Gale’s Festival Mild

It’s been a long time since the last blog post because we’ve not done anything beery for a while (apart from drinking it!). But tonight we made some beer, so I thought it might be a good idea to bang out a blog post whilst the wort chills. (20:22, 68C).

Tonight’s Brew

It’s winter. It’s cold and dark and generally rubbish weather. At this time of the year you need dark rich winter-warmers. In order to appease me, and my liking for milds, Andy agreed that we’d make a beer based on Gale’s Festival Mild. But this is no ordinary mild: 1.058 (so probably about 6%), very black and hopefully very delicious.

Recent Tastings

Recently we’ve been drinking two brews: The Rye Experiment and Shutlingsloe.

The Rye was certainly successful – not a bad bitter, but with something different about it that I can’t out my finger on. People say rye gives beer more of a “grainy” taste. I’m not exactly sure what that means, but I suspect that’s what we got!

However the Shutlingsloe was a real success. It’s a smooth, deeply dark and rich beer, but still a bitter. It’s not sweet; rather it’s strong, dark and bitter. Big success. That will be going into the Cheshire Peaks range for future re-brews.

Popping Hops

Our friend Andy Bowers has reported a strange phenomenon when he adds his wort chiller to his boiling wort. The hops seem to find their way into the spiral of the chiller, and push up above the level of the wort. We thought nothing more of it until today, when it happened to us too. No idea why. Answers on a postcard.

S-04 versus US-05

Considering we’ve not been brewing that long, our brewing preferences have already diverged from those of Andy Bowers. Regular readers will know that we recently undertook the Great British Brew Off, to see if our mashing techniques have a noticeable effect on the outcome of a beer. Results pending on that one.

Another of our diverged preferences is yeast. At Cheshire Peaks we’ve settled on Safale S-04 – a high quality dried English Ale yeast. We love it because the taste is good, but it’s also really reliable to use – it ferments well, gives average attenuation (ferments most but not all of the sugars, leaving a bit of sweetness) and, in particular, drops out to the bottom of the fermenter like a stone when it’s finished (called flocculating).

Andy Bowers on the other hand has primarily used Safale US-05 – a similar dried yeast, but with a very clean neutral flavour. He claims it’s far better.

I guess even if you haven’t been doing something for a long time you still tend to develop a preference for what you know.

82 IBU!

We bottled the Great British Brew Off porter tonight – it made 40 bottles of lovely chocolaty ale.

However it was BITTER! We used a whole brick of Morris Hanbury fuggles hops, which should be 113g (see photo below for evidence!). But afterwards I checked how much a brick of hops weighs, and it is much closer to 140g! My mistake for not actually weighing it on brew day. Duh!

I went back to my recipe and recalculated the bitterness units, and it looks like the porter is 82 IBU! In my post on hop bitterness I gave a list of beer styles and their bitterness ranges – 82 IBU is nearly off the scale!

Oh well, what we do know is that bitterness eases off over time, so I think we’ll be leaving this one for at least six months before we start drinking.

Great British Brew Off–Cheshire Peaks leg

We had a successful brew day yesterday, brewing Whitbread's Porter for the Cheshire Peaks entry in the Great British Brew Off.

We had just one incident, which resulted in us liquoring back (posh name for letting down the wort with water) by far too much. The reason? There were so many hops in the boiler that the hydrometer wasn’t floating, it was balanced on the hops! So initially we read the post-boil gravity as 1.101! We liquored back accordingly, but when we thought about how much water we’d added it just didn’t add up. After checking the gravity properly (using a hydrometer jar) we found that we had dropped the gravity way past the target of 1.060 to 1.051. So what should be 6% ABV will only be 4.8%. Oh well. I hope it does not affect our comparison with Andy Bowers’s brew too much.

Spent grains in the mash tun.

 

Much hot break on the surface of this really dark brew.

 

One must always be impeccably dressed on brew day, don’t you think?

 

Skimmed off hot break scum.

 

LOTS of hops – 113g!

Labelling the Dubbel

We finally got up to date with bottle labelling today. We bottled the Belgian Dubbel a while back, but it has been sat without labels all this time.

Why did it take so long? Well partly laziness, sorry, needing to find time to get round to it. But also partly we kind of struggled with a suitable name and pithy description for the beer.

In the end we settled on “2x” for the name. (It’s a Belgian Dubbel – did you see what we did there?)

And for the pithy description: “A Belgian-style Dubbel, from Cheshire”. Not exactly sparkling with wit, but we also suspect it’s not going to be appearing on our first commercial pump clip anyway…

The Great British Brew Off

Our brewing friend Andy loves traditional (nay, archaic) brewing methods. He mashes for three and a half hours, and mucks about with stepping up the temperature at the end (known as a “mash out”).

I’m not convinced these methods are necessary these days. The modern malting process has been perfected over the ages resulting in “better modified” malts, which means they have a lot more enzymes available to convert the starch to sugar.

So, we wondered, does a three hour mash make any difference to the final beer? Indeed, do any of the other differences in our overall brewing processes make any difference?

And so The Great British Brew Off was born!

Both breweries will work to the same recipe (supplied by Andy, below). Andy will use his three and a half hour mash. Cheshire Peaks will use their standard one hour mash. And at the end we’ll have a hell of a lot of beer to drink!

Here’s the recipe we’re working to:

London Porter (1850) Whitbread's Porter Brewery London OG 1060

per gallon

2.25lbs Pale Malt

7oz Brown Malt

2.5oz Black Malt

1oz fuggles

It’s just like the “technical challenge”. :-)

Colchester’s Bane

We had a very successful brewday yesterday – brewing a dark winter bitter that we plan to call Shutlingsloe.

What’s it made of? Well our usual maris otter pale ale malt, coupled with a decent helping of crystal malt (for sweetness and richness), chocolate malt and Carafa Special I (for that dark rich toasty malty flavour).

