Wincle Brew Day

On Tuesday I had my Christmas present from my wonderful wife – a day brewing at Wincle Brewery, near Macclesfield. Needless to say I had a fantastic time.

I have already posted a few general photos for my Facebook friends, but I thought I would write this blog post too. In the Facebook photos I kept them pretty general. Here I aim to be a little bit more “beery” (since it is a brewing blog after all!).

The first thing to say is that the brewery is in an idyllic location, right on the River Dane on the border between Cheshire and Staffordshire. There had been snow over the weekend, so the photographer in me was treated to some wonderful scenic opportunities.

I got there at 8.45am, and met Giles (Owner and Brewer), Justin (Head Brewer) and Hayley (Shop Manager). (Oh, and Molly the Brewery Dog, photographed above). I was immediately made very welcome and, frankly, was told that I was one of the team for the day.

The brewery has a brew capacity (“brew length”) of 15 barrels, which in metric money means the largest brew they can make is 2500 litres. They have three fermenters, plus water (liquor) tanks (hot and cold, on left of photo), mash tun (behind the blue ladder) and boiler (copper).

Malt is stored on the upper floor, and drops down a hopper into the mash tun where it is mixed with hot water. This is how my day started – “mashing in”. I was delighted to be told I could do it all, so I dashed up the ladder and opened the various values under Justin’s guidance.

The mash takes an hour, as it does in home brewing. Just enough time for a chat and bacon butties. Bloody civilised if you ask me! :-)

Sparging (washing the sugars from the grains) is a much more mechanised affair than at home. We use an old milk carton with holes punched in the bottom. In commercial breweries it’s done with a rotating pipe, so you just turn it on and leave it for an hour.

During sparging, wort is run off the bottom of the mash tun into the “underback” (see photo below) and then pumped into the boiler.

This photo is through the boiler hatch, showing the wort just starting to well up through the inlet at the bottom. The black rods above are the boiler’s heating elements.

Once the boil was underway, the mash tun had to be dug out and cleaned. (They say more than half of brewing is cleaning!). Yes, I did dig it out, but Hayley kindly went inside the mash tun to scrub it clean.

Hops were weighed out for the three additions at various stages during the boil.

Finally, once the boil is finished the wort is pumped through a counterflow chiller (this has many plates, and allows wort to flow one way and cold water to flow the other) which drops the temperature to 20C in a few seconds. From here it goes into the fermenter. A sample is drawn off to measure the gravity…

… and also to allow the “cold break” to be assessed. This is the precipitation of proteins that occurs during the rapid chilling. As you can see, the precipitation is quite pronounced. We can’t achieve that sort of cold break at home because we use an immersion chiller (just a copper coil in the boiler, with cold water passing through it), so the chilling takes much longer (an hour or so). The more rapid the chilling, the greater the cold break.

I was very interested to see that they use dried yeast. In fact they use exactly the same strain as we use: Safale S-04. This is me re-hydrating 1kg of dried yeast.

I had to dash before the yeast was pitched, because my wife had got stuck in a snow drift coming to collect me! Giles kindly got me back up the hill out of Wincle and I headed home very happy.

If you have even the vaguest of interest in brewing and fancy a really interesting and hands-on day I’d wholeheartedly recommend that you contact Wincle Brewery. They can take groups up to about five or six. Some people go for a social event, and just like to chat, watch and of course sample the beer. Others, like me, want to get as involved as possible.

Thanks to Giles, Justin and Hayley for making me so welcome.

Anatomy of a beer engine

When I connected up my beer engine last night I noticed that it wasn’t drawing the cleaning water up as well as it should, so I thought that it might need some maintenance. So this evening I took it apart. It turned out that all it needed was a good clean, but I thought you might like to see a few photos of what it looks like inside.

Here’s the engine removed from the counter and ready to be cleaned:

This is what it looks like round the back. It’s dead simple. The beer line connects to the nozzle at the bottom, and the silver cylinder contains the pump mechanism.

Close up of the mechanism before disassembly – note the hideous beer stains.

