Diageo screw Brewdog

This is slightly off-topic, but I thought you might find this interesting. You can’t make this sort of stuff up.

http://www.brewdog.com/blog-article/diageo-v-brewdog

Frankly, I don’t think craft breweries like Brewdog are a threat to the monstrous super-tankers that are the drinks giants. I just can’t see craft beer taking any appreciable slice of the “fizzy crap” end of the market any time soon. And let’s face it, that must be 95% of the market. But it’s very interesting that Diageo see Brewdog as a threat. Something of an own-goal methinks…

The importance of maturation

When we first started making beer I was obviously extremely keen to start drinking our beers as soon as possible. Andy, on the other hand, was always the voice of restraint. He argued that every beer needs plenty of time to mature before it is consumed.

He’s absolutely right of course, and if you read my previous post about the American Amber Ale tasting you’ll see what I mean. When we first tried it (after a couple of weeks in the barrel) the flavours just had not blended. It was like drinking two different beers in one glass.

I have a suspicion that some of the “green” taste that many people associate with home-brew beers is largely down to lack of maturation too.

So what happens to the flavours during maturation? It’s a little hard to express, but once you start tasting beers through their lifecycle you start to pick up on how the flavours mellow out and blend over time. It’s a bit like eating a chilli that has not had a couple of hours of slow simmering: the flavours are all there, but are separate and distinct. Time is needed for them to blend into a new thing.

Initially the bitterness of a beer is much more pronounced. This eases off after 4-6 weeks, and so is something that needs to be compensated for in the recipe if you want a very bitter beer. Also, unfortunately, the hop flavours and (especially) aromas ease off too. This is perhaps the one downside to a long maturation – you can loose those crisp young fresh hop aromas. I certainly noticed that with the First Gold Experiment (again, see previous posting).

So how long should beer be matured for? Well I’d say 2-3 weeks as an absolute minimum. (Andy would say 4-6 weeks minimum!). For a light hoppy beer the minimum is probably OK; for a dark ale like a porter it should be more. For lagers, maturing them for a long time very cold is all part of the process – it is not a lager if this isn’t done. In fact “lager” is the German word for “store”.

As far as we are concerned, this extended maturation phase means a couple of things:

1. We need more barrels! Currently we have three. That is just about enough, but having four would allow us to leave beers alone for longer.
2. We should aim to brew some of our darker winter beers earlier and lay them down in bottles for a long maturation phase. We plan to do this soon – we have a winter porter on the list for the brew after next.

Mini Beer Festival

I had some ex-work friends over on Thursday night. We usually go into Wilmslow for beer, curry and a chat once a month, but since I have three barrels of beer ready to drink in the garage, I suggested they come to me first for a sampling session.

So the poor guys ended up trapped in my garage whilst I babbled on about step infusion mashes and alpha acid isomerisation. They nodded with polite interest, but I am pleased to say that the beer was consumed with some enthusiasm. It’s fortunate that the by-product of my hobby is something most of my friends seem very happy to drink!

I have previously blogged about the making of all three of the beers we drank that night, but what I haven’t done is write some tasting notes now the beers are being drunk. So here we go.

First Gold Experiment

Many of our beers at the moment use just a single hop variety. We’re doing this because there is such a huge range of hops available these days, and we want to understand what they are like. I first heard about the First Gold variety through the Badger beer of the same name. It’s an English dwarf hop with huge versatility both for bittering and also for flavour and aroma.

We made a simple, pale ale and used plenty of First Gold hops. Initially it had a wonderful sweet, spicy and slightly citrus (for an English hop) aroma and good robust bitterness. Over the weeks this has eased off a lot, leaving a rich and balanced English ale. We’re very pleased with this variety and I’d certainly choose to use it again.

American Amber Ale

The recipe for this was based on a recipe in Brewing Classic Styles by Jamil Zainasheff. It has a fairly complex grain bill: pale ale malt, munich malt, two types of crystal malt and also biscuit malt. You can certainly get the orangey flavour of the munich malt in this rich and sweet amber ale. The hops are two US varieties: Centennial and Amarillo.

When we first tried this beer it was a strange beast. The aroma of the hops was very strident – quite a distinct flowery and citrus aroma. But the taste of the beer just didn’t match it. It was like drinking two different beers in the same glass. I worried that we’d cocked it up, but it is surprising what a number of weeks maturation can do. Gradually the strong hop aroma eased off enough for the beer to blend itself into a satisfyingly sweet ale. The colour of the head is curiously orange (probably that munich malt).

I think if we did it again I would try to make it a little less sweet, but other than that I’m very pleased with it.

The Guildford Ginger

This is probably the most experimental of the three. We devised the recipe by looking on a few internet forums, and then sticking a finger in the air.

The amount of ginger to use was our major concern – some people reported a few hundred grams; others over a kilogram! In the end we used 800g of very fresh grated ginger in the boil, and it was perfect. The beer has a robust ginger aroma and flavour without being too overpowering. There is also a slight kick at the back of the throat that stays with you for quite a while. You know you are drinking ginger, without it going too far. We’d happily brew this one again without any changes to the recipe.

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.