Attending: Andy Whitaker, Dave Caiels, David Beaton, Graham Smith, Guy Gallington, Kev Warnes, Richard Bradshaw, Richard Swindells, Steve Bennett, Steve Plampton, Nik Leng.

Saturday Just 1st saw the much anticipated Suffolk June ACB meeting. With a chance to brew a clone of “Beyond the Firs” by the popular regional brewery: Burnt Mill, our brewers were all keen to see how their examples fared.

We all met in at the Walnut Inn in Stowmarket for the 12pm start time and quickly set about the bar to try the local beers. With brewers settling into their first beers, the atmosphere was buzzing with conversation and the day looking to be special.

Not long afterwards, The Burnt Mill Head Brewer, Sophie, arrived to join in the fun, and we all sat down to go over the agenda. Sophie began the day with an overview of Burnt Mill, and a technical overview of the Beyond the Firs beer.

Sophies presentation covered the 7th Anniversary of burnt Mill and the anniversary beer “7 Acre”. She covered her brewing history and finding out about being a celiac during her time brewing at Muntons. This led to the move to the newly opening Burnt Mill. Her time to start with was spent brewing as head brewer, without being able to drink beer due to gluten intolerance. There were obvious challenges, but finding a way to work through this was necessary for success. Burnt Mill are doing things right and have an expanding customer base, including expanding in the export markets across the world in places like Japan.

Burnt Mill are expanding with a current capacity of 3x 5000l and 6x 3600l fermenters and 2x 5000l bright tanks. With recent expansions in bright tanks planned in the near future. They also run their own counter-pressure canning line, which was fortunately purchased just before the lockdowns in 2021. This also coincided with the rapid opening of their online webshop. Something many breweries and small business needed to do to pivot to home consumers, as wholesale sales fell off a cliff.

After several questions and technical answers from Sophie, it was time to get to the Beyond the Firs Challenge. The colour range for the challenge was from near perfect pale, to best bitter, which many claimed wasn’t the case at home, this was put down to potentially oxidation discolouration. The beers were judged using the “Pete” scoresheets, as is usual at monthly meets.

As the beers came out, we all judged the scores against a calibration beer of Beyond the Firs, made available on the bar. The scores were judged by the brewers, and Sophie gave her verdict on her thoughts. After we’d sampled all the beers and logged scores, we were ready for our glamorous waitress Steve to collate the scores.

Burnt Mill Head Brewer Sophie’s vote for her top 3:

Closest clone: Richard Swindells
Second place: Graham Smith
Third place: Dave Beaton

Brewers results:

1st Graham Smith
2nd Dave Beaton & Guy Gallington
4th Richard Swindells
5th Richard Bradshaw
6th Kev Warnes & Nik Leng

There were numerous AOBs, but the afternoon soon got away from us, and we all became ubiquitous and otherwise engaged in improving our “oiled” status. Nik Leng brought a reduced ABV version of his Shed Festival beer “yellow snow”, which went down well. Rich S brought along a RIS that’s now 6 months old to try, which was also received well. At 8.5%, this brought the meeting to a close and eventually we ordered a couple of pizzas to get us over the line.

After the final AOB, let’s just say, order went out of the window. This was a very good meeting and the energy in the room was amazing. Lots of fun and some serious technical information swapping.

In closing, I’d like to thank Burnt Mill & Sophie for her extremely open talk and questions answered. There was a massive amount of technical information to take in and I’m sure we all learned something new. The next challenge is remembering it… Slainte (hic).