New Scottish brewery – Innocente Brewing Co

Talented home-brewers now have several routes to seeing their beers being served in pubs and appearing on the shelves of our bottle shops. The most terrifying is surely to bite the bullet and compile an enormous mound of cash for a shiny brew kit. Another option, as we saw last week, is to enter competitions to have commercial breweries take on their recipes. Alternatively though, there’s always the middle ground – contracting a local brewer who has the tank time, and collaborating with them to make small batches of beer.

One such brand new producer in Scotland is Steve Innocente, the one-man band behind the fledgling Innocente Brewing Company. I caught up with Steve at the victor’s night of the aforementioned IBD home-brew competition (which he also entered, as it happens), to see how things are going. Innocente Brewing Co are so new only a handful of their casks have appeared in Edinburgh pubs thus far, all of them from the initial contract batch brewed with James Davies at Alechemy Brewing in Livingston.

Like James, Steve is something of the hop-head – since relocating from his native Canada he established a hop distribution business to help fund the home-brew, having switched to full-mash brewing only in the autumn of last year. This method of scaling up is becoming more common, as brewers get past the kits, then tire of extract. The only step above full-mash is to get those honed recipes out into the market.

Steve’s debut beer is called Bystander – at 4% abv and hopped with Galaxy, it’s a slight re-working of his entry in the IBD competition. That previous iteration may not have won either of the two prizes, but it went home with the ‘people’s choice’ award. When I first spoke with Steve, he’d just been delivering more casks of Bystander to various pubs around the city – including some that were dry-hopped (which practically comes with the territory at Alechemy).

At the time of writing, those casks are starting to appear on the bars around the city – following sightings at Cloisters and the Radical Road, at this moment both the Caley Sample Room and Bow Bar have Bystander pouring from their fonts. Steve’s self-proclaimed mission is to brew massively hopped beer – he describes Bystander as ‘a perfect session ale for hop-heads’. After chatting to him for a while, it’s pretty clear Innocente are going to be all about the hops – which, of course, is no bad thing…

Innocente Brewing Company – Facebook page / Twitter

UPDATE
In April 2013, Steve and family relocated back to their native Canada, so Innocente beers are no longer available in Scotland. Steve’s carrying on though, brewing in Ontario rather than West Lothian…