SOBA sticks it to The Man

I've been a member of the Society Of Beer Advocates (SOBA) for almost 2 years, and recently we've got into our first serious bit of campaigning. We became aware that DB Breweries, one of the Big Two breweries in New Zealand, had taken action against the Green Man craft brewery in Dunedin. Green Man's crime? Releasing a low-strength beer called Radler. DB sent a threatening letter pointing out that it owned the trademark for Radler and, after a short battle, Green Man acquiesced. They're only a small company and so couldn't afford to take on the big boys.

The issue is that Radler is a generic beer style. It's not very well known in New Zealand but is fairly common in Germany. A single brewery owning the trademark for a beer style is obviously nonsense. Just imagine if someone trademarked Pilsner, for example. To make matters worse, it turns out that DB have also trademarked Saison in New Zealand.

SOBA decided that this could not be allowed to happen, but it wasn't clear what we could do. A boycott of DB products was proposed, and SOBA is still encouraging people to avoid DB products (which shouldn't be all that painful as there are many many better beers available from craft breweries around New Zealand). SOBA secretary Greig McGill got some excellent publicity for the cause via an article in the Waikato Times, followed by a radio appearance on Radio Live and finally a TV appearance on 3 News·

This publicity led to well-known intellectual property (IP) lawyers James & Wells getting in touch with SOBA and offering to fight for the revocation of the Radler trademark on a pro bono basis. The campaign is now in full swing, via a press release and an excellent interview on TV3's Campbell Live show. We're confident we can win but all support is welcomed. We've had support from around the world, including a UK brewer who used to work for DB but is now supporting our cause.

This is not about beer geeks getting sniffy about a name. This is about allowing creativity and innovation to flourish amongst the community of small brewers. We don't mind if DB continues to brew and market their (technically out of style and pretty unpleasant) Monteiths Radler. Just give up the trademark and let Green Man and others show how it should be done.

The great handpump adventure!

As an Englishman and fan of English real ale, I've always wanted my own handpump/beer engine (the terms are fairly interchangeable). And now, thanks to my Dad, I have one! Dad found someone who could lay his hands on one and shipped it over to me. The shipping cost more than the pump itself, but it was well worth it.

The pump arrived mid-week, but I didn't really get chance to play with it until today. Here's a photo of all the bits laid out on my dining table:

It's in superb condition, factory-reconditioned by the famous Angram company. I then set about figuring out how to connect it to my corny kegs. Which was where I encountered my first problem - the shank for the hose on the bottom of the cylinder (the silver bit in the middle in the photo below) is for half-inch hose, while my standard beer line is 6mm. I was momentarily confused by the 2 connectors with green hoses on the right of the picture, until I figured out that they were the connections for the optional water-cooling system.

However, I've bodged up a solution using a couple of jubilee clips. the narrower bore beer line from my kegs goes inside the wider bore line for about an inch, and 2 jubilee clips secure it. I suspected I may get a leak here, but I was pleasantly surprised.

I then went outside and mounted the handpump on my bar. Boy, does it look good!

Then it was time to hook things up. I part-filled a keg with plain water as a test, then attached my beer line to a standard quick-disconnect fitting. I hooked that up to the keg and locked the pressure relief valve open so air could get into the keg to replace the water being drawn out. A few brisk pulls on the handle and water began coming out of the pump!

Unfortunately not all of the water was emerging from the spout as expected. Some water was dripping from underneath the pump, so it was obvious I had a leak somewhere. Time to strip the cover off and check it down. A little investigation showed that, surprisingly, the leak was not at either of the places I had expected (the join in the beer line or the attachment of the line onto the pump) but from the John Guest fitting which linked the output of the pump onto the dispense spout (see below).

Not sure how I'll fix this. It should be possible to pick up another John Guest fitting and replace it. I suspect it's just a bit old.

So, not quite got beer pouring from the pump just yet, but not far away!

Busy Easter weekend!

All been a bit quiet on the blogging front recently, although my brewing has been progressing well. However, I had a really busy extended long-weekend over Easter so I thought it was worth catching up on a few things.

Friday - brewed Urban Bohemian
On Good Friday I finally got around to brewing the Bohemian Pilsner I've been meaning to for a while. I had a pack of Wyeast 2001 Pilsner Urquell yeast sat in my fridge, but I'd been putting off brewing the beer. I brew very few lagers, mainly because of the time they take. A typical lager fermentation will take around 2 weeks, followed by at least 4 weeks lagering time. That means that my fermenting fridge would be tied up for 6 weeks on one beer. During the summer this would have meant that I couldn't brew anything else, as ambient temperatures would be too high for ale fermentation (range is around 18-22 degrees centigrade). Anyway, now that we're into autumn here in Auckland, the ambient temperatures are more conducive to ale fermentations so I can safely tie up the fermentation fridge with this lager, while I ferment an ale or two in the understairs cupboard.

