Alex is wild about beer!

Alex Tennant can make a couple of fairly unusual claims to fame.

For one thing, there can’t be too many women in Belfast who own their own craft brewery. The Belfast Brewing Company – which hopes to get properly underway in October – will initially aim to produce three traditional products: an India Pale Ale (IPA); a smoked porter and a witbier (wheat beer) in the Belgian style of Hoegaarden.

But it’s not just Alex’s crafty passion for traditional beers that’s been attracting the attention of the trade lately – what she’s putting in them has also got folk talking.

She’s always been interested in natural, healthy ingredients and her new range of beers will contain a variety of unusual, wild products such as coriander, bergamot, elderflower, orange peel and even gorse!

Speaking to LCN recently, Alex revealed that her interest in brewing craft beers had really begun to bear fruit following an invitation from her sister:

“Kathy was having a birthday party and having some friends around, so I said that I would make some beer,” she recalls. “I bought a kit and I didn’t expect too much, but it turned out to be pretty good and that really got my imagination going.

“From then on, I started to brew my own and what really interested me was the thought that I could bring in some of the natural ingredients that are all around us and make something that was slightly different from all the others beers that are available.”

Alex, who works full-time in the children’s sector, has spent time developing a number of recipes for the new products that she believes are “fairly unique”:

“I want this to be about returning to the craft of making beer as opposed to the huge, factory-type production of beer that goes on. So I will be setting up on a very small scale, I have space at the back of my house where I will be putting two barrels and initially producing 300 litres, so it’s quite small but I hope to build that over time.

“Beer was initially brewed in the home by women before it was industrialised so I think it’s really about back to that tradition,” she adds.

The ABV of the proposed products will vary by style from around 4.5% for the witbier to a hefty 8% for the smoked porter. The only one of the products that so far has a name is the porter. Alex says that she’s likely to call it Inkling Porter after the Oxford literary group which counted CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien among its members.

“What I am doing here is really just a pilot, setting up on a small scale,” she adds. “There are real challenges to trying to set up in a market that is so constrained by the big companies and where a lot of the pubs are tied. Anyway, I’m not really thinking about cask or keg beers at the moment. A lot of pubs will take bottles and that is the direction that I will go in to start off. I think that as pubs start to see that people are looking for craft beers and that they are no longer just looking for six types of lager and Guinness, then they will want more craft beers.”

Alex, who is married and has a nine-year-old son, also believes that there is scope for seasonal brews, particularly to compliment meals:

“I don’t think that we’ve grasped the beer-food matching thing here yet,” she remarks. “Restaurants like to emphasise that they have a good wine list that they can match with the food, but actually, beer offers the same possibilities, if not better, because of the width of the range from light, hoppy beers to rich dark ones. I would love to see more of that in restaurants.”

Alex says that she’s conducted her own research among young male professionals who are interested in quality new beers and women who rarely drink beer. That, she adds, has confirmed the quality of the recipes that she’s developed and the demand for them. She has also taken some of the beer along to meetings of the Belfast Food Swap group which she launched last August to help local people get rid of excess produce:

“Most of those who took it came back to tell me that their husbands loved it!”

As for the future, Alex says that in two or three years’ time, she would like to be producing craft beer on a much bigger scale, perhaps as much as 20 barrels at a time:

“Obviously I’d like to have moved away from the back of the house by that time aswell,” she adds. I’d like to be doing it full-time and I would like to be distributing the product to places further afield than Northern Ireland.”

There are plans for product development as well, perhaps a damson beer, and maybe some seasonal beers that could be released at each point in the Celtic calendar.