And the hops? Well we’re trying something new here: Boudicea hops. These are a less well-known English variety, said to have a light floral character. Andy quipped that we should therefore be calling the beer Colchester’s Bane.

In other news… we also labelled our Norton Priory Abbey Ale. This is a bit of a labour of love because every label has to be shaped by hand. I’ve tried to persuade Andy that we should have a rectangular label like everyone else, but he’s having none of it. Oh well, it gave us something to do whilst the wort chilled.

We’ve made Rodenbach

Credit where credit’s due – Andy’s got a good taste-memory. I said back in my post about infection that Andy had commented that our “Belgian Sour” (as we are now forced to call it) tasted like Rodenbach Classic (Red). Well last night Andy turned up with a bottle of Rodenbach Grand Cru from the Bottle Stop in Bramhall so we could do a side-by-side tasting. (As an side: if you like beer and you live in south Manchester and you haven’t been to the Bottle Stop, then why not!? It has an amazing selection of British and foreign ales).

Anyway, back to the story: the Grand Cru is not exactly the same beer as the Rodenbach Classic, but b*gger me if Andy wasn’t right! Our Belgian Sour is really very similar in aroma and taste. The Grand Cru is understandably more malty and a little bit woody, but the basic elements of the sour flavour are exactly the same.

So I have no idea how we managed to make what we did, but there you go – justification that it isn’t a complete disaster. We both think it will be better served chilled, but we need to finish the Bohemian Wrenbury before there is fridge space.

As another aside (in true Ronnie Corbett style), we also tasted a tricky-to-get American beer called Stone’s Arrogant Bastard. I’ve never tasted such a full on, aggressive beer! It had everything in there – smoke, wood, peat, malt, bitterness, resinous. There were flavours in there I’d just never tasted in beer before. It’s not exactly what you’d call a session beer (in fact I was very happy to have shared a bottle rather than drink a whole one to myself) but interesting nonetheless. I’m not sure we’ll be trying to brew that one however!

Experiences of brewing with rye

We had a successful brew day yesterday, making our Rye Beer Experiment.

We used 30% rye malt and 70% barley malt – from what I’ve read this is a fairly high proportion, but we wanted to get a feel for what it tastes like so risked pushing it.

So what did we learn? Well the first thing I was warned about was getting a stuck mash. This is where the grain in the mash tun becomes to gloopy to allow the sparge water to pass through properly. Rye has much less husk than barley, which means it is prone to becoming a big sticky mess that won’t allow water through it (think porridge). However, despite the warnings our mash/sparge ran completely normally.

Then it comes to the boil. It seems that rye is much higher in protein than barley, and this really showed itself during the boil. Proteins precipitate out during the boil process: an effect known as the hot break. Last night’s hot break was huge -  we had great big clumps of stuff the size of cornflakes floating around in the boil, as you can see below.

Andy skimmed quite a lot of the scum off the boil too, as you can see below.

Finally, getting the wort out of the boiler into the fermenter was something of a challenge. My new boiler has a filter at the bottom, as shown below.

I don’t have a photo of it, but the filter mesh was utterly clogged up with break material (the precipitated proteins). I had to sanitise a little brush and scrub at the mesh to help the wort to get through. (Sorry, no photo of that – too busy with it!).

So all in all, it doesn’t bode well for a clear beer. Those proteins are bound to leave a lot of haze. But hopefully it will be an interesting (and tasty!) beer nonetheless.

Rye Beer Experiment

You can make beer out of all sorts of grains. Obviously the most common is barley. Wheat is also a common addition to beer. But many other grains can be used too: rye, spelt, oats, rice, sorghum, millet.

So I thought we’d better try some to see what they taste like. The most obvious one after wheat is rye. My interest in rye was piqued following a conversation with Toby at Red Willow on Twitter, where he said that he uses rye in his excellent Sleepless American Amber Ale.

So that’s the recipe for Monday’s brewday: a rye experiment. It will be a fairly standard bitter in most respects, except that 30% of the pale ale malt will be replace with rye malt. (This is fairly brave – most people seem to recommend about 20% maximum, but we want to really get a sense of what it tastes like).

So what are we expecting it to taste like? I understand that rye gives the beer an interesting grainy, slightly spicy flavour with a dry mouthfeel. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Infection

This is not a marketing blog. We aren’t trying to sell anything. (If we did, we’d have the Duty Man chasing us). So we’ve got no reason to keep all the articles all positive and “we made this lovely beer then we made that lovely beer”. So here goes – the truth is we seem to have a major problem with a recent beer.

Regular readers will remember that we made a series of Belgian style ales. The first was a Belgian Pale Ale, which fermented nicely and tasted very promising when we transferred it into the keg.

We followed Andy’s “six weeks maturation minimum” rule, but when we came to taste it something was badly wrong. The initial signs had been there – frantic secondary fermentation and a leaking keg (a bit like our earlier explosion). When we served it, the beer gushed out under such pressure we ended up with a whole pint of froth.

But it’s the smell and taste that tells us we have an infection – it’s sour. Not vinegar sour. It’s softer than that, which suggests to me that it is lactic acid, rather than acetic acid. But sour nonetheless. Bugger.

We’ve not had a lot of experience of infections, but given the softness of the sour taste, I am guessing it is a lactobacillus infection. Lactobacillus is present on all raw malt, of which there is plenty around the brewery (I mean house).

So disaster. Well, we’re not so sure. A number of people that have tasted it have been intrigued by the “funky” sourness. It’s not unpleasant, just not what we normally expect from our beer. Andy believes it tastes rather like Rodenbach Classic (Red).

So, since we don’t need the keg right now it hasn’t been dumped. We keep sampling the odd half pint, and we haven’t died yet (or indeed had any adverse symptoms). So we’ll just have to see.

(If you LIKE this sort of beer let me know, we have a LOT to spare! :-)

Photo: http://www.thebarleyblog.com/2011/rodenbach-classic/

Norton Priory

Our brew day went well yesterday. We now have 5 gallons of “Chimay-ish” happily fermenting.

