The Curly Hetchins

Beer, at the end of the day its just a drink, 568mls of malt, hops, water, yeast and time, right? Well , yes ultimately it is, but sometimes it’s not, its more than that. It’s a social lubricant, it’s a national flagship, a regional bond, a timestamp to the end of the day or the start of a break. It can transport you back in time and space to a memory, a place, a feeling a warm summer's day when all was well.

It can be a communal bond, between family and friends.

---

The late Dr. Andy Fowell (left) with his son, Rich Fowell.

Back in September 2021 Rich Fowell, the founder of our very own Jack In The Box Altrincham and one of the Brewery’s & Bar’s directors was preparing to get married to his fiancée Elyse. The wedding had already been delayed twice by the prior 18 months of COVID disruptions, but they held off wanting to celebrate with family and friends. However, devastating news arrived one week before the date. News was received that Andy Fowell, Rich’s father had died in a cycling accident in Snowdonia aged just 66.

Weeks later Rich approached the Brewery team resolutely set on brewing a charity beer to raise money in his father’s name. As we discovered, for the last 25 years of his life he spent setting up the palliative care system across North Wales and beyond. His work was of huge benefit to those with Motor Neurone Disease, and their end of life care, with him, later becoming a trustee for the MND Association. In fact, two years ago he and his friends Steve and Roger cycled from Istanbul to Anglesey raising £25,000 for MNDA. Asia To Anglesey Facebook

What was called for was a 4% hoppy pale ale on cask and in can. A perfect match to that post cycle refreshment, a thirst quencher with a citrusy punch. A crowd-pleaser and a beer suitable to raise a glass in memory. To continue the fine work Andy and co started, we’ll be donating 50p from every pint sold and 50p from every can sold to Motor Neurone Disease Association in memory of Andy. We hope to donate around £2500 once all sales are in.

Roger, Rich & Steve at the brewery.

Rob from Loughran Brewing Stores who donated the hops for the brew.

To help us in this mission we’ve been blown away by the support we’ve received from our suppliers. Rob, Hamilton and Loughran Brewing Stores have very generously donated their expertise and 3 hop varieties that fit the bill for our citrusy, refreshing beer. Cashmere, Idaho 7 and Meridian. Rob Hamilton was actually the founder of Blackjack, moving on to Loughran Stores in 2020 and worked alongside Rich for 8 years. Rob and Loughran were the first to offer help to us to make sure we can achieve our charity mission and offered their expertise in offering a blend of hops that will hit our target. Crisp Maltings, who is our sole supplier for base malt at Blackjack came in with an amazing offer to supply the whole malt bill for the brew, again a massive help, no questions asked, reliable and resolute of support above and beyond from one of our key suppliers. And finally, Lallemand has provided us with a whole brew pitch of yeast. Gram for gram this is the most expensive addition, we are hugely thankful to them as well.

Huge thanks to Crisp Maltings for the donation.

---

So where does all this lead? Well to 23rd of Feb when who else but Andy’s son Rich and two cycling partners in crime Roger and Steve who cycled across a continent with their late friend to raise money for charity, joined our newest brewer Sam to make this beer a reality. Mashing in a simple blend of Crisps Extra Pale & Wheat to an original gravity of 1.039. We’ve added a dash of bittering and a late hope whirlpool blend of Meridian, Cashmere & punch Idaho 7 T90 pellets donated from Loughan, with more in store for a big late dry hop hit. 

Roger (left) & Steve

---

The Curly Hetchins didn’t mean anything when we were told that’s the name of the beer, but the cycling buffs seemed to have a knowing nod. The Curly Hetchins as it transpires is the model of his much-loved bike, which Andy bought with his first pay as a doctor, and still rode most weeks. Beyond its lasting name, we have to thank Emma Hobbins who has produced a fantastic and beautiful hand-drawn illustration of Andy’s bike for the can design and pump clip.

More news to come, but book in March 15th for the launch of this most special of beers from Blackjack.

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

Darcey & The Brewery Team.

Finally Brewing Again - 14 Months Of Challenge

Seemingly a lifetime ago, back on the 14th of Feb 2020, before COVID, before any of this chaos, the directors of Blackjack signed on the multiple dotted lines at the bottom of a contract and agreement to buy a brand spanking new 15bbl brewery and a small but bespoke fleet of dual purpose fermenter/conditioning tanks.

A major step for the company. This came only a couple of months after a restructure that saw the departure of Rob, the founding company director whilst bringing in the associated market bar and pubs companies fully into the fold of Blackjack Brewery. A crystallisation seeded centrally by a huge investment in Blackjacks future, the brew kit.

Fast forward a few weeks to these pictures, 3rd of March 2020. The first real introduction between our team and Gravity Systems who have designed and installed our new brewery and plant. Little did we know this introduction would be the last face to face and the last time in 10 months that the team could assemble in the same place.

little more than 3 weeks later and all our bars were closed, staff safely at home, the country in lockdown, our whole industry mothballed, and I am not ashamed to say nerves began to fray. Originally as per the guidance at the time we planned for 3 months closure, whilst this was well within our plan for opening the brewery; after all we had a September installation date to be brewing by October, our concerns however fell closer to home.

