Red moon is owned by two friends, who have been brewing for over 17 years each. We have made hundreds and hundreds of bottle of home brew over the years using all the kits you can find.

In all the shops going. From Wilco’s to the home brew shops. But I can tell you looking back that they were not very good.

We still have some bottles around from back then and I can’t believe we used to drink the stuff.

Well early 2016 I found an all grain training course, and we decided to take the next step in our brewing life and go for it. We spent a week in a class room learning all the technical aspects of the brewing and the last two days was a practical assessment. BUT one of the key things that made us go on the course was that there was free beer tasting all the time you were doing the practical.

How it worked was you got to drink all the ale made from the last class. There ware 5 ales on offer and we were told that most classes drink.

About 1 barrel (72 pints), well to me, Mark and our friend Chris this came across as more of a challenge so if you can imagine a large room with a central demonstration table surrounded with chairs. Everyone was sitting next to the teacher and writing everything down in great detail.

WELL, there were three of us at the back drinking beer like it was going out of fashion and after two days of this we cleared up 3 barrels, needless to say we had a great time. But there was not much left for everyone else to drink so we got into trouble. We were made to do a full demo in front of the whole class, very drunk. You can imagine how that went.  

Well after the hangover had gone, we set about making and testing our ales.We made our original Back Yard BBQ, it was 9% ABV and the smoky after taste was more of a burnt cardboard than the current lightly smoked taste.

The taste was so strong I could not taste my food and yes it was me who fell over into the BBQ. It was at this point that the bearded maniac (Marks brother in law) suggested we take this beer making seriously and look to sell it…… SO the journey began.

We started off working on the Alcohol level (due to me falling over) and then the after taste and we got the ABV down to 4.5% and the light smoked after taste we know and love today. We were still very unsure if it was good enough to sell to the public so we took the ale to our local Solihull beer festival and had it judged buy Camra official judges.

We came 3rd in the competiton which was then opened up to public for further judging. 

Well………… that’s when things got really interesting, It went down a storm and  the public loved it. It came 1st. The feedback we got gave us the confidence to go for it. 

Well, we spent the following 6 months going through all the red tape to become Red Moon Brewery. We had visits from HMRC and every other government body you could think of. To finally get our official brewery numbers and status on January 1st 2018.

This is where the big journey began…… and that people is it until the next newsletter.