The Making Of Roll With It

Like most great things in the modern world, this collaboration all started with an Instagram DM. We noticed that Bin Day Brewing Co-Founders Robbie Knox and Mike Millar both followed us on social media and, having followed their journey into the craft beer world, we thought it would be a missed opportunity not to reach out. Craft beer is a fun industry and, although we pride ourselves on creating top quality beers, it is always important to inject a splash of excitement into each project. Well this project had a little more than a splash!

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Robbie Knox, he is a YouTuber, Twitcher, Podcaster, Ex Soccer AMer and, most recently, beer maker! A social media personality and an all round great guy. And then there’s Mike. He runs the mailing list. Together they formed Bin Day Brewing: The world's first Brewery for the Youtube community. Having collaborated with breweries such as S43, Docks and Gypsy Hill, Bin Day Brewing wanted a new challenge and another chapter in their story. This is where we came in.

A bunch of ideas were thrown around that pair the two brands quite nicely. We discussed creating a fruity sour using waste fruit (pairing our sour beer making experiences with the ‘bin day’ theme). We discussed the opportunity to forage for ingredients (merging our Flavour By Nature tagline with Robbie Knox’s love for the outdoors). However, one idea stood out above any others.

In early 2022, Robbie released a video called “Eating an AWARD WINNING Sausage Roll.” This video certainly piqued the interest of the Youtube community, collating over 100,000 views and thousands of likes, turning into one of Robbie’s most successful videos. The fascination with one of Britain's favourite lunch-time snacks is nothing new. From number one Christmas hits to the infamous Greggs Vegan roll, the sausage roll has been a hot topic for quite some time, and we wanted in on that action! 

We are consistently analysing our beers and how they pair with different foods. Beer has a unique effect on food, much like wine and cheese, the pairing between beverage and food is important. We take the flavours, bitterness, sourness and mouthfeel of each beer to create the perfect beer-food pairing. We have done this for a variety of dishes, however, we (and no other brewery) have never created a beer specifically to pair with sausage rolls. Well we have now! Introducing Roll With It! A Hot-Rock Apple Pale, designed to pair with the godly sausage roll! 

Once we had decided the purpose of this beer, our first task was to identify what beer taste paired nicely with elements of sausage rolls. We sent a crate of different beers to Mike and Robbie and jumped on a call. We spent over an hour tasting the beers and eating different styles of sausage rolls. After much debate, we whittled it down to two of our beers: Wild IPA and Zintuki. We were all surprised to find that a sour beer like Zintuki complimented the flavours of sausage rolls, until it was pointed out that pork and apple is a very common match. We knew that we needed to explore the apple route.

Our core celebration beer Ninkasi uses local Somerset apple juice, and we thought this was something we wanted to incorporate in our collab beer. We wanted this beer to be sessionable, crisp, refreshing and slightly sour (but not as sour as Zintuki). Brett and James got to work concocting a unique recipe.

We have always taken inspiration from every type of brewing method and, with this project, we were given the opportunity to try something we had never done before. The medieval practice of using heated up rocks to boil the mash! Why did we do this? Mainly because we wanted to, but also because we were curious about the tastes it would produce. We brew at a large scale, so it would be impossible to brew the entire batch using this technique. Instead, we created a mini-mash in an oak barrel that we later added to a larger mash. The medieval ‘stein-style’ mash would be used as the secret ingredient. The mini-mash added a lot more character than we first expected. The 500 degree rocks caramelized the malt and created a smoky tone the the final product. We blended the beer with apple juice and used Philly Sour yeast to add a sour twang. 

The brew day with Mike and Robbie was awesome. We got to try something new and exciting whilst keeping to our passion of pairing beers with food. Roll With It is a Medieval Hot-Rock Apple Pale that does exactly what is says on the can: pairs perfectly with a sausage roll!