… to quote Terry Pratchett (who incidentally I will miss tremendously)

So we are now ready to go (well nearly).

• The food safety licence is sorted (that wasn’t too painful)
• HMRC have said I can pay beer duty to them … how kind (also not too painful)
• Bristol City council have given me a licence to sell beer (now that was a pain: training course, an exam, application fee and delays … but we’ve got there).

All I need now is to get the branding sorted out and that is taking AGES

As you will see from the website, things have moved on and we are getting there, but it seems to take forever!

On that front you will start to see a lot of changes to the website as I introduce a more professional look, and remove my rather sweet, but amateur attempt. Still not professing professionalism, but maybe a bit more grown up?

Most importantly I have been brewing and have refined my range into three groups:

• The core four: the backbone of the brewery
• The experimental four: very high or low alcohol, or a bit off the mainstream – I will be putting some pages up on those in the next few days
• The aspirational four: things I’d love to brew but maybe no one would buy … the twinkles in my eye

So one of the delights of running your own brewery is having to demonstrate that you are not going to poison someone. Reasonable enough I suppose (though you could argue that alcohol in excess is a poison … but let’s not go there).

So this week’s joy has been writing a food safety plan (beer is classed as food – so that makes it essential to life, just as I always thought). The plan isn’t difficult as just about every stage of beer production must be practically sterile otherwise you get nasties in your beer which make it taste off (far before it gets to be a health hazard … we’ve all tasted off beer and not died … yet).

Now I’ve got to get someone from the local authorty to tell me where I’ve got it wrong.

This web site stuff is a pain in the backside. Images don’t go where you want them to, colours are wrong, text is wrong, font size is wrong. Think I need to practice this a bit.

Also an apology is in order to anyone who’s images I have pinched during this set up phase – I promise I will sort that out when I go live.

First Fermentation.

Bolthole brewery in Westbury-on-Trym will be on tap in 2015.

Contact neil@bolthole.beer if you want to be one of the first to sample these traditional hand made beers with a  modern twist. You can see our initial range on the tap list.