About Us

It all started when as a boy my Dad decided to help me out with my homework. Whether it was biology, chemistry, or physics it sure was and is the science of brewing. He started out using Boots home brew kits along with the required paraphernalia. This is how it stayed until my late teens. Human behaviour is partly moulded on a reward basis and I was soon to discover the rewards of brewing, along with failures, which demanded a deeper understanding of what is fundamentally a simple process and been around for centuries.

Soon we moved to all grain brewing with the aid of various sized Burco boilers. Together we were always cautious of spending hard earned money on ready-made solutions and were disciples of the great Heath Robinson and the alcohol assisted process of lateral thinking. They were good times. As the years went by, upscaling was a perfect opportunity to put our minds into achieving our objective of increasing brews from 25 litres into the hundreds. Pumps, pipes, insulated vessels and of course hygiene, hygiene, hygiene. Stainless steel was beyond us at this point and pumps would require electrics, and everything would require “Housing”. Brewing may be science, but history is the repertoire of knowledge. Look no further than The Great Creator of the Universe, Sir Isaac Newton and the great Tower breweries of the Victorians for the answer. Yes……. a Treehouse!

My two daughters did indeed get a treehouse, overengineered with interior scaffolding and of course the all-important height. As they grew their interest in the Treehouse waned in direct proportion to my desire to move in. With lots of research and relocating of acquired items, a brewery using blue food grade plastic barrels emerged and morphed into a hot liquor tun right at the top of the tree via a tap and gravity fed a mash tun which was another blue barrel encased in a wooden case surrounded by wiggly polystyrene chips. The same HLT had sufficient header pressure to drive the sparge arm via the same set up. The kettle was a slightly trickier affair as in order to have sufficient height beneath it to drain into the fermenting vessel and then casks required a rather large hole in the floor with the kettle half upstairs and half downstairs. This was the birth of what is has now become Treehouse Brewery with a brewing capacity of 160 litres. It looked pretty much like this:

During this period, I made a new friend and neighbour Tony who keenly dived in and was equally of the Heath Robinson school and we cobbled things together to make the brewery work. Many hurdles were jumped and problems solved including the only professional help of installing the electrics via a buried armoured cable from the house. The great Derby shop of Potts Electricals helped us design the heating elements, and large quantities of beer helped Tony and I develop some seriously wacky ideas to resolve other issues, particularly in relation to cooling. We brewed like this for a number of years, purely for our personal consumption, but we had ambition. We wanted to brew commercially and share our passion for real ale with like-minded folk. Moving house and saying goodbye to the treehouse gave us the opportunity to make the dream a reality.

We needed help to take us to that next level. Rob joined the team and took us from being keen amateurs to navigating the mire of registering the business, obtaining our licence to brew commercially, HMRC duty, Alcohol Wholesalers registration as well as marketing and social media. What a mine field this was, but finally we did it. Treehouse Brewery Ltd was incorporated on 20th July 2021 and after investing in further equipment and several test recipes, we made our first commercial brew on 23rd March 2022. The rest as they say is history. We have quickly established a loyal following and are delighted to have our beers available in the very best independent ales houses in Derbyshire and surrounding areas. We are immensely proud of our achievement and thank everyone who has helped us along the way. We hope you continue to enjoy our beer as much as we do making it.