and I think I put a video out on my socials years back but it just chucked hop debris all over the brewery it just fountained out the top and just exploded everywhere.

But once that had calmed down, hop volcano, think you could probably call that. Once that had calmed down and cleaned up the brewery, the beer that was left was absolutely phenomenal. So I'm not sure it was due to that mistake that it came out the way it did, it's yeah. Absolutely not. No, no. You know, was an expensive beer to make because the duty rules changed just as we were coming into making that. So it used to be that you'd pay on a sliding scale for the ABV, but it goes off the cliff edge now, anything over 8.4.

Martin (22:07)
Well, I'm sure you're not going to want to try and recreate that. ⁓

Jonny (22:24)
paid full duty on and you lose your duty reduction for being a small brewery. So as an example, a keg would have previously had perhaps 10 or 15 pounds worth of duty on it and it would now have 60 or 70 pounds worth of duty straight away, which is huge, huge different. And someone's got to pay for that. And invariably the pubs aren't prepared to pay that because they'd end up charging maybe 18 pounds for a pint and it's not really palatable to be charged.

Martin (22:38)
It's a big difference, isn't it? Yeah.

Yeah. The

thing is that doesn't really filter down to the consumer who's buying that pint for, you know, X amount of money, 10 quid, 18 quid, like you said, and they don't really understand, you know, everything, the prices that go into, to making the beer, but obviously the duty that you have to pay for making such a high ABV beer as well. And don't really fully understand that. So hopefully they do now, obviously now you've explained it and the reasons why certain pints are very expensive.

Jonny (23:17)
actually, I think the reason that this ABV change came about was that the breweries like St. Austell, for example, there was at least 50 that were in a group that were lobbying the government to get the duty rates changed. Because I think they felt that as craft breweries, we were getting an unfair advantage. So we get a duty reduction because we're small scale, which I believe is

correct and should happen because we don't have the same economies of scale as the bigger breweries. So this is a ⁓ useful thing for a small brewery. It helps you grow, means you're not spending all your profits back on taxes for the government. It just allows you to grow a bit and get more equipment. And as you grow, you get a reduction in the discount that you get off your duty. it was fair, as you grew, you pay a bit more. And that made sense. But the breweries that bang out

4 % pale ales, hand-pulled beers, that's all they do, lobbied the government and made them believe that craft breweries by producing beers above 8 % were causing a problem for alcoholism and inappropriate behaviour, anti-social behaviour, etc. Which I just don't think that's true. I think if you buy a double IPA and you're spending £6 or £7 for one can of it, you're not going to be slugging back.

Martin (24:34)
No, I think that'd be more

Jonny (24:42)
five or six loads and getting shit faced. You're going to enjoy that beer for what it is. You're not drinking it to get drunk. You're drinking it because it's a lovely beer and it's it's been punitive to the craft beer industry. And I really think it's not ideal.

Martin (24:42)
Yeah.

Yeah.

It also, that should also filter down mainly for the, you know, the, places that are selling the beer. They have to, they have a responsibility to make, to make sure that all the customers in their establishment are drinking responsibly. I mean, there is a massive thing called drink responsibly out. So yeah, it's up to them to make sure that, if they're having a 10 % TIPA that they're not drinking huge quantities of it, or you sell it at

Jonny (25:10)
Yes.

Yeah.

notes.

Martin (25:23)
certain measure half, two thirds or even a third and make sure that people are drinking it responsibly because it is supposed to be enjoyed not to, like you say, get drunk. So yeah, I totally agree that I don't agree that it's the breweries that are, you know, making this, you know, alcoholism and all that, like you say, that's definitely not correct. But there you go.

Jonny (25:31)
Yeah.

couldn't agree more. think it's what's happened is that they've got less duty to pay and we've got more. So they've won and we've just ended up with higher costs. I just think, I think it's punitive and it's, it's basically done for their shareholders to make more money. It's not to make the beer industry any better. I just, I just don't agree in it.

Martin (26:00)
Yeah.

Yeah, totally agree with that. So on that note, where do you see the UK Indie beer industry going in the next few years? What sort of direction are we heading in?

