Storecupboard Larger

Brewing day again. I'm currently trying to save the pennies, partly so I can afford to buy the necessary kit to start all-grain brewing, so today's brew is a bit of a hotch-potch. As its name suggests, the recipe came about by looking at what ingredients I had in my brewing cupboard. Unfortunately I couldn't quite manage a whole recipe without buying anything, but I managed to limit the purchases to a can of malt extract and a sachet of dried yeast. The recipe is:

• 0.5kg Munich malt (steeped at 70 degrees C for 30 mins)
• 0.5kg Vienna malt (steeped as above)
• 1 can of John Bull Pilsner kit hopped malt extract
• 1.5kg can Black Rock light liquid malt extract
• 13g NZ Hallertau hops (boiled for 60 mins)
• 25g Motueka hops (boiled for 10 mins)
• 1 tsp irish moss (10 mins)
• 5 tsp yeast nutrient salts
• 1 sachet Saflager W34/70 yeast

Measured OG was 1.044 and the batch size is 23 litres.

I'm getting quite comfortable with the brewing process now so it all went smoothly. The fermenter is in the temperature-controlled fridge, which has been set to 12 degrees C.

No idea how it will turn out. I've not done a lager before and the hop levels are a total guess as I don't know how heavily hopped the Pilsner kit was. It looks darker than I expected but the sample I took to measure the OG tasted OK. I'll give it a week at the primary fermentation temperature then rack it off into a clean fermenter for 4 weeks lagering at 2 degrees.

Bottling day again

4BC Altbier (batch #4 of my homebrew adventures) is now safely bottled. I'm getting quite used to the process now so it all went very smoothly - I racked the beer from its secondary fermenter (where it has been cold-conditioning at 2 degrees for the last 4 weeks) into another fermentation vessel where it was mixed with a solution of dextrose (corn sugar) and water to encourage carbonation. After that it was just the tedious process of washing and sanitizing the bottles before filling.

I have to say that I am very pleased with this batch. Strike that - I'm bloody ecstatic about it! I've been quite happy with my beers up to now but this one tastes so much better than the others even at bottling stage. It's going to be hard to wait a few weeks for the carbonation to develop and the beer to settle down. I drank the dregs (the last almost-pint that wasn't worth bottling) and it was gorgeous - lots of tasty malt but also a nice steady bitterness. Clear as a bell as well. I'm stoked.

I also picked up the remaining ingredients for batch #5 today. This batch will be called Storecupboard Larger because, er, it's a kind of a lager and it was meant to be constructed entirely from ingredients I already had in my brewing cupboard. However I was short of one ingredient so had to pop to the homebrew shop today for some malt extract. It will probably be next weekend before I get this hotch-potch kicked off anyway.

I have created purest Greene.....

....King IPA! Batch #2 of my homebrew was an IPA based on a recipe from John Palmer's How To Brew book. I modified the recipe slightly, but it was fairly close. The beer was bottled in January and over the last few weeks I've sampled a few bottles. The more of it I taste, the more it reminds me of Greene King IPA, a beer which is legendary amongst British real ale drinkers, and not for good reasons. A few years back it won an award at the CAMRA Champion Beer of Britain awards, which was met with a stunned silence followed by howls of derision.

As beers go, it's not a particularly bad one. It just isn't very good. The thing that sticks out for me (and where my homebrew is reminiscent) is a musty old-hops character to it. I'm not sure how I've managed to recreate this in my homebrew, but I'll certainly be trying not to do it again. Batch #2 is otherwise not too bad to my tastes, a reasonable amount of fruit with good bitterness. I'll be trying again before too long.

(Apologies to Lord Percy Percy of Blackadder the Second for mangling his excellent line for the title of this post!)

This isn't just homebrew.....

When Kieran came up from Wellington he came bearing gifts. A couple of beers from Saltaire brewery in the UK which I'll look forward to sampling soon, plus a bottle of his own Imperial Stout which I couldn't resist beyond last night!

