Scaling up a recipe to a 30-barrel kit isn’t as simple as just adding more ingredients. Canning isn’t as easy as just feeding the beer into a machine and letting it do its thing. When the first release of Cannonball cans landed, beer geeks could hardly contain themselves. Unfortunately for Magic Rock, a small amount of cans hit the market with faults such as lack of carbonation and high levels of diacetyl making the beer taste drastically different than it should.

“I have this constant relationship with Cannonball because I know when it’s on it’s as good as anything,” Burhouse says. “It tastes about 4% and I think, ‘Fucking hell, that’s good.’ And it’s not always like that. This is why we’re hiring people like Nick [Zeigler] to help us nail it now that we’re brewing on the bigger kit.”

If there’s one thing head brewer Stuart Ross excels at, it’s designing hop-forward beer. He brews the kind of beer he wants to drink a lot of, and he’s very good at it. But with more beer comes more problems, so Burhouse set about hiring people who could solve them. “The cans of Cannonball we released which had diacetyl in them, contained it because there was an issue with unhealthy yeast,” he says. “There was a chemical present called alpha-acetolactate, apparently. With a scientific mind like Nick [Zeigler] on the team, we were able to solve the problem.”