Home brewing doesn’t get much attention on the telly, so this new show is welcome. Beer Masters: The Search For Europe’s Next Great Beer is basically MasterChef but with beer. Five pairs of homebrewers, each representing a different European country, make a beer each week. The style and specs change from one week to the next, and each episode culminates with a tasting/assessment, with a winner announced each time. The grand prize is to have a beer scaled up and brewed commercially, a traditional incentive in the well-established world of competitive homebrewing.
But first a trigger warning: The show is presented by James Blunt. Yes, him. I’m perplexed at the choice—perhaps he is popular with the ladies, a demographic that homebrewing usually leaves cold. But if like me, your reaction to his smug grin and smarmy nasal voice is to want to punch the screen, you have been warned. He is on the screen a lot, but fortunately he doesn’t say much (and he doesn’t sing), and he is paired with a co-presenter with more relevant credentials, Jaega Wise, head brewer at the—clearly very trendy—Wild Card Brewery in Walthamstow. In fact, the show is very keen to position itself in the hipster East London beer scene. The set/studio is run-down/done-up Victorian industrial space, and this first episode begins with a visit to the Camden Town Brewery.
That segment from Camden includes a quick run down of the brewing process, but if you haven’t made beer before, you’re not going to learn how from this show. The main point made by Andrew Fulford, the Camden brewer who goes on to judge the round, is that hygiene is vitally important, suggesting that he has been presented with an unconscionable number of infected homebrews over the years.
But the challenges themselves are clearly designed for advanced homebrewers. In this first episode, the task is to brew an easy drinking beer, but that also combines two different beer styles, and incorporates some element of local character. That’s a tough ask. Were it me, I’d go for something big on hops, because that stuff tends to win competitions. But the teams, to their credit, are more adventurous, and we get dark, light, brett, the works.
Sending everybody back to their home countries to actually make the beer saves the trouble of following every detail of the brewing process and trying to convert that into pacy TV. All of the teams seem to be using Grainfathers, or equivalent, a sign of the times I guess.
Then there is a section on label design. Is this really necessary? Homebrew pretending to be commercial beer production seems delusional, and this five minutes spent in desktop publishing makes for even slower television than a brewday. Never mind.
When we reach the judging, the sheer diversity of the beers makes for some interesting conversation. One of the teams, Amy and Maike from the Netherlands, have made a black IPA with homegrown hops. The judges are impressed, but it clocks in at over 7% (I wish I could accidentally make a 7% beer) so it’s out of the running as far as easy drinking is concerned. The winners are Lorenzo and Federica from Italy (pictured above), with their saison/IPA, infused with basil. That is an interesting combination: saison is risky for an easy-drinking beer, but IPA is a safer choice for any competition.
Next week they are all making a Belgian Tripel, another challenging beer, especially if they have to put their individual stamp on it. I doubt we’ll learn much about how to actually brew the stuff, but I’ll be tuning in for some gently engaging viewing, and perhaps some pointers towards making my own brewing a bit more adventurous in the future.
Beer Masters Episodes 1 and 2 are now available to stream on Amazon Prime Video
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