Tollgate Brewery

Last weekend we had a fantastic weekend away with friends at Calke Abbey in South Derbyshire. The National Trust has a property on the estate called Southwood House Farm which is available for rent (sleeps 14). (As an aside this is a lovely property, highly recommended).

The Trust has been keen to see some of the old farm out-buildings put to use, and recently Tollgate Brewery has relocated from an nearby industrial unit to this more picturesque setting. Brewers Quentin and Pat welcome visitors to the house, and were kind enough to give us a tour of the brewery. In fact, if you remember, last weekend was very snowy – we had at least six inches over the weekend, which pretty much snowed us in. So we were faced with a weekend of snowball fights, good food and of course an unlimited supply of beer! What a hardship!

(One more aside: it was not ME that chose this property. The fact that there was a brewery one site was merely a piece of good luck as far as I was concerned! :-)

Tollgate is a six barrel plant, so pretty similar in size to a lot of UK craft breweries. They have a range of about eight beers which are mainly sold in casks to local pubs, but are also bottled and sold locally, such as in the National Trust shop and at farmers markets. Quentin also has another full time job, so they only brew at the weekend (must be a busy life!).

For a business perspective, I was interested how Quentin and Pat came into brewing. They purchased the brewery relatively recently (in the last couple of years), and at the time neither of them had any experience in brewing. So essentially they wanted to run a business first, and the fact that it is a brewery came second. As a passionate homebrewer this interests me, because obviously I would come to it from the other direction: as a brewer first and businessman second. Having said that, you might argue that brewing skills are easier to learn than business skills, so starting with business skills first might actually result in a better run business.

Anyway, the tour was great – Quentin was very good with the kids, and the beer was excellent too. Can’t think of a better place to have got snowed in!

Coole Pilate

Andy and I have been absolutely bombed out with other stuff going on in our lives recently, but we realised this week that we really need to get our pilsner bottled. It was brewed on 10th February, fermented for about three and a half weeks, then I dropped the temperature down to 4C to let it start “lagering”.

But it’s been sat on the yeast cake since then, and I really wanted to get it bottled in case that started to affect the flavour. So that was last night’s job.

After much consideration we came up with the slightly bizarre name of Coole Pilate.

Why? Well firstly it’s a small hamlet near Audlem in Cheshire, near to where Andy’s family come from. Secondly, it’s got the word “cool” in it, and it is a lager after all. Thirdly, it has got the letters “pil” in it, and it is a pils after all. And fourthly, it’s our beer and we can call it what we like. I claim that it is the first beer ever to be graced with that name. So there.

And since you asked Gill, it’s pronounced like Pontius, not like a form of yoga. I think.

Beeston Castle fiasco

We’ve been trying to drink up the Beeston Castle porter, which has turned out to be a bit of a problem. I’ve just checked back on previous blogs posts, and it seems that I didn’t write an article about this brew. We made it back in May 2012, with the plan to bottle all of it and lay it down for a few months.

But we’ve had a real problem with carbonation. About a third of the bottles have carbonated nicely and are, frankly, delicious. The remaining two third are totally flat and have a nasty oxidised taste.

So we’ve had to designate it “for brewery consumption only”, because we can’t give any bottles away with a hit rate like that. It just needs drinking up and the bad ones disposing of, which is rather a shame. (Although I have saved a couple of bottles for steak and ale pies! :-)

We’re not exactly sure what the cause of the problem is. My best guess is that it was a faulty batch of crown corks. I would guess that the bad ones have not quite sealed properly, which has lead to no carbonation and a little oxygen getting in. If that’s the case, it’s a hell of a problem, because how to do tell when you are bottling a brew whether the crown corks are OK? I’m going to ditch the remaining corks from that bag just in case, but it does worry me for future brews.

A train sleeps in a siding

The driver guzzles another can of lager…

The last (and only) time we made lager was last year, a Bohemian Pilsner (in other words a Czech lager like Budvar). Regular readers will remember that it turned out pleasingly malty, but we had some problems making it fizzy.

