Brew Dog Bar, Manchester

This is a little off topic, for which I apologise in advance. Andy and I visited the Brew Dog Bar, on Peter Street in Manchester yesterday, and I thought I’d write a few words about it and share a few photos in case you live locally and are interested to try it out.

Brew Dog are based in Ellon, Aberdeenshire, and were formed in 2007. They pride themselves in utterly shaking up the brewing format, claiming they are a “post Punk apocalyptic motherf*cker of a craft brewery”. What does that mean in beer terms? It means they take just about every style of beer that exists and warp and twist it to the maximum degree. Some may not be to your taste (in fact a lot may not be to your taste!), but you have to admire them for tackling an industry steeped in tradition head on. (In fact, regarding that, have a read of this previous post).

So, enough about Brew Dog themselves (if you want to know more, see their web site). What are the beers like? And what are the bars like? And what can Cheshire Peaks learn from all that?

Beers

Well the first thing to say is that they make a LOT of beers. In the bar they had about 12 beers on draught, plus dozens and dozens in bottles. All Brew Dog beers. So no shortage of choice then. But wait, these are no ordinary beers. Many are too strong to sell in pints. The majority are between 6% and 10%, and they go up to Tactical Nuclear Penguin (32%) and Sink the Bismarck (41%). Really. Both these are sold in 25ml shots, at £5.

As for the rest of their beers… well they do like their American hops. And their IBUs. I had a pint of Dead Pony Club – it’s light at 3.8%, but the hop flavour takes the lining off the roof of your mouth. I loved it, but not to everyone’s taste.

Andy had a half of Goldings. A half? Well, it is 6.7%, and hopped to hell (again) but this time with an English hop. It was very interesting to see what happens when you take such a hop to its limit. (Again, it was very nice).

Gill had their Tayberry Berliner Weisse. Berliner Weisse is a very traditional style, which is extremely sour and very light in alcohol, and usually served with a fruit syrup. In this case the ABV had been pumped up to 5% and the fruit already added. It was delicious but intensely sour. (And I was delighted that Gill liked it – it seems she’ll drink beers as sour as they come, but she won’t touch bitter beers).

Finally we had to try the Tactical Nuclear Penguin. This was served in a large wine glass. It is a dark dark conker colour and has an intensely oxidised aroma, like a really dark old sherry. Taste-wise (sipped like a whisky), it has more deep rich oxidised flavours, but was not vaporous like a whisky. More like a really intense and concentrated PX sherry but with added bitterness. Mad, but well worth a try.

What can Cheshire Peaks learn from all this? Well the main thing is anything goes! This is the great thing about beer – there are so many flavours to work with that there are an almost infinite combination of possibilities. You don’t have to stick to “styles”. That may be a good place to start, but after that you need to branch out and experiment. We have already discussed making a “Goldings++” beer – to see how much bitterness we can extract out of this English hop.

Bars

As you can see from the photos below, the bars have a hard industrial feel, with bare walls and exposed concrete and girders. The seating was either comfortable bar stools at tall tables or low armchairs. No TV screens, but there was a pinball machine. The staff were chatty and friendly. Clientele was, not surprisingly, mostly students. No one batted an eyelid at having our kids with us.

We had a very enjoyable drink, and I’d gladly go back again. Long may Brew Dog cause waves in the beer market.

Filtered water

I’ve heard some people talk about the fact that the chlorine or chloramine added to drinking water can be detected in beer. It’s not something I’ve noticed myself, but in the spirit of trying to make the best beer possible, I’ve been giving it some thought.

Traditionally water companies use chlorine to kill bacteria in drinking water. Some people can smell this in the water. For this reason some companies are switching to adding chloramine. This has the same anti-bacterial effect, but cannot be tasted or smelt in the water. But it does, apparently, react with the beer itself to produce off-flavours in the finished beer. It’s also harder to get rid of.

Chlorine can be removed by boiling the water. Well wort gets boiled so that ought to cover it. Chloramine cannot be removed through boiling. It has to be removed by charcoal filtering the water, or using a campden tablet.

Since I have a water filter in my fridge, I have filtered the water we used in the last three brews. See the photo below for the ingenious method we used for making the filtering process a bit easier.

But having said all that, I am starting to feel that this is solving a problem that we don’t have. I’ve checked on our local water company web site, and the implication is that they still use chlorine, not chloramine. And whilst we have been working very hard to identify the cause of “that homebrew taste” (note to self: must do another post on this soon), I am coming to the conclusion that chlorine or chloramine isn’t it. But you have to consider these things!

Rauchbier

You may remember that back in January we made a very successful brew called Audlem Smoky – a smoked old ale. The smoked flavour comes from rauchmalz – a Bavarian beech-wood smoked malt that imparts a distinctive smoky flavour. As I mentioned in the post, another common smoked beer is Rauchbier – a malt-rich lager with a sweet smoky aroma and flavour.

