It's always interesting to see beers you've been involved with in the wild. So the rise of Jubel is something I've been keeping an eye on. I had a very minor role in the beer right at that start, back when I was working at the now sadly closed Campden BRI brewing site in Nutfield.
 |
| Draft Jubel: it's bigger than Punk IPA you know |
We occasionally got people wanting to launch a drink brand getting in touch, I suspect after finding us through google. We had a pilot brewery there, along with extensive laboratory facilities and a sensory department, so were well set up for New Product Development. Some of the enquiries were non-starters, but I always invited people down to discuss them, as talking to people about brewing is easy and enjoyable work, and you'd get a buffet lunch laid on if you had visitors.
The people behind Jubel were a couple of posh boys who'd liked a peach flavoured beer they'd drunk on a skiing holiday, and wanted to launch something similar over here. We discussed how this might be done, and how we could help, and off they went.
Slightly unusually, they later asked if they could come back to discuss some more things. I didn't see what else could be added with another chat, but free sandwiches are free sandwiches, so I arranged another meeting. I think only one of them came this time, and as I'd suspected I was blatantly being used as a unpaid consultant. I was a busy man, so much as I like burbling on about beer I didn't feel I could justify any more of this. I proposed doing a trial brew for them, and mentioned that you can get innovation vouchers that mean the government pays for your research. I even filled the forms in for them. Sure enough, we got accepted, but then we hit the catch. You have to pay the money up front and then claim it back.
There's only a month to pay too, so it was a bit irritating when it all went quiet from Jubel at that point. I tried chasing them up but got no response and the voucher expired. This made it more than a bit irritating when I got an email from them a few months later asking if they could visit again as they had more questions. "You can sod off" I thought as I hit delete. That was the last contact I had with Jubel, and so forever gone was my chance to claim I was the first person to brew Britain's fourth biggest selling draught craft beer.
I believe they got brewing trials done at Nottingham, and it was produced for a while at Hepworths, the brewery I'd recommended. I did end up working at Hepworths myself later, but Jubel had moved on by then.