Andy persuaded me to make it much stronger than I had anticipated. I’d been aiming for about 7% (OG 1.062), but Andy egged me on to go up to 9% (OG 1.074) on the grounds that we are bottling it (so it can be drunk over a longer period) and that strength is very in-style for Chimay. Ooer.

Then we sat and discussed a name… always tricky. Given that this is based on a monastic ale, we looked for a suitable local name with a similar theme, and came up with Norton Priory.

But we struggled to find a satisfactory name for the Belgian Dubbel. Any suggestions from my extensive readership gratefully received! Incidentally, we tasted the Dubbel last night too. Very, very pleased with it. Deep, complex, smooth, warming and with a distinct figgy note. That’s going to be great around Christmas.

Norton Priory. Photo: Wikipedia.

Last of the Belgians

Tomorrow’s brew day sees the last in our triptych of Belgian ales. We started with a Belgian Pale Ale, then moved to a Belgian Dubbel, and tomorrow we are brewing a Chimay Red-inspired ale. Chimay is a Trappist monastery in the south west of Belgium that has been brewing beers since 1862.

Why three in a row? Well we started with a batch of WYeast 3522 Belgian Ardennes yeast, and it seems such a shame not to use it as much as possible.

So what’s this one going to be like? Well here are some tasting notes I found for Chimay Red:

It pours with a lovely deep red colour and tall, foaming head that is very persistent. The nose is intensely fruity, with notes of dried apricots and fig and a chocolaty background. On the palate it is smooth and silky-textured, with a luxurious mouthfeel. There is plenty of nutty, dry, but concentrated fruit character and a spicy, malty finish with plenty of bit.

I have to confess it is many years since I drank any Chimay (note to self – visit The Bottle Stop soon). But I’m sure it’ll be interesting to make our own. I don’t think it will be exactly like Chimay because you should use specific Chimay yeast.

And what else is in it? Lager malt, crystal malt, a dash of chocolate malt and the key ingredient: two jars of honey.

Like the Belgian Dubbel, this will be heading into bottles, and maturing until the colder months. Om nom nom.

Photo: www.chimay.com

Marmite Beer

We’ve made Marmite Beer! Speaking metaphorically of course!

If you remember, back in June we made a Citra-hopped American Pale Ale. It’s just coming up to being ready to drink, and my first impressions are extremely favourable. Not so Andy’s. He absolutely hates it.

On the aroma I get peach, apricot and melon. Not harsh and citrusy at all (unlike some Citra-based beers).

The flavour has a warm rich malty sweetness coupled with some sweet fruit like melon or mango. You are left with just the right amount of bitterness which is not harsh or resiny.

Of course Andy disagrees, which shows you just how subjective the world of beer tasting is. I’m not saying he’s wrong. But I do know who’s going to be drinking a lot of this barrel!

PS I’m pleased to say the clarity is very acceptable. (Cf previous post).

PPS If you are interested in seeing the recipe for this or any other beers, leave a comment. I tend to leave recipes out because I assume that those people reading this are doing so out of mild interest, rather than any more detailed interest in brewing. If you are a home brewer and would like to see the recipes let me know.

Clarity Problems

This is not a marketing blog. That’s because we don’t have anything to sell (did you hear that, Mr Duty Man??). And it means that this blog is not all about “we made this lovely beer” and “we made that lovely beer”. Sometimes things go wrong. Happy to admit it – that’s how you learn.

The previous blog post is a case in point – we’re currently drinking pretty much flat lager.

So here goes with another. What the hell happened to our ability to make clear beer??

This problem has afflicted the last couple of brews: East Kent Goldings Single Hop and Liberty Lightning.

The funny thing is that the beer seems fairly clear when it is racked out of the fermenter. Then it sits in the keg to mature for 4-6 weeks (a period of time soon to be designated a “Burrows”). When served we end up with the haziest beer you’ve ever seen (see the photo below). It’s a bit embarrassing giving it to friends to be honest.

I can only think of a couple of possible reasons:

1. Dry hopping. Maybe adding dry hops after fermentation has somehow affected the clarity.
2. Yeast activity during conditioning. Maybe the yeast’s secondary fermentation is so vigorous (especially given the warmer days of “summer”) that it’s kicking up a load of yeast into suspension and not settling out.

Certainly the vigorous secondary fermentation of the Liberty Lightning points towards the latter possibility. But I’m really not sure. Here’s hoping the Citra American Pale doesn't suffer the same fate.

Making lager fizzy

It’s funny how sometimes what would on the face of it appear a fairly simple thing turns out to be much much more complicated…

If you are our regular reader, you will remember that way back in April we made a Czech-style lager, named Bohemian Wrenbury. This has been lagering (cold storage) for many weeks, but now summer is here (ho ho!) we want to drink it. But obviously being lager it needs to be fizzy.

As everyone knows, the bubbles in fizzy drinks are carbon dioxide. How do you make beer fizzy? Well there are two ways: first is to provoke a secondary fermentation. Fermentation gives off carbon dioxide, so if you keep the beer sealed it will dissolve in the beer. This is how we carbonate our ales. The second way is force carbonation, i.e. seal the beer and use bottled carbon dioxide.

As I said, for our ales we use a secondary fermentation. So why not just do this for the lager? Well, mainly because of the lack of yeast. After many weeks of lagering, I think most of the yeast will have dropped out of the beer. Plus the lager is in the fridge, so any secondary fermentation would take a long time. And finally, it’s a bit uncontrollable. You add sugar to power the secondary fermentation… if it didn’t ferment we’d end up with somewhat sweet lager.

So we decided to try force carbonation. First problem: how do you know what pressure you have in your keg? After much research, I bought a keg pressure gauge on eBay:

After a bit of drilling, tightening and testing it was fitted and seems to work OK.

