Most new beers you fall in love with started life as a spreadsheet. Before a single hop hits the water, someone has already worked out the exact colour, strength and bitterness the beer needs to be, down to the decimal point. At Tun Brewing Co., that someone is founder Richard Alston, and his process for turning an idea into a pint is part science, part instinct, and part "let's just see what my mates think."
Here's how a brand new Tun beer actually comes together, from a blank page to a full 2,000-litre tank.
Step One: Pick a Style, Then Read the Rulebook
Every beer starts with a decision: what kind of beer is this going to be? A hazy pale ale? A crisp lager? A rich stout for the colder months?
Once Richard has that starting point, he turns to the Brewers Association style guidelines. Think of these as the rulebook for each beer style, setting out the expected ranges for bitterness, alcohol content and flavour.
These guidelines exist because every beer style carries a set of expectations. Drinkers have a rough idea in their head of what a stout should taste like, or how strong a session IPA should be, even if they've never thought about it in those terms.
It's not about following rules for the sake of it. It's about making sure that when someone orders a pale ale, it actually tastes like one, even with Tun's own spin on it. The guidelines are the foundation. Everything interesting happens on top of them.
Step Two: Go Hunting for Inspiration
With the guidelines as a framework, the fun part begins. Richard looks around for ideas, themes, and interesting twists that could make a beer stand out.
This is where the creative decisions happen. Should this beer lean on classic British hops, or something bright and citrusy? Is there a seasonal angle, maybe a spice, or a specific fruit peel, that could give the beer a bit of character?
Hops alone open up a huge range of directions. A traditional British hop can give a beer that earthy, slightly floral backbone that feels properly old-school. A citrus-forward hop, on the other hand, can push a beer towards grapefruit, mango or pine, giving it a completely different personality despite starting from the same base style.
Then there are the adjuncts, which is just a fancy word for extra ingredients that aren't your standard malt, hops, yeast and water. A festive, Christmassy ale might call for warming spices like cinnamon or clove. A summer beer might get a lift from the hops, lemon peel or a handful of fresh fruit. These small choices are what turn a technically correct beer into one people actually remember and ask for again.
This is also the stage where Richard starts to picture who the beer is for and when they'll be drinking it. A beer built for a summer beer garden needs a different personality to one meant for sipping by a fire in December, even if both technically sit within the same style guidelines.
Step Three: Let the Software Do the Sums
Once Richard has a style and a direction, it's time to get precise. He turns to two pieces of brewing software, Grainfather and RAPT, to lock in the recipe.
These tools work out exactly how much grain is needed, what colour the beer will end up, and the gravity, which is really just a way of measuring the sugar levels in the wort (unfermented beer, essentially). From there, Richard can estimate how strong the finished beer will be, based on how the yeast will ferment those sugars.
It sounds technical, and it is, but this is what separates a beer that's roughly the right idea from one that hits its target every single time. Get the grain quantities slightly wrong and the beer might end up thinner or sweeter than intended. Misjudge the gravity and the alcohol content could miss the mark entirely.
This is the point where a creative idea gets turned into something you could actually hand to a brewer and trust it would come out right. The software doesn't replace Richard's judgement, but it does remove the guesswork, so the only real unknown left is how the beer actually tastes once it's in a glass.
Step Four: Brew It Small, Taste It Often
Here's the part most drinkers never think about. Before any new Tun beer gets anywhere near full production, it's brewed on a tiny scale first.
Richard uses a 30-litre home kit, sometimes called a pilot kit, made by Dark Farm. This is essentially a scaled-down brewery that lets him test a recipe properly before committing to it.
The beer gets tasted, checked for colour, and measured against those original style guidelines. And Richard doesn't do this alone. Friends and family get roped in as tasters, offering honest feedback on whether the beer actually delivers what it promised on paper.
If something's off, whether that's too much bitterness, not enough body, or a hop character that doesn't quite land, the recipe gets adjusted and brewed again. This step can happen more than once. Sometimes several times.
There's something quite lovely about this part of the process. Long before a beer ever reaches a customer, it's already been through a small circle of real people sitting around, comparing notes and being honest about whether it works. No focus group, no marketing spin, just genuine opinions from people who know Richard well enough to tell him if something's not quite right.
It also means every Tun beer has already survived its toughest critics before it gets anywhere near the taproom.
Step Five: Scale It Up for Real
Once a recipe has been through enough rounds of tasting and tweaking that everyone's happy, it's ready to grow up.
The finished recipe gets sent over to Farmyard Brew Co., where it's scaled from that 30-litre test batch up to Tun's full 2,000-litre production kit. That's the moment a homebrew-style experiment officially becomes a Tun Brewing beer.
Scaling up isn't just a case of multiplying every ingredient by the same number either. It takes care and attention to make sure the beer that impressed everyone at 30 litres tastes just as good at over sixty times that size.
Bigger equipment can behave differently to a home kit, and small variables that barely mattered at 30 litres will have a much bigger impact at 2,000. That's part of why the recipe needs to be so well tested and so precisely measured before it ever makes that leap. All that earlier care with the style guidelines, the software calculations and the taste testing is really what makes this final scale-up possible without any nasty surprises.
So How Long Does All This Take?
From that very first idea to a finished beer ready for the taps, the whole process typically takes somewhere between two and five months.
The exact timeline comes down to how many rounds of testing and tweaking are needed. Some recipes come together quickly. Others take a few more attempts before they're exactly right, and Richard would rather take the extra time than release something that isn't quite there yet.
It's a good reminder that the beers lined up on a bar aren't rushed. Every one of them has been through months of small adjustments, taste tests and second guesses before it was ever considered finished. That patience is exactly why each new Tun beer tends to taste like it knows what it's trying to be.
The Short Version
Every new Tun Brewing beer goes through the same journey: choosing a style, checking it against the official guidelines, adding a creative twist, running the numbers through brewing software, testing it small with friends and family as tasters, and finally scaling it up at Farmyard Brew. It's a process that blends genuine craft with real precision, and it's a big part of why each new release feels worth the wait.
Next time you're holding a pint of something new from Tun Brewing, have a think: what would your dream twist on a classic style be?