Well, we had 2kg of rauchmalz that needed using up… so that was yesterday’s brew. Being a lager, this is fermented at 10C, so we need to use the garage fridge and the temperature controller to maintain the right temperature. The brew day went well and fermentation appears to have started.

I’ve only had one rauchbier (at Wincle Brewery, when I did my brew for a day). It’s a fascinating beer: both cool and clean flavoured (being a lager) but also sweet and intensely smoky. Rather like a soft Bavarian smoked cheese (funnily enough).

Andy hunted for an idea for a name for our rauchbier – looking for a Cheshire connection but also something to do with smoke. He discovered that there was a Great Fire of Nantwich in 1583 which was, ironically, started in the local brewery. And so the name was found: Nantwich 1583.

Photo: http://www.nantwichtowncouncil.gov.uk/?page_id=657 with thanks.

Coole Pilate tasting

Andy and I had a first taste of our Cheshire (I mean German) pilsner yesterday. We were very very pleased with the outcome.

If you remember, we had problems last year with our first lager, because we could not carbonate it properly in a keg. So this year we bottled our lager rather than kegging, calling it Coole Pilate (follow the link to find out why). Bottling, we believed, would allow greater carbonation to build up than is possible in a keg (without an explosion!).

So yesterday we tasted it:

Carbonation was excellent. The bottle gave a good hiss when opened, and it pours with fizz, leaving plenty of bubbles in the beer and a light head round the edge.

Colour is a rich golden, with very good clarity (see photo).

The aroma is crisp and hoppy.

The flavour starts with rich maltiness, but then you get hit by considerable bitterness. This is not a British lager; this is a full-on German style pils. It reminds me of the crisp bitterness you get from a Munich Helles.

Boiler lagging

We have two boilers in our brewing set up: the first one I bought is an old five gallon Burco that I got on eBay. We now use this purely as a hot liquor tank (hot water to non-brewers!) because I also have a Brupaks beer boiler which is used for actually boiling the beer.

These boilers run for several hours on brew day. The Burco probably runs for 2 hours (on and off) and the Brupaks boiler for a similar time, depending on how long the recipe requires the wort to be boiled for.

That’s quite a bit of electricity, given that the Burco pulls 2.5kW and the Brupaks boiler 2kW.

So on brew day I reckon we must burn about 9 units of electricity, which at 13.5p per unit will cost us about £1.20.

So I popped down to B&Q and bought some reflective radiator insulation – the stuff you slide behind your radiator to bounce the heat back into the room. A pair of scissors, a load of gaffer tape and some sticky Velcro later, we have two lovely jackets for our boilers that come on and off as required. During the boil we are looking to hold as much heat in as possible (this allows us to maintain a better rolling boil too), but as soon as we start chilling the wort we can whip the jacket off to allow faster heat loss.

We made them with two sheets of radiator insulation back to back, which is why they are shiny on both the inside and outside (which is not entirely clear from the photos below).

Oh, one last thing. If you look at the Burco jacket you’ll see that we have cut a small window in it to expose the side of the Burco. Why? So that we can use our infrared thermometer to get an accurate temperature reading from the wall of the vessel!

Mauribrew Yeast Trial

In our early brewing days we tried a number of different yeasts, from dried yeast, through liquid yeast (which takes a bit more effort to handle) to yeast cropped from the top of a commercial brewery fermenter. But in recent brews we have settled on one yeast for our English ales which we have found to be reliable and very easy to use: Fermentis Safale S-04.

This is a cracking yeast. It has the necessary flavours for an English ale, it is dead easy to use (simply re-hydrate in some cooled boiled water, then pitch), and we’ve found that we can reliably re-use it by pitching a second (or third) brew onto the yeast cake from the previous batch. Recently I’ve discovered that a number of commercial breweries enjoy this convenience too (although they use 500g packs whilst as a homebrewer I use 11g sachets!).

There is just one down side to it – it’s expensive. An 11g sachet costs about £2.99, which when you consider that ALL the ingredients for a batch cost about £20 is quite a high proportion. I guess because it’s good it’s popular, so they can charge more for it. (Fermentis US-05 is even more expensive, at £3.35 a sachet!).

So on a whim I decided to try another yeast, just to see whether it’s anywhere near as good as S-04. Mauribrew yeast comes from Maurivin, and their Ale 514 yeast is cheaper at £1.99 a sachet.

So on Monday Andy and I brewed gyle 49 – a light bitter hopped with First Gold hops. We’ve called it “Second Gold”, because this is the second time we have used these hops. It’s fermenting right now, and the Mauribrew yeast seems to be working very busily and making good smells in the utility room. I’ll post again when it’s done and we have some feeling for whether the yeast is a success or not.