MAGIC ROCK PERMANENT TAP
The next permanent tap in our bars will be dedicated to Magic Rock and will launch on 1st June! The West Yorkshire magic mob have been one of our favourite UK brewers for a long time! We can’t wait to pour the magic on the regular at our bars!
We had a wee chat with Magic Rock founder Richard Burhouse recently about cannonballs and desert islands...
Cannonball became a cult classic when it was first released way back when, and it still stands up today! Has the beer changed much since you first started brewing it?
It changed quite a bit initially we changed dry hopping recipe and methodology quite a lot over the first year, but has been pretty consistent ever since. The beer was a homage to the West Coast IPA’s we were so impressed with that placed drinkability on an equal footing with aroma and flavour. We were particular fans of Ballast Point Sculpin which used Simcoe and Amarillo in the dry hop, we added some Centennial to round things out a bit.
How important has your local community in Huddersfield been in the success of Magic Rock?
Our community has been a massive part of things since we moved to our new site in 2015 and opened the Taproom, in the early days we sold most of our beer further afield, craft beer wasn’t as much of a thing back then and I think some people locally were a little suspicious of what we were about!
How has the uk beer scene changed and evolved since you first started brewing in 2011?
Massively! We had no idea that craft beer would become so mainstream. To give you an idea of differences between then and now, Cannonball our 7.5% IPA was the first beer we brewed and at that time many double IPA’s were 6%. We also kegged from the very start which wasn’t at all common back then. When we were planning the brewery I had an old home brewing keg which I’d fill with various breweries cask beer and then force carbonate to see if it tasted like the US IPA’s we were so fond of.
What new Magic Rock beers can we look forward to over the coming months?
We have several collaborations in the pipeline mainly around SeshFest our low abv beer festival so 4.5% and below sours and session IPA’s. I’m increasingly drawn towards beer that you can drink in volume but I’m sure there’ll be one or two bigger beers in there too.
What would be your desert island beer and why?
If I were stuck on a desert island presumably it’d be boiling hot so it would have to be a Pilsner of some sort, the ultimate warm weather session beer. So something crisp, cold and defined
which I could drink a lot of like a Camden or Augusteiner Helles. Failing that, I drink about three times as much of our Session IPA, Saucery as anything else these days so that’d go down well!
Our permanent Magic Rock tap launches 1st June in six°north bars.