The technical director and co-founder of one of the UK’s best breweries, Brian Dickson’s journey in beer has taken in Huddersfield, Kent, Leeds and more. Here’s how this excellent, much-loved brewer made his way in the world of beer and brewing.

Brewing is something of a family trade. My Dad worked 40 years in the industry straight out of Heriot-Watt and joining him at Heineken Tadcaster might have been seen as a sensible career choice. Even getting into micro brewing took the more unusual route of volunteering in commercial breweries before getting into homebrewing. However, as a teenager my passion was always for the creative subjects and so off to Huddersfield I headed to study Music. 

I wasn’t disinterested in beer, always keen to try the occasional rarer brand that Dad would bring home from the company shop and more likely to order the most premium-looking lager from the student bar than a Carling. But two moments stand out as starting me on ‘good beer’.

First, the pub where as a 17/18-year-old I washed pots and peeled potatoes had Deuchars IPA on as a guest cask and as an Edinburgh bairn, I felt duty bound to drink it. Second: myself and two friends regularly lurked in the corner of a Sam Smith’s pub, 18 going on 80 putting the world to rights over our regular round of two pints of bitter and a pint of lager. One day that round came back as three pints of bitter and I was told “drink it, you’ll enjoy it”. They were right.

Like any typical student, by second year money was tight and I needed to find a job. Coincidentally, a mate and I were also choosing to spend more time in the numerous real ale pubs of Huddersfield than any of the usual student haunts.

There was one we had heard about but had as yet to venture outside the ring road to visit – The Grove. A dozen casks pouring, a world tour of a bottled beer selection and a daunting array of unpronounceable European spirits behind the bar, all soundtracked by a lively Irish session in the snug.

We sat at the bar, worked through the cask line up and on the encouragement of the barman I wandered back up the next day with my CV. After hearing nothing for weeks, I received a phone call from Ian the landlord and a couple of days later I was behind the bar like a rabbit in the headlights. 

I got through my undergraduate degree, killed a year and went back to do a masters, still unsure on what I was going to do with. All this time working at the Grove as US craft beers landed in the UK and inspired dozens of exciting new breweries.

To this day, Odell IPA is a desert island beer, while memories of those first tries of beers from the likes of Dogfish Head, Stone, Anchor and Goose Island are still with me. Ian never did things in an orthodox manner, with permanent lines for beers such as Tripel Karmeliet, Anchor Liberty and Schlenkerla Marzen baffling regulars while on cask we had a permanent Thornbridge Jaipur line, a couple of years before endorsement by Oz Clarke and James May sent demand through the roof.

Brewdog beers arrived and blew our minds, followed by the likes of Buxton, Kernel and of course Magic Rock just a mile or so away from the pub and who’s launch party we hosted. I was getting a say on what beers we’d order by this time, and as Ian would happily hire a van and travel across the country to load up on the newest breweries from different regions, I got to source the very best of the UK. 

New Year’s Eve into 2011 was to be the night that finally set me on a course to brewing. We raided the cellar well into the early hours (I recall 3 bottle of Mikkeller Black being opened…) and at some point, the conversation meandered to my plans on finishing my masters that coming summer. 

My plans? None. Nada. I’d had months of pub regulars asking why I wasn’t following a career in beer but I was still unsure. Ian comes up with the idea of me being ‘The UK Mikkeller’ – travel around learning to brew and putting together weird and wonderful collaborations that we’d bring back to sell through the pub. 10 months later I’m in a repurposed shipping container washing casks out the front of Eddie Gadd’s Ramsgate brewery in Kent. 

The commissioning engineer took one look at my initial attempts with some John Guest fittings and promptly left. It took six brews scratching our heads as to why we couldn’t cool the wort below 35c before we realised, we’d plumbed the heat exchanger in wrong (In my defence, those pipework schematics had gone from me, to my Dad, to a Heineken colleague, to the contractors and no-one had noticed!).

Brian Dickson, Northern Monk

Eddie rarely let his beers, his tributes to the glory of the humble East Kent Golding, outside of the county yet somehow we’d been getting his beers up north for years, thanks to Ian’s van excursions.  He’d become a friend to us, and he bravely took me in for a few months to show me the ropes.

From there, he set me up with his buddy Mark Tranter and I spent a few weeks at Dark Star, then back north to get creative with Toby at Red Willow. I even got into the labs at Thwaites to get a sense of how a bigger brewery operated. I also arranged dozens of brew days with whoever would put up with me for the day, including the likes of Jay at Quantum (now of Cloudwater) and Rob at Blackjack who became regular, patient brewing partners.

We created the slightly cringe brand ‘Bitches Brewing’ (after too many pints in Newcastle) as a nod to both my jazz background and to me digging out everyone’s mash tuns. I brewed half a dozen or so fun beers for the pub and whoever else would take them. 

At this point a homebrew kit finally joins the story. I did around 9 months of travelling then largely settled into studying a lot of brewing textbooks, with odd brew days and collaborations predominantly around the North. I started working more shifts back behind the bar and eventually ended up managing the pub.

As much as I loved the place, this wasn’t scratching the itch and so after talking about it for an age I teamed up with a friend, an equally nerdy colleague, and got into the homebrewing game. 

