Trouble at brewery

Minor mishap at the start of our brew day today. We’re making an English bitter, hopped only with East Kent Goldings hops.
Andy was filling the mash tun with strike liquor (posh brewing term for hot water), when he suddenly realised his feet felt hot and damp. I’d left the mash tun tap open, so the water (sorry, liquor) was running out. It had soaked the sleeping bag the mash tun was in (insulation), run across the work top, through four kitchen drawers and across the floor. Bugger. At least it was only water and not sticky wort.
So we’ve now managed to get the mash on OK, but the sleeping bag is soaked. We’ve had to improvise a little insulation for the mash tun so it doesn’t cool down too much during the hour long mash. Hope it’s enough!

How to pair food and beer

I know this doesn’t relate specifically to the activities of Cheshire Peaks Brewery, but I just found an interesting series of blog posts on the BBC Food web site about pairing food with beer.

As I’ve become more and more interested in beer over the last couple of years (both making and drinking!), I have realised what a broad and complex thing the world of beer is. Most people immediately think to drink wine with a fine meal. To drink beer with a meal might be considered crass. I strongly disagree with this – if you can get past your preconditioning that tells you wine is the perfect accompaniment to every meal, you will find that beer offers just as much in terms of varied and interesting combinations to compliment pretty much any meal.

I’m not saying wine doesn’t go well with food. I’m just saying that I think we should think a little more broadly – why not try buying the right beer to suit the meal you are having and see what you think.

Anyway, enough of my blabbering, because if you’re interested you’ve got quite a bit of reading to do.

How to pair food and beer – part one

How to pair food and beer – part two

How to pair food and beer – part three

How to pair food and beer – part four

Boil video

One thing I didn’t expand on in my previous post was the recipe for Bohemian Wrenbury. The malt bill is essentially Bohemian Pilsner malt, with a little bit of Carapils malt, which adds a little sweetness.

But the hops are the interesting bit – the style requires Saaz hops, which are a German hop variety with very low alpha acidity (about 3%). (For more info on what that means, see this post). Because of this you need a LOT of hops to get the required bitterness. In a normal ale brew we might add 50-80g of hops. Yesterday we used nearly 200g!

This had an interesting effect on the boil, because the kettle was just so flippin’ full of hops. We had to keep a very close eye on it because it kept pushing up a huge cake of hops, and was often close to overflowing.

I thought I’d see if I can publish a bit of video to this blog. It might not work, but if it does you can see what a “rolling boil” looks like with 200g of hops!

Bohemian Wrenbury

It’s been a few weeks since we last made beer, partly because we have three in barrels ready for drinking, and partly because Andy and I have been away. But a brewer’s work is never done…

…so yesterday we brewed again. And this time it was something very new – lager. Yes, with the prospect of warmer days coming we’re planning ahead so we have something cold and refreshing to offer guests.

So what is it that makes a lager different to an ale?

1. It is made with different yeast. Lager yeast is “bottom fermenting yeast” because the yeast cells do not clump together and float to the surface in a thick crust like ale yeast.
2. Lager yeast ferments at a much lower temperature (10-12C rather than 18-20C).
3. A lager is “lagered” (the German word for “store”), which means once it is fermented it is stored for a number of weeks at a very low temperature (4-6C)

Obviously there are other differences with lagers, but these are recipe-based, i.e. lagers are generally very light in colour and highly carbonated. But not necessarily. The three things above are the main things that define a lager.

Items 1 and 3 on the list are pretty straightforward changes to our brewing process. But item 2 (fermenting at 10-12C) has presented us with some challenges and, err, a retail opportunity. Essentially we’ve needed to crack the issue of temperature control. For ales it has always worked OK to ferment our beers in a cool room in the house (the utility room is generally about 19C). I tend to warm them up towards the end of fermentation by moving the fermenter onto the underfloor heating in the dining room.

But that approach is no good for a lager, and even if the garage is down at about 12C at the moment the temperature fluctuates too much between day and night. So I have built a temperature controller for the beer fridge (hence the retail opportunity).

