Beer Education

For Palmer, he was never much of a fan of the Budweiser brand anyway, instead favouring the European stylings of Michelob instead. “When you’re getting cases and cases free each month, being shared by my friends and I at the age of 12, then that’s probably not that much of a surprise!

While his future business partner Matteson developed his beer education through brewing in New York and Germany, Palmer believes his passion for beer, through drinking beers such as Young’s Double Chocolate Stout, led to a desire to travel.

“That type of beer doesn’t probably doesn’t have the same impact here in the UK, but in the US it simply blew my mind. I didn’t know a beer could look and taste so rich, so black, so beautiful. Me and my friend looked forward to every delivery of it.

So that, Heineken and Red Stripe represented these exotic foreign places in my homeland. But it was Japan that ended up being one of the first places I visited, back in 1996, so it ended up being a choice of Asahi, Kirin Ichiban, Sapporo and Suntori as the only things available. But they very distinct beers all the same.”

Palmer had several stints in Japan, which included lecturing as well as brewing under the tutelage of Chris Poel, lead brewer at Baird Beer and a “big influence” on the former’s career in the field. But in 2011, Palmer’s tenure in Japan came to an end after he chose to leave the country after it was struck by the devastating earthquake and tsunami in the March of that year.

Following a time brewing in Spain, Palmer moved to London permanently in 2013, though continuation of his brewing career wasn’t, surprisingly, top of his agenda. Instead, he planned to further his education in the UK following previous experience lecturing a wealth of subjects including anthropology, language and ethics during his time in Japan.