We love beer, particularly real ale. Yes, we sell more lager and keg beer, but when traditional cask ale is brewed well and kept well, you can’t beat it. We’re relatively spoilt for choice up here in the North West, too. Top quality beer has been brewed all around us for centuries and you’ll always find some – probably three or four – on hand pulls in our pubs.
Having said that we still thought it would be fun to have our very own beer. Our own recipe, from scratch, that a decent local brewer could take and run with. We hoped it would prove to our customers that we really are passionate about beer, and like everything we do, we’d do it properly. There are umpteen suppliers out there that are keen as mustard to give you a “house beer” – they give you something off the shelf, tell you to order loads of it and in exchange you get a bit of a discount and can call it whatever you want. It feels a bit like cheating to us, and it’s always sad when you’re at the bar, ask what the house beer is like, and the person serving simply turns around the badge on the pump and says “it’s actually this”.
So, where do you start? We spoke to Brewlab, based up in Sunderland. They’re leading experts in the science of beer and were happy to help. Next, three of us and a box full of beers we liked travelled north-east and met Julio, a time-served member of the Brewlab team, originally from Valencia. We set out the key things we were looking for: a light ABV, lovely golden colour, easily drinkable and sessionable pale ale. It should appeal to traditional bitter drinkers but work for more modern palates too, thanks to some light, fruity, almost citrusy notes. The three of us talked a lot about what we liked and didn’t like about the sample beers we took with us, in a very rambling fashion. Somehow, Julio managed to translate what we’d said into a sort of technical brewer’s language that was beyond all of us.
We wanted the list of ingredients to come solely from the UK, in keeping with the traditional theme. It’s good to support UK farmers and to avoid shipping vast kilograms of hops across the Atlantic, if you can. So we ended up with a list of three hops; Target, as the base to give us the bitterness we wanted, followed by Olicana and Jester. The latter two would give us that twist of modern style that we were looking for, and are really quite American in profile. They were both developed through the Charles Faram hop development programme, where entirely new hop varieties are cultivated and grown here in the UK. Ours come from Worcester, which isn’t a million miles away.
We agreed with Julio that he’d brew three slight variations of the loose recipe we’d arrived at. He’d condition the beer and put it into bottles, then post it down to us to taste. We’d pick the favourite, he’d do a bigger brew of it and we’d put it on our bars for people to try. As the brews get bigger, it comes out a bit differently, so we’d also use that opportunity to tweak the recipe if we wanted. Then we would have our own, proper, nailed down recipe.
So we had a plan. Not wanting to do a poor job, before we headed home we spent an evening on the town with Julio, to complete the beer research process. We learnt many useful things, and it will always be a shame that none of us could remember a single one of them.
Within a few months we had a recipe we loved and had lined up a top local brewer to make it for us: Big Hand, based in Wrexham. It took a few big scale brews for us to settle on the exact specification because, again, scaling up the recipe and using slightly different equipment naturally leads to little variations in the beer. The owners of the brewery lived a few doors up from one of our pubs, which made the tasting and review process very straightforward and fun. The definition of staggering distance.
It needed a name. We bandied around a lot of ideas but something about JPA – Jerry’s Pale Ale - had a ring to it. Jerry is a modest character and felt it was a bit unbecoming to name our beer after him, but by that point ‘JPA’ had stuck, and even he admitted it sounded better than the other names on the list. It could, of course, have been ‘Julio’s Pale Ale’ all along.
Almost four years on and we’re still very proud of JPA, and sell a lot of it. It is still brewed by a top local brewer and to the same recipe, but now by Magic Dragon, just outside Wrexham. We didn’t fall out with Big Hand; they’re still great friends of ours and we still love their beers. Julio has moved on to other things from Brewlab and now has his own beer brand – if you’re ever in the northeast and come across Wear Beer, give it a try, it’s sure to be excellent.
We need to say a special thanks to Dave Shaw, the original brewer at Big Hand, who was a big part of our JPA project. Dave sadly passed away in late 2022 and is sorely missed as a friend and drinking buddy.
If you’ve never had a pint of JPA, then give it a go. We drink quite a lot of it ourselves and are heavily biased, but think it is a genuinely good, year-round pale ale. It was a real joy to work on and we’ve often thought about coming up with another beer from scratch. It’s a hard job but someone’s got to do it. Maybe something much stronger, perhaps even Belgian style, that we could put in 750ml bottles…