Getting to Know: Lee at Beercosm & The Brewer's Droop

Getting to Know: Lee at Beercosm & The Brewer's Droop

Posted on: 05 Jun 2023

This week on Getting to Know, we spoke with Lee from Beercosm & The Brewer's Droop - a beer and brewing shop with serious history in Bristol. Find out about his brewing tips, the brand new space they're opening up - and his ideas for a robot road network below.

 

1. Introduce yourself – and Beercosm & The Brewer’s Droop.

I’m Lee, and this is Beercosm & The Brewer’s Droop. I took the business on from Mike, who set it up in 1984, so it’s coming up for its 40th birthday very soon. That began at the market in Bristol, and that’s the roots of the business really.

But he also brewed up on the floor above; the eventual plan for this place is to continue on the legacy of those roots by doing a similar thing here – we’ve got some space upstairs where we’re just getting round to the actual practice of brewing.

On the whole, the business is about teaching people how to brew – we mostly get beginners. We’ve taught – over just the ten years I’ve been working with Brewer’s Droop – hundreds of people how to brew and imbued confidence in them, which is nice.

More recently we’ve been focused on beer, cider, mead – the Beercosm side of it, which is the craft beer and ‘unusual brews’ side of things. Brewer’s Droop makes sense as a local legacy, but as an online brand that will be primarily focused on the beer, Brewer’s Droop...was always a sort of joke title – and I’m not sure how well it will translate in that forum!

The brewing side is more of a local advice thing – more of a local service than anything.


2. What’s your background in beer and homebrewing?

I started brewing when I was in university. I made some really nice wines and meads actually! And the odd beer, but all from kits. I used the local homebrew shop up in Lancaster, but when I moved down to Bristol, I used Brewer’s Droop to get some kits & ingredients to make my own wines, and ventured more into my own fruit wines, elderflower champagne and stuff.

So, it was pretty exciting when I started working for Mike, who had been brewing for decades. He showed me what he knew about how to brew, and meanwhile I did beer tasting courses and beer judging programmes – like the BJCP (the Beer Judge Certification Programme), to refine my palate and learn about the different styles of beer, their history, what they should & shouldn’t taste like...which is useful when you’re having to taste people’s homebrews!

I’ve always had a particularly adventurous nature in terms of food & drink; I’ve always been someone who mixes things up a lot and likes to try something new, or unusual, or even weird. I’ve always had a special appreciation for food & drink in general.

Brewing is a good balance between creativity and technicality – that’s always been where my appreciation for things lie.

 

3. Any advice for people who are interested in homebrewing?

It’s actually much easier than people think to produce something acceptable without having to be an expert or professional. It’s worth just starting, and doing something – because there’s a very high chance you’ll end up with something perfectly acceptable to even possibly good, even when you don’t know anything.

A lot of people assume if they don’t know anything and they just start, it’ll end up a mess and disgusting – but that’s very unlikely to happen. Unless you aren’t anal about cleaning, which is very important.

The one other thing is to keep your temperature as consistent as possible for fermentation. You need to find somewhere it’ll stay a stable temperature – whether it’s 16, or whether it’s 24, you want it to stay stable.

4. Things are tough at the moment for venues & breweries alike – what’s it been like here?

Yeah, it’s been very weird recently. During COVID, brewing took off massively, then during the second and third lockdowns, there was a big shift toward going online.

That changed habits quite a lot – on the homebrew front, we get less people coming in now for larger items like wine kits and things. I think because people are going online for that sort of thing.

We weren’t open very much during COVID – and then we moved, because the previous shop was so small. All of these things have created major changes in our landscape, and our customers’ habits. So we’re still kind of paving a new way for the business as it now stands.

I am seeing since April, people have been coming out of their shell a bit, and have begun to adapt. I feel like confidence is coming back a bit, even though the overall picture looks still a bit dismal for everybody.

In the immediate, it’s been tricky, the last few months, and since we only moved in just under one and a half years ago to this new venue, we’ve not managed to get to the point where we’re completely on top of everything.

What we really need to make sure people know is what we’re offering in terms of the homebrew; not only equipment and ingredients, but the advice that we give, and the knowledge that we have – which is free, by the way! And the fact that people can come in and drink, and choose from a huge range of beers, and find out about those beers from us, because we know our stuff about them.

We are seeing, for sure, a lot of people figuring that out from passing and coming in and discovering us.

 

5. Speaking of discovering new places, you’ve got a new space opening upstairs soon. What’s going to happen with that?

It’s a bit of a wildcard, to some degree. We will hopefully be doing brewing up there; we’ll be doing brewing workshops, and producing our own brews, which we’ll have down here. In the meantime, we’re going to be having a little vegan kitchen open up on the weekends.

There’ll be extra seating and a cool, neon-vibes atmospheric retro-gaming lounge. Just another space to hang out, and be a slightly different zone from the one downstairs – and a very different zone from anything else on Gloucester Road.

We may have to adapt it as we go – but that’s the thing when you’re a new place finding its way on a street like this; you need to listen to the area and what the people around it are saying, and slot into the shape that’s missing from the area.

 

6. What’s your favourite beer you have on tap at the moment?

We’re going to get another keg line on soon – which will be nice, then we’ll have five keg lines. Because we have so few lines, we only get beers we either know are really good, or we think are certainly going to be very good.

Right now, we’ve got such a range on...they’re all very different. We’ve got two German lagers, which are quite different, a really amazing fruit sour from Yonder, and a juicy, soft, silky IPA from New Bristol.

Even the two lagers; one is a herbal pilsner, and the other is called a ‘dortmunder export’, which is this creamy, crisp...kind of like a Helles but more full-on.

They represent such different parts of the beer spectrum – but just recently, my most pleasant surprise has been how good the Jaever is on tap. It’s beautiful – a fresh, grassy, herbal pilsner. Really refreshing, loads of character, but not too intense.

That beer was the beer that made me realise that lager was good. It was the first lager I ever had – but from a bottle, this is the first time I tried it on draft - that made me get it. I realised lager is not a bad thing, it broke me out of that mindset that was around about ten years ago when lager was still quite heavily demonised from the CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale) times.

 

7. Finally, if you were Mayor of Bristol for a day – what would you do?

Bristol has definitely outgrown its road network. This is a little bit of a fantastical thing, but rather than the underground system – actually, I guess blimps would be cool – but, assuming the technology is there, a whole fleet of AI-driven vehicles that are moving people and things around in an economical and efficient way.

Robot Road Network, is basically what I’m saying. If it was possible, I’d fast-track the robot roads.

Watch out Elon, there's a new kid on the block! Cheers, Lee.

 

You can find Brewer's Droop at 123 Gloucester Road - and you can keep up to date with all their goings-on on their Facebook, Instagram, and their Youtube channel.


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Article by:

Patrick Bate

Patrick is a filmmaker with so much Bristol in his blood the white blood cells are graffiti'd. Educated at the Northern Film School in Leeds, he’s returned home to be a Videographer and Reviewer for 365Bristol and BARBI. When he’s not messing about with cameras, he enjoys playing guitar, spending far too much time on tabletop RPGs, and being an awful snob about cider. Have a look at his work here, or get in touch at patrickb@365bristol.com.