Five Minutes With Faram – Titanic Brewery (Keith Bott)

Charlie: Hi everyone, welcome to this month’s Five Minutes with Faram. I’m here with Keith Bott, owner of Titanic Brewery. Keith and I have known each other for years in various roles, including when you were my boss at Titanic and later at SIBA. Let’s jump straight in. What is your current favourite hop, and why?

Keith: It’s tough because there are so many great hops, but Cascade is still my favourite. It has such a great flavour and works brilliantly whether used early or late in the boil. It gives beer a smoothness like nothing else.

What beer style are you loving right now?

Keith: Plum Porter still amazes me. If you’d told me when we first brewed it that it would become our best-selling beer, I’d have said you knew nothing about brewing. Yet here we are, this 4.9% fruit beer is over half of what we brew. And now we’ve released a nitro version, which the brewers say is even better than the cask.

What has been a beer epiphany moment for you?

Keith: Visiting Pilsner Urquell in the Czech Republic. Sitting in the cellars with friends, drinking unfiltered, unpasteurised Pilsner Urquell, it was one of those moments where you realise how fabulous beer can be.

What’s your favourite beer destination?

Keith: Honestly, my local pub. I live next door, so I can wander over for a pint. It’s perfect.

What small technique or tweak has made a big difference to your beer?

Keith: When we started brewing in the 80s, nobody added hops late in the boil. Discovering late hopping opened a whole new world for us. It changed everything.

What underrated ingredient should brewers talk about more?

Keith: Ingredients that change character without changing flavour, like roast barley for body and mouthfeel, or torrefied wheat for head retention. Small tweaks make a big difference.

What ingredient choice has had the biggest impact that drinkers rarely think about?

Keith: Plums. Enough said.

What’s one thing in the brewery you couldn’t live without?

Keith: A tiny tool someone gave me years ago for undoing John Guest fittings. Cost about 30p and changed my life. Before that, I’d spent years hurting my fingers trying to pull them apart.

What’s your brew day soundtrack?

Keith: When I first learned to brew, Phil Salt, who taught me, played Smiley Culture nonstop. Proper 1980s hard reggae.

Do you sing while brewing?

Keith: Hymns. Everyone loves singing a hymn.

What keeps you sane outside the brewery?

Keith: Pubs. They’re brilliant places, community, friends, and relaxation. Everything good happens in a pub.

If you weren’t brewing, what would you be doing?

Keith: I was supposed to become a civil servant, a cadet valuer. Hard to imagine now.

What experiment taught you the most, even if it failed?

Keith: A spring blossom beer I tried years ago. It tasted like someone had poured fabric softener into the beer. A complete disaster, but you learn by making mistakes.

How do you evaluate whether a new process or ingredient is worth adopting?

Keith: We talk to people, especially the team at Faram. They know the ingredients better than we do and help us find what we’re looking for.

Where do you push boundaries, and where do you stay cautious?

Keith: We’ve always pushed boundaries. Brewing should be fun, and that’s where the best ideas come from. We’ve been doing it for 40 years.

What’s next for you and the brewery?

Keith: Hard to say, we’ve never had a plan! When Dave and I took over in 1988. No plan, no idea how to run a business. Not much has changed.

What beer are you dying to brew at Titanic Brewery but haven’t yet?

Keith: Nothing specific. We just keep trying new things and staying open-minded.

What excites you most about the future of brewing?

Keith: Helping people understand what a beer really is, community, friendship, joy. We’ve set up the Titanic Foundation to support charities near our pubs because community matters. We just want to keep brewing great beer and spreading smiles.

What worries you about the future of brewing?

Keith: Government policy. We’re taxed heavily, business rates are unfair, and proposed changes like lowering the drink-drive limit won’t save lives but will hurt pubs. We need to keep fighting for fairness.

What skills separate good brewers from great ones?

Keith: Great brewers push boundaries. Good brewers make consistent beer, but great brewers innovate. And listening helps, though not all brewers are good at it.

Precision or intuition?

Keith: Intuition. Precision makes perfect beer every time, but that’s for Budweiser. Intuition makes something interesting.

Repeatability or experimentation?

Keith: Experimentation.