BREWERY TOUR DATES

Places available unless otherwise stated

Saturday 14 December 12pm

Saturday 18 January 12pm

Saturday 15 February 12pm

Saturday 15 March 12pm

Saturday 12 April 12pm

Saturday 17 May 12pm

Brewery tours start and finish in our onsite brewery tap, the Gunmakers Arms, and last around 90 minutes. Mark, founder and head brewer, describes the brewing process, gives a brief history of brewing in Birmingham and, of course, Two Towers Brewery’s place in it. It's a small brewery so there's not much walking involved!
Samples of ale are included in the price (our licence limits how much we can give away) and we give you four tokens worth half a pint each which may be redeemed in The Gunmakers Arms on the day of the tour only. If you don't want ale we might be able to make you a cup of tea but we cannot substitute anything else whatsoever. That includes bottles for consumption at the time or later. You can, of course, buy beer!
If you book a Tour+Meal we'll email you with a food choices beforehand so you can let us know what you want.

You cannot yet book online (we're working on it).
Book by emailing tours@twotowersbrewery.co.uk with your preferred date , the number of people and your choice of either TOUR (£18) or TOUR+MEAL (£28). You can always give us a call, of course: 0121 439 3738.
We accept most UK credit and debit cards - over the phone and in person - cash, bank transfer (contact us for details) or cheque (made out to Two Towers Brewery Ltd). We’ll let you have full details when we invoice. Payment must be made at least 14 days prior to a tour because 'no shows' on a fully subscribed tour mean that people who wanted to come along for a special occasion (like a birthday) miss out. And, of course, we lose customers.

Looking for a gift? Something a little bit different - and very thoughtful: how about a personalised gift voucher for a Brewery Tour? Email tours@twotowersbrewery.co.uk telling us your name and the name of the recipient and we’ll email you a customised gift voucher you can either print or forward. The recipient simply has to check on this website for tour availability and email us with their booking.
Tour vouchers are £18 per person for a tour, £28 for the Tour+Meal deal. You can pay by phone or in person - we accept most cards - bank transfer (we'll send details with the invoice), cheque (Two Towers Brewery Ltd), or even cash!

Our brewery is an ideal venue for informal corporate events. We welcome party bookings of all kinds and have organised office, stag, hen, retirement, anniversary, birthday, Christmas and what-the-hell-let's-just-have-a-party parties.
If you're a business and you want to entertain clients we can lay on a special tour; if you want an exclusive tour the cost will be dependent on numbers. We can arrange food, too. Just ask when you enquire.

Full refunds of fees and deposits paid will be given for cancellations via email if seven days notice is provided by the customer.
Partial refunds of fees and deposits paid for cancellations made with notice of more than three days but less than seven days will be made at the discretion of Two Towers Brewery.
In the event of Two Towers Brewery Limited cancelling a Brewery Tour or Brew Day Experience event due to circumstances that are specific exclusively to Two Towers Brewery Limited, the customer will be offered alternative dates in the first instance. If no alternative date is convenient for the customer Two Towers Brewery will provide a full refund.
In the event of Two Towers Brewery Limited cancelling a Brewery Tour or other event due to circumstances that are beyond the control of Two Towers Brewery Limited, alternative opportunities will be presented to the customer to re-book at no additional charge. Reasonable extensions to voucher expiry dates will be provided to accommodate the customer’s re-booking of the event. Full or partial refunds will be provided where the event cancellation is due to circumstances that are beyond the control of Two Towers Brewery Limited only at the discretion of Two Towers Brewery Limited.

Thanks to everyone who's supported our brewery tap especially through the closure for refurbishment and the re-opening earlier this year. And thanks, too, to those who helped the Gunmakers Arms through to the shortlist for Birmingham CAMRA's Pub of the Year 2017.
The Gunmakers Arms and the house next door are Grade II listed buildings built as three houses around 1820 (watch out for our 200-year birthday celebrations in 2020!). Two of the houses were converted to a pub not too long afterwards (we’ll find out when and have another anniversary to celebrate!). The pub is a classic example of the street corner community pub that was so popular for much of the 19th and 20th centuries but so many of which have been demolished or converted into far less interesting establishments.
The Gunmakers Arms, 93 Bath Street
, 
Birmingham
 B4 6HG. Here it is on a Google Map.

