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Half Sound, Liverpool (2026)

15/05/2023

🎬 on my 13 years of booming for . Onto the next chapter, riding the wave of trade union activity that’s swept me away from the most enjoyable day job I thought I’d never leave, with my first day as an Organising Official for Prospect BECTU sector in London TV & Film Production.

🍻 Cheers for the memories, and the clapper board 🎬 memento. My last crew was a belter 😉

26/12/2022

Mindfulness 3D puzzle/model making/studying in the brewery this festive holidays instead of making beer. Time for taking it easy after a stressful year, whilst also thankful that things have settled down, and there’s time to do more of the things that recharge us.

Back to beer in the new year - with a new batch of homegrown to take advantage of. After picking the brains of the brewing staff I met on my brewday at Ellon in November, I have a few inside tips to try on something style 👌🏼

For now I’m reprising my Christmas (swipe 👉)
Where I buy a random advent calendar with 24 different beers, cover the cans in tin foil so I don’t know what anything is, & each day I sample one, guessing the beer style and flavours before revealing the can. Excellent training for exams I plan to take at some point.

16/09/2022

Heading to Aberdeen today to meet up with some EFPs I met in Ohio, USA in 2019.
Tomorrow we are gonna brew a special one off 7% West Coast IPA at the Brewdog Brewery in Ellon.
Any suggestions for a good name to give it for when it goes on sale? We get to name it too 😃

Also looking forward to sharing the last couple of bottles of my homebrewed Orval inspired Brett Saison I made in 2020, and that’s been ageing nicely for over 2 years now.

08/08/2022

Tried to make beer.. had a meltdown instead.. 😑

I knew if everything wasn’t in order I would have trouble focusing. Brewing was the only thing I really wanted to do with my day, but evidently, I got a bit derailed. Never known it this bad.. Do I need help?

Started with the morning coffee. Release valve on the machine jammed stiff, so of course I dismantled the group head to diagnose & fix it.
Then realised I needed to breakdown & clean all the equipment, as I haven’t brewed at all in 2022.
That turned into cleaning the entire area as I saw how much dust I was disturbing.
Neither of those tasks were finished when I noticed the radiator behind the fermenter bench wasn’t straight, so took a look
behind it - was just hanging off the wall by a thread.
Took it off the wall & realised some a**hole had just screwed the brackets for a 25kg radiator straight into drywall with wood screws. No anchors or anything.
Started gathering the tools to refit it, resisting the urge to carry on cutting some boards for the loft I saw lying there waiting to be done, noticing instead how sunny it was outside.
🤔 Then started wondering how much solar I could generate by putting panels on the shed roofs, and wether it would be enough to power the bar/fridge.
Got a stepladder, measured up the roofs, bought a Victron 100v solar controller on Amazon, & spent the rest of the day lying on a hammock trying to figure out which panels and wire gauge to pair with it.

No beer was made.
Accepted defeat, and took this photo in B&W, cos that’s how grey I’m feeling. 😒

07/05/2022

style comparison - this is a great exercise to test yourself, with these two amplified examples of related beer styles: the classic Bavarian Weizen, and American Wheat beer. Both ales, both wheat beers, but couldn’t be more different.

Training for the practical certified exams, I need to drink a lot of beer for homework 😉. A big part of that is style knowledge & identification. They tell you a beer you’re about to drink is either one thing or another, and you have to determine what it is, just by sensory evaluation.

Comparing these two highlights style differences and solidifies that knowledge. ‘Wheat Street’ is all banana & clove aroma, with a sweeter body and much lower hop character through to bitterness - typical of the German style. The American Weiss Heist is all about hop character by comparison. More intense hoppy aroma, more bitterness, and much less yeast character, save from a few fruity esters. Lighter hazy appearance, and there’s a little spice to it as well, with 0% banana, as that would be inappropriate.

19/04/2022

😎
Been adding our own touches to the back bar this Easter, & this sticker bombed freezer-turned-beer-fridge represents all of my untappd experiences since 2020, but now it needs finishing off with more homebrewer logos. So I’ve got a bunch of half_sound stickers to swap with anyone who’s got their own unique logos to trade. DM for swaps.