Next problem – how much pressure do you need? The first thing to say is that the amount of carbonation in beer is measured in “volumes”. That is, carbonation to one “volume” means you have dissolved the same volume of carbon dioxide in your beer as you have beer. Two “volumes” means twice the volume of carbon dioxide has been dissolved as you have beer.

Generally lagers are served at between 2 and 2.5 volumes. So far so good. Now the amount of carbon dioxide you can dissolve depends on the pressure of the gas above the beer and also the temperature. A quick look on Google reveals some handy charts for the pressure (in PSI) required to attain a certain level of carbonation versus temperature. Yes, temperature plays a part: the colder the beer the more gas you can dissolve in it. This sounds counter-intuitive, but it’s right. For dissolving salt in water, you need it to be warmer to get more to dissolve. Not so for dissolving a gas – for that you can dissolve more gas at lower temperatures, because a higher temperature means more energy in the liquid, which can drive the gas out of solution and into the space above.

All fine, except that you need quite a lot of pressure, even at about 5C, to dissolve 2.5 volumes or carbon dioxide. More pressure, unfortunately, than the King Keg is supposed to tolerate (10-12 PSI max). Bugger. But given that I’d got this far I didn’t see that there was much else I could do but go for it, and see how much carbon dioxide I could get to dissolve. So far it turns out that the answer is “not enough”. When served, the lager comes out at quite a gush (because of the pressure above), but it doesn’t hold any bubbles. Just the very slightest hint of carbonation, like mostly flat mineral water. Arse.

On the plus side, the beer itself tastes and smells wonderful – just like Budvar. And it’s nice and clear.

So what was the “right” solution? To invest in a “cornelius keg”, which can hold much much more pressure. But I don’t think one would fit in my fridge. So this is going to take a lot more thought and experimentation for future lagers.

New boiler

On Tuesday we made the second of our Belgian beers – a Belgian Dubbel. The brewday was enhanced by the arrival of a shiny new boiler for my birthday (thank you Gill!).

“Hang on!!”, I hear you say, “you’ve got a lovely vintage Burco boiler, what do you want to replace that for?”

A couple of reasons really. Firstly, the new boiler is slightly bigger (29 litres versus 22 litres), which means we can boil the whole batch (previously we’ve always boiled a little under the full volume, then topped up with a bit of water at the end). Bigger also means the liquid isn’t anywhere as near to the top. Much safer!

The second reason is speed. We have been able to shave some time off our brewday by using both boilers. The old Burco is now just a Hot Liquor Tank (HLT). Previously it had to do both jobs, which meant that we had to collect the runnings from our mash tun somewhere else until we had completely finished sparging and no longer needed hot water. Then we transferred it all across to the Burco to start boiling it. Of course the wort was cooling down during all this time, so with the new boiler we can start heating the wort much sooner, saving time.

Oh, and I’ve just thought of a third reason. The new boiler has a nice filter at the bottom, which holds back hops and trub (precipitated proteins) as we are running off. I suppose in theory that should mean clearer beer, although there is some debate about that in brewing circles.

Oh Belgium man! Belgium!

Holy Zarquon singing fish, July is going to be a month of brewing Belgian ales at Cheshire Peaks.

It all started because Andy and I were discussing what to do next, and we decided branching out into some continental beers would be interesting. Our initial thought was a Belgian Pale Ale – a malty, fruity, somewhat spicy, easy-drinking, copper-coloured ale.

The important thing with most beers is getting the yeast right. It’s OK with British ales because we have found some very reliable dried yeasts (mainly Safale S-04). But for a Belgian Pale Ale we need a proper Belgian yeast. Enter Wyeast liquid yeasts. Our recipe calls for Wyeast 3655 Belgian Schelde, but this does not appear to exist anymore. So we decided Wyeast 3522 Belgian Ardennes should be a suitable alternative. I called the Brew Shop in Stockport – they don’t stock it but would see if they could get it.

Yesterday I popped in to see if the yeast had arrived. It hadn’t, so I whipped out my copy of Brewing Classic Styles and looked for an alternative beer to make. After much consideration I settled on a Belgian Dubbel – a deep reddish, moderately strong, malty, complex Belgian ale. The grain bill is much more complex - lager malt, munich malt, Belgian candi sugar, aromatic malt, caramunich and Special B. Phew! But as it happened the Brew Shop had every one. I settled on trying Safbrew T-33 dried yeast.

Sorted. About to leave the shop. Then for some reason Peter looked in a packet which had been recently delivered and was hanging around the shop – it was a bundle of Wyeast Activator packs (not in the fridge, eek!). And lo and behold one was the Belgian Ardennes I had asked him to get.

So I ended up buying the ingredients for BOTH beers. As I said, July is going to be a month of brewing Belgian ales at Cheshire Peaks. Belgium man!

Liberty Lightning

I realised as I was writing the last post about explosions that I haven’t written anything about our Liberty Lightning beer. I must have been busy with other things – there haven’t been any posts for a number of weeks. Sorry to all you readers. (Both of you!)

So, what is Liberty Lightning? Well we wanted to make a really light and easy drinking summer ale with a nice hop flavour along the lines of Hop Back’s Summer Lightning.

So we decided: keep the grain bill simple. And choose one interesting and light hop. What we ended up with was 100% maris otter pale ale malt, and 100% Liberty hops. I’ve heard some people refer to this as SMASH brewing: Single Malt And Single Hop.

Liberty is a US variety, although it’s very low acidity (compared to other US varieties). It seems to have Germanic roots, giving it a clean spiciness with a bit of fruitiness, apparently. We shall see! Apart from the loss of about a pint and a half (see the post about explosions), the rest is currently conditioning nicely.

STOP PRESS: It’s tried to escape again! Stop fermenting, you yeast! I made you; I am your lord and master!

Photo: Hop Back Brewery

Explosion!

Sorry for the sensational headline. Rumours of an explosion at Cheshire Peaks appear to have been exaggerated. But I did avert one this week. Bit of a long story.

