Borrowed Parts Brew Co

Stir To Action's annual Playground for the New Economy Festival is happening July 12-14 and we are super excited because we will be in the beautiful grounds of Stir's Selgars Mill touching grass (as the kids say) and serving our pints throughout. Tickets are still available at stirtoaction.com/festival

Borrowed Parts Brew Co updated their business hours.

We had an absolute blast at Kernow Transformed running the bar! The feedback was music to our ears, with attendees appreciating a refreshing but full-of-flavour sessionable ale. We also bought some of our casks and in time honoured tradition they had the wet towel treatment to keep them chilled. It was great to hear how much people appreciated a full bodied table beer, with Op Shop being 3.5%. Kernow bys vyken!

📷 Jack Witek

[Image Description: festival attendees holding up festival cups of beer, musicians playing on stage and lots of Cornish flags]

If you came to our launch parties, you may have taken away one of these lovely hand printed coasters. They were manufactured by Alan Qualtrough, a Plymouth based typographer and designer who runs Kiss & Bite Letterpress, featuring design work by Chris Mayoh of Mutant Creative.

We love process and craft at Borrowed Parts, and so over to Alan to explain how he made them.

‘’The coasters were hand-printed by letterpress, which provides an often rough hand-made texture. Typically, a lot of moveable type would be used, but this time thermo-plastic printing plates were made from a digital file produced by Mutant.

The coasters were hand printed on a small Adana Press, made around the 1950’s. It consists of a platen on which the coaster is placed, rollers, and an inking disk that ink the plate. Pulling down with force causes the coasters to be pressed against the printing plate.

To get the printing plate, the design was laid on a light-sensitive thermo-plastic plate and exposed to UV light, which caused the areas to be printed to harden. The undeveloped areas were washed away with water leaving sharply formed letters and artwork ready to be printed.

Unfortunately, the Adana broke down - Broken Parts, you might say. We switched to using a much larger cylinder press, also made in the 1950’s. But this has a grip feed that couldn't deal with the thickness of the coasters. So we had to hand ink the plates and then balance the coasters on top of the plate before rolling over them with the large printing cylinder, leaving a few looking artfully skew-whiff.’’

Cheers Alan. We like the combination of old and new methods, and look forward to experimenting with other designs and products in the future.

📸 coasters Laura Harris, 📸 Alan's studio Jack Witek

[Image Identification: several of the coasters laid on a table, Alan's studio and various printing tools and letterheads]

We thought it was time we said something about the beer eh!

🍻 Other Horizons 🍻

For our flagship launch beer, we set out to make a pale ale that would be crushable, aromatic and refreshing. A lower ABV beer full of flavour and body. And to do so on a tight budget, using a brewing system that was designed and installed to make small batches of cask ale. Thus was born Other Horizons, our 4.2% punchy pale ale.

On the ‘hot side’ for bittering, we use UK grown Chinook and Cascade, two North American craft staples grown under the grey pall of English skies. This brings spicy and earthy tea-like qualities. On the ‘cold side’, we dry hop using Azacca and Columbus, which gives a bright herbal and citrusy balance.

🍻 Op Shop 🍻

Nearing our launch window, we lucked into a pile of Nelson Sauvin leaf hop that the owner needed rid of. Nelson Sauvin is a famed variety grown in New Zealand’s hop and wine district and coveted by craft brewers. We weren’t intending to dive into real ale at this point, but knew if or when we did, we wanted to make something a little different.

Adapting our existing malt base and using a West Coast style yeast, we developed a dry, grapefruity 3.5% table beer. A byproduct of brewing on the system we have is that any cask ale we make will always be hazy, which gives the beer a glowing yellow colour. And like all our recipes, it is vegan.

In Australia and New Zealand, second-hand shops are called op shops, short for opportunity shops. This term was coined by a former Melbourne showgirl in the 1920’s named Lady Amelia ‘’Millie’’ Tallis, who wanted such outlets to be treated with the dignity they deserved.

🍻🍻🍻🍻

So there you have it, our launch beers! We feel they nicely live up to our brewery’s moniker of Borrowed Parts.

📸 Laura Harris

Bonus launch week content: we've been prepping for Kernow Transformed next week where we are running the bar, our first big outing, and we've been aided by the brilliant Borrow Don't Buy - Plymouth's Library of Things. They're centrally located library of all sorts of useful things - good for the environment and your wallet. Whilst browing their inventory we found a Fujifilm Instax Mini 8 which takes 'Polaroid' style instant exposures, and we simply had to nab it. [Image Description: Borrowed Parts Brew Co team enjoying beers at Minerva Cafe during launch takeover event and making friends]

What a week! We were honoured and thrilled to see so many of you for our launch takeovers at Minerva Cafe and Clothing. It's been a long and winding slog to get here, full of uncertainty, so finally being able to share a pint (that we brewed ourselves and everything) with friends, partners and family has been just what we needed. And we were delighted to make some wonderful new friends as well. Thank you all for making time to mark this milestone with us, and for all the warm and kind feedback. Shout-out to Laura Harris for the pics. Salut! Geddon! 🍻💖 [Image Description: images of Minerva Cafe and attendees trying our beers and hanging out on launch night]

BIG thank you to the wonderful Dave and Tyrell at Minerva Cafe and Clothing for hosting our little private launch the other week, the perfect venue for it. We'll be dropping some photos soon, and we'll be doing it all over again this Friday 27th from 18:00 - tomorrow! Invite your mates. Pic: Jack Witek [Image Description: Dave and Tyrell posing beneath a neon sign spelling Minerva]

Our beers are brewed using the former teaching brewery housed in City College Plymouth, which we have been dusting off and putting to work again after several years of dormancy.

As part of our developing educational partnership with the College as we hone our own skills and develop our products as a brewery team, we have been able to offer students at the College paid work experience.

For our launch keg batch we had the wonderful help of Lily and Qwyn who spent the entire brew day with us, shovelling grain, weighing hops and patiently wrangling the equipment.

For their efforts we also paid them a Real Living Wage minimum day rate, which we felt was only fair and is something we will continue to provide to any students receiving work experience from us.

''I’ve always said great partners and meaningful collaboration will achieve the best outcome.'' - Mark Trewin, Director of Creative, Digital & Science Industries, City College Plymouth

A big thank you to Vacancy Atlas for having us serve at their launch on Friday night. It was slightly nerve wracking to be serving our pale ale Other Horizons for the first time, but we couldn't have asked for a more lovely crowd. It's so exciting to see Vacancy break new ground in the city!

Hello! We are Borrowed Parts Brew Co, Plymouth's newest and only Cooperative Brewery. There's a lot we want to say and plenty of news to bring you in the coming weeks, so stay tuned here, visit our website and sign-up to our news letter, follow us on Instagram or drop us a message at [email protected] 📧

We look forward to serving you at an event soon! 🍻

www.borrowedpartsbrew.co

Borrowed Parts We are Borrowed Parts Brew Co, the only cooperative brewery in Plymouth, England. Housed in the grounds of City College Plymouth, we’re brewing on a training system installed at the turn of the millennium. Partnered with the College, we have brought the facility out of a long dormancy and are deve...

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