Marks and Spencer Craft Ale Range

We all love something new. In fact you could go so far as to say that our society is obsessed with everything that is different, new and improved. Anyway, it has to be said that the same is true in beer-making as much as anything else in life.

Take hops: England used to have a selection of about a dozen “native” hops (Fuggles, Goldings, Challenger, Target, Northdown, Whitbread Goldings to name but a few). They have subtle earthy and fruity flavours. Maybe just a little bit spicy. Then along came the American varieties with their massive bittering and citrus and piney flavours (Cascade, Columbus, Centennial, Chinook, Citra – I think they all have to start with a C!). We loved them because they were NEW! Still do.

But now England fights back. We are starting to see some new varieties that have been bred in England but have all those “new” flavours drinkers are looking for. But are grown over here.

One of those new varieties is called Jester (maybe because it is taking the mickey out of the American hops varieties?!) This hop has only been available commercially since about 2012 and as yet I have not seen them for sale to homebrewers. But this week I discovered that one of Marks and Spencer’s “Single Hop Variety British Hop” ales is called Jester.

Oh my god it was good. It did not disappoint with its “soft, aromatic flavours of gooseberry and lychee”. This ale is billed as an “IPA”, but it left no noticeable bitter aftertaste. Just the gorgeous flavours of new world hops. In fact my wife, who usually hates beer because of “that beery aftertaste” said this beer was the first one that she felt she could actually sit down and drink to herself (rather than just sipping mine).

Anyway, SEEK IT OUT! We’ve all got an M&S nearby.

And while you’re in there, try some of the others in the range. I have to commend M&S on their whole “Single Hop Variety Hop” range. There are quite a number of them and every one I have had has been either good or excellent. Each is brewed on contract by a different brewer (Jester IPA is made by Adnams in Suffolk).

http://www.marksandspencer.com/l/food-and-wine/wine-shop/beer-cider-and-ale

Non-disclaimer: The author does NOT own any shares in Marks and Spencer. Honestly.

The Grainfather

I walked into my local homebrew shop today and Julie (who shall be called Sue) said “have you seen my Grainfather?”

I’d never heard of this thing. I’d seen some stuff about the PicoBrew Zymatic, which is a box that you pour grain into and beer comes out the other end (after waiting a while and taking $2000 out of your bank account). This is the breadmaker of the homebrew world.

But the Grainfather is a bit different – this is a mash tun, boiler and wort chiller all built into one device. You still have to do the actual brewing, but it’s all done with the one piece of equipment.

How does it work? Well it looks like this:

(Image from http://www.lovebrewing.co.uk/)

So it’s a five gallon boiler with a recirculating pump built into the bottom (left hand side on this photo). This allows you to mash with a temperature controlled heater (the black box on the side).

Once the mash is done, the grains are lifted up in a sort of inner basket, which allows the wort to drain below and sparge water to be added.

Once all the wort is collected, the Grainfather becomes a boiler and boils your brew. Finally the pump is used to pump your wort through the counterflow chiller (right hand side of the top photo) and into your fermenter.

Neat!

And the price? £599. But if you were starting out you wouldn’t need to buy a boiler (£150), a mash tun (£75) or a chiller (£75). OK, so the Grainfather is twice that, but it’s still pretty cool.

Rushton Imperial Stout tasting and future brews

It’s been a long time since I posted to this blog. To be honest, we’ve had a glut of beer that was brewed before Christmas and are only just starting to think it’s time to make more.

But the reason for this post is to update you on the Rushton Imperial Stout that we brewed back in 2013.

We’ve held off trying it for well over a year but decided the time had finally come. I have to say we were not disappointed. You can read my initial tasting notes made at the time of bottling by following the link above.

Since then it has carbonated well and softened/mellowed. It is still highly viscous, but the carbonation turns that into a kind of mousse in your mouth. It has deep coffee and roasty flavours, but has also retained a firm bitterness. This is a good job – it cuts through the sweetness to give what I think is a fairly balanced beer.

We were so pleased with it that we have decided to make another batch in the next month or two. For that we are going to need a lot of yeast, so the plan is to make a brew of Scottish 70/- (using Jamil Zainasheff’s recipe from Brewing Classic Styles – you do have a copy don’t you?). This will produce a yeast cake that we can use to ferment both the Imperial Stout brew and also a “second beer” made from the second runnings.

Hopefully that brew will be next week – that’s only our second brew this year.

From one extreme to the other

In my last post I wrote about moving our homebrewing to a new level with the production of a sour ale. Well since then we’ve been aiming to brew a simple English bitter for consumption at Christmas to compliment our Robust Porter and Christmas Unusual spiced ale that are currently maturing. But the pressures of work and other pre-Christmas activities means that I don’t think we will find the time. All-grain brewing is a time-consuming business – it takes us 5-6 hours on brew day.

So, on a whim, I bought a homebrew kit today! I haven’t made a beer kit since our very first brew, back in May 2010. But I thought “what the hell!”. It’d be nice to have a lighter beer in stock for the Christmas period, and anyway it’d be interesting to ferment a kit using the knowledge and equipment we have gathered over the last four years.

So I purchased a St Peter’s Golden Ale kit.

It’s dead quick and easy to put it all together, but there are a few things I did out of habit that were NOT mentioned in the very brief instructions on the box:

1. Re-hydrate the yeast. It helps to get the dry yeast into liquid form before you dump it into sugary wort. Supposedly the osmotic pressure of rehydrating yeast in sugary wort can damage the yeast.
2. Oxygenate the wort. Yeast needs oxygen to multiply, which is the first thing they do before making alcohol. Our wort usually gets oxygenated by pouring it from a height from the boiler into the fermenter. So with this kit I was vigorous with the mixing of the malt extract and water.
3. Fermentation temperature. I am coming to the view that this is critical to the flavour you get in the finished beer. Warmer fermentations produce more fruity and fatter flavours. Cooler fermentations produce cleaner, less cluttered flavours. I like to ferment my ales at 18C, which is tricky because the house is 1-2C warmer than that. The garage is too cold (and the temperature fluctuates too much), so I use a fridge with a temperature controller to make sure the temperature is dead on.