The Smithfield 24 Hours After The Close Down Order

Glassworks Drinks Distribution had been the glove to Blackjack Brewery's hand since nearly year one. The two companies, originally merely only shared a unit, but this developed into a symbiosis over time resulting with the two merging in 2014-15. Glassworks was a wholesale company that pumped craft and modern beers into the city of Manchester, I don’t think its going to far to say it set the stage or at least laid the foundation for the world leading beer city and trendy suburbs you’ll find now, all this since 2013. If you've been drinking crafty beer in, or around Manchester for a few years no doubt you've had something bloody tasty that came via Glassworks and as such Blackjack.

A busy operation, sometimes more than 12 pallets heavy laden with the freshest beer the UK could provide landed weekly, 2 vans a day 5 days a week shuttled both wholesale and Blackjack beer across the region. 100's of fresh cask and kegs weekly. A working stock holding of up to £110k of date sensitive fresh beer. Once the initial shock of the industry closing and learning a newer normal had set in the realisation sank in. ~£80k+ of draught cask and keg stock both Blackjack and Glassworks was suddenly at risk, the 3 months we expected to be closed was way past where some of this beer best before was. All of this stock on credit to your peers and friends in the industry, we didn’t want to draught, we didn’t want to start what could be a domino effect of the industry collapsing in, equally we were not trading, we couldn’t afford the bills that were becoming due. We had a problem...

Cask In A Box: Lockdown 1’s Saviour

Using a word I have grown to hate, however a word in reality does sum it up best, Blackjack pivoted. You see, we sold a lot of beer to trade, in fact Blackjack ONLY sold to trade. We had a barely functional web shop and all our focus was on wholesale suppliers and customers, our customer face was the bars, but they were closed. Something had to be done otherwise the whole thing was to be canceled. We saved cask beers from the drain by developing Cask in a Box beer, beer in a bag in a box, which we continue to sell now, we invented mini kegging stations to fill and save the keg and tank beer we had. These sales, these pints of fortitude, saved our company, saved the jobs and futures of our staff and all this only worked because of the the fantastic people of Manchester who took up the mantle and became our sole income and friends during those very traumatic months of lockdown 1.

The Brewtap: Same but different for 2020

Eventually restrictions eased, pubs opened slowly and carefully for the Summer, we got brewing again and focus re-shifted into installation of the new brewery. We opened our brewtap and bars only to have them closed and restricted by local lockdowns and the now infamous Tier system. Dates had moved, COVID and the banking system made sure of that but we were hopefully of a pre-xmas installation. We closed up the brewery tap in September with a cold but fantastic live music event thinking we were just around the corner to completion. What else could go wrong?

Last Brewtap Gig Of The Summer

November, the kits been delayed again, COVID is spiking, Tier 3 is really causing us some problems, it's cold, the flooring needs time and it needs to be right. The old unit where the mountain of anxiety that was our precovid stock is now empty. A brand new epoxy blue floor and drainage system is being laid, but it takes time, and COVID lockdowns keep chipping away at our schedules.

Then disaster, further disaster, all this time you see, our faithful brewery system, originally born of Marble Beers back in 1997 and since expanded, modified and fettled has been keeping the Blackjack flag flying. Making the best beers the companies ever made, a motivated team is smashing high quality beers consistently, energy is high for the new brewery and a new way of working. But, a catastrophic break down stops all that. The gas burner has burnt its last, the bumbling rumble, both deafening but background was familiar to anyone that’s visited Blackjack on a brewday. That noise came from the kettles burner has been threatening for nearly a decade to conk out. Almost a triggers broom affair by this point its had more replacements parts and work done on it than would be expected of even the highest quality piece of equipment. Even the most flexible and adventurous of gas engineers wring their hands at the prospect of getting it going again.  Quotations fly around at £20k+ for a solution. We can’t justify that can we? No, the new brewery will be in soon, we have got stock it'll be fine. We keep what's already in tank going but the old kit has brewed its last beer Blonde (foreshadowing for anyone keeping up).

Tara brewing the final beer: Blonde back on the 2nd of December 2020.

The Smithfield, Sawn Street: Closed again for winter

What happened next? Ah yeah Lockdown 3 lands on us, a new date of the second week of Jan, for delivery of the new brewery and by this point, almost amazingly it actually happened! Early on a cold and drizzling January day 3 articulating waggons turn up, and with some of the floorings expansion joints still tacky, Kettle, Mashtun, HLT, CLT, 4x 50hl thanks, 3x 25HL were positioned in their new home with brewery team eagerly looking on at the columns of stainless which dwarf everything we’ve brewed on before.

4 weeks from delivery to brewing would be normal ish, engineering whilst awarded as a science does have a degree of art, you can’t rush art, but still normally around 4 weeks right? Well, our story thus far has been far from normal, so why would it end normally? We had the 14th of Feb at the end of the gantt chart, 14th of Feb for grain to hit water and the dream to come alive. Now if you've come this far in our winding tale, that date may ring a bell, back in on the 14th of Feb 2020 this whole epilogue began with the signing of papers and the order of the kit, how serendipitous that would be!