The covid-19 pandemic was also a pandemic of British people building lockdown pubs in their back gardens, garages & basements to pass the time. This house was no exception because one was already here when we moved in last November. Wasn’t my 1st choice for cliché home improvement projects, but now the summer sun is starting to creep up over the rooftops early enough to tease at how much of a great social space we’ve got here to take advantage of… hopefully Dinners/HouseParties/BBQs are still a thing? 😷

23/03/2022

My day job; aka how I pay the bills while brewing and creating drains my wallet of every penny I put in there.

I work with hundreds of talented, creative and intelligent people, and it takes every single one of us put together to create award winning drama. It’s much bigger than just who you see on the screen, or walking up to that podium to collect the award. *Present All 23*

&tv

25/12/2021

Finally finished setting up the brewery in our new home, just in time to make a nice backdrop for Christmas dinner 😃. No time for a Christmas brew this year, but I’m looking forward to firing up the brewery over the holidays to make a highly drinkable EPA, using the fresh U.K. grown hops harvested from our sailboat hop garden in Scotland.

I was a bit worried about the hops this year, as the mast they were climbing up got blown over in one of the mad storms, and they had to be harvested/dried in a rush, only to sit there in a bin bag for a month while there was so much to do here. But as I was pulling the hop cones off the bines yesterday, in no time at all I noticed my hands covered with the pungent aroma of sticky fresh lupulin powder.

Half the bag has gone to my partner-in-cicerone , so we can make the same holiday beer together, (albeit socially distanced) in expectation of being able to drink the final produce together properly next year, and compare results.

08/12/2021

While we are still busy setting up in our new home, here’s a 2 minute interview segment I did on homebrewing with our old setup, for the Lekkerbrew Liverpool ‘Merseyfest’ online beer festival.

My contribution was to enthusiastically show how quickly Homebrewing can take over your life, your kitchen, the rest of your house, your socials, and your bank account too 😂

The full stream is also still available at https://youtu.be/bFzRr_i2hyU and is a good intro to the Liverpool craft beer scene, with contributions from all the local breweries, viewed through the lens of last years lockdown self-shooting video production quirks 😃

28/10/2021

6 months later, and finally the home brewery is moving to a new home over the Mersey! Still a stones throw from Liverpool.

Plenty of space here for the equipment in the far corner by the kitchen, and the zero maintenance beer garden through bi-folding doors already features a small bar, covered seating area, and solar powered storage sheds to bottle age some of our more ambitious brews. Maybe even an opportunity for a few upgrades on the brew-bench I’ve been putting off 🤔 ()

03/10/2021

Upgrades to the Boel iTap pressurised bottle filler - these were kindly sent over by to improve style and functionality, by allowing me to pour pints from the same bottling setup - just by attaching the g-connector in seconds, as well as displaying our custom branded tap handle - with the replacement upper section/diaphragm, that features a standard sized tap handle thread. It’s gonna come in very handy for when we take a keg out somewhere and need to pour samples as well as bottles for taking away 👍

When originally building the stand for this, I really underestimated the length that would be added by the G-Connector 🤔
So bear that in mind for all you tap tower keezer types. Luckily we mostly only pour 1/2 pints , owing to the intensity of our usual brews. But for those session ales that go down like a glass of water, this handy 2/3rds U.S. style ‘shaker’ glass bought from fits nicely just under the spout.

04/09/2021

1st Liverpool Homebrewing club meet since 2019! Our venerable hosts warmly welcomed us to their new brewery/taproom in Bootle.

The brewing game has remained strong with the group over lockdown, with a rollercoaster of unique flavours and styles contributed to the tasting session. Many awesome wild ciders were passed around due to the great online malt shortage of 2020 😂 but the main highlights for me were a wonderfully hoppy and almost woody India Porter, and a funky saison that has been aging for such a long time since our last meet that it was starting to develop Flanders qualities 😋

The half sound homebrewery brought along a mini keg of the beechwood smoked lager (Märzen Rauchbier) I made back in March and lagered since the end of April, and it was a huge hit 👌🏼
Those with far more brewing experience than myself positively dubbed it as ‘annoyingly good’, and along with the nods of approval from the commercial brewers of the group, convinced me it’s one I should develop further.

As many as 5 commercial breweries have been created out of the members of this club, so it’s an incredible place to learn and get feedback from people who’ve been brewing all their lives.

Here’s to the summer of getting back out there and trying great beers 🍻

Half Sound

15/05/2023

26/12/2022

16/09/2022

08/08/2022

07/05/2022

19/04/2022

23/03/2022

25/12/2021

08/12/2021

28/10/2021

03/10/2021

04/09/2021

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