Tollgate Brewery

Last weekend we had a fantastic weekend away with friends at Calke Abbey in South Derbyshire. The National Trust has a property on the estate called Southwood House Farm which is available for rent (sleeps 14). (As an aside this is a lovely property, highly recommended).

The Trust has been keen to see some of the old farm out-buildings put to use, and recently Tollgate Brewery has relocated from an nearby industrial unit to this more picturesque setting. Brewers Quentin and Pat welcome visitors to the house, and were kind enough to give us a tour of the brewery. In fact, if you remember, last weekend was very snowy – we had at least six inches over the weekend, which pretty much snowed us in. So we were faced with a weekend of snowball fights, good food and of course an unlimited supply of beer! What a hardship!

(One more aside: it was not ME that chose this property. The fact that there was a brewery one site was merely a piece of good luck as far as I was concerned! :-)

Tollgate is a six barrel plant, so pretty similar in size to a lot of UK craft breweries. They have a range of about eight beers which are mainly sold in casks to local pubs, but are also bottled and sold locally, such as in the National Trust shop and at farmers markets. Quentin also has another full time job, so they only brew at the weekend (must be a busy life!).

For a business perspective, I was interested how Quentin and Pat came into brewing. They purchased the brewery relatively recently (in the last couple of years), and at the time neither of them had any experience in brewing. So essentially they wanted to run a business first, and the fact that it is a brewery came second. As a passionate homebrewer this interests me, because obviously I would come to it from the other direction: as a brewer first and businessman second. Having said that, you might argue that brewing skills are easier to learn than business skills, so starting with business skills first might actually result in a better run business.

Anyway, the tour was great – Quentin was very good with the kids, and the beer was excellent too. Can’t think of a better place to have got snowed in!

Coole Pilate

Andy and I have been absolutely bombed out with other stuff going on in our lives recently, but we realised this week that we really need to get our pilsner bottled. It was brewed on 10th February, fermented for about three and a half weeks, then I dropped the temperature down to 4C to let it start “lagering”.

But it’s been sat on the yeast cake since then, and I really wanted to get it bottled in case that started to affect the flavour. So that was last night’s job.

After much consideration we came up with the slightly bizarre name of Coole Pilate.

Why? Well firstly it’s a small hamlet near Audlem in Cheshire, near to where Andy’s family come from. Secondly, it’s got the word “cool” in it, and it is a lager after all. Thirdly, it has got the letters “pil” in it, and it is a pils after all. And fourthly, it’s our beer and we can call it what we like. I claim that it is the first beer ever to be graced with that name. So there.

And since you asked Gill, it’s pronounced like Pontius, not like a form of yoga. I think.

Beeston Castle fiasco

We’ve been trying to drink up the Beeston Castle porter, which has turned out to be a bit of a problem. I’ve just checked back on previous blogs posts, and it seems that I didn’t write an article about this brew. We made it back in May 2012, with the plan to bottle all of it and lay it down for a few months.

But we’ve had a real problem with carbonation. About a third of the bottles have carbonated nicely and are, frankly, delicious. The remaining two third are totally flat and have a nasty oxidised taste.

So we’ve had to designate it “for brewery consumption only”, because we can’t give any bottles away with a hit rate like that. It just needs drinking up and the bad ones disposing of, which is rather a shame. (Although I have saved a couple of bottles for steak and ale pies! :-)

We’re not exactly sure what the cause of the problem is. My best guess is that it was a faulty batch of crown corks. I would guess that the bad ones have not quite sealed properly, which has lead to no carbonation and a little oxygen getting in. If that’s the case, it’s a hell of a problem, because how to do tell when you are bottling a brew whether the crown corks are OK? I’m going to ditch the remaining corks from that bag just in case, but it does worry me for future brews.