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!