A stout beer with an alcohol content of more 16% has won the first home brew competition at the Campaign for Real Ale’s Great British Beer Festival.
The contest was held to tap into a boom in home brewing during lockdown that has continued to flourish during the cost of living crisis.
The winning home brew, an imperial stout called Doggy in the Woods by Stephen Folland from Great Shefford near Hungerford, Berkshire, was chosen from more than 170 entries. At 16.1% it is the strongest beer to ever win a Camra award.
Folland’s prize is to have his homemade stout produced commercially by the Brewhouse & Kitchen in Worthing.
Speaking to the Guardian, Folland, 59, an engineer for an online marketing company, said: “I’m stunned – I never thought in a million years that I would win with such a high strength beer. The prospect of brewing at a commercial scale is really exciting.”
Folland said he took up home brewing in 2017 “because I was bored with some of the local beer offerings and felt sure I could brew beer better”. And he reckons the home brewing trend will increase as the cost of pint increase.
A YouGov poll commissioned by Camra for the festival found that for the first time more than half now think the price of beer is unaffordable. Last week official figures showed that the average cost of a pint has topped £4 for the first time and is well over £6 in London.
Folland said: “A lot of my friends took up brewing in lockdown because they needed something to do. As prices in pubs go up it is making the gap between making your own and going to a pub much wider, so the cost of living crisis is only going to fuel the home brew hobby.”
Folland said the secret to his winning beer’s flavour was leaving it to mellow for five years.
The panel of five judges were impressed by the flavour of the beer despite its strength. One of the judges, Phil Cooke, landlord of Hop Inn in Hornchurch, said: “To brew really strong beers is very hard. To brew a beer at 16.1% that is that drinkable is absolutely stunning.”
Labour MP Charlotte Nichols, chair of the parliamentary group on pubs, confessed that strong beers were “not really my thing”, but during the judging she said: “I actually really like that. You could almost put it on ice-cream.”
The second prize went to the least alcoholic beer on the 12-strong shortlist, a mild called Crooner by Mark Sanderson, from Catford in south London. He said: “We’ve all had to drink horrible home brew that you to have to be polite about, so to brew something that people actually want to drink is a really wonderful feeling.”
Beer writer Laura Hadland, who has written a history of Camra and who helped judge the shortlist, said: “I thought the standard was really high.”
She added: “Cask ale is a great British product. It’s something that we do better than anyone else in the world, so I love that people are taking the leap and trying it do it themselves. A lot of small brewers come from a homebrew background.”
She added: “It absolutely will save you money if you get good at brewing beer even if you start from scratch.”
Her favourite beer was a speciality salty sour beer, called Margarita Gose, which came third overall. She said: “It has that incredible Margarita vibrancy, but in beer form.”
Its brewer, Thomas Corry, 33, a physics teacher from Farnham in Surrey, said: “Home brewing is all about new flavours and doing stupid things in my garage that a commercial brewer can’t. I wanted to see how cocktails could be merged with beers.”
He added: “You can brew a beer for less than a pound a pint, whereas in a pub you’re looking at up to £6 a pint for craft beer, so a lot of people are turning to home brew. I made most of my beer with a kit of under £100.”
