Demand Valve

One of the best things I have ever bought is my beer engine. It allows me to serve home-made beer in my garage, but create a creamy rich head on the beer in a way that is usually only possible in pubs. My friend Andy sometimes comes round with a 2 litre pop bottle filled with his home-made beer, and we draw it through the beer engine and magically it turns into beer like you’d get from a pub.

The most popular post I have ever made on this blog was when I took my beer engine apart to clean it, and photographed the process.

However, all is not entirely well in the Cheshire Peaks beer serving arena, and it all comes down to how the beer is stored in our kegs. In a British pub, hand pulled ale comes from a cask. The publican will open the cask by knocking a peg through the hole in the top of the cask. This allows air to be drawn into the cask to replace the beer as it is served. The oxygen in the air eventually stales the beer, so a cask will generally need to be used in 3-4 days. Obviously at Cheshire Peaks we don’t drink quite that volume of beer. (“No???” I hear you ask…). So we need the beer to be replaced with carbon dioxide not air as the beer is drawn from the keg. I do this by injecting CO2 from time to time to keep a slight positive pressure over the beer.

The problem with a positive pressure is that it will force the beer from the keg when the tap is opened. If it’s quite a high positive pressure then we get the “self serving pint” – when you open the tap on the keg the beer forces itself through the beer engine without any pumping required. It’s not ideal and makes serving a pint a two man job: one to open the tap on the keg and the other to draw the pint.

There had to be a solution to this.

And there was. It turned out to be a “demand valve” (also called a “check valve”). This rather pricey gadget goes in the line between the keg and beer engine, and prevents the beer from forcing its way through the engine. Beer will only be allowed through the valve if there is a negative pressure (ie pumping) on the engine side.

So I got one, and it does work a treat. Now we can open the tap on the keg at the start of the evening and friends can pop down to the “cellar” (ok, garage) and draw their own pint whenever they wish.

There was one slight complication in the whole affair however. That was in the size of the connections on the valve. One side (the engine side) is 1/2 inch (which is the size of the keg tap and also the back of the beer engine). But the keg side of the valve is a 3/8 inch “push fit” connection. I have to thank my friend David for sorting this problem for me. In his brewery he had a box of dozens of different types of pipe connectors and converters and he soon found what I needed (the grey bit on top of the valve in the photo below). That saved me ordering things blind on eBay and hoping for the best!

Making Mozzarella

A few weeks ago we had a go at making some mozzarella cheese, following the procedure I learnt on my cheese making course.

The process is fairly simple, but it does require rennet and citric acid, so you can’t do it with just what you have in the kitchen at home like the lactic cheese.

What you do is heat the milk to 31C and add the citric acid and rennet. Then you gently heat (over a water bath) to 40.5C and leave the milk to separate.

Once separated, you scoop the curds out with a slotted spoon and allow them to drain in a sieve. That’s the standard bit. The bit that is different about mozzarella is that the curds are then briefly cooked in hot whey, which makes them stringy and stretchy. This gives the stringy cheese you use on pizzas.

What you do is heat the whey to 80C, then dip small blobs of curd into the whey for 30 seconds or so. The stretchy curds can then be shaped into mozzarella balls or pulled out into cheese strings. This is great fun for the kids!

The photos below show how we got on.

Wedding Commission

It’s been a long time since I wrote a blog post, and I have made a list as long as my arm of things I want to tell you about. To maintain a certain air of suspense, I’m not going to tell you what they all are… but I am going to apologise that each will probably be written fairly briefly just so I can get through them. So here goes with the first one – our wedding party commission.

Our neighbours’ son is getting married in July. We were delighted to be asked if we would make a barrel of beer for a barbecue party to be held at their house the day after the wedding for all the guests still staying in the area.

The brief was fairly broad. “A nice malty English ale” was about it. So Andy and I got thinking, and we decided that to make sure we had the best chances of providing a great beer we’d make TWO and choose the best. Initially these were going to be two similar malt driven bitters. But in the end we decided to make one malt driven bitter and one lighter beer hopped with cascade hops for a nice summer ale.

I think in the end we’ll probably deliver both barrels to our neighbour’s house, and let them have some of one, then switch over mid-evening. Unless either of them turns out to be sub-standard. I do have a concern that some of our beers have been a bit “estery” recently, and I put this down to the warmer summer weather. Fermentation temperatures have been up at 21C or so, and this tends to result in a far from clean tasting beer. 19-20C would be more appropriate. With hindsight we should have used the temperature controlled fridge for all fermentations, but that was in use lagering the lilac blond and oktoberfest brews (oops, given hints on future posts there!).

Anyway, back to the wedding beers. The malt-driven beer will be called “Vulcan”, in celebration of XH558, the last flying Avro Vulcan. (If you haven’t seen her, GO AND SEE HER THIS YEAR!). The lighter cascade beer will be called “Buccaneer”. Let’s hope it doesn’t taste too much of bananas, given the nickname of the bomber it is named after!