Tom Newman

Had an interesting breakfast listening to the chief shouting and swearing at the waitress for some reason. Headed over to the Brew-School in Bakewell for the Advanced Beer course. Started at 10 and finished at 4 with an hour for lunch. When I called up to book the course I explained what I wanted to know and was told this was a good course to do. Tom Newman was hosting the day and he was extremely knowledgeable about breweries and making beer. The course content was a huge let down however. For the advanced course, which was meant to cover recipe design, we didn’t get onto that till the last 90 minutes of the day. 45 minutes of this was an exercise where we were meant to design a beer to a particular style we had only just covered. Seems Tom was asked to present the course the Brew-school had created and I cold tell which books they had pulled the sides from. This fell well short of my expectations as the chemistry which happens during a brew wasn’t covered and the raw materials were brushed over. All in all a very expensive waste of time. Had a good drive home apart from the last 15 miles, which were in thick fog. Nice to have a rest in front of the TV watching the final of the Voice.