I have been trying to work out how to serve our Bohemian Wrenbury – a Bohemian Pilsner (lager). I wanted to be sure that a King Keg (the barrels with the black tops in the photo below) would fit in the fridge. So I took the lager out (currently in a fermenting vessel) and briefly put the King Keg full of Liberty Lightning into the fridge (yes, it fitted fine, in case you were worried). I returned both vessels to their original positions and thought nothing more of it.

The following day I popped into the garage for something, and as I left the words “mmm, nice beer smell” went through my mind (probably in a Homer voice). Huh? I went back in to see beer gradually trickling across the garage floor. The Liberty Lightning was leaking! It was dripping off the bottom of the barrel, into a drip tray, which was now overflowing and the beer was running across the floor. On closer inspection I saw that the point where the black tap joins the barrel was fizzing (see photo).

I immediately opened the top of the barrel to release the pressure, then started the tedious process of mopping up.

I can only guess that in moving the barrel I stirred up the yeast and it started fermenting again. It’s summer, so the (reasonably) warm weather must have helped keep the little yeasties busy.

I just wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t caught it as soon as I did… Never mind the explosion, imagine all that wasted beer!

This was a few days ago, and it still smells rather nice in the garage.

Citra American Pale Ale

Citra hops are a very new variety: only commercially available since 2008. Since becoming widely available, these American hops have become almost “trendy”, if you can have such a thing in the beer world. There are a large number of craft breweries, in the UK, US and elsewhere, that delight in their citrus fruit flavour and aroma. They have been described as: peach, apricot, passion fruit, grapefruit, lime, melon, gooseberry, lychee fruit, pineapple, mango, papaya and other tropical fruit flavours and aromas.

I’ve had some lovely beers made with citra, and I wanted to give them a try. One problem: Andy’s had plenty of beers made with citra too, and he really doesn’t like them. It became a bit of a running joke, and so more as a wind-up than anything else I bought some a month or two back. (In fact the on line retailer actually sent me four packs by mistake, which made it look even more like a wind up!)

However, having bought them Andy relented and agreed that we’d make something with them. We decided to make an American Pale Ale – described as a “clean, fresh, hoppy beer with enough malt backbone to carry the moderate hop character and bitterness”.

I’ve seen some comments on the intertubes warning about using solely citra hops.(Suggestions of “cat’s pee” didn’t sound too appealing). So I decided we’d use 50% citra and 50% liberty – a softer, more Germanic style hop. Citra is also aggressively bitter (15% as opposed to Liberty’s 5%).

We made it last Monday and it has been fermenting frantically since then – nearly done now and ready for racking.

The question now is what on earth to do with the remaining three and a half packs of citra! Actually I gave a pack to my brewing friend Andy Bowers – he was talking about making a brown ale hopped with citra. Sounds bizarre, but hey, you have to try these things!

Diageo screw Brewdog

This is slightly off-topic, but I thought you might find this interesting. You can’t make this sort of stuff up.

http://www.brewdog.com/blog-article/diageo-v-brewdog

Frankly, I don’t think craft breweries like Brewdog are a threat to the monstrous super-tankers that are the drinks giants. I just can’t see craft beer taking any appreciable slice of the “fizzy crap” end of the market any time soon. And let’s face it, that must be 95% of the market. But it’s very interesting that Diageo see Brewdog as a threat. Something of an own-goal methinks…

The importance of maturation

When we first started making beer I was obviously extremely keen to start drinking our beers as soon as possible. Andy, on the other hand, was always the voice of restraint. He argued that every beer needs plenty of time to mature before it is consumed.

He’s absolutely right of course, and if you read my previous post about the American Amber Ale tasting you’ll see what I mean. When we first tried it (after a couple of weeks in the barrel) the flavours just had not blended. It was like drinking two different beers in one glass.

I have a suspicion that some of the “green” taste that many people associate with home-brew beers is largely down to lack of maturation too.

So what happens to the flavours during maturation? It’s a little hard to express, but once you start tasting beers through their lifecycle you start to pick up on how the flavours mellow out and blend over time. It’s a bit like eating a chilli that has not had a couple of hours of slow simmering: the flavours are all there, but are separate and distinct. Time is needed for them to blend into a new thing.

Initially the bitterness of a beer is much more pronounced. This eases off after 4-6 weeks, and so is something that needs to be compensated for in the recipe if you want a very bitter beer. Also, unfortunately, the hop flavours and (especially) aromas ease off too. This is perhaps the one downside to a long maturation – you can loose those crisp young fresh hop aromas. I certainly noticed that with the First Gold Experiment (again, see previous posting).

So how long should beer be matured for? Well I’d say 2-3 weeks as an absolute minimum. (Andy would say 4-6 weeks minimum!). For a light hoppy beer the minimum is probably OK; for a dark ale like a porter it should be more. For lagers, maturing them for a long time very cold is all part of the process – it is not a lager if this isn’t done. In fact “lager” is the German word for “store”.

As far as we are concerned, this extended maturation phase means a couple of things:

1. We need more barrels! Currently we have three. That is just about enough, but having four would allow us to leave beers alone for longer.
2. We should aim to brew some of our darker winter beers earlier and lay them down in bottles for a long maturation phase. We plan to do this soon – we have a winter porter on the list for the brew after next.

Mini Beer Festival

I had some ex-work friends over on Thursday night. We usually go into Wilmslow for beer, curry and a chat once a month, but since I have three barrels of beer ready to drink in the garage, I suggested they come to me first for a sampling session.

So the poor guys ended up trapped in my garage whilst I babbled on about step infusion mashes and alpha acid isomerisation. They nodded with polite interest, but I am pleased to say that the beer was consumed with some enthusiasm. It’s fortunate that the by-product of my hobby is something most of my friends seem very happy to drink!

I have previously blogged about the making of all three of the beers we drank that night, but what I haven’t done is write some tasting notes now the beers are being drunk. So here we go.

