Head Brewer | Beer Innovator | Variety LoverMeet the Brewer: Jon Elks

Armed with a degree in Environmental Science, Jon began looking for jobs based in labs after leaving university in 2001. “I thought I would end up at a water company or the Environment Agency, but then I found a job that said ‘wanted for the testing of beer’ and I thought ‘well, that sounds better than sewage,” Jon says with a smile.

That job was working at Carlsberg, where Jon remained for 18 years. According to Jon, he decided he fancied a change, and moved to Everards – starting his current job, as head brewer, five months before the beginning of the Covid pandemic.

“At that time, this (Everards Meadows) wasn’t built. It was just steelwork and nothing more, so we were all based at the warehouse five minutes up the road. My job was to oversee this getting constructed, but obviously Covid threw a bit of a spanner in the works so things did get slowed down. We were meant to start brewing here in October 2020 and it ended up being March 2021. We actually did our first brew when every pub in the country was shut, which was a bit strange!” recalls Jon, who is heavily involved in the creation of new beers.

“We have meetings all the time about what we’re going to do, because we have to be working a couple of months ahead, to get all the ingredients purchased and get all the artwork done. We’ve now got a really big portfolio of recipes and styles so we can do variations on those themes and we can do completely new things. The small batch brewery was built so we can test out new ideas, and if it sells well on the bar here, then maybe we’ll scale up to the main brewery and do it on a bigger scale.”

Recalling one of the first beers he made in Everards’ small batch brewery, Jon says: “We did a raspberry wheat beer, which was the first time we’d done a wheat beer and we hadn’t used fruit before.

“The Beer Hall was just opening after Covid and we put it in a tank on the bar and it was immediately obvious that people would go for it, because it was pink. We realised then that if we could do things that were different, there was an appetite for it.

“It was a really nice beer – quite fruity, quite light, certainly not like anything else we did. That probably opened the doors for us to go ‘right, we could do anything we want,’” says Jon, who is a fan of all beer styles. “I like to drink some of the darker beers, more in the winter than in summer, but equally, I like a hoppy keg beer or Tiger. I love variety.”

Talking about what he enjoys about his role at Everards, Jon says: “The job here involves doing a bit of everything, so the breadth of things you cover, versus say in a bigger brewery, is far, far wider. In a bigger brewery, you have different departments doing different things whereas here, everything comes to me. That’s really interesting because you get involved in lots of different things and I like the variety.

“I really enjoy the recipe creation and it’s great to see how we, as a small brewery, can have an impact in a really short period of time. We’ve had ideas here on a Friday and made them on a Monday and they’re on the bar the following week. I think that speed and pace and ability to do things is great.”