‘You can never start them too young’ is an often quoted adage but perhaps with beer this is probably not the best piece of advice. However, my children’s scout group does ask parents to come in and give a talk on what they do for a living.

Hmm, but what to do when you make beer?

We do sell beer to scout leaders when they’re off duty, to be fair, but not the scouts themselves.

So, I decided to approach this from a cereal point of view. It’s a long time since I studied Malting and Brewing at university but cereals were a big part of it. It’s time to dust off those notes.

Ask your average man in the street what he knows about cereals and you may get the answer ‘I

prefer corn flakes’ but the variety of cereals available for brewing beer is quite large from the more familiar barley, wheat, rice, maize, rye and oats to the more outlandish sorghum and millet. The way those grains are modified with different kilning and roasting regimes gives us many different colours and flavours at our fingertips.

A shame then when so many brewers have gone down the route of over hopping to get ever more and more extreme flavours and bitterness in their beers, throwing all sense of balance and proportion out of the window. Don’t get me wrong I like a hoppy beer too (we produce a couple ourselves) but increasingly it seems that some breweries are becoming one trick ponies and don’t know what to move onto next except to try and produce the ultimate bitter. Some try and add other ingredients to their beers. Some work and some maybe don’t.

Our Bandwagon range hopes to show not just what you can do with hops but also the different types of cereals, malted and un-malted. Each type of malt gives its own particular flavours, bread, caramelised sugars, toffee, brown sugar, molasses, burnt sugar, biscuit, roasted and many more (you get the idea).

All the different cereals can be malted (or not) and kilned and/or roasted in many ways to produce pale ale, amber, brown, crystal, chocolate, black malts and everything in-between.

Our Bandwagon beers are our take on old fashioned ales, existing beer styles or creations of our own. Each run is limited quantities so blink and you’ll miss them on the bar but as this brand also goes into can, you’ll get more chances to taste them. Either way you can be sure of the quality of all our products.

Please do give us feedback on our products whether you like them or not and look out for those

more subtle notes that we try to impart in our beers be it cereal, hop or something slightly different.

Andy Burrows.

Hadrian Border Brewery has been producing beer at its best since 1994. With over 25 years of experience and knowledge in brewing, Hadrian Border now operates from its SALSA accredited 40 barrel plant in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne and is known all over the North-East for its fine ales including – Tyneside Blonde, Farne Island, Grainger Ale and Ouseburn Porter. To learn more about Hadrian Border Brewery, visit www.hadrian-border-brewery.co.uk.