Last week Brewdog released the recipes for all 215 beers that James, Martin, Bracken, Simcoe and various other human wunderkind have brewed in Fraserburgh and Ellon . If you haven’t seen the news, visit their blog or twitter feed. Even in an industry that is surprising open with recipe formulation, this is completely nuts. Why would they do that? Why provide this intellectual property to everyone? The only answer, apart from limited publicity, is to enable the homebrewing community to brew their favourite punk beer of course.

I have an affection for Brewdog. They are often viewed as the Marmite of brewing by traditionalists but there are few pleasures in life to match hot buttered toast and Marmite with a big mug of tea on Sunday mornings. Brewdog were early adopters of the hoppy beers that I had sampled in the States and found it difficult to obtain in the UK. Later they got me back into malty beers at a time when my palate for traditional British beers was jaded to say the least. They provided imaginative brews, emotional brews (more on that later) and they produced one or two that I had to spit out. They challenged my palate. They had attitude. They had elan. They had principles and they also had a clever marketing ploy. They wanted us to invest cash and emotional capital in them. And they still have all those characteristics. It’s as true now was in the early days.Those of us that love the beer and the brand have bought into it. We are Equity Punks. We visit the bars. We buy the beer online.

Now we have to brew the bloody beer ourselves! All of it. Every one of the sodding 215 Brewdog beers. As soon as I read a tweet that asked which idiot would be the first to brew them all and blog about doing so I knew I had to try. I am sure there are  others who also volunteered for this mission. I hope we can work together as there are some I have no idea how to brew. I’m not keen on lagers, so I tend not to brew them. I have never seen cloudberries in any English supermarket or online supplier. Maybe I need to speak to my friends at Lervig. What is sure is that there are plenty of challenges ahead.

So what resources do I have?  I have two 30 litre brewing systems consisting of 2 x 10 gallon Igloo cooler mash tuns, from a Home Depot in Florida; a 30 litre square Brupak mash tun: 30 litre kettles and a series of plastic fermenters of various types. When I have time and the sun is shining it’s wonderful. So that’s two days a year. For the wet days I use a series of small stovetop pots and some 1 gallon glass carboys. However I recently funded Picobrew development to the tune of a Developer Pack and other toys. If you haven’t seen them look at http://www.picobrew.com , knock three times and ask for Olivia. As a company they seem extremely responsive and are very helpful. When the Zymatic and Picobrew arrive, they will enable me to brew when the weather is poor or I don’t have all day. So no more excuses.

I am intending to follow the recipes provided, boiling pale ale worts for 60 minutes and anything with Lager/Pilsner malts for 90 minutes, unless I get alternative instructions from Simcoe. I will serve these beers unfiltered.

The only question remaining is what order to brew them in. Numerical? My favourites first? My favourites last? I’m off to discuss this with a 5am Saint but I think I will start with the original Punk IPA. Let me know if you are intending to brew the Brewdog 215 – maybe we can get group discount on a therapist…