Bruce Dickinson: lead singer of Iron Maiden, pilot, and now brewer – guess which bit I interviewed him about?

I’ve just been on tour with Iron Maiden.

When I say ‘tour’ I mean ‘brewery tour’, and when I say ‘Iron Maiden’ I mean the lead singer, Bruce Dickinson.

But still.

When I was at school in South Yorkshire in the early eighties, music was tribal. As my generation reached musical awareness at roughly the same time as puberty it was simple: you were either a mod or a rocker. A fishtail parker with targets and badges or a denim jacket with sewn on patches.

I was a Mod – or at least, I imagined I was. I graffitied my desk in ‘O’ Level German with the logos of The Jam and The Specials. The following week my slogans had been defaced and shouted down by Motörhead and Black Sabbath logos. This graffiti war escalated until it covered the entire desk. At one stage I lost the moral high ground by defacing the inscription “Stairway to Heaven” with the words “are shit” underneath. It was years before I learned it was the title of a somewhat famous song and not the name of a band.

To this day I have never willingly listened to anything ‘heavy’, even though metal legends Saxon were from Barnsley and lead singer Biff Byford’s daughter was in the year below me at school. The first album I ever bought was this one:

Madness were associated with the Mod movement because of their early involvement with the 2-Tone label. And weirdly, and rather wonderfully, I’m going to be helping them launch their own beer next week.

But weeks before that, Stockport brewer Robinson’s gave me the exclusive beer trade interview with their latest collaborator, on the project that has turned very quickly into the most successful beer launch they’ve ever had:

A few weeks before the official launch of Trooper, I’m invited to Maiden’s press office. It’s a Friday afternoon and Dickinson, an affable and absurdly fit and healthy-looking bloke in his early fifties, is fussing about getting some bottles of Trooper cold enough for us to try. Every ten minutes he interrupts his flow to ask his friend and publicist, Iain Macauley, to check the fridge.

Like Madness, Maiden today are no eighties nostalgia circuit band: they’re selling more records than ever, and writing new material for every tour. It surprises me in my pre-interview research to discover an ethic of discipline and professionalism that would be impressive in any industry, let alone the supposedly sex and drugs-fuelled world of hard rock. And the polymath Dickinson takes this perfectionist approach with everything he turns his hand to.

“That’s something that was drummed into me by my Dad,” he says, after deciding his beer is not yet the perfect temperature and must be returned to the fridge. “He taught me that it doesn’t matter what you do – if you’re a road sweeper, be a good road sweeper. Take pride in who you are and what you are, whatever you are. That’s a good starting point. If you’re just in it to make a fast buck, you demean yourself at the same time as being fairly scornful of the rest of the human race.”

When Dickinson took up sword fencing, he ended up representing Great Britain in the sport. After qualifying as a pilot, he not only flies the band’s jet while on tour; he pilots commercial flights in his down time. And when he decided to brew a beer, he was very particular about the type of beer it had to be.

“I live in Chiswick, 600 yards from the Fuller’s brewery, and I’m an ESB drinker,” he says. “It’s a lovely beer, but you can only have a couple of pints. On the other hand, 3.5% beers don’t cut the mustard for me. I wanted a beer that’s full-flavoured and punches above its alcoholic weight.”

To test how serious Dickinson was, Robinsons put him through his paces with a blind taste test – “The first time I’ve had to audition in twenty years!” as Dickson puts it.

“We wanted to work with someone who was genuinely passionate about beer,” says Robinson’s head brewer Martyn Weeks. “So we set up this tasting, including some of his favourites. Out of ten beers he was actually able to name six of them, including the ones he said were his favourites, and he got them all right! He really took his time to work out a recipe he liked. He spent ages in the hop room picking out his favourite hops. The result is a genuine collaboration. Bruce likes his southern English, full-flavoured beers, and Trooper has turned out unlike any other beer we brew.”

Dickinson is also delighted with the result. “It punches above its weight in terms of flavour but sits just the right side of brain damage,” he says, “Everyone can have a good session and we can all go away friends.”

This easygoing sessionability has proved surprisingly subtle for commentators who were expecting more of a punch after being by charged by a demented zombie on the pump clip. It may lead to accusations of blandness from some. But the whole point of this beer is that it is a genuine passion rather than a gimmick constructed by marketers aimed at a specific group of fans. I mean, if it were that, wouldn’t you expect a metal band to maybe brew a lager instead, like Lemmy did?

A few weeks later we meet again at the official launch of Trooper in Robinsons’ brand new brewery visitors’ centre.

Bruce pulls the first pint of Trooper on cask, and I’m surprised to find it much better than the bottle, because the bottle wasn’t bad. The cask is hoppier, with a building dryness that makes it naggingly drinkable, a pint that seems to evaporate from the glass.

Bruce insists on conducting the collected journalists, trade people and liggers around the new brewery himself. He talks confidently and knowledgeably about the history of the brewery and the intricacies of brewing process, without notes.