The craft beer industry is a funny old thing. Each brewer and drinker seems to think that there is only one way to make that one type of beer that’s the only real beer. If you’re doing something different – be it investment, ingredients, brewing or marketing – then that just ain’t beer. However, Jubel – and its growing fans – would beg to differ. TBJ reports. Images: Max White.
The way Jesse Wilson, co-founder of Jubel, tells the story, it happened like this.
During his final year in university he was in the French Alps on a skiing holiday with friends, when he made two discoveries at an Alpine bar. The first was a song the bar used to close out the afternoon. Called ‘Jubel’, the name translates to “a feeling of extreme joy.” The second discovery – in the same bar – was demi-pêche. This is abeer cocktail with peach; either from fresh peaches, puree, concentrate or extract, depending on the establishment and time of year.
“Wow!” screamed his taste buds.
Back in England, he joined Mars Chocolate on their graduate scheme. But Wilson couldn’t get the craving for the peach beer out of his mind, along with the idea of creating something that would give people the same feeling of joy he had in the Alps, especially after having a couple of pints of demi-pêche at altitude.
Work-time went to the chocolate giant; spare-time went to beer. Four years later, after learning how to brew, raising money, and after testing many, many attempts on family, friends, and strangers – some of whom must of ran the other way when they saw him approaching with his latest batch – Jubel’s peach infused beer was ready to launch in April 2018.
From the beginning, Jubel knew that it was brewing a new type of beer for the UK market, one that would not be for traditionalists or those craft beer fans who craved hop-driven beer. By going with a lager, it would make Jubel’s beers more accessible.
“Initially we were really just brewing the style of beer we wanted to drink, something that you could session on and that was really refreshing – the type of beer you’d want to take to a BBQ or a day at the beach. The more we shared it round family and friends, the more it seemed 25 to 35-year-olds took most naturally to our beers,” says Wilson.
“Instead of starting out home brewing, we initially brewed on a small 100L kit in a microbrewery, and had further help fine-tuning the beer from Roger Ryman at St Austell Brewery. After we brewed a few consistent batches, we jumped fairly swiftly to taking the beer to music and beer festivals to see whether people wanted to drink it, and after selling out each time we fully committed to it as a job.”
It was during one of the first times at a festival that Wilson was given a scare.
The problem, as any brewer can tell you, is getting people to try your beer to see if it will be a hit or a miss. If you’re doing something that is way beyond the norm, your problem is doubled or tripled. So what to do to get maximum exposure? It was decided to bring Jubel to one of the UK’s largest outdoor concerts.
Wilson says that they realised they needed honest opinions. But, as he found out, there can be too much honesty. After sleeping in the mud for a couple of days, people tend to speak with no filter.
One sampler took a sip and said: “You must have the worst job in the world trying to flog this stuff.”
At that point, Wilson must have felt his dream crashing down around him. But, luckily for Wilson and Jubel fans, that person was in a very small minority. Five thousand bottles were sold and by far the overall consensuses was: “This is really good.”
“I think it’s really good to get the raw reaction from people to see whether you’ve got a goer on your hands or not, and who your consumer is. It’s not very helpful to get approving nods from people if they actually don’t like it,” he says.
“Once we had been to a handful of music and beer festivals and seen the beer sell out consistently, we knew we had a product that people wanted to drink,” says Wilson. “They would say things like ‘this is as refreshing as a cider but I can drink it all day and I can usually only have one cider’. So we knew Jubel was unique and it gave us the confidence to jump in full-time.”
Going contract
Every brewer wants their own brewery, but many times having a contract brewer makes much more sense, if for no other reason less money has to be invested in the project and you can often times then get your dream in a bottle faster. However, finding the right contract brewer who has the equipment, expertise, time and space to do your beer justice can be a challenge to find.
“After over a hundred disappointing conversations with potential contract brewers we definitely considered setting up our own brewery. Jubel is a fairly complex brewing process because the product is so unique, so I spoke to over 100 contract brewers and would hold my breath when it got to the stage of talking through the brew specification,” says Wilson.
“Capital was a real constraint to building a brewery that was capable of brewing a light lager consistently so we stuck with the contract brewing route and fortunately were able to partner with St Austell Brewery. We were very lucky with timings as St Austell Brewery were opening Hare Brewery in Bath in Spring 2018 so we partnered with them to brew Jubel; initially on the pilot plant in St Austell in Cornwall, and then commercially at Hare Brewery in Bath.”
Branding and category
If a writer is doing something very different in a novel, a problem they will face is where the book will be placed on a bookstore’s bookshelf or website’s category list. If you combine something like science fiction with a detective story, you could find yourself not placed at all. The same can go for a unique beer.
In the case of Jubel, without giving it much thought a store might consider it a lager, a craft beer, a flavoured cider, an alcopop or even a shandy.
“Jubel is a very unique style of beer and we did have some lengthy chats about category positioning. Craft beer as a category is often championed by hop-forward IPAs, APAs and Pale Ales, so we were unsure whether that was the right positioning for us,” says Wilson.
“But we went right back to the initial drive behind craft beer, which was a push for beers with real flavour, offering something different and more interesting to drink than the bland mass-market beers. In that sense we felt craft beer is exactly where we sit.”
Fairly soon into commercial production, Jubel did a step backwards and decided to do a major overhaul of the design.
