Other Monkey Brewing has eyes set on taking over Colchester

Some do it almost at the first time of asking.

Some people wouldn’t fancy going to work in the small, but temperature-controlled, room off the popular Gin bar downstairs in Three Wise Monkeys.

Some people live for it.

Which brings me neatly to Aidan Kerins and Jack Snell.

The pair have headed up the increasingly popular Other Monkey Brewing, based in the basement of the well-known High Street bar, since March 2017.

And the pair are certainly brewing up a storm.

Last month, the brewery - at its first real shot at it - was named in the coveted Camra Good Beer Guide.

And the good news kept coming when its Vanilla Latte Stout took top honours in the Colchester and North East Essex Camra awards.

Job well done. But the pair aren’t stopping there.

In the last 18 months, they’ve concocted 148 brews, which have been widely welcomed by the bar’s customers.

By far the most well-known is flagship IPA, which is now a staple on the bar in Three Wise Monkeys, as well as sister bars V Bar and Twisters.

But added to that are new favourites such as the mango and pineapple milkshake IPA, the coffee IPA, the award-winning stout, a strawberry-infused beer, a new amber beer on tap for the first time this week and a speciality brew to coincide with Oktoberfest. There are more.

Neither Jack, 24, or Aiden, 20, had a huge amount of experience in the brewing world.

While Aiden had attempted a few home brews, having developed a taste for beer while working behind the bar at the Church Street Tavern and at Three Wise Monkeys, Jack has a self-confessed guilty pleasure for standard lager - but he fancied a challenge.

Jack said: “Tommo [owner Paul Tonkinson] just came to me one day and said: ‘Do you fancy brewing some beer?’

“I said: ‘Yeah,’ and it kind of took off from there.”

Aiden added: “We both just put or heads down and tried to read as much as we possibly could on brewing.”

The pair were also sent on a brewing course, in Sunderland, which enlightened them further on what has now become their craft.

The first beer, the IPA, followed and by and large the pair were happy.

It went on at the bar without a name initially and had just a question mark on the chalkboard, something which the duo now think fed customers’ curiosity.

It sold out in one night than they thought so they knew they were onto a winner.

Aiden said: “We knew then we had to start brewing a lot more of it.”

Jack added: “To be fair, we are proud of that one but we’ve tweaked it a few times since we first did it - not because we needed to change it but we needed to perfect it.”

He added: “I think the thing you have got to bear in mind is that you’re never going to brew a beer which hasn’t already been done; they’ve all been done before at some level of brewing.

“All you can do is build on things and put your own twists on things.”

This is true. But it hasn’t stopped an explosion in microbreweries in the UK over the last five-to-ten years.

The other beautiful thing, the pair say, is that they are measuring their beer against some of the best in the business.

With about 20 beers on tap at the Three Wise Monkeys at any one time - including some of the most coveted around - customers certainly have a choice.

And increasingly they’re choosing Other Monkey Brewing beers.

Business manager Ben Howard added: “I think choice is really important. There will be some bars you go into and the choice is limited and people will generally go for what they know they like.

“But it’s such a wide choice here, the boys are having to contend with some really popular beers even in their own bar.”

He also admitted they don’t tend to shout too loudly about their products. But that will soon change.

Next year, Three Wise Monkeys will expand into the former Jacks store.

Work is still being carried out by Colchester Council, which owns the building, to bring it up to standard before its new occupiers can fit it out the way they want to.

Under the initial plans, that will become home to the brewery as well as tasting rooms - which are becoming increasingly important for breweries of any size.

It means customers will physically be able to see the beer being brewed and they’ll start to hold ‘meet the brewers’ evenings which will see the pair face a tasting audience and answer questions - again, something which is becoming the norm in breweries around the world.

Further down the line, the beer will also be bottled and, hopefully, canned, so people can take Jack and Aiden’s wares home.

The other big difference will be upscaling the kit; so they’ll be able to brew more than they ever have done before - up to 20 kegs at a time in fact.

And for beer geeks (like me) that’s exciting.

In the longer term, there is no reason their beer won’t begin to appear in other bars around the town.

Aiden added: “If you look at what the Odd One Out is doing since it was taken over by Colchester Brewery, that gives it a great platform to sell their own beer but they still have other beers there too.

“In the same way, we’ve got theirs on tap here so there’s no reason people wouldn’t walk into other bars around the town and see Other Monkey Brewing at some point.”

For now, the best place to get their beer is probably the ground floor of Three Wise Monkeys - about 25 metres away from where it’s brewed.

And it’s hard to beat that.