As Assistant Brewer Mike Holmes sets sail on a new career in the Royal Navy, the Brentwood Brewery team has had to bid him Bon Voyage.

Mike has worked at the brewery for 7 years.  His thoughts:

What he’ll miss most –  everyone and brewing!

Fondest memory – is of watching the brewery team make a video for George and the Dragon beer around St George’s Day.  Mike’s contribution?  He added his spontaneous laughter to the soundtrack.

Weirdest memory – this is more difficult to pin down, as a source close to the brewery puts it, ‘it’s hard to remember a day at the brewery when nothing weird happened’.  Mike says climbing inside the fermenter vessel to clean it for the first time was definitely the weirdest.

Favourite Brentwood Beer –  Marvellous Maple Mild which is co-incidentally May’s  Beer of the Month.

Over a lunchtime farewell beer on Friday, Roland Kannor, the brewery’s MD, presented Mike with leaving gifts from the team including an engraved tankard, an appropriate selection of Brentwood Beer mats (framed and on the theme of service life and the sea) and a miniature bottle of rum, ‘to help prepare him for life on the ocean wave’.

Mike joins up later this month and will spend ten weeks basic training at HMS Rayleigh in Plymouth before tackling 33 weeks trade training for marine engineering at HMS Sultan at Gosport near Portsmouth.

We all wish him the best of luck.

Love Beer, Love Brentwood