At a first glance:

The Herne-Breowen - Bain Valley Brewery - web site was set up to throw a load of my ideas out there on the Internet for anyone that may find it helpful. It is NOT instructions on how to do things, it is how I have built up my home-brewery, it is how I do things. But if you find it helpful, if you wish to copy it verbatim, if you wish to try out the couple of recipes later on; then I have done a good job. Do NOT use this as your primary reference, I am an amateur at this game and it's only stuff that I have worked out for myself.

How did it start?:

It all began, I suppose many years ago; making beer from kits, as a teenager in the garage. We made our own beer for Friday nights, tinkering with the hot-rod car, or simply sat around discussing the world around us. We made some horrible stuff, mainly lager, but the occaisional bitter or stout. Back in the 70's the kits were dreadful, but to a healthy, and hungry teenager it was sheer bliss - and a certain amount of street-cred accrued if you brewed your own beer.

And then:

... work, marriage, divorce, more work and finally along came CovID-19 - you know the one, the one which curtailed many events and changed many people's lives, mine included - when the pubs closed down and a decent pint was almost a forgottten dream. I tried various bottles of beer from the supermarkets, and not being a particular fan of bottled beer, but having had some amazing bottled beer on the continent, I knew that draught beer was not the be-all and end-all of excellent tasting beer! viz. Belgian Trappist beer, the Abbaye beers - some, SOME of the Polish lagers.

So what next?:

Well, at first I did buy a couple of modern kits and tried to get them to work. Good beer, and a world of difference to the 1970's kits. But I knew there must be better out there somewhere. I had been on a tour of our local brewery (Bateman's of Wainfleet). One of their beers is acceptable, their XXXB (triple-ex-bee) is very nice if kept well. Unfortunately it rarely is; often it is dire. And being of a questioning mind, I knew that somehow beer brewing was not rocket science, though some people try to make it so! I will dispell that idea right now and tell you that no matter how scientific the Americans try to make it sound - it is NOT difficult to brew an excellent beer at home, in your kitchen, and make it taste better than anything you will buy commercially.

The kit:

First of all, my kit has evolved over a period of a couple of years. And I can still remember the look on our local engineer when I asked him to drill a 1 inch hole in the bottom edge of my 70 litre stainless steel saucepan! Initially I used electric, but soon moved on to gas; I could get more heat, more control, and far cheaper to run than electric. I started doing the old "BIAB" Brew-In-A-Bag thing. Messy, very messy! but thinking back to how Bateman's worked, I could see that a bit of thought was needed, and after burning out an (expensive) electric element, getting pi**ed off with the mess of cleaning up the kitchen after a brewday; I did a complete re-design of the whole brewing idea. In the pages that follow I'll show you what I did.

Lets crack on and build a brewery. Some of the pages are quite lengthy with images. I wanted to keep the pages discreet so each page deals with a complete subject.