So this year our lager will be a really simple German Pilsner. 100% lager malt and a couple of German hops (Hersbrucker and Tetnang). Last time’s carbonation problems were down to the fact that we could not get enough pressure in our King Keg to dissolve enough of the CO2. So we have concluded that the only way we can be sure our lager is fizzy (short of investing in a Cornelius keg system as used in pubs) is to bottle it.

So yesterday was the brew day. Making lager is a longer affair than making ales because you need to mash for 90 minutes (rather than 60), boil for 90 minutes (rather than 60) and chill the wort to a lower temperature (we chilled to 15C rather than about 22C). I could ramble on for ages about why all that’s necessary, but I’ll spare you the details. In short, it meant that we needed a full day at it (well, 1.30pm to about 8.30pm). But that did give us time to label the Audlem Smoky (or it would if the printer ink hadn’t run out).

Back to the pilsner: it’s currently in the fridge fermenting. The key difference between a lager and an ale is the fermentation temperature – about 10C rather than 20C. Normally our ales are fermented in the house. But for this out came my temperature controller to ensure the fridge stays at exactly the right temperature.

Since we’ll have a good batch of yeast from this brew, when it is finished we plan to make a rauchbier – a German smoked lager. We’ll pitch that right onto the yeast cake from this brew, giving it a really good start. More about that in a few weeks…

Wincle Brew Day

On Tuesday I had my Christmas present from my wonderful wife – a day brewing at Wincle Brewery, near Macclesfield. Needless to say I had a fantastic time.

I have already posted a few general photos for my Facebook friends, but I thought I would write this blog post too. In the Facebook photos I kept them pretty general. Here I aim to be a little bit more “beery” (since it is a brewing blog after all!).

The first thing to say is that the brewery is in an idyllic location, right on the River Dane on the border between Cheshire and Staffordshire. There had been snow over the weekend, so the photographer in me was treated to some wonderful scenic opportunities.

I got there at 8.45am, and met Giles (Owner and Brewer), Justin (Head Brewer) and Hayley (Shop Manager). (Oh, and Molly the Brewery Dog, photographed above). I was immediately made very welcome and, frankly, was told that I was one of the team for the day.

The brewery has a brew capacity (“brew length”) of 15 barrels, which in metric money means the largest brew they can make is 2500 litres. They have three fermenters, plus water (liquor) tanks (hot and cold, on left of photo), mash tun (behind the blue ladder) and boiler (copper).

Malt is stored on the upper floor, and drops down a hopper into the mash tun where it is mixed with hot water. This is how my day started – “mashing in”. I was delighted to be told I could do it all, so I dashed up the ladder and opened the various values under Justin’s guidance.

The mash takes an hour, as it does in home brewing. Just enough time for a chat and bacon butties. Bloody civilised if you ask me! :-)

Sparging (washing the sugars from the grains) is a much more mechanised affair than at home. We use an old milk carton with holes punched in the bottom. In commercial breweries it’s done with a rotating pipe, so you just turn it on and leave it for an hour.

During sparging, wort is run off the bottom of the mash tun into the “underback” (see photo below) and then pumped into the boiler.

This photo is through the boiler hatch, showing the wort just starting to well up through the inlet at the bottom. The black rods above are the boiler’s heating elements.

Once the boil was underway, the mash tun had to be dug out and cleaned. (They say more than half of brewing is cleaning!). Yes, I did dig it out, but Hayley kindly went inside the mash tun to scrub it clean.

Hops were weighed out for the three additions at various stages during the boil.

Finally, once the boil is finished the wort is pumped through a counterflow chiller (this has many plates, and allows wort to flow one way and cold water to flow the other) which drops the temperature to 20C in a few seconds. From here it goes into the fermenter. A sample is drawn off to measure the gravity…

… and also to allow the “cold break” to be assessed. This is the precipitation of proteins that occurs during the rapid chilling. As you can see, the precipitation is quite pronounced. We can’t achieve that sort of cold break at home because we use an immersion chiller (just a copper coil in the boiler, with cold water passing through it), so the chilling takes much longer (an hour or so). The more rapid the chilling, the greater the cold break.

