A few years back, when I first came across Elliot Brown watches, I assumed they occupied a liminal space between fashion watches and the more serious pieces for which we enthusiasts yearn. I’ve been curious to test that assumption, especially as the brand has added what seem to be more robust and technically savvy watches to its lineup in the past couple of years. In particular, I’ve been keen to get my hands on something from their Beachmaster line, the technical pinnacle of the brand’s wares.
First, a little about the brand, which, according to my light-touch internet sleuthing, we have yet to review here at The Time Bum. Launched in 2013 and hailing from the U.K., Elliot Brown was created by a pair of blokes (I believe this is the regionally correct technical term) with a fondness for outdoor coastal living, an ethos I feel kinship with. As you can imagine, given such a predilection for an environment fairly hostile to watches, the brand’s focus is on hardy, reliable tools.
That coastal background also provides the inspiration for the Beachmaster, which adds a mission-timing function to the GMT dive watch formula that has exploded in popularity over the past year. The Beachmaster collection is available in automatic and quartz forms, with a total of 6 base variants, not including strap options. Though the automatic is positioned as the peak of the lineup, being the brand’s most expensive offering by far, the quartz models intrigue me more. For a watch intended to be a no-fuss tool, the always-ticking nature of a quartz movement better befits the design brief.
I didn’t actually know what version of the watch I would have in hand for review. Several seconds of hacking through multiple layers of tape and another layer of packaging revealed the Beachmaster Ghost. What a reveal it was, as the Ghost looks fantastic, like a hard-boiled action movie prop come to life.
Tan dials are all too uncommon in watches, and pairing a stone hue with a black PVD case makes for a cool fishbowl effect, wherein your eyes immediately focus on the dial. That extra help corralling ocular focus is very welcome, as there’s a lot of substance to process on the dial and rehaut. The center segment of the dial, outlined in light gray, features the brand’s text and graphic logos above the pinion, the model name below, and the even positions of a 24-hour scale. This inner sector could be cleaned up by removing the text logo, shifting the graphic logo to that lower position, and then completing the inner numeral scale with a “24” marker for midnight. As it is, though, the presence of both logos is handled well enough by placing the graphic logo at the midnight position.
The delineation between the inner and outer segments of the dial is further aided by a subtle wave texture on the inner portion, the undulating lines of which refract the light at certain angles. It is a nice trick that emphasizes the functional distinction – second-time zone within the inner sector, local time without. The local time is managed mainly with linear graphics – hash marks for minutes and seconds, darker, bolder bar markers for non-cardinal hours, and bold Arabic numerals at the cardinal positions. All of the printing is done in a medium gray, and the fonts are attractive and cohesive.
The last in this trio of time-telling rings is the rehaut, which serves an atypical function here. On a dive-GMT like this – rotating or stationary – it will most often track an additional time zone, the minutes, or perhaps a 60-minute timing scale. Here, the scale on the rehaut enables the timing of a mission of up to 24 hours, with a caveat. How? Rather than include a full 24-hour scale, the inner bezel ring counts from “H” position up to “12”, and then back down from “12” until you reach “H” once again. Regardless of what the moment in question is – a military mission, expected landing hour, the optimal time to pull the turkey from the grill – you rotate the inner bezel so that the handy outer arrow of the GMT hand points to the count-down starting hour to “H” hour. If you want to count down from 4 hours, position the “4” that is counter-clockwise from “H” where the GMT hand is pointing, and that hand will indicate the elapse of 4 hours when it reaches the “H.”
What’s the caveat? Though the brand notes that the bezel tracks 24 hours of a mission, it effectively does so for 12 hours. Yes, a full cycle of the GMT hand around the dial represents 24 hours, but the inner bezel’s 12-hour countdown and 12-hour count up format isn’t intuitive for any time interval between 12 and 24 hours, where the numerals repeat themselves. It is still a useful function, and I love to see esoteric ingenuity of this type – it keeps watches interesting.
