Getting back to brewing

It’s been a long long time since we made any beer (25th November to be precise).

Why? Well over Christmas we had a glut of beers in keg. First we had our Old Horizontal clone, then Audlem Unusual (our Old Peculier clone), followed by the vanilla stout (a “small beer” made from the second runnings of the Rushton Imperial Stout).

Coupled with that, we were away over Christmas, so we didn’t have as many guests in the house to consume beer.

Anyway, we’re now down to a couple of inches of the vanilla stout, and that’s it. So Monday is going to be a brew day. We’re moving back towards lighter beers, but what we’re doing is going to be a bit of a project that I’ll describe in detail in a future post. For the moment, the starter is sitting in the kitchen, pretty much ready to go (see photo below).

In other news, we tried a bottle of the damson porter last week. I have to say we’re rather disappointed. Firstly, it has not carbonated very well (hardly at all). Secondly, the flavour is sharp and acidic. OK, so it does taste strongly of damsons (obviously), but that has imparted a sharp acidic edge. All we can hope is that it will ease off over time. And maybe the carbonation will improve a little too. If not, well I’ll probably be making a lot of steak and ale pies! You can’t win them all.