I was very interested to see that they use dried yeast. In fact they use exactly the same strain as we use: Safale S-04. This is me re-hydrating 1kg of dried yeast.

I had to dash before the yeast was pitched, because my wife had got stuck in a snow drift coming to collect me! Giles kindly got me back up the hill out of Wincle and I headed home very happy.

If you have even the vaguest of interest in brewing and fancy a really interesting and hands-on day I’d wholeheartedly recommend that you contact Wincle Brewery. They can take groups up to about five or six. Some people go for a social event, and just like to chat, watch and of course sample the beer. Others, like me, want to get as involved as possible.

Thanks to Giles, Justin and Hayley for making me so welcome.

Anatomy of a beer engine

When I connected up my beer engine last night I noticed that it wasn’t drawing the cleaning water up as well as it should, so I thought that it might need some maintenance. So this evening I took it apart. It turned out that all it needed was a good clean, but I thought you might like to see a few photos of what it looks like inside.

Here’s the engine removed from the counter and ready to be cleaned:

This is what it looks like round the back. It’s dead simple. The beer line connects to the nozzle at the bottom, and the silver cylinder contains the pump mechanism.

Close up of the mechanism before disassembly – note the hideous beer stains.

The whole thing can be disassembled without any tools. Ideal to allow it to be maintained easily in a busy pub. Basically it’s a milled steel cylinder, held fast by two long bolts that fix to the underside of the unit. This shows the first bolt being removed:

Then the bottom part of the pump can be removed:

And the seal ring:

Then the main steel cylinder can be removed revealing a rather dirty piston:

Hmm. And we drew our beer through that?

All clean and ready for re-assembly:

Replacing the steel cylinder:

Testing:

And back in place on the counter in the garage:

Using stuff up

We did our first all-grain brew on 20th June 2010 – a Boddingtons recipe, although as I remember it was far from close to Boddies (too bitter). Since then we have done a further 42 all-grain brews, so you can imagine we have amassed a large stock of ingredients over that time.

In fact, it’s gone a bit crazy. We have 21 different types of malt, from a sack of maris otter pale ale malt (that gets used nearly every time), to some melanoidin malt and flaked maize that I bought on a whim and have so far never used.

Hops aren’t much better. There are 19 different types of hops in my freezer, including 267g of Citra hops which I bought for a laugh to wind up Andy (he hates citrus American hops). We have 267g left because the online retailer mistakenly sent me FOUR 100g packs instead of one. (I gave one to my other brewing friend Andy – have you used them yet Andy??)

So this brings me to the issue of shelf life. Let’s deal with malt first. Generally when you buy malt it has a best before date of one year hence. You need to keep malt in an air-tight container and in a cool dry place, or it tends to absorb moisture from the atmosphere. The brewing term for this is slack malt. Obviously this is best avoided because its provides an opportunity for bacterial growth. But it also means the malt contains a greater water to starch ratio, so the same weight of slack malt will produce less fermentables than fresh malt – meaning your recipes don’t work quite right.

As for hops, they tend to have a best before date of two years hence, although I tend to worry more about hop aging than malt aging. Why? Well hops impart a lot of important flavour to beer, and as they age these flavours and aromas disappear and oxidise into compounds you don’t want. (Very aged hops can go a bit “cheesy” apparently). So I keep all our hops tightly clipped shut and in the freezer.

So, what to do about the mountain of aging ingredients? Use them up! Recently I have been looking for opportunities to use up older stock, either by choosing recipes that use them, or by careful substitution. For example, we have a plan to brew a Light Spring Ale next. The recipe calls for a little Caravienne malt, which surprisingly we don’t have any of. But we have a little Carapils (slightly lighter) and a little Caramunich (slightly darker). I reckon we can substitute both of those, thus avoiding buying anything new and also using up two malts in the process.

On the hops front, we have taken to substituting the bittering hops but staying faithful to the flavour and aroma hops. So we tend to use up older hops for bittering and just try to substitute a similar variety. But for the favour and aroma we stick with the recipe and fresher hops.

An added bonus to all this is that adjusting recipes slightly makes them yours, rather than borrowed from someone else. So you win all round.