First Gold Experiment

Many of our beers at the moment use just a single hop variety. We’re doing this because there is such a huge range of hops available these days, and we want to understand what they are like. I first heard about the First Gold variety through the Badger beer of the same name. It’s an English dwarf hop with huge versatility both for bittering and also for flavour and aroma.

We made a simple, pale ale and used plenty of First Gold hops. Initially it had a wonderful sweet, spicy and slightly citrus (for an English hop) aroma and good robust bitterness. Over the weeks this has eased off a lot, leaving a rich and balanced English ale. We’re very pleased with this variety and I’d certainly choose to use it again.

American Amber Ale

The recipe for this was based on a recipe in Brewing Classic Styles by Jamil Zainasheff. It has a fairly complex grain bill: pale ale malt, munich malt, two types of crystal malt and also biscuit malt. You can certainly get the orangey flavour of the munich malt in this rich and sweet amber ale. The hops are two US varieties: Centennial and Amarillo.

When we first tried this beer it was a strange beast. The aroma of the hops was very strident – quite a distinct flowery and citrus aroma. But the taste of the beer just didn’t match it. It was like drinking two different beers in the same glass. I worried that we’d cocked it up, but it is surprising what a number of weeks maturation can do. Gradually the strong hop aroma eased off enough for the beer to blend itself into a satisfyingly sweet ale. The colour of the head is curiously orange (probably that munich malt).

I think if we did it again I would try to make it a little less sweet, but other than that I’m very pleased with it.

The Guildford Ginger

This is probably the most experimental of the three. We devised the recipe by looking on a few internet forums, and then sticking a finger in the air.

The amount of ginger to use was our major concern – some people reported a few hundred grams; others over a kilogram! In the end we used 800g of very fresh grated ginger in the boil, and it was perfect. The beer has a robust ginger aroma and flavour without being too overpowering. There is also a slight kick at the back of the throat that stays with you for quite a while. You know you are drinking ginger, without it going too far. We’d happily brew this one again without any changes to the recipe.

Trouble at brewery

Minor mishap at the start of our brew day today. We’re making an English bitter, hopped only with East Kent Goldings hops.
Andy was filling the mash tun with strike liquor (posh brewing term for hot water), when he suddenly realised his feet felt hot and damp. I’d left the mash tun tap open, so the water (sorry, liquor) was running out. It had soaked the sleeping bag the mash tun was in (insulation), run across the work top, through four kitchen drawers and across the floor. Bugger. At least it was only water and not sticky wort.
So we’ve now managed to get the mash on OK, but the sleeping bag is soaked. We’ve had to improvise a little insulation for the mash tun so it doesn’t cool down too much during the hour long mash. Hope it’s enough!

How to pair food and beer

I know this doesn’t relate specifically to the activities of Cheshire Peaks Brewery, but I just found an interesting series of blog posts on the BBC Food web site about pairing food with beer.

As I’ve become more and more interested in beer over the last couple of years (both making and drinking!), I have realised what a broad and complex thing the world of beer is. Most people immediately think to drink wine with a fine meal. To drink beer with a meal might be considered crass. I strongly disagree with this – if you can get past your preconditioning that tells you wine is the perfect accompaniment to every meal, you will find that beer offers just as much in terms of varied and interesting combinations to compliment pretty much any meal.

I’m not saying wine doesn’t go well with food. I’m just saying that I think we should think a little more broadly – why not try buying the right beer to suit the meal you are having and see what you think.

Anyway, enough of my blabbering, because if you’re interested you’ve got quite a bit of reading to do.

How to pair food and beer – part one

How to pair food and beer – part two

How to pair food and beer – part three

How to pair food and beer – part four

Boil video

One thing I didn’t expand on in my previous post was the recipe for Bohemian Wrenbury. The malt bill is essentially Bohemian Pilsner malt, with a little bit of Carapils malt, which adds a little sweetness.

But the hops are the interesting bit – the style requires Saaz hops, which are a German hop variety with very low alpha acidity (about 3%). (For more info on what that means, see this post). Because of this you need a LOT of hops to get the required bitterness. In a normal ale brew we might add 50-80g of hops. Yesterday we used nearly 200g!

This had an interesting effect on the boil, because the kettle was just so flippin’ full of hops. We had to keep a very close eye on it because it kept pushing up a huge cake of hops, and was often close to overflowing.

I thought I’d see if I can publish a bit of video to this blog. It might not work, but if it does you can see what a “rolling boil” looks like with 200g of hops!

Bohemian Wrenbury

It’s been a few weeks since we last made beer, partly because we have three in barrels ready for drinking, and partly because Andy and I have been away. But a brewer’s work is never done…

…so yesterday we brewed again. And this time it was something very new – lager. Yes, with the prospect of warmer days coming we’re planning ahead so we have something cold and refreshing to offer guests.

So what is it that makes a lager different to an ale?

1. It is made with different yeast. Lager yeast is “bottom fermenting yeast” because the yeast cells do not clump together and float to the surface in a thick crust like ale yeast.
2. Lager yeast ferments at a much lower temperature (10-12C rather than 18-20C).
3. A lager is “lagered” (the German word for “store”), which means once it is fermented it is stored for a number of weeks at a very low temperature (4-6C)

Obviously there are other differences with lagers, but these are recipe-based, i.e. lagers are generally very light in colour and highly carbonated. But not necessarily. The three things above are the main things that define a lager.

Items 1 and 3 on the list are pretty straightforward changes to our brewing process. But item 2 (fermenting at 10-12C) has presented us with some challenges and, err, a retail opportunity. Essentially we’ve needed to crack the issue of temperature control. For ales it has always worked OK to ferment our beers in a cool room in the house (the utility room is generally about 19C). I tend to warm them up towards the end of fermentation by moving the fermenter onto the underfloor heating in the dining room.

But that approach is no good for a lager, and even if the garage is down at about 12C at the moment the temperature fluctuates too much between day and night. So I have built a temperature controller for the beer fridge (hence the retail opportunity).

