What We Do
We supply mobile bar units for functions and events, we supply and fit home bars and we support homebrewers with a good stock of equipment, malt, hops and complete whole grain recipe kits plus hands on brewing experience via brewday events.
We are based in Thornton Cleveleys and you can contact us in a few ways:
Call: 01253 867290 or 07710 603646
Email: steve@shedbeer.co.uk
We always respond to messages, always happy to talk to fellow beer nerds!
We also brew craft beer in small batches.
Our Story
We’re beer nerds; we just like good beer and like to share it. We literally started brewing beer as a hobby in a shed and found that brewing good beer is a fascinating, never ending, learning process that got bigger as we got better at it.
We brew beers for cask and keg, although we usually have some bottles as well but those tend to be in small numbers for samples.
We are socially conscious and responsible as far as we can be so we don’t use any one way packaging commercially. All of our kegs and casks are return-to-base and any glass bottles we send out we ask to be returned.
Our spent grain from brewing goes back into the food chain via our friends at Farm Yard Ales.
Water consumption is a major factor in brewing. Traditionally, it might take eight pints of water to produce one pint of beer. Boil off and grain absorption losses are part of that, but cooling and cleaning are massive factors as well. Whilst we can never get away from cleaning we can definitely mitigate waste water by being conscious of our cleaning routines and minimising waste wherever we can; such as using our cooling water as part of that cleaning routine.
We are currently around three to four pints of water for one pint of beer and working to improve that further.
We do run a van and brew with LPG, both of which create emissions. We use the calculators at Clear Offset to figure out our emissions and support gold standard projects in the Amazon or methane capture in Thailand to offset what we produce. Our pledge is to offset by 150% per year.
Cask or Keg?
The truth for us is that we use the same recipe and brewing process for both. the only difference is that the keg version goes through a carbonation process at the end, which gives it some fizz, and it sits in the keg below a carbon dioxide blanket which helps stabilise the product and extend its shelf life.
Once a cask is breached it’s open to the elements and needs to be consumed relatively quickly, in three days ideally. Keg beer is never exposed to the elements in the same way so can last for months without any discernible reduction in quality.
Which is best? For us that’s down to personal preference and, personally, we lean neither one way or the other.
Clear or Hazy?
As a beer consuming public we tend to use clarity as a marker for quality, it’s something we’ve become used to over time so hazy beers can be a tough sell for some people.
What’s our take on the clarity of beer? Well, for us, we like hazy beers but completely agree that a crystal clear beer is a treat for the eyes so we don’t take a position either way. We do take a position on how clarity in beer, particularly cask beer, is achieved though because the traditional products (fining agents) of isinglass and gelatin are both animal derived and seem incongruous in beers that contain nothing but natural ingredients until we fine them.
Our approach is to use kettle finings at the end of the boil, usually whirlfloc which is a seaweed derived product but there are several different brands that are essentially the same. Given sufficient time this will be enough for most beers to drop relatively clear.
We are asked for clear and bright cask beer sometimes and we are happy to add finings at the last stage to give the consumer what they demand. We use isinglass and are conscious that this puts our products at odds with those who don’t consume animal products. Again, we don’t take a position on this and when we produce beers they are always clearly labelled in regard to whether they are fined or not.
We do not fine any of our keg beers with isinglass and will not. When we want a clear keg beer we use an ethical fining product called Brausol and that works like a charm.