The whole thing can be disassembled without any tools. Ideal to allow it to be maintained easily in a busy pub. Basically it’s a milled steel cylinder, held fast by two long bolts that fix to the underside of the unit. This shows the first bolt being removed:

Then the bottom part of the pump can be removed:

And the seal ring:

Then the main steel cylinder can be removed revealing a rather dirty piston:

Hmm. And we drew our beer through that?

All clean and ready for re-assembly:

Replacing the steel cylinder:

Testing:

And back in place on the counter in the garage:

Using stuff up

We did our first all-grain brew on 20th June 2010 – a Boddingtons recipe, although as I remember it was far from close to Boddies (too bitter). Since then we have done a further 42 all-grain brews, so you can imagine we have amassed a large stock of ingredients over that time.

In fact, it’s gone a bit crazy. We have 21 different types of malt, from a sack of maris otter pale ale malt (that gets used nearly every time), to some melanoidin malt and flaked maize that I bought on a whim and have so far never used.

Hops aren’t much better. There are 19 different types of hops in my freezer, including 267g of Citra hops which I bought for a laugh to wind up Andy (he hates citrus American hops). We have 267g left because the online retailer mistakenly sent me FOUR 100g packs instead of one. (I gave one to my other brewing friend Andy – have you used them yet Andy??)

So this brings me to the issue of shelf life. Let’s deal with malt first. Generally when you buy malt it has a best before date of one year hence. You need to keep malt in an air-tight container and in a cool dry place, or it tends to absorb moisture from the atmosphere. The brewing term for this is slack malt. Obviously this is best avoided because its provides an opportunity for bacterial growth. But it also means the malt contains a greater water to starch ratio, so the same weight of slack malt will produce less fermentables than fresh malt – meaning your recipes don’t work quite right.

As for hops, they tend to have a best before date of two years hence, although I tend to worry more about hop aging than malt aging. Why? Well hops impart a lot of important flavour to beer, and as they age these flavours and aromas disappear and oxidise into compounds you don’t want. (Very aged hops can go a bit “cheesy” apparently). So I keep all our hops tightly clipped shut and in the freezer.

So, what to do about the mountain of aging ingredients? Use them up! Recently I have been looking for opportunities to use up older stock, either by choosing recipes that use them, or by careful substitution. For example, we have a plan to brew a Light Spring Ale next. The recipe calls for a little Caravienne malt, which surprisingly we don’t have any of. But we have a little Carapils (slightly lighter) and a little Caramunich (slightly darker). I reckon we can substitute both of those, thus avoiding buying anything new and also using up two malts in the process.

On the hops front, we have taken to substituting the bittering hops but staying faithful to the flavour and aroma hops. So we tend to use up older hops for bittering and just try to substitute a similar variety. But for the favour and aroma we stick with the recipe and fresher hops.

An added bonus to all this is that adjusting recipes slightly makes them yours, rather than borrowed from someone else. So you win all round.

Brew For A Day

Next Tuesday is another brew day for me, but not a Cheshire Peaks brew day. My wonderful wife has treated me to a “Brew For A Day” event at Wincle Beer Co. in Wincle near Macclesfield.

You can read more about the event on their web site here, but essentially it’s an opportunity to go along and fully participate in their brewing for a day, with lunch and beer thrown in.

Sounds great fun. When I spoke to Giles at the brewery, he told me that some people like to go along and enjoy it as a social day (have a drink, see the brewing, have some food and more drinks etc.) and some people like to get more “hands on” with the brewing process. I certainly fall into the latter category, and I fully expect to be carrying grain and digging out the mash tun (as well as the food and beer bit). No doubt I’ll bore them with hundreds of nerdy brewing questions as well (I got into a discussion about first wort hopping on the phone to Giles whilst we were sorting out a date!).

By the way, if you have not had beers from Wincle Brewery (and you live somewhere where you can get them) I strongly recommend them. They produce a wide range of really well-made classic English ales, plus a few other interesting seasonals such as a hefeweizen. Their bottled beers have a really strong and eye-catching branding on the label so you can’t miss them. Check out the web site.

Watch out for a future blog post on my experiences on Wincle Brew Day.

