Three cheers for Steve and his own-brew beers

Published on Saturday 26 September 2009 11:58

TAKE one coal bunker, drill a hole through the kitchen wall and insert a tube.

Get an electric cable to power things up, stick a tap over the kitchen sink, add your vital ingredients – water, hops, yeast and malt – then sit back and wait.

The result, recalls Steve Stewart, was not just free flowing ale. It was the blueprint of his dream of becoming a microbrewery boss.

A few weeks later and his home – with beer on tap in the kitchen – became party central as dozens of friends took up his kind offer to help sample some of the brews that would eventually become staples of his now thriving business.

"It all worked very well indeed," he recalls with a grin. "I'd brew about 40 pints at a time. At one point I had about 30 kegs of beer, each different recipes, stored at the house. We'd start to forget which one had which recipe. But at least there were lots of people who enjoyed trying to find out."

Today he's boss of a thriving microbrewery, Stewart's Brewery, churning out 3,000 barrels of his five varieties of beer every year and supplying 250 pubs around Edinburgh and the central belt.

There's just a single cask of Stewart's 5, a celebratory brew to mark his business' fifth anniversary, left to shift. "I'm getting calls from pubs asking for more every day, but that's it," he insists. "It's a one-off – when it's gone, it's gone."

It's that ability to tinker with his beers, selecting limited edition brews for special occasions, that drew Steve home from working with one of the UK's brewing giants, Bass, to an industrial estate unit on the outskirts of Edinburgh. Launched in 2004 as a one-man band – Steve's wife Jo now works for the business in marketing and sales – Stewart's Brewery set up shop at a time when Edinburgh's once thriving brewery industry was on its knees.

As the big guns closed down at Fountainbridge and elsewhere, he snapped up whatever pieces of equipment he could salvage from wherever he could – one of his tanks was used for making Barr's Irn Bru – and set about customising his industrial unit into a brewery that now employs seven full-time staff.

Five years on and every week, hundreds of gallons of Edinburgh Gold, Pentland IPA, Copper Cascade Red Ale, Stewart's 80/ and Edinburgh No. 3 now flow through the pipes into casks bound for pubs or mini-kegs and plastic bottles for beer connoisseurs.

Soon they'll find their way into bottles – a new bottling line is ready to swing into operation, bringing the Stewart's beers to restaurants and off-licences.

Ironic, perhaps, that his bottling line gears up just as nearby Belhaven Brewery has announced its bottling plant is to close with business relocated south of the border with the loss of 20 jobs, yet Stewart's seems to be booming.

It all started even further back than that coal bunker experiment. "I was given a home brew kit when I was around 16 or 17," Steve remembers. "I was too young to go to pubs but I quite liked the taste of beer, so I'd stay at home in North Berwick and make my own pretty awful lagers and ciders."

The booze might have been of dubious quality but Steve, now 38, was hooked on the idea of creating his own brews. He went on to study brewing and distilling at Heriot-Watt University.

He ended up with brewery giants Bass in Belfast, helping produce their newly-launched Caffrey's brew.

"I had the chance to go to Boston around that time and worked with a small brewery in the Boston area called Harpoon Brewery," he remembers. "It was a fantastic place, where there was so much passion for what they were doing and they had huge fun.

"Their ethos was 'love beer, love life', and we've pretty much adopted that here too."

Enthused by what he saw there, he set about planning his own microbrewery in Lothian. But first he had to perfect his recipes – and it was while still working for Bass in Birmingham that he hit on a variation of his old home brew kits.

"I built a little microbrewery at home to see how it might go," recalls Steve, who lives with wife Jo, and their two sons, James, five and Robbie, three.

"I extended the coal bunker, knocked a hole into it from the kitchen, put in an electric cable to power it and fed the beer line through the hole to a tap at the kitchen sink – and it was good.

The recipes he tinkered with then – swapping black malt for chocolate, crystal for wheat, adjusting amounts of hops – laid the groundwork for today's products.

But what makes them special, he stresses, is one particular ingredient he couldn't possibly get from a coal bunker in Birmingham.

"These are Edinburgh beers," he nods. "The city was virtually built on the brewing industry.

"I have a simple philosophy," he adds. "Great beer, great service, made in Edinburgh."

For more on Stewart's Brewery see www.stewartbrewing.co.uk