Ed Bright gave up a secure career at one of the world's biggest banks to teach himself to brew beer from scratch. Ten years on, Stubborn Mule Brewery & Tap has become one of Altrincham's most quietly cherished local businesses - and Ed still makes every drop himself.
When Ed Bright left his job at the BNY Mellon bank in 2015 with nothing but a personal loan, a borrowed shed in Timperley and a pile of brewing books, some may have questioned the wisdom of his decision.
A decade on, Stubborn Mule is one of Altrincham's quiet success stories - and Ed is still the only one making the beer.
Appropriately enough, it is a back story built on a stubborn refusal to give up. Ed spent 12 years in banking, working up to a decent middle management level, but by the time Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008 he was watching colleagues disappear without replacement.
"It just wasn't doing it for me," he says. With his wife Swan expecting their second child, he made the call. "There was no point getting hung up about sitting behind a desk for the next 10 years. I wanted a challenge."
Teaching himself entirely from books - "just trial and error, really" - he started brewing in a shed in his back garden in Timperley on Saturday afternoons. "I'd just kind of wander off to the shed and say, I'll see you in about six hours."
Before long he was bottling beer in the kitchen, then walking into bars in Manchester's Northern Quarter with bags of bottles under his arm. Before long, orders started coming in. "People just started getting on the phone saying, can we have a case?"
By August 2016 he'd signed a lease on a unit at Radium House behind the old Packet House, and sunk everything - a £25,000 personal loan plus family savings - into a second-hand 10-barrel brew kit. "I wandered in on day one and just thought: I don't even have a kettle." The backing of Swan, he says, was critical. "The backing from Swan was kind of amazing. We were just about to have children. It was a very big leap."
A decade on, the process Ed runs entirely alone is deceptively complex. Brew day is Tuesday, when he starts before half seven in the morning and keeps going for 10 hours. Every stage is managed by hand - mashing grain in the hot liquor tank, transferring the wort to the copper to boil, adding hops in carefully timed stages.
"The first hops that go in are all the bittering hops," he explains. "Then throughout the hour you add another set with 15 minutes to go, another with 10, and then right at the end they start adding aroma and flavour." Everything is conditioned and canned on site, quality-controlled with an attention to detail that verges on obsessive. "Not one beer has ever gone sour," he says. "The cleanliness is just implicit in the process."
The beers themselves range from the sessionable L’il Napoleon pale ale - his consistent best-seller and a Northwest Regional Champion - to the House Pilsner and a Gingerbread Milk Stout that won Beer of the Festival at Bradford Beer Festival. Stubborn Mule is also listed in the latest edition of the Good Beer Guide.
The tap room itself - open until 9pm on Fridays and Saturdays - only came properly into its own after Covid, when a home delivery operation accidentally transformed the business model. Ed is candid about what the pandemic taught him. "A barrel of beer, I could turn that into five mini kegs selling at twenty-five pounds each. Rather than selling to trade, I was selling direct to people's houses" The margins on direct retail, he realised, were in a different league to wholesale. When the chance came to move into better premises on Skelton Road in Timperley four years ago and build out a proper tap room, he took it.
He still does everything himself. Brewing, packaging, delivering, managing the bar. "I must drive the bar staff mad," he admits. "I'm always just collecting glasses, doing something. I just get on with it." Swan handles the accounts, but Ed’s preference for a work/life balance means there is plenty of time for kids Harrison and Poppy, 9 and 12, too.
The lease comes up for renewal in September and Ed is expecting to sign.
"I'm probably doing as well out of this as I've ever done," he says. "But it's taken 10 years to get here." The journey, it seems, has been worth every stubborn minute.
Stubborn Mule Brewery & Tap, Unit 1, Skelton Rd, Timperley, WA14 1SJ. Visit stubbornmulebrewery.com for more. The tap is open on Fridays (4-9pm) and Saturdays (3-9pm).
Photography: Laura Marie Linck
