St Ives x All The Gear
• • • One for the Road Award • • •
Robyn Gilmour
Saturday 18 October 2025
This article is from
Beer Awards 2025
issue 123
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Our One for the Road Award is a real celebration of adventure. So often, finding new flavours and experiencing craft beer at its best requires packing a bag, hitting the road, and *checks notes* camping in a tent you fashioned from household items purchased in Poundland. Christ. That’ll certainly make you glad of a beer.
This year our One for the Road Awards recognises a collaboration between St Ives Brewery and All The Gear, an all-things-outdoors Youtube Channel hosted by Jack Joy and Ethan Smale. The two friends met on the set of another YouTube show, Car Throttle, where they worked for a combined 20 years, before quitting to pursue a shared ambition: “doing things”.
“Both of us are into camping, being outdoors and going on trips,” says Ethan. “We liked the idea of doing a channel where we were going on adventures and ‘roughing it’ and that was the germ of the idea for All The Gear. We then added the elements of challenges, DIY, automotive and also developed the camping aspect and it has snowballed into all the weird ideas we've had in the last year. Someone on the internet described us as ‘just two guys doing things’, which we thought was quite apt.”
Since starting All The Gear in 2024, the pair say they’ve stuck pretty closely to their original vision for the channel. “We've actually stayed pretty true to what we had in mind with it,” Ethan continues. “We lay out a road map in our very first video and looking back at that now, it's not too dissimilar to the point we're at now. We've of course tried things we never expected, like visiting the Arctic Circle at -32°C or trying to paddle a £49.99 Kayak out to the sea from the streams, but we haven't steered off course. Everything is an evolution of what we initially envisaged.”
PHOTO: Jack and Ethan, All The Gear creators
You don’t need to be intimately familiar with Ethan and Jack to know they love the technical side of what they do — filming, video production, and presenting are second nature to them — but the playfulness and dry humour that characterises the channel is what’s really won hearts and minds among All the Gear’s community.
“The last year has been such a whirlwind and we often pinch ourselves at the things we get to do and the weird adventures we've been on,” says Ethan. “Some of my favourite moments include having a ‘backie’ from Olympic gold medallist, Jeffrey Hoogland, on a bike we cycled back from Amsterdam, watching Jack trying to climb underneath his church pew bed and foraging with an incredibly knowledgeable man called Joseph on the Isle of Wight.”
Jack says “the whole year has been a highlight, we're very lucky to get to travel and make videos for a living. We've managed to take in some crazy sights in places like Japan and Iceland but the best bits are the small moments, just having a laugh, usually at each other.”
The perfect example? Each egged on by the other, Jack and Ethan recently decided to turn their tiny Suzuki Carry van into a pub. The Suzuki featured in All The Gear videos on several occasions before this, with Jack and Ethan first challenging themselves to spend 24 hours inside it, and then converting it into a camper van in just one day. “We wanted the next version of it to be a tiny pub,” says Ethan. “It's by far the biggest project we've undertaken and something we've learnt a lot from, particularly on the beer front, but also how we shrink everything down to fit in the van, from the bar to the stools and the glasses.”
Not long after that, the pair were introduced to founder of St Ives Brewery, Marco Amura, and together, they decided to brew a beer for the Suzuki-turned-pub. “We had a great initial call with Marco, then headed down to the brewery to have a beer tasting and work out what we liked. We absolutely love what he's created with his amazing team down there and how accommodating he was with us. One of us drinks more lager and one drinks more IPA and we settled on some sort of middle-ground that we think makes for really easy drinking.”
So, what does the future hold for All The Gear? Fuck if I know. The world is Jack and Ethan’s oyster.
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