Silver Rocket Brewing is a small, award-winning brewery in Hassocks, West Sussex, run by two friends who love craft beer & Sonic Youth.
Matt & Ben have known each other for years, and have always shared a love for wonky music, tasty beers and playing football enthusiastically but without much quality.
In 2016, Matt & Ben went on a 1-day course entitled: ‘How to Make Craft Beer’. And they succeeded in making beer for the first time in their lives. This made them feel exceptionally happy. They wanted to do it again.
Over the following months they bought, borrowed and cobbled together a standard homebrew equipment set-up. They got to work brewing some beers of their own, focussing on the kind of beers they liked to drink themselves: session-strength hoppy pale ales (and one knock-out Black IPA). Things went well. Everything they brewed tasted good. Friends and wives tried it and said nice things.
Next Steps
After a while, Matt & Ben started to invest (just a few quid) in some more bits of kit. Then they made more nice, drinkable beer. And their friends and wives continued to say nice things. Bless them. But then they would, wouldn’t they? Which got them thinking:
‘Is it actually any good? Would people who don’t already know and like us drink our beer and say nice things about it too…?’
So they took the plunge and created Silver Rocket Brewing. They registered Matt’s house as a brewery, jumped through some regulatory hoops, and then, curiously, just like that, and much to their surprise and delight, they were a real and actual brewery.
Their first official batch was brewed right there, in Matt’s kitchen in Hassocks. They only had the capacity to make around 40 litres, which they hand-bottled and hand-labelled.
Their beer was sold in a few local shops, to people who didn’t already know and like them, and they did say nice things about it.
Award-winning Beers
We entered two beers into the Great Taste Awards 2021 and both won!
Hazy Paving 2-stars : “A delightfully aromatic Pale Ale… well crafted & beautifully balanced… constantly inspires further sipping… A really good example of this style of beer…”
Launch Pad IPA 1-star & the Great Taste judges said: “The tropical citrus you’d hope for… the palate is very crisp with good hop flavour & an earthy malty undertone… the hops are very clean & juicy on the nose… for a sessionable IPA, this has a lot of character…”
We’ve never had our beers professionally judged before and are really happy with all those comments. The Great Taste Awards are a fabulous tool for guiding consumers towards proven quality products and we’re looking forward to it encouraging more new customers to check out our lovely beers.
Silver Rocket Brewing uses EAN-13 barcodes from Barcode1.uk.