The fermenter is in the fridge with a temperature probe attached to it by blu-tak. This goes to the temperature controller which turns on and off the fridge (and optionally a heating element too, but we don’t have one at the moment) in order to maintain the required temperature (11C in this case). It’ll be great because as I want to ramp up the temperature towards the end of fermentation I can just set it on the controller. By the way I said “built” earlier because the controller came without all the necessary wiring and case, so I had to do that bit.

So what lager did we make? Well this leads to the strange blog post title. Bohemian Pilsner is essentially Czech lager, along the lines of Budweiser Budvar and Pilsner Urquell. It’s a rich malty lager with a spicy floral bouquet from Saaz hops.

It’ll be a long time before I can report back on what it’s like, but I’ll keep you posted on how the brewing part goes.

The Guildford Ginger

Would you believe it? We made some more beer last night! (And this after me being ill for nearly a week. I haven’t drunk a drop for well over a week, but brewing still has to be done!)

Yesterday’s brew was an interesting one. We wanted to make a Ginger Beer. That’s a beer flavoured with ginger, as opposed to one of those gassy sweet drinks that actually don’t have anything to do with malt and beer (although I do quite like them).

Andy’s very keen on Marble Brewery’s Ginger – a strong bitter with a hell of a fiery ginger kick. So we decided to formulate our own recipe. This really was stabbing in the dark (if you google “ginger beer recipe”, as you can imagine you get a lot of recipes for sweet gassy stuff).

So here’s what we aimed for. We wanted strong, fairly malty and well bittered. So the grains were pale ale malt, biscuit malt and a bit of crystal malt. For the hops, we used target (for bitterness), challenger and goldings (for English flavour and aroma).

But how much ginger to put in? Well we had no idea, so we just took a guess. Andy bought a kilogram of root ginger, which once trimmed and blended to a pulp made about 800g. We put it into the boil for 30 mins.

This is the fun of brewing. Now that we’ve got a basic grip of the sort of things that you have to do we are now mucking about with recipes to see what happens. Andy’s big worry is not that it will be overpowering, but more that it will be insipid and not gingery enough. We’ll have to wait and see. If this happens, we have a plan for a second ginger addition after fermentation.

Given the horrible cold I’ve been left with after last week’s illness, I could do with something really fiery to clear my airways! :-)

First Gold

Last Monday we brewed another batch of beer. “Not more!” I hear you shouting, “that's two batches in two weeks!”

Well, yes, it is, but there’s method in our alcoholism. Andy has always been strongly of the view that our beers are much better if allowed to mature in the cask for several weeks (at least 3, ideally 4-6) before we start drinking them. The problem is that, well, frankly, we need beer to drink. So casks were getting started and drunk before they reached this level of maturity.

The only practical solution we could come up with was to do an extraordinary general brewday, to give us one extra batch in hand. (Great excuse, don’t you love it??)

So what did we brew? Well I have always liked Badger beers, and one of the best I’ve had is First Gold. This is named after the single hop variety that is used to make it. First Gold is an English hop variety, so if you are a regular reader you will know that means herbal, earthy and fruity flavours. Having said that I have seen tasting notes saying it has “an added extra citrus quality” and “an orangey quality”.

Sounds good! We were not trying to replicate the Badger beer entirely, so we used the “standard” malt bill we use for a hop trial. 91% pale ale malt and 9% biscuit malt. Nice and simple.

It has just finished fermenting and I have added “dry hops” to the fermenter (See All about Hops). At the moment they are all floating on the surface of the beer because they are so incredibly light. But they smell fantastic! I’m trying to think of a way of getting them to sink into the beer without resorting to stirring it (which involves putting a spoon in the beer so could risk infection). Any suggestions?

Is this the way to Amarillo?

Just a short post this, because I don’t have a great deal to report.

Last Monday we brewed again – this time we made an American Amber Ale. This is basically like a pale ale but with more body and more caramel richness. But being an American ale, it’s hopped with American hop varieties – in our case Centennial and Amarillo. As I talked about in a previous post, American hops lend a citrus, herbal and spicy quality to beer. Especially Amarillo, which is described as “flowery, spicy and citrus-like with a distinct orange bouquet”. Om nom nom.

The Hines Test

Brewers and the beer drinking public seem to have an obsession with beer clarity. These days beer just has to be “bright”, otherwise it is considered faulty.

In fact having totally clear beer does not make any difference to the beer’s flavour or aroma. Nor does it make it unsafe to drink. But “the first taste is with the eyes” as they say, so at Cheshire Peaks we take every step to ensure our beer is as clear as possible.

Our mate Dave is obsessed with torches (flashlights to our American cousins). (Perhaps more so even than we are with beer clarity :-) So when he is sampling our beer, a torch is usually whipped out of his pocket and shone directly up through the bottom of the glass. This is a cruel cruel way to treat a beer (and a brewer!) – every single fleck in the beer is illuminated like a beacon and any haze makes the torch beam look like a searchlight (especially with Dave’s 130 lumen monsters - it practically cooks the beer as well!).

It’s fun to do, but the Hines Test can make even the clearest of commercial beers appear to have something of a haze. I prefer to hold my glass up at arms length and look at a point light source behind it (such as the room lights).

What affects beer clarity anyway? This is a massive topic in brewing, but in summary clarity can be reduced by:

• Proteins. Sometimes proteins precipitate out at low temperatures, leading to a “chill haze” which disappears as the beer warms up again.
• Starch from the malt that has not been converted to fermentable sugar.
• Yeast – yeast can fail to “flocculate” (clump together) and drop out after fermentation
• Other particles, such as bits of grain husk or hop

So how do we go about making sure our beer is clear? That’s a huge topic, and probably one for another post!

Hop bitterness

This is a follow on article from the recent All about hops article.

