Twice in the last week local microbrewers have impressed me with their excellent customer service and this has led me to wanting to comment on how wonderful they seem to be collectively.
The story starts a couple of weeks ago when Emma (I think - apologies if I have misremembered your name) from Green Jack in Lowestoft came along to the Theberton Lion Beer Club to share some of their beers with us. We had some great beers, with the Baltic Trader being the standout star of the night for me, but we also chatted quite a bit about all sorts of things beer related. At one point the conversation turned to their two elderflower beers, Summer Dream and Flower Power, and Emma mentioned that the whole brewery staff spend a week in early summer picking vast amounts of fresh elderflowers for these beers. Now my wife and I love both of those beers and we are lucky enough to have a fine elderflower tree in our garden, so I started thinking about brewing my own elderflower beer this summer. I spent a week trawling the internet for elderflower beer recipes with quite a spectacular lack of success. I came across just a couple of recipes but these called for the use of either dried elderflowers or elderflower extract. Eventually I did what I should have done from the outset and just asked Green Jack, via their website contact form. The very next day I received a reply in my email inbox telling me that they use 1 kilo of flowers heads to brew 36 gallons of beer. That is an awful lot of elderflowers but, luckily, I only brew 1 gallon at a time so that should make the collecting a much shorter process. Then, on Monday, I was enjoying a drink at the Sweffling White Horse but, unfortunately, it wasn't convenient to Untap my beer at the time. The next day I realised that I couldn't remember exactly what the beer was called and it didn't seem to be on Untappd. So I went to the Bartram’s Brewery website but I couldn't see anything there that looked like the beer that I had been drinking. This time I didn't hesitate but immediately sent off an email through the website contact form and received a reply the very same day! It turned out that I had been drinking Ipoxymoronic, a black IPA, which was rather good indeed. As I think about it I realise that I had a very similar experience last summer, also with a beer that I had at Sweffling. On that occasion it was #88, an imperial IPA, by Station 1-1- 9. In all these cases I was struck by the friendliness of the people involved and their willingness to help out with my enquiries. I suppose that it isn't so surprising that a small independent craft brewer should be keen to talk about their beers but even so I think that it is very good of them.
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AuthorI am Sean, husband, father, beer fan and homebrewer, morris dancer, teacher and sometime blogger. ArchivesCategories
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