Yeast is truly marvellous. It’s a fungal, single-celled, microorganism which converts carbohydrates, certain sugars, for example, into carbon dioxide and alcohol. All hail yeast, for giving us beer!
There are billions and billions and … well, let’s just say it’s an unimaginable number … of yeast cells in each brew; quite a few in each cask, and an awful lot, even, in each bottle of bottle conditioned beer. And that’s an issue for some people. Because, most of the time, it means beer will be hazy. And sometimes, downright cloudy.
Now, the marketing people round about the 17th century noticed that people would rather drink a clearer beer than a less clear beer. Given time a hazy beer will clear. Too much time most of the time. Because while all those yeast cells are slowly falling to the bottom of the cask there are all sorts of other things happening to the beer. Oxidation for one thing. Yes, the beer rusts! So, the beer might clear but, by the time it does, so many other processes will have taken place that it’s undrinkable. Then somebody decided to add the dried swim bladder of a sturgeon to a difficult cask of ale that wouldn’t clear. How do these things happen? Who decided it was a good idea? Probably a Russian because it was a Russian sturgeon that originally provided the swim bladder. (Precisely which Russian sturgeon, for goodness sake?)
Now, here’s an interesting thing concerning Birmingham. For it was the very same William Murdoch, one of the golden trio, along with Matthew Boulton and James Watt, standing on a plinth on Broad Street, who, in 1795, invented a way of using the swim bladders of cod (cheap) rather than sturgeon (very expensive) to produce isinglass, which is the actual stuff that results in flocculation.
What’s flocculation? Glad you asked. Isinglass and yeast have opposite electrical charges and, as we all know, opposites attract. (Didn’t work for me, two marriages, two divorces.) So the yeast cells gather round the isinglass particles. Flocculation. They get heavy and fall to the bottom. (Know that feeling after a few pints.)
These days most real ale is fined - clarified - using isinglass. In fact, the vast, really vast, majority of beers go through a process of clarification (pasteurisation, for example). This is where you, the consumer, comes in. Actually, if you’re reading this you’re almost certainly not a ‘consumer’ but an interested and discerning drinker of beer. Sorry. The other consumers (not you) won’t drink beer, or lager, unless it’s clear. They’ll bring it back to the bar, complaining that it doesn’t taste right, even when it tastes exactly as it should.
Funnily enough, they don’t usually do that with wheat beer. All down to expectations and perception, we suppose. Far too much to go into here. Another time.
There is a school of thought which suggests that isinglass changes the taste of beer and isn’t necessary. There are loads of schools of sturgeon and cod swimming around that totally agree.
We’re thinking the same thing as those schools of fish and brewers.
Does the addition of isinglass really change the taste of beer? To be honest we really don’t know; not in the sense of knowing a scientific fact, anyway. What we do know, however, is that it either tastes the same or better; never worse.
We had requests from the Birmingham Vegans to hold events at our brewery tap, the Gunmakers Arms. We already had a couple of ales that didn’t require isinglass because they’re porters or stouts - like Jewellery Porter and Bhacker Ackhams - and, obviously, don’t need clearing. We decided we’d provide another couple of casks of our other ales to which we wouldn’t add isinglass so they’d be vegan-friendly.
Our other, non-vegan, customers at the Gunmakers Arms also drank the beer and liked it, even though it was hazy. So we thought, let’s go the whole cabbage! (Cabbage? Well, we were going to say ‘the whole hog’ but it didn’t seem appropriate.)
And here we are, one of the very few breweries in the UK (at least) that doesn’t use the dried swim bladders of fish to clarify our beer, making us vegetarian and vegan friendly. And, possibly, although we only have the support of subjective perceptions rather than scientific evidence, tastes better.

You'll find the widest selection of our ales at the Gunmakers Arms, our brewery tap. We have bottle-conditioned ales which are only otherwise available in the best off-licences and restaurants where there’s a genuine appreciation of real ale. Bottles are available individually, in cases and in 3-bottle presentation packs. We also sell cask-conditioned ales in 10 litre and 20 litre polypins, filling them to order. Find out more here>>>>>>>>>>>>>

These prices are ONLY available from the brewery and not from other outlets. Two Towers Brewery Club members can choose between the discounted prices below or free delivery (with certain restrictions). See below for full details.

