Back in the good old days you could go to your local pub for a pint of Housewives Knee and the only other people in there drinking proper beer would be old men and people who go to Games Workshop. People wearing fedora hats. Those sorts of people.

But then they came. The normal people. Suddenly craft beer was cool. And the pubs got well lit. And clean. They stopped serving pork scratchings. Now it’s pulled pork and street food. Toby the bartender? He’s working at Ladbrokes now. There’s a new guy behind the bar. Wears a checked shirt and has one of those little moustaches he waxes up on the ends. Looks like vaudevillian lumberjack for God’s sake.

Anyway, the point is that craft beer is really in now and we’re totally okay with that. And so it should come as no surprise that we got a copy of Brewmaster to review: a beer brewing simulation game, and honestly, it’s pretty good. We like this one. You follow recipes to brew a beer: boiling water, adding grains, hops, honey or other additives, and then you ferment it.

Once the fermentation process is over you can bottle your beer, with a label you can customise, and you also get a report explaining the flavour profile of your beer, how alcoholic it is, and other things like that. Brewing beers with certain characteristics progresses the story and you can later buy new equipment or ingredients. You can even decorate your workspace a little. We put a picture of a cat in ours.

Brewmaster is really laid back. There are no fail states — or certainly none that we found. There’s no drama. Nobody dies. It’s just about brewing beer, and learning about beer, and then eventually entering a beer brewing competition to be crowned the titular Brewmaster™. That’s it. And we like it.