Elliot Brown has added to the functional fun by using ceramic bearings for the inner bezel, which affords satisfyingly heavy clicks as you operate the dedicated crown. Unfortunately, that crown – signed with a raised triangle – is tough to operate while wearing the watch, as it is a little too short. I understand not wanting the crowns to dig into the wrist, but the operational challenge seems out of line with the purpose of the watch – if you happen to wear gloves on your clandestine mission, you’ll need to pause and remove them to operate your mission-timing scale. I’m also not in love with the position of the two crowns, which are not on the same horizontal plane. Presumably, this is a concession to function, with the crown at 2 o’clock positioned higher to connect to the gearing of the inner rotating bezel, and the brand logo-signed crown at 4 o’clock sitting lower to align to the Ronda 515.24H movement within. It is relatively forgivable, as there is a functional benefit achieved through the crowns’ placement, but it looks unbalanced.
When I first saw the familiar British mil-spec hands, with their black-filled plots contrasted against the tan dial, I assumed this was a full-lume dial. Beyond assuming, I was excited to see that a brand had done full-lume in my preferred style, using the hands and dial markers as blacked-out negative contrast to the dial’s lume. For not the first time in life, my assumption was wrong – the black paint on the hands is lume, as is all of the ghostly-gray paint of the dial text. As is oft the case with lume of this hue, the glow from the hands and dial markers is short-lived, and faint compared to the more common BGW9 and C3. The lume display you see in this review is more potential than actual, with a quick flash from a blacklight to illustrate what elements of the watch are lumed. Elliot Brown, in a respectable display of transparency, notes the reduced lume performance on the watch’s purchasing page.
The transparency is appreciated, but I’m not a fan of the decision to lume the hands and not the dial. I appreciate that wearing a little flashlight without a switch is not a great aid for masking one’s position, but there’s space between the torch-like light shows we’ve come to expect from modern watches and a glow so faint as to be unusable in dark conditions. A full-lume dial with fewer layers of paint would afford close-up visibility in the dark without surrendering one’s position from a distance. Add in hour markers printed in black to better match the excellent aesthetics of the black-on-tan handset, and the visibility in light and dark conditions would be improved, significantly so for the latter.
The Beachmaster Ghost’s commitment to nocturnal stealth continues in the case, finished in a matte-black PVD coating. The case, shared with the bare-steel version of the Beachmaster, has some elegant touches that are surprising for a watch intended to be used and abused. The lugs have a pretty turndown from the upper surface of the case, accented by chamfers that taper outward from the 3 and 9 o’clock positions, and have the visual effect of slimming the lugs. The chamfers bear the same matte finish as the rest of the case, but their angles catch light in a manner that fooled me, at first glance, into thinking they were polished. Undercuts on either side of the case further help prevent the watch from appearing slab-sided. Together, these tricks help the Beachmaster from feeling as bulky as its 40mm x 50mm x 14mm dimensions suggest.
The steep descent of the lugs helps the case wrap around the wrist, though the elevated position of the holes for the screw-in strap bars means non-fitted straps will have some gap to the wrist. The placement of the screw bars is necessary, though, for proper fitment of the fitted Tropic-style strap or bracelet that the Ghost is offered with. The brand also sells a handful of other fitted straps that work with the Beachmaster, including the tan rubber one shown in this review. I typically don’t love fitted rubber straps, as they can be too stiff where they connect to the case, but I found the tan OEM option fairly comfortable and of high-quality construction. Some of the comfort owes to the long lug-to-lug length, which fits the 7.5.” circumference of my wrist well – if you have a significantly thinner wrist than me, expect some strap gap with the fitted rubber.
Sitting atop the case is the final time-telling element, a 120-click unidirectional countdown bezel, finished in a matte black that nicely matches that of the case. The countdown scale is a sensible choice given the theme of the Beachmaster, though I would love to see a fully-graduated scale rather than 5-minute intervals. If every minute counts on a mission, every minute should be trackable.
Having read this far, you may have noticed that my first hands-on with Elliot Brown is a bit of a mixed bag. The quality of construction, including the engineering of the inner rotating bezel, is readily evident when wearing and using the watch. The aesthetics are, perhaps, even more impressive. Overall, there’s a lot to like about the Beachmaster, and some of my critiques – lume decisions, for instance – are specific to the Ghost variant, not the entire model range. Others, like the difficultly operating the 2 o’clock crown and strap-bar height, are common across the lineup. With a few tweaks, particularly inverting the current lume choice to make the display more useful, the Ghost would quickly shift from an aesthetically pleasing and well-built watch to the heavy-duty tool that Elliot Brown designed it to be.
Click here for more about the Elliot Brown Beachmaster Ghost.