“We didn’t feel our initial brand identity was a strong enough reflection of our mission to pioneer a new style of beer and disrupt the category. We set Pearlfisher [creative design and branding company] the brief and they came up with the cut through concept that reflected our ambition to cut through the beer market with a distinctive offering, and this worked visually on-pack across the range.
The taste
Over the years peach flavouring in beer and other alcoholic drinks has had some utter failures. Some seem unsure what they were, ranging from an adult fruit juice to an alcopop drink for older teens to something highlighting what a chemical lab can create. One of the strangest has been Michelob’s ‘Ultra Dragon Fruit Peach Beer’, which is the butt of jokes on TV’s ‘Family Guy’.
That said, there have been some definite success stories. With Jubel’s Peach, in some ways it is easier to define what it isn’t in comparison with Beavertown’s Peacher Man and Lindeman’s Pecheresse.
“Peacher Man is a witbier so it hazy, heavier bodied and about three times the IBU of Jubel. Pecheresse is a lambic so it is very tart, verging on a sour. Jubel is a light-bodied, crisp lager that is brewed to deliver the refreshment of a fruit cider with the dry sessionability of a lager,” says Wilson. “The fruit [taste] in Jubel is prominent and refreshing, and our lager is brewed to a low IBU and zero PG to be very dry and sessionable. It took two years to get the right balance of being slightly sweeter than a normal lager, but still being sessionable.
Fruit flavour can be added to beer using fresh or frozen fruit, puree, concentrate, natural flavouring extract or essence, or artificial flavourings. Each has advantages and disadvantages and if you ask 10 brewers who make a fruit flavoured beer, you will get 10 different answers.
“We started off with peach pulp and peach juice but it affected the stability, body and colour of the beer so we developed the peach essence to infuse the beer in BBT and the result is a clear and light-bodied lager,” says Wilson. “We have developed a fruit essence from peach, elderflower and grapefruit extract oils and we infuse the lager with these essences post-fermentation in BBT.”
These are for, in respected order, Jubel’s Peach, Elderflower and Grapefruit beers.
In looking at reviews of US peach beers, a consistent complaint is a lack of consistency in flavour. For those familiar with a lack of 100 percent flavour consistency in using the same species/country-of-origin hops over a five-year period, this problem is only magnified when using fresh fruit, with each season bringing a slightly different taste.
“We’re very lucky to have a fantastic brewing partner in Hare Brewery, and Jubel is brewed under the watchful eye of Georgina Young, ex-Head Brewer at Fullers and now heading things up at Bath Ales. Like hop extract oils, our fruit essences are completely stable so we get brilliant fruit flavour consistency and the team at Hare Brewery do a great job of brewing our base lager consistently,” says Wilson.
Jubel’s peach beer does not smell overpowering ‘peachy’ when opening the bottle or pouring into a glass. When you sniff it, you will find yourself going back and forth, debating if the beer or peach aroma is more dominant with beer winning out. Flavour wise, the initial taste is peach, followed by a gentle hoppy beer flavour, with the peach taste not lingering in the mouth.
Taste comparisons can be made to a Bellini cocktail. It is about as far removed from shandy as Earth is from Pluto, just barely in the same solar system.
As a 4.0% ABV session, this would make an excellent summer beer. To drink this while eating barbequed sticky ribs would be a match made in heaven.
Jubel’s Elderflower is an elderflower infused beer which works well. While to label a beer as one “a woman would like”, is a huge injustice to both women, men and the beer in question, during a taste test, this was brought up numerous times by both sexes.
With hops used so much over the last decade to create a grapefruit taste and/or real grapefruit flavourings added to IPAs, you would think Jubel’s 4.0% ABV Grapefruit would find a quick home with IPA drinkers. However, with it being a lager with an IBU rating 1/10 that of a West Coast style grapefruit IPA, what you might be expecting in bitter flavour is not there.
If you have never had a Ballast Point Yellow Sculpin or something similar, you would find Jubel’s grapefruit beer enjoyable. If, however, you enjoy a grapefruit IPA, it might taste too sweet.
The future
While most breweries seem hellbent on creating as many new beers as possible in the shortest period of time, Jubel is taking a very different approach.
“Peach was inspired by demi-pêche in the Alps, elderflower by a lager with an elderflower-top at a London restaurant, and grapefruit by a grapefruit juice and lager shandy-style tradition in Croatia. All three of our beers have been inspired by interesting and unique beer serves we’ve discovered and the plan is to keep it that way,” says Wilson, adding that peach is Jubel’s best seller.
Jubel can be bought at Sainsbury’s, bottle shops and from the Jubel website. Wilson says that pouring pints in pubs is the core of Jubel’s business, so on-trade is its most important channel. From 2018 to 2020, the increase in bottle production has gone from 200,000 to 800,000 – an increase of 300 percent.
“That all changed with the impact of Covid-19 so we’ve since shifted towards the off-trade and online channels to drive sales,” he says.
“We normally do lots of sampling sessions, activations and events in the on-trade which are a great way to get people trying Jubel in an experiential and memorable way. The last few weeks we’ve accelerated our digital marketing activity to put Jubel on the radar of people on social media who are likely to enjoy our beer, and we’ve had really strong take up of online orders.”