Chris lived in what I recall being a converted Sunday school with a large kitchen to brew up chaos in and lots of warm and cold spaces for fermentation and conditioning. He was much more of an engineer than me and did the bulk of the equipment build, converting his Mum’s cool box into a mash tun and an old tea urn I rescued from going in the bin into our kettle. I downloaded Beersmith and set about assembling recipes.

Being the ‘experienced’ one, I proposed a professional approach of starting off by brewing a few simple pales to learn the efficiency of our setup, and our first brew was a simple Chinook and Centennial pale ale. This was followed by a Pumpkin Ale and a Raspberry Stout.

Well, I tried… Our signature was what we christened our ‘Emergency IPA’. We’d fill the mash tun, empty the freezer of all the part bags of hops we’d accumulated and brew the biggest IPA we could. One malt miller order later and the freezer would be quickly refilled. 

We brewed regularly for about a year but things gradually fizzled out. It’s mid-2013, approaching 2 years since getting into brewing and not much is happening with the Bitches Brewing side of things either. Meanwhile, another new brewery appeared – Northern Monk. I saw the advert calling for a brewer to join Northern Monk full time, to go on the journey of finding a site, sourcing equipment and try brew some world class beer.

I was fiercely loyal to the Grove given the influence and support I’d had, I was absolutely torn but the frustration and eagerness to be brewing eventually won out. Even then I needed a few strong IPAs at Leeds International Beer Festival to get the courage, find Russ and declare interest. A sketchy Skype interview later (as Russ went for one last adventure in India before the brewery took over) and I was on board. 

This was September but I didn’t go full time until early 2014. I continued at the Grove until February, working on small bits of brewery planning on the side. Much of this took the form of showing up at ‘meet the brewer’ events around the North and chewing the ears off those I considered my brewing idols.

Thankfully the likes of Colin Stronge and Dominic Driscoll had endless patience with this overly enthusiastic upstart and his many questions. When we finally found a site with the character we were looking for (The Old Flax Store), I was at least prepared with a list of recommended kit manufacturers to talk to and, in my head at least, a rough idea what I was doing. 

Over the next 6 months layouts were drafted and a kit was ordered, a 10bbl 2 vessel system from Malrex (chiefly because they’d done the likes of Magic Rock and Kernel). Work to gut and prepare the 130-year-old exterior listed building to be a brewery progressed steadily, despite our attempts to ‘help’. Temporary HQ was Russ’ Mum’s dining room and I borrowed the homebrew equipment from Chris so I could trial more recipes in the kitchen of the shared house I called home.

Luckily the owner of the house loved his ale! A few of these recipes did get scaled up including: True North a cask pale ale; a rework of New World IPA (Monk’s first brew) and Dark Arches, a black IPA which I’ve shared here. Many will likely already know my love of the oxymoronic style. I had the luck of getting to work with James Kemp, formerly of Buxton and Thornbridge, as consultant on our earliest recipes.

Among the many beers JK had been involved in, where some of the OG UK Black IPA – Black Rocks, Imperial Black, Raven… we’d work on a fair few more together over the years. 

The kit was delivered early June 2014, and we finally got brewing in August. It’ll be of no surprise to hear that plenty didn’t go smoothly in the beginning. I’d ordered a glycol chiller but hadn’t considered how I was plumbing this to the fermenters.

The commissioning engineer took one look at my initial attempts with some John Guest fittings and promptly left. It took 6 brews scratching our heads as to why we couldn’t cool the wort below 35c before we realised, we’d plumbed the heat exchanger in wrong (In my defence, those pipework schematics had gone from me, to my Dad, to a Heineken colleague, to the contractors and no-one had noticed!).

Another benefit to this big brewery ‘in’ was being able to get our first 4 beers analysed before release. This backfired slightly when I got results back that were so bad I was ready to quit an hour before our launch event (pint of butterscotch anyone?). I once got distracted (who, me?) dumping out dry hops from the cone and accidentally drained the entire tank. Rookie move. 

But I guess we got it together. Me solo brewing and packing, while Russ drove around delivering out of the back of a Renault estate. 18 months in we picked up a World Beer Cup medal for our session IPA Eternal, the first English brewery to do so in an American IPA category.

An achievement that I’m still so proud of to this day. We outgrew the 10bbl kit three years in (although it’s still regularly used today) and took on a proper industrial site to house a two-vessel 50HL system, which also got upgraded to a five-vessel automated brewhouse in 2021. From a startup of two (and a dog) we now have a team of over 100 and six taprooms (and many dogs). 

I often think back to the version of me that had no interested in working in a huge brewery and wanted anything but a desk job and yet here I am, kind of! It’s too many years since I last brewed, and writing this is another reminder to myself to find time to jump back on the Old Flax Store kit every now and then.

It’s also a reminder of why I got drawn in to beer in the first place, in those heady circa 2010 days where everything seemed new and exciting and it’s always reinvigorating when I encounter someone either in a bar or at a festival or even joining our team at Monk who reminds me of me, with an infectious enthusiasm for beer and brewing. 

Click here to make Brian’s excellent Black IPA – Dark Arches.

Photos: Supplied and used with permission by Northern Monk