The photo below shows the extremely sexy bottle of Imperial Stout alongside the glass I was about to drink it from - a Fuller's ESB glass which I (ahem) liberated from a pub back in the UK. It's excellent for sampling the stronger beers.

So, what was it like? I feel I have to come over all Dervla Kirwan M&S advert here - "This isn't just homebrew....". Wow. Stunning. It's quite obviously dark, rich and alcoholic but there isn't that cloying sweetness which you sometimes get with big strong beers. The bitterness isn't over-assertive but it provides a good backbone to the beer. And the finish! It seems to last forever. I can almost taste it now. A superb beer that I would have been very happy paying good money for. Kieran, you're a gent!

The best pub in Auckland

I didn't visit Galbraiths all that much during my first few months in Auckland (more fool me) but over the last few weeks I've been there quite a few times for one reason or another. On Thursday evening I met up with fellow beer-blogger Kieran who was visiting from Wellington and on Saturday I was there agin (this time with the missus and son in tow) to meet up with Kieran and SOBA secretary Greig (plus assorted other folks). A couple of very pleasant sessions!

Galbraiths is a truly wonderful place. A superb building with tons of beer-and-brewing memorabilia adorning the walls. Excellent food - mainly good solid pub food but well put together, and the best pork pie I've had outside England! An excellent friendly atmosphere with a really mixed clientele. Oh, and lashings of excellent cask-conditioned, brewed-on-the-premises beer. Not to mention the varied guest beers and the well-stocked bottle fridge. The only thing wrong with it is that it isn't next door to my house. Then again, that could be a good thing for my waistline and bank balance!

In the interests of fair and balanced reporting, however, I will note one minor complaint. The draught beers at Galbraiths are, as previously mentioned, hand-pulled cask-conditioned real ales. As such I would expect them to be less carbonated than keg beers (which is a good thing). However, the last couple of times I've been in there I've noticed the level of condition (i.e. carbonation) has been a bit lower than I would like. This makes the beers very easy to drink but less exciting on the palate. A minor issue, but I hope they sort it out.

I will still be back there at every possible opportunity!

Another beery weekend Part I - Educating the masses

Another weekend where the defining factor was beer. OK, it started on Thursday night so it was an extended weekend, but there was plenty of beer involved.

On Friday evening I organised a beer tasting for my colleagues at work. This is something I'd been talking about for a while - despite there being a reasonable selection of bottled beers available in New Zealand our company's Friday Night Beer fridge was stocked with Heineken, Corona and a few examples of New Zealand enormo-brewery beers such as Tui and Export Gold.

Anyway, I persuaded them to let me run a small beer tasting. I procured six beers from the local New World supermarket (actually one of them came from Liquorland), wrote some brief tasting notes (mainly grabbed from the breweries' websites and Ratebeer) and stuck up a few amusing beer-related quotes around the office (quite a few grabbed from the excellent A Swift One blog). The beers were poured into numbered jugs and then distributed one at a time for people to taste and try and match the beer to the tasting notes.

The beers we tried were:

• Wanaka Cardrona Gold. A Vienna Lager from Wanaka, near Queenstown.
• Emersons Organic Pilsner from Dunedin.
• Limburg Witbier from the now-defunct Limburg brewery.
• Epic Pale Ale. The award-winning beer from Luke Nicholas' Auckland brewery.
• Founders Long Black. A German-style Black Lager from Nelson.
• Pink Elephant Mammoth. A strong ale from Blenheim.

It all went very well. Everyone enjoyed the beers and there were definite expressions of surprise at the quality and range of beers available. The Cardrona Gold went down very well and was probably the most-favoured beer of the evening. I thought that the Limburg Witbier was poor - a thin lemony-flavoured beer with little character.

In terms of guessing the beers, no-one got all six correct. Almost everybody (there were 20 people there) got the Founders Long Black right (which is fairly understandable) but not many got the rest.

All in all, a good evening although perhaps I shouldn't have stayed behind to tidy up all the leftovers.....