I shall be interested to see how it comes out. Hopefully, served through my beer engine, it will be a nice clean bitter. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, the difference in the cost between all-grain and kit brewing interests me. This kit cost £24. That’s the total cost, apart from boiling the kettle a few times.

Here’s a rough breakdown of the cost of an all-grain batch:

• 5kg malt £7.50
• 50g hops £2.50
• Safale S-04 yeast £3
• Running the boiler (2kW for ~2 hours) 60p
• 12 man-hours (myself and Andy for six hours) Priceless

So that makes £13.60. I think St Peter’s and the retailer have some profit factored in there, even after the cost of packaging and distribution…

Flanders Red–Belgian Sour Ale

We recently moved our homebrewing to a whole new level. We’ve made many ales, a few lagers, but never a sour beer.

To get started we used a recipe for a Flanders Red Ale from Brewing Classic Styles by Jamil Zainasheff. This is basically along the lines of the beers made by Rodenbach in Roeselare in Belgium. The beer is fermented with both yeast and various bacteria strains that give the distinctive sourness and complex flavours.

So what’s different from the way you make a regular ale? Well, firstly you need the right combination of both yeast and bacteria. One of the reasons we chose this recipe is because you can get the whole lot blended in one pack from WYeast, called, funnily enough, “Roeselare Blend”.

What else? Well the fermentation lasts for a year. Initially the yeast ferment most of the sugars, then over the remaining months the bacteria consume what is left. The different types of bacteria produce both lactic acid, which gives a soft sourness, and acetic acid (vinegar), which gives a sharper sourness. It is important to get the balance right – too much acetic acid will make the beer challenging to drink. Both temperature and oxygen levels affect the level of activity of the different bacteria strains. What we need to aim for is a small amount of oxygen, and a moderate temperature (18C – 20C) to give a steady fermentation.

If you ferment the beer in a plastic fermenter (aka bucket) you get oxygen going into the beer: plastic is permeable to oxygen. So you need to ferment in glass rather than plastic. So I invested in a 6 gallon carboy. (This is a bugger to move around – it’s heavy and would smash or chip very easily!)

You’ll see in the photo that we used an oak peg rather than airlock (custom made by Andy’s personal cabinet maker – yes, really, every gentleman should have one!). This, we understand from Mr Zainasheff, will allow just the right amount of oxygen into the beer to emulate the oak barrels used by commercial breweries.

Anything else different? Yes, we also used toasted oak chips, which again emulates the oak barrels used by commercials breweries.

As the beer ferments it is supposed to form a pellicle on the surface. This is a grim-looking white mat produced by the bacteria. Have a look here for the sort of thing I mean. This hasn’t happened yet – at the moment the fermentation is too active and the surface too bubbly (see the last photo below).

Apparently the pellicle sinks back into the beer when the fermentation is done. This is the cue to rack and bottle the beer, but takes a year or so.

Below are a few more photos from brew day. I guess I’ll post again about it, but not any time soon!

Polypin

At Cheshire Peaks we put most of our beer into barrels. Well actually they are plastic kegs with a pressure valve on the top. My preferred type is a King Keg.

Recently however we were asked to brew a barrel of beer for a friend’s 40th birthday party. I knew I had to ship it over to her house on the day of the party and I was concerned about the unwieldy nature of a barrel. So I got a Polypin from my local homebrew store. Polypins are basically a large strong polythene bag with a tap that fits inside a special cardboard box. You can buy beer from local breweries in polypins these days if you need a large amount for a party.

When I serve beer from a barrel through the beer engine we eventually build up a vacuum over the beer because I don’t allow air in through the cap into the barrel. Every now and then I have to inject some carbon dioxide from a cylinder to replace the consumed beer, or the beer refuses to come out! Carbon dioxide keeps the beer from going stale.

The beauty of a polypin is that it just collapses as the beer is drawn out by the beer engine. So it allowed me to set up the polypin and beer engine before the party and basically leave it alone all night. I could have used a barrel and just allowed air in by opening the cap, but that would have meant that if any beer was left over it would stale very quickly.

Below are a few photos of the polypin. The first two are how it is now, full of cleaner and ready for re-use. The last two are how it looked after the last bit of beer had been drawn out – totally sucked in.

Pouring beer away

Sigh. It had to happen sooner or later. To be fair, we’ve made seventy batches of beer now (the first being in May 2010) and this is the first time I have been forced to pour a barrel away.

What happened? Well this was a Rye IPA, which we made on 9th June. It was OK initially, but got overlooked by other more exciting beers like the CF103 trial. Fairly early on I had some problems with the rubber seal inside the barrel cap – it was old and had become a bit perished and warped so it did not fit snugly inside the cap. The photo below shows the replaced seal – the bright white ring. The faulty seal meant that I couldn’t get the cap to close properly and when beer was drawn from the barrel air was being drawn in at the top. It must have been more than I expected, because despite changing the seal the beer eventually went sour.

I have to admit that in the past we have drunk up at least one barrel that went a bit sour. I remember way back we made a Belgian Pale Ale, but souring resulted in a “rebranding exercise” to a “Belgian Sour”. Hmm. I think pouring it away and making a fresh batch is a better solution. It hurts a bit at the time, but I’d rather drink perfect beer. (And anyway, it gives me something to blog about!)