Dave Brown of Lowtide Brewing
LOWTIDE BREWING CO HAVE BROUGHT SOMETHING DELICIOUSLY DIFFERENT TO THE WORLD OF ALCOHOL FREE CRAFT BEER. FOUNDER DAVE BROWN ANSWERS OUR QUESTIONS.
Who and what’s behind Lowtide?
Lowtide Brewing Co was founded by my cousin Rob and me. We were chatting at a family gathering a few years back over a couple of alcohol free beers, and we got onto the topic of how much we love craft beer. We shared the sentiment that, however delicious it may be, craft beer was increasingly incompatible with our goals to live healthy lifestyles, especially as we were getting older and ready to start families of our own. After trying our hand at distributing AF beer online, we realised we were better suited to start our own brewery, as that’s where the passion really came from. Now we’re in our second full (official) month of trading as Lowtide, and we’re absolutely loving it. We put so much time and effort into each beer we create, from the recipes to the names and artwork. It’s been great fun so far and we are both massively looking forward to continuing our journey to create great tasting AF beer!
Your heart-sink moment so far?
That’s a tough one – we can think of several. A standout moment to us was when we thought we had nailed the recipe for our first beer, DIPA Toe In, but were in fact still very far away. After months of development, we’d got our first 1,000 cans brewed and labelled, and we were ready to take the world by storm. Unfortunately, the beer just wasn’t ready yet. We tasted it and although we wanted to be optimistic, the feedback we got from our initial taste tests was disappointing. It was tough to admit we needed to go back into development after what felt like such a long process, but we had to come to terms with it and dump the rest of the brew to preserve a sense of dignity. It took us longer to get the beer out, but looking back we’re so glad we took the extra time.