Jonny (26:12)
Yeah, that's one. I

think we're heading for a lower alcohol beer. The market for low and no is huge. It's not something that we've got any intentions of getting into right now. I think it's something that you can't step into lightly because there are inherent dangers in brewing low and no alcohol beers. There's a big opportunity for infection of those beers and maybe dangerous pathogens.

being presented to the customer and that's not something that we would ever want.

Martin (26:41)
Yeah. mean,

is it much, is it increasing that much? No, low alcohol beers or, is it just a, you know word of mouth getting around that it is in a big market at the moment? Is it truly something that customers want?

Jonny (26:53)
think it is. haven't seen

the figures because I don't tend to sit there and look at marketing trends and what have you, but from what I gather reading between the lines, I think it is a market that's growing Somebody said to me the other day that it's growing by 7 % year on year and if that's true then that's huge growth. could be something.

Martin (27:10)
Yeah, there definitely

is a shift with the younger generation. Obviously wanting a lower ABV beer, but they also want flavour. ⁓ And I find I do like, I've tried a few alcohol-free beers. I just find them very thin with no body to them sometimes. And it's very hard to get that body in alcohol-free beer, you know, without alcohol. And for me personally, that's...

Jonny (27:19)
Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah.

Martin (27:36)
That that's what makes a nice refreshing pint is, is that body. It is the trade off. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. ⁓

Jonny (27:39)
Yeah, that's the trade-off is that alcohol tastes gorgeous as well. It does add flavour, it really does. The difference between

a 4 % and a 6 % even is markedly different.

Martin (27:50)
Yeah. So where do you see pipeline heading in the next year or two?

Jonny (27:56)
Well, I touched on this earlier, so we've been in this unit for five years. We've totally outgrown the space. You should see it. It's so crammed in. There's not room to swing a cat. We managed to get a tap room every Friday at the moment, but we have to move so much stuff out the way. The canning line has to be wheeled out and pushed next door. The unit next door have been really kind and let us use some of their space, but there's no more space available in this yard that we're on.

So we've made the decision to up sticks production from here and move it to a bigger unit over in Newquay

Martin (28:28)
when you move to Newquay. I'll pay quite a few visits down to Newquay and there is a, there is a brewery in Newquay at the moment, isn't there? Newquay Brewing.

Jonny (28:32)
Thank you.

No, there's no brewery

in There's one called Lost Brewery, but they don't have a brewery based in Newquay. They've got a tap room. But no, there's no brewery in Newquay anymore. was Lost joined up with Newquay Brewing Project a few years ago, but that's no longer there. No, so I think there's a good opportunity for us to give Newquay what it really needs. It's not got much in the way of craft beer offering at the moment.

Martin (28:50)
That's the one I'm thinking of, yeah, Newquay Brewing Project.

Jonny (29:04)
Bluntrock have just opened a pub there and I think that's going to do really well. They took over an old verdant venue called The Sink Inn. That's bang in the centre of Newquay. That's going to be nothing but great.

Martin (29:10)
Yeah, been in there.

exciting news, moving to a new brewery. Newquay's got the nightlife for it. Obviously during the summer holidays, it's absolutely booming. Can't even move in town. I think, yeah, I think you're gonna have a tap room there as well.

Jonny (29:22)
Mmm. Yeah.

Yeah, it's built around the tap room really in a way because it's it's quite a lot bigger space than we've got now and it's got a big mezzanine going in so we're going to put the tap room up on the mezzanine so the people can look down and just see the brewery activities going on as they're there enjoying a nice cold beer. We won't have a glass floor, no. We're not quite that wealthy, crikey We might have a glass balcony if we're lucky but yeah, we're just going to try and get it so that the tap room is up and running for the school holidays this year.

Martin (29:42)
Is that glass floors?

You

Jonny (29:57)
We just got the keys last week. There's a lot of building work to do. Breweries need a nice floor and that's unfortunately going to be the expensive part of this move. The brewery floor in here was 30 grand and it's going to be more in that one because it's bigger. And that's what keeps me awake at night, having to pay for the floor, etc.

Martin (30:07)
Yeah.