Those of you still with us will know this didn't happen, here we are in April, on a cool hazy morning about to brew that first beer. 8 weeks later than the gantt told us. GAS was the problem, not gear acquisition syndrome (ok maybe a bit of that), but burning fossil fuel gas, or liquid petroleum gas. The life blood of our system. Using LPG, drawn from, the depths of the earths crust, energy from sunlight that shone on plants and swaps 120 years ago distilled by time into complex hydrocarbons, extracted from the Brent oil fields off of Scotland’s ragged coast. we were set to fire a steam generator, the heart of the new brewery. This steam under pressure, piped to our copper and hot liquor tank would provide amazing efficiently, we would boil faster, longer and harder, improving our control on the beers and styles we wanted to make. An efficient system, and part of the core design of the brew house.

Irk Street, a shuttered brewery

Forgotten streets

However friends, this is another chapter in our tale of woe. Being on the unfashionable and forgotten backstreets, sandwiched between the trendy Norther Quarter that demands its beer and the Green Quarter where many of those patrons reside, sits our two archways. We straddle Irk Street, a forgotten cobbled Victorian dead end road, that last had anything approaching it's heyday 100 years ago. All this means that this forgotten road despite being overlooked by the old gasworks never got mains gas installed. Bulk Storage we cried! “That's the key”, that's what the plan was. Our peers in the industry across the nation have the same problem, railway arches and the small roads and estates tend to be cut off from infrastructure spending so plenty of our compadres have the same problem and the same solution. Bulk gas container in your yard, hook it up off you go! Great! However, landlords, subcontracts and litigation mean we were delayed once more. Our investment towered above us in Arch 34, the accumulation of 12 months of graft stood unused. The lustre of the stainless steel that once wowed us suddenly shimmered cold and burdensome. You see at some point we had to start paying for this equipment, and with quite frankly amazing support from some of our lenders and Gravity Systems we were able to delay, but with steel hitting concrete we had to start to pay the Ferryman at some point.

Clever electric conversion: The Kettle

With litigation on going and people with clipboards and important sounding job titles arguing over the exact positioning of an LPG tank, power was out of our hands once more, but ultimately our fate riding on the coming weeks we had to act. Back to that word I hate, pivot. What do you do with a gas powered brewery when you cant get gas? Yeah, that is correct my friends you convert it to electric. Thanks again to the amazing help from the team at Gravity we installed elements in our HLT and Kettle. It's not ideal, in fact we would have designed it from the ground up different if this was our final solution, but for now it'll have to do. It'll get us brewing, it'll get our team back to work. We'll keep fighting to get our gas, we'll get it done, but we've got to take in our own hands our own destiny and get brewing.

Would you believe this started at 5am as a quick post to socials to let our fans know that today, the 29/04/2021 Blackjack is brewing again. We'll be joined today by Jenn Merrick who works with Gravity to onboard new breweries and offer salient advice but brewers new and old. A total mix of emotions has kept me awake most of the night, trepidations for gremlins in the system, excitement to get brewing, nerves about the industry and self-doubt after so long with out defined purpose and dates. But today we brew, and what are we brewing? Blonde, that beer that saw out the old kit, a beer quaffed at the marketbars by our fans. It’s not cutting edge, but when that first cask gets tapped it’ll be the most well deserved and hard fought for pint I’ll ever have.

The best plans of mice and men, whats missing? Whats left to do? Budgets existed and for an amazing rebrand to really launch us into the stratosphere, time and tutorage to really understand what we are about, to communicate our dream to you all. A canning line to get our beer out to the people, lab gear to put us amongst the best breweries in the country, all this on hold but queued up read to roll just as soon as we can get brewing and get beer back out there and start turning the wheels of industry once more. Whilst we may be missing some items of our dream list, we do have this kit and that’s all we do have, but because of its quality and compromise design we’re going to make the best damned beer we can and that’s all we can do. So no big rebrand launch or inviting people to our dream tap but we’ve been here before, would it really be Blackjack if it was 100% ready and 100% slick? It’s almost like starting again, 9 years back, completely wiped and back to the start but we have this kit we have a desire as a team to brew the best damn beer we can. Wish us good luck and please do try our beer because we’ve tried really hard to get to this point and with this kit we can do so much still. Not what we intended but we have this. And we have our team and it’s show time.

The brewery tap space is a work in progress, it’s taken a backseat for the reasons above, we’ll get open this summer, again not in idea ways, but enough to show you what we have done. So keep an eye out and come visit some time.

Summary, it’s been bloody tough but we cant wait to share what we are going to make. But we've got loads of great new beers to show you in the future, we cant wait to stretch our legs and brew the beers we have always wanted to. We cant wait to get our Market Bars back open, welcome you back into the Smithfield and also show you around our brewery and tap, the focus of so much energy, blood, sweat & tears from the last 14 months. 

We'll see you soon.. 

Darcey