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)
Huge loss - nobody who knows beer wanted Boddies to move production, and it's cask-less form is solely as a result of beer lovers turning away from the inferior product.....but....even the inferior version is decent.
ReplyDeleteIt makes me shudder to think that this could so easily have happened to Theakstons too. In the end, fate dealt a very different set of cards to Theakstons, and we have to be very glad about that.
ReplyDeleteI think the difference may be that the Boddingtons brewery was in the centre of a very large city, and therefore the land would have been much more valuable than the land that the Theakstons brewery sits on.