The fermenter is in the fridge with a temperature probe attached to it by blu-tak. This goes to the temperature controller which turns on and off the fridge (and optionally a heating element too, but we don’t have one at the moment) in order to maintain the required temperature (11C in this case). It’ll be great because as I want to ramp up the temperature towards the end of fermentation I can just set it on the controller. By the way I said “built” earlier because the controller came without all the necessary wiring and case, so I had to do that bit.

So what lager did we make? Well this leads to the strange blog post title. Bohemian Pilsner is essentially Czech lager, along the lines of Budweiser Budvar and Pilsner Urquell. It’s a rich malty lager with a spicy floral bouquet from Saaz hops.

It’ll be a long time before I can report back on what it’s like, but I’ll keep you posted on how the brewing part goes.

The Guildford Ginger

Would you believe it? We made some more beer last night! (And this after me being ill for nearly a week. I haven’t drunk a drop for well over a week, but brewing still has to be done!)

Yesterday’s brew was an interesting one. We wanted to make a Ginger Beer. That’s a beer flavoured with ginger, as opposed to one of those gassy sweet drinks that actually don’t have anything to do with malt and beer (although I do quite like them).

Andy’s very keen on Marble Brewery’s Ginger – a strong bitter with a hell of a fiery ginger kick. So we decided to formulate our own recipe. This really was stabbing in the dark (if you google “ginger beer recipe”, as you can imagine you get a lot of recipes for sweet gassy stuff).

So here’s what we aimed for. We wanted strong, fairly malty and well bittered. So the grains were pale ale malt, biscuit malt and a bit of crystal malt. For the hops, we used target (for bitterness), challenger and goldings (for English flavour and aroma).

But how much ginger to put in? Well we had no idea, so we just took a guess. Andy bought a kilogram of root ginger, which once trimmed and blended to a pulp made about 800g. We put it into the boil for 30 mins.

This is the fun of brewing. Now that we’ve got a basic grip of the sort of things that you have to do we are now mucking about with recipes to see what happens. Andy’s big worry is not that it will be overpowering, but more that it will be insipid and not gingery enough. We’ll have to wait and see. If this happens, we have a plan for a second ginger addition after fermentation.

Given the horrible cold I’ve been left with after last week’s illness, I could do with something really fiery to clear my airways! :-)

First Gold

Last Monday we brewed another batch of beer. “Not more!” I hear you shouting, “that's two batches in two weeks!”

Well, yes, it is, but there’s method in our alcoholism. Andy has always been strongly of the view that our beers are much better if allowed to mature in the cask for several weeks (at least 3, ideally 4-6) before we start drinking them. The problem is that, well, frankly, we need beer to drink. So casks were getting started and drunk before they reached this level of maturity.

The only practical solution we could come up with was to do an extraordinary general brewday, to give us one extra batch in hand. (Great excuse, don’t you love it??)

So what did we brew? Well I have always liked Badger beers, and one of the best I’ve had is First Gold. This is named after the single hop variety that is used to make it. First Gold is an English hop variety, so if you are a regular reader you will know that means herbal, earthy and fruity flavours. Having said that I have seen tasting notes saying it has “an added extra citrus quality” and “an orangey quality”.

Sounds good! We were not trying to replicate the Badger beer entirely, so we used the “standard” malt bill we use for a hop trial. 91% pale ale malt and 9% biscuit malt. Nice and simple.

It has just finished fermenting and I have added “dry hops” to the fermenter (See All about Hops). At the moment they are all floating on the surface of the beer because they are so incredibly light. But they smell fantastic! I’m trying to think of a way of getting them to sink into the beer without resorting to stirring it (which involves putting a spoon in the beer so could risk infection). Any suggestions?

Is this the way to Amarillo?

Just a short post this, because I don’t have a great deal to report.

Last Monday we brewed again – this time we made an American Amber Ale. This is basically like a pale ale but with more body and more caramel richness. But being an American ale, it’s hopped with American hop varieties – in our case Centennial and Amarillo. As I talked about in a previous post, American hops lend a citrus, herbal and spicy quality to beer. Especially Amarillo, which is described as “flowery, spicy and citrus-like with a distinct orange bouquet”. Om nom nom.