Club prices are only available to Two Towers Brewery Club members, public prices apply to everyone else. But never fear, membership is free and all you have to do is sign up for our newsletter. Please scroll down for more details.
We're working our way through the bureaucratic and financial procedures but we don't yet have online merchant status so you'll have to contact us to order. We're also without a card machine at the moment so can't take debit or credit card payments. There's more really important information below so please scroll down and read it before contacting us.

Prices are for cases of 12 x 500ml bottles except Livery Street Mild which is 19 x 330ml bottles.

...... in a modest house in Edgbaston round the back of what, as kids, we used to call the rezzer. We called the recreation ground the rec and the reservoir was the rezzer. Apparently, those kids who still get out and about these days speak the same language.
On that kitchen table, back in autumn 2009, stood two five gallon fermentation vessels. As well as homebrew beer they contained an idea which had been fermenting for almost a decade and which now became a mission - bringing real ale back to Birmingham.
Those two beers were the result of more than 50 years (well, we're late developers!) of the combined homebrew experience of lifelong friends Mark Arnott-Job and Trevor Harris who had first discussed the idea of setting up a brewery back in the late 1990s over a few pints of homebrew. As you do!
That's when they began brewing together, steadily developing from amateur hobbyists, brewing for fun, into amateur hobbyists brewing seriously, which meant they were often doing more reading and studying than brewing. Over that decade up till 2009 that vague, pie-in-the-sky idea of setting up their own brewery became less vague and more pint-in-the-hand than pie-in-the-sky. They also became more focussed on the idea of 'bringing real ale back to Birmingham'. Which wasn't a dig at the other fine breweries in Birmingham but an ambition to brew the kinds of ales that had been available in the region in the past; before the introduction of pasteurised, artificially carbonated beers in the 60s and 70s. Then there was that day, in 2009, the two fermentation vessels sitting on the kitchen table, when "Wouldn't it be great to set up our own brewery" became "Let's do it!"
The beer in those two vessels, by the way, eventually became Baskerville Bitter and Mott Street Mild.
A year later, in 2010, Two Towers Brewery was in business. They chose a basic, undistinguished industrial unit quite deliberately, with no regard for aesthetics, because they wanted the brewery to reflect the industrial heritage of Birmingham. After all, pioneers of the industrial revolution such as Boulton, Watt and Murdoch (commemorated in that glittering statue at the city end of Broad Street) didn't build factories to look pretty.
(OK. That's a bit tongue in cheek. They were the only affordable premises we could find!)
Utter madness, you may think, setting up a brewery in the midst of a recession and a huge increase in the number of microbreweries fighting for a share of Britain's beer pumps. At the time we'd have disagreed. In hindsight ... well, we're still here, which delights us as much as it surprises others.

We're Two Towers Brewery because our ales were first brewed, and the enterprise conceived, believe it or not, within sight of two towers! From the aforementioned kitchen you can see the solid and impressive Victorian water tower in the grounds of the Severn Trent Water depot next to Edgbaston reservoir. Just a couple of hundred yards down the road is another tower: Perrotts Folly, built in 1758 by John Perrott; probably so he could survey his hunting grounds for wild boar and deer.
We liked the name Two Towers because it has a nice ring to it but when we discovered the possible link with Minas Morgul and Orthanc, the two towers familiar to Orcs, Ents, Hobbits and other inhabitants of Middle Earth, we were convinced.
OK, there's no actual proof that the Lord of the Rings author, JRR Tolkien, based the fictional two towers on the real two towers but there is plenty of circumstantial evidence.
Tolkien grew up in Birmingham and, from the age of 12 till he went to university, lived in Edgbaston, just around the corner from the water tower and Perrotts Folly. He wouldn't have been able to step outside his front door without seeing the two towers. On many occasions Tolkien acknowledges that much of his fiction is based on real people, places and events and it seems almost impossible for the two towers that were a constant presence in the formative years of his youth not to find their way into his fiction.
Anyway, it's a nice coincidence and a good story. So why shouldn't we celebrate the connection between Birmingham and Tolkien?