Yeah, so I'm

guessing you're not going to be expanding the equipment just yet either.

Jonny (30:20)
Well, it's part

of the plan to do that, it'll be part of the two-year plan to get more fermenters, essentially. We're happy with the size of our brew length. 12 hectolitres is a good size. We're just going to get some 24 hectolitre fermenters so that we can double brew into those some of our core beers. And the plan is to just make sure that every pub in Newquay that's able to will have pipeline beers on tap so that everyone can get it wherever they want. That's our goal and that's our ambition, and hopefully that will come true.

Martin (30:48)
Yeah. I mean, obviously access to markets always going to be a big problem. ⁓ Yeah. Hopefully you can overcome that and all the locals in Newquay will enjoy it. And I'll definitely be down there when I pop over at some point to see. Lovely. Brilliant.

Jonny (30:52)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, come and see us and I'll shout you a pint.

Martin (31:05)
coming towards the end of our chat, but what's the weirdest beer idea you've ever had and did it make it to the tank?

Jonny (31:14)
Well, weirdest beer, well, that does actually spring to mind one that it wasn't one that we brewed. It was when, in my early days, when I was a home brewer and I was just starting to consider the idea of brewing commercially, I went to this home brew meeting down in Truro, which is our local city. This chap was wandering around offering people samples of his beer. So it was just in a flip top bottle.

And being the mug that I am, said, yeah, I'll try some of that. I poured it out and straight away tasted of Brett. It was a Brett infected beer. So, you know, it's well, it's it's not sanitary, but it tasted okay. But I was taking a swig of this and I said, this is interesting. What's this beer? And he said, well, what happened was during the winter months, I ⁓ don't tend to need to do this, but in the summer,

Martin (32:02)
Not a start.

Jonny (32:07)
I'm inundated with slugs and snails in my garden. So what I do is save up the dregs from every homebrew beer that I make into this bottle and pour it into the beer traps. Okay, so what's this I've got here? says, well, that's a beer that's made up of all the dregs. my God, this is slug juice, isn't it? So I very politely said, yeah, that's great. Turned my back on him, chucked it in a hedge, walked away.

Martin (32:22)
mixture of all different beers and styles.

Jonny (32:31)
and made sure that I washed my mouth out. I don't know whether the slugs had actually been in that beer, it made a great name, Slug Juice. That beer's been released by us, I must add. It was a funny story at the time, and I survived.

Martin (32:35)
Yeah, get stomach pumped.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's it.

Just a random person going around poisoning people with his slug juice.

Jonny (32:48)
Yeah, yeah that's

homebrew meets right there.

Martin (32:52)
brewing club.

Jonny (32:52)
it was something

special. I've never seen anything quite like it since, but yeah, it's good story.

Martin (32:57)
Yeah. So, ⁓

last question. If you weren't running a brewery, what do think you'd be doing instead?

Jonny (33:07)
Well I used to be a building contractor, so I'd build houses and extensions for people. I definitely wouldn't be doing that because I'm glad I got out of that. That was a hard, hard job and a cutthroat business to be in.

Martin (33:15)
Yeah.

Jonny (33:18)
But what would I do if I wasn't brewing? I'd probably get back to surfing and learn to surf again. I think I'd do that. If I had the money not to work.

Martin (33:25)
into some competitions

and off to Hawaii.

Jonny (33:28)
Yeah, that'd be great. Pipeline,

surfing pipeline. Amazing. One day maybe. No, a bit big for that maybe. You might get snapped in half.

Martin (33:32)
It would be amazing. But yeah, not for me on my body board.

Probably sink. ⁓ Johnny, it's been absolutely amazing talking to you and learning about pipeline and obviously the exciting news of you moving to your new brewery. Many thanks for coming on. It's been a pleasure. And yeah, next episode we'll be talking to Johnny Garrett from the Craft Beer Channel about their whole petition to make cask ale heritage.

Jonny (33:52)
Thank you.

You're welcome.

Martin (34:08)
Um, until then, uh, we'll catch you, catch you in a couple of weeks. See you later.

Jonny (34:14)
Bye.