Author: Paul

Matt’s Leaving Do

Bristol’s Loss is Belfast’s Gain

Last night was a great night out tinged with sadness as we send off our much-loved club founder, and man that brought us all together, Matt Hazley. Matt is moving back to Northern Ireland in a few days before travelling the world in 2025. Of course, we only know one way to do a send-off properly and that’s with beer!

Starting at the Swan with Two Necks the group quickly grew, bringing friends together who haven’t seen each other for years. After a few pints had very quickly disappeared we made our way to the club’s home at Wiper and True’s beautiful taproom, where Evs made a surprise appearance. After drinking through their extensive tap list, last orders were called, and the group separated to make their way home.

As all good nights in Bristol must go, a few stragglers made it to Elmers for just one more, which always guarantees a headache the following morning.

Matt’s passion and dedication was the driving force in setting up the club in 2019, and attracting high quality, skilled homebrewers from all over Bristol and the South West. His absence at the club meets will be felt immediately, and more importantly his beers will be missed.

I know for a fact Matt will be making regular trips back to Bristol and we now have plenty of excuses for club trips to Belfast in 2025 and beyond, so this isn’t the end, just an exciting new chapter. On behalf of everyone from the club, we wish Matt and Nic all the best for their new adventures.

1 November 2024

October 2024 Meetup

Christmas Collab Challenge – Brewer Pairings

Another great night out at Wiper and True’s Taproom, and our special annual announcement of the Christmas challenge pairings. Each year, brewers signup to the challenge, to get paired up and random and their challenge assigned. This year they will need to brew something inspired by their assigned Christmas movie.

Movie	Brewers
The Santa Clause	Ian & Dan
Jingle All The Way	Pete & Rob
Gremlins	Matt & Sam
The Grinch	Remy & Ben
Die Hard	Kendon & Will
Home Alone	Euan & Paul

We all have until the Christmas meetup on the 18th December back at Wiper to present our finest work.

In addition to the annual challenge admin we opened a few bottles of our own beer we had ready to go, as is tradition, going from low to high ABV:

Brewer	Name	Style	ABV
Will	Orgimmar-Weisse	Hefeweizen	5.0%
Euan	Explorer	Export India Porter	5.9%
Pete	Not Brut IPA	Brut IPA	6.0%
Paul & Matt	Electron	Saison	6.0%
Paul	Willamette Falls IPA	English IPA	6.4%
Paul & Matt	Surveyor	American Barley Wine	8.4%

As usual, the beer quality was exceptionally high, with a few sore heads this morning!

25 October 2024

Collab 23
Christmas Reel Ales

It’s that time of year already – Christmas! Well, at least time to announce the our annual challenge. This year, our theme is Christma Movies!

How does it work you ask? Well, two brewers get paired up and randomly assigned a movie title. Your job is to collaborate and brew something inspired by the film. Maybe the title? Maybe a character, or a line of dialog? Perhaps a scene that has inspired you? Or something incredibly tenuous? Doesn’t matter, work it out together (and explain the connection).

You have until our October meetup on the 24th to sign up. After that brewers will be paired up and assigned a movie title at random. Then you have until our Christmas party in December to brew and prepare to show off your best work!

For those new to the club, all challenges are free to our Patreons who, for £5 a month support the club and allow us to organise meetups, buy club merch and attend events such as Love & Beer. Everyone else is welcome and encouraged to join us for the Christams challenge but we do ask for a one off contibution of £10 to the club. Or simply, become a Patreon, using the button below.
- Patreon
If you’re new and want to take part but don’t have a brew kit (we all started somewhere), just make a note in your signup and we’ll pair you with an experienced brewer – pick their brains, find out more about their brewing journey and get stuck in to an amazing hobby.

Patreons, sign upon Eventbrite

Of course, everyone else is welcome to join us for our Christmas party to try the brews, meet new people and celebrate our festive get together.
16 October 2024
Collab 16

Wiper and True

For Collab #16, we visited the Bristol stalwarts Wiper and True at their beautiful Old Market Taproom.

The idea was really simple and fun – we were tasked with designing a beer in the same way that Wiper and True design a beer and then the end goal was to make that beer and then collectively judge it against the design.

Wiper steers away from the overly clunky BJCP guidelines and has developed a set of criteria that they design a beer against. These criteria are much more about how the beer looks, feels and tastes, rather than trying to ram it into a complex style specification.

We found it to be a really interesting way to design a beer, so if you want to try it, please find the guide here.

Here’s some photos from the night:

11 May 2023
Collab 15

RAB and Yakima Chief

Our friends at Reading Amateur Brewers invited us to collaborate with themselves and Yakima Chief! What an opportunity!

A squad of HBC brewers hopped on the train to Reading on Thursday 9th March, to meet at Phantom Brewing Co. and get some chat and hop smelling with the legends that are Yakima Chief.

On the night we delved into the details of some experimental HBC Hops that Yakmia will be sending out to us for some experimental brews.

The Reading crew will then be joining us in Bristol for leg number 2 of Collab 15 later in 2023 where we’ll taste everyones’ brews and try to pick a fave!

14 March 2023
We are almost 4!
Reset, Restart, Refocus…

We are almost 4 years old! Crazy to think we’ve grown so much and had so many great collabs over the past few years. We’ve become better brewers through it all and 2022 and early 2023 have seen us bag loads of medals at prestigious national comps!

With age comes reflection though and for a while we’ve been thinking of how we can run HBC a little better and make it more sustainable going forward. We think it’s time to kick off a few changes.
- We’ll be forming a proper committee
- We’ll be moving to Discord as it gives us help-forums and the ability for breakout rooms
- We’ll be entering into a subscription model at £5 per month, managed via Patreon platform (about the cost of a beer we thought!)
Ok, so first, re: the committee, for the next 6 months, Matt will assume the Chairperson role and Paul Willis will be Treasurer. This is just until we have an AGM in ~Sept, at which time we will likely re-nominate ourselves for these roles along with anyone else who wants to be on the committee. We’ll add a secretary at this point so we’ll have a 3 person committee.

Secondly, re: Discord, this is live now! You can sign up via this link:
- Discord
Thirdly, the subscription. £5 a month will get you free and priority access to all brewing collabs, access to club recipes, early and cheaper access to merch and, later in the year, access to club excursions.

All money will go back into Homebrew Collab and what we use it for will a core subject at the AGM in 6 months.

It will allow us a degree of flexibility which will allow us to book trips and buy merch without having to be out of pocket personally and I think it will help us towards eventually running a comp in Bristol.

If this kind of thing interests you, please sign up a Patron using the link below.
- Patreon
Its important to add… the subscription is not a blocker to getting involved with the club. Our socials will always be open doors, Brewers can still take part in brewing collabs at a cost of £10 per event and Discord is free to join.
23 February 2023