Good Stuff Brewing @ The Abdication

Meet the Brewer

Matt Grace

After starting with full mash, cooker-top home brewing in a tiny flat kitchen back in the mid-2000s, I attended a brew course with Dave Porter in Bury and knew then that I wanted to switch from working on trains to working with beer!

Opening up the pub meant home brewing took a bit of a back seat for a while. But the itch to brew didn’t go away. I also had a gang of tasters readily available - the willing customers! - so I started to look into options to brew on-site at the pub.

The BrewHa BIAC looked like it would be ideal, so I jumped in and imported one directly from the manufacturers in Canada.

Meet the Brewkit

BrewHa BIAC

With this innovative, compact brewing system the complete process takes place in the one vessel - mashing, boiling and fermenting. It’s incredibly easy to use, has a small footprint and importantly for me, wheels! Ideal for brewing in the main room of the pub and then moving it out of the way during fermentation. The only adaptation needed in the pub was brackets on the wall for a jib and hoist to lift out the mash colander. The other key advantage of this system is that the process is fully temperature-controlled giving precision to each stage of the brew.

As far as I know, this is the only commercial brewing set-up using a BrewHa in the UK. The first brew was in May 2016 and by September that year I started trying them out on customers - Good Stuff Brewing at The Abdication was born!

Meet the Beers

As yet, a core set of beers haven’t emerged; instead I’m enjoying learning and experimenting with new ingredients and recipes. 2018 saw some beers go out of the pub for the first time - spotting them at local beer festivals is a great thrill!