So back to hops…

The bitterness from hops is created from chemicals referred to as alpha acids (humulone, cohumulone and adhumulone if you must know). These reside in the soft resin part of the hop flower. Try rubbing some hops in your hands and you will soon learn about their resinous nature. Alpha acids are not naturally bitter to taste, but boiling isomerises these chemicals to produce the bitter tasting compounds found in beer.

Each hop variety has a different proportion of alpha acids, which means some varieties will make beer a lot more bitter than others. The German Saaz variety has very low alpha acids (~3%, used for flavouring German lagers); the classic English Fuggle is middling (~5%, used for bitterness and flavour in English ales), and some new world hops (such as Chinook) are just stupid (up to 14%, used by American hop-heads).

The bitterness in beer is measured using the aptly named International Bitterness Unit (IBU). The bigger the number, the more bitter the beer. Beers tend to start at maybe 20 IBU (very low bitterness) and can go up to 80-100 IBU (turns your face inside out).

Here are some example IBUs of commercial beers (these may not be totally accurate, but are given just for interest):

• Banks Mild  25 IBU
• Theakston’s Old Peculier  29 IBU
• Marston’s Pedigree 35 IBU
• Black Sheep Riggwelter  39 IBU
• American IPA  ~ 60-70 IBU
• Imperial (or Double) IPA  ~100+ IBU

Bramling and Competition

Andy and I brewed again last week. This time we brewed the Bramling Cross hops experiment that I referred to in a previous post. This beer is made purely with English hops called Bramling Cross. We’ve added plenty for bitterness, flavour and aroma, and we’ll be dry-hopping too once fermentation finishes completely.

On the same night we racked and kegged our “special bitter” that I also talked about in that previous post. We were extremely happy with how it tasted – rich and malty but also with a strong English hop flavour. It’s going to be delicious. I had joked that we should call it “Quarry Bank Bitter” (since it was based on Sam Smith’s Museum Ale, ha ha). But we’re trying to avoid too many puns or jokes in our names, so we’ve settled on “Shining Tor” – another Cheshire Peak (just up near the Cat and Fiddle on the way over to Buxton).

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned before, but our friend Andy Bowers (a different Andy) has also started all-grain brewing in the last few months, and recently we’ve been sampling some of his creations. He started with a rather excellent rich and dark oatmeal stout, followed by a sweet and strong porter. He then used our recipe for Knutsford Brown Ale to create his own Mobberley Brown Ale (“Because it’s close to Knutsford”). It wasn’t just close to Knutsford, it was very similar indeed – a fantastic rich, sweet, malty beer that is hugely quaffable. So, the competition is hotting up – we’d better keep on our toes!

Shining Tor. (Photo: Thanks to http://www.walksinthepeakdistrict.co.uk/)

All about hops

If you’ve read some of the previous posts on this blog, you’ll I’m sure be aware that one of the key ingredients of beer is hops. Hops are a perennial climbing vine (a member of the hemp family). The vines grow to 15 – 18 feet tall, and produce cone-shaped green flowers which are harvested in late summer and dried for use in beer-making.

But what is it about adding hops that is beneficial to beer?

• Firstly, hops impart bitterness to beer which counters the sweetness of the malt sugars. Without this bitterness, most beers would be cloyingly sweet and hard to drink in any quantity.
• Secondly, hops impart flavour and aroma to beer. There are many flavours and aromas, and they depend on the hops variety used:
  • English: herbal, earthy, fruity
  • German: floral, spicy, evergreen
  • American: citrus, herbal, spicy
  • New Zealand: fruity, citrus, floral
• Finally hops have a very important anti-septic quality that preserves the beer. This, plus the alcohol in the beer, means that beer can be stored for many months without spoiling. This is why in the middle ages everyone drank beer rather than water: water was nearly always infected and unsafe to drink so it was made into beer which was safe to drink and could be stored.

So when are hops added during beer-making? Well the answer to that is actually pretty much any time: during the boil, at the end of the boil, after fermentation, or in the cask.

To extract the bitterness from hops they have to be boiled for at least an hour. The problem with this is that in doing this all the flavour and aroma molecules are driven off. So brewers tend to add hops at several stages during the boil: at the beginning (for bitterness), towards the end (for flavour) and right at the end (for aroma). Adding hops after fermentation or to the cask is referred to as dry hopping, and obviously is done to deliver more of the most delicate flavour and aromas.

This post is getting rather long… I sense your attention drifting… go on, go get yourself a beer and I’ll post some more another day.

Museums and Bramlings

We brewed a special bitter last Monday. This is a very simple recipe, based on a recipe we found for Samuel Smith’s Museum Ale. It contains only pale ale malt and crystal malt (quite a lot, 10%). It uses the two classic English hops: fuggles (for bitterness) and goldings (for flavour and aroma).

We wanted to strip things back to their basics, just to see what we get. We are hoping for a medium strength (4.5% ABV) mid-coloured bitter, with plenty of body, some sweetness and classic English hop flavours: floral, fruity and earthy.

I suggested calling it Quarry Bank Bitter (well, it’s a local museum isn’t it?), but we’re not sure if that will stick or not.

Whilst we were brewing we were chatting about other hops varieties, and I mentioned that I had recently bought a pack of Bramling Cross hops. This is another English variety, but much less commonly used. When we looked up the flavour profile, we discovered that is it supposed to have a strong spicy and blackcurrant flavour and aroma. This has to be investigated, so our next brew will be a single-variety hopped bitter using Bramling Cross.

In planning the beer, we considered what flavours would work well with a spicy blackcurrant flavoured hop. It needs to have some darkness to it, and perhaps a slight chocolatiness to work with the sharp blackcurrant flavour. But we don’t want it dark, sweet and chocolaty like Audlem Unusual. I had also recently bought some pale chocolate malt, which as the name suggests, is a toned down version of chocolate malt. It is described as “toasty rather than roasty”, which sounds ideal.

So there it is… we’re aiming to brew it a week on Monday.