Photo: Wincle Brewing Co (funnily enough!)

Audlem Smoky

I love trying new brewing ingredients, be it malt, hops or other additions to beer (such as coriander and orange in Hoegaarden). One I’ve been wanting to try for a while is smoked malt. In fact I bought 3kg of German beech-wood smoked rauchmalz a few months ago, but we haven’t yet had chance to try it.

The two popular beers to make with rauchmalz are rauchbier (a malt-rich lager with a sweet smoky aroma and flavour) and smoked porter. So we’re not doing either of those. ;-)

Regular readers may recall that one of our favourite Cheshire Peaks brews is Audlem Unusual, a brew based on a similar peculiar (ahem) Yorkshire ale. Tomorrow, that will be re-born as Audlem Smoky.

It’s going to be a bit of guesswork with the proportions of smoked malt to regular malt. Rauchbier recipes tend to come in at about 33% rauchmalz. Smoked porter recipes a little less. So we’re keeping safe and going for around 20%. Can’t wait to know what the mash tun smells like!!

Pendle Witches

After the Boddingtons, we decided to move to a stronger slightly darker ale. So at the end of December we brewed a beer based on a recipe for Moorhouses Pendle Witches Brew.

To be honest, I don’t recall what this beer is like, although I think I have had it at some stage in the past. But Graham Wheeler’s recipe book describes it as “a deceptively pale strong bitter”, with a “deep, dry finish, good hop character and vanilla notes”. Sounds nice, so that is what will keep the beer engine busy through February. It has finished fermenting and is ready for going into cask tomorrow.

We’ve developed a process for re-using the yeast from previous brews, by pitching the next brew right onto the yeast cake from the last brew. We reckon we can do that at most three times, and each time we move to a darker and stronger beer than the last one. This is why we started with Boddingtons (very light), then moved to the Pendle Witches brew, and tomorrow we’ll be brewing… well, that’s for another post! By the third brew the number of yeast cells is huge, which means a really strong brew can get off to a good fermentation very quickly.

Incidentally, if you’re into making your own beer and you like British ales, you really should have a copy of Brew Your Own British Real Ale by Graham Wheeler. This is a hugely comprehensive collection of recipes. They all work to basically the same process, so if you can brew one successfully you should be able to do them all.

Image: Amazon.co.uk

Boddingtons

It’s been another month since my last blog post: Christmas seems to have got in the way of writing blog posts, but you’ll be pleased to hear it’s not got in the way of brewing beer!

So I have quite a bit of catching up to do. To keep them bite-sized, I’ll publish each as a separate post. Here goes with the first.

Our first ever all-grain brew (Gyle* 003, back in June 2010) was based on a Boddingtons recipe. But looking back at what we did, we really didn’t understand at all about how to control the bitterness of a beer. We couldn’t get the required hops (Whitbread Goldings), so for some reason we used 74g of Northern Brewer hops (I think the guy in the brew shops said they were similar – no idea why!). Recalculating it now, that would have made the bitterness about 75 IBU. Somewhat more than the 30 IBU called for by the recipe. :-/

So we re-brewed before Christmas, this time hitting a restrained 27 IBU. The beer has now been kegged and awaits the required (by Andy) maturation period (which seems forever, and I’m THIRSTY!)

By the way, for those who don’t know Boddingtons (is that possible?), it used to be an absolutely classic northern session bitter – beautifully golden in colour, light in body with a rich creamy head, and a lovely almost straw-like aroma. It was brewed at the Strangeways Brewery in Manchester, and was marketed as “The Cream of Manchester”, which indeed it was. You can read about it on Wikipedia here, but in short it got killed by corporate acquisitions. The brewery was closed in 2004. Cask production was moved to Hydes brewery until last year, and now it has been discontinued apart from in pasteurised tins. I learnt my love of real ale from that stuff and I miss it greatly. Sigh.

So in short – we have high hopes that we can make something that is like we all remember Boddingtons from the Strangeways Brewery.

* “Gyle number” is the posh term we brewers use to mean “batch number”.

(Image: http://manchesterhistory.net/manchester/gone/boddingtons.html, with thanks)