The recipe came from Brewing Classic Styles by Jamil Zainasheff. I've brewed a few recipes out of this book now and they've all been excellent. I had to tweak the hops slightly to take account of what I had in stock, but it should be OK.

What I'm not so certain about is the yeast. I've learnt from experience that having the right amount of healthy yeast to start with is critical. I use the Pitching Rate Calculator at Mr Malty.com (Jamil's web site) which works out the right amount of yeast to pitch based on the age of the pack, the type of beer, strength etc. For this beer it told me I needed to make a giant yeast starter - 6.5 litres!! I don't think I have a container large enough to make such a starter. Anyway, I made a 3.5 litre starter and emailed Jamil, asking him if he thought I really needed a mega-starter. He didn't get back to me in time (he's a busy man, so it's understandable) so I just went with the 3.5 litre one. If I'd had a bit more time I might have tried to step it up to 6.5 litres by pitching another 3 litres of wort, but I didn't have time (or dry malt extract available). So we'll see how we go. The beer is fermenting away at 10 degrees now so we'll see what happens. The picture below shows the starter bubbling away:

Update: as of last night (22nd April) primary fermentation seems to be basically complete. The specific gravity has dropped from 1.054 down to 1.010, which is better than I expected so it looks like it was a healthy fermentation. The beer tasted pretty good too - nice malty crispness and no signs of sulphury off-flavours which can be produced by over-stressed yeast.

Friday - Keg Oatmeal Stout

I don't normally drink beer while brewing (got to keep focussed!) but while brewing the Urban Bohemian I decided to treat myself to a glass of my Anniversary Day Porter, which had been tasting very nice indeed. It turned out to be the last glass, as the keg blew dry! Luckily I had another beer ready to go into it so the brewing day was extended as I cleaned and sanitised the empty keg then transferred my Donkey Oatie Stout into it. Donkey Oatie is an amusingly-named oatmeal stout (which is now tasting very delicious).

All in all a very busy day, but very satisfying.

Saturday - visit to Galbraiths
On the second Saturday of each month we have a meeting of the local 'branch' of the Society of Beer Advocates (SOBA). As this meeting fell on the Easter weekend I decided to just have a low-key event, as many people would be likely to be on holiday. A handful of us therefore gathered at one of my favourite places - Galbraiths Alehouse in Eden Terrace. I'm sure I've waxed lyrical about this place before, but I never tire of it. The perfect combination of good beer, decent food, excellent atmosphere and a lovely building.

We were lucky to be joined by Ian Ramsay, the brewer of Galbraith's outstanding English-style beers (also a SOBA member). We sampled a few of the beers and chatted about beery things in general. I was sad to hear that the Mr G's Luncheon Ale was not selling well enough and was therefore likely to be discontinued. I've enjoyed this beer a lot - it's a rare sight, a low-strength (3.5%) yet flavoursome English-style pale ale. Beautifully balanced, and the sort of beer you can drink a lot of. Sadly, not enough people have been doing so, so it's not long for this world. Get it while you can.

Sunday - day of rest, inflict homebrew on visitors

On Easter Sunday we had a few friends round for a barbeque. The autumn weather has been very pleasant in Auckland this year and we were able to sit outside all afternoon.

Whenever we have visitors round I'm always keen to get them to try my beer, but always a little nervous. A lot of people still have a negative reaction when you mention "homebrew" - no doubt conditioned by those hideous "kit and kilo" brews that people used to make. If I can get people to sample my beers, I usually find that they are pleasantly surprised.

On this occasion I inflicted my Best Bitter, Pale Beauty pale ale and Donkey Oatie stout on a couple of people. They came back for more so I assume they liked it!

Monday - Wire up temperature controller

For the last few months since I bought a secondhand fridge to act as my outdoor beer fridge I've been running it with the temperature dial turned as low as it would go (i.e. warmer), but it's still a bit cold for the ales that I usually brew and drink. I bought a temperature controller a few months ago from MashMaster in Australia but hadn't got around to wiring it up. Part of this was due to needing to fit it into a plastic case as it was going to sit outside.

So on Easter Monday I finally motivated myself to get it done. I drilled and cut the case, sorted out the wiring and assembled the temp controller. It wasn't all that difficult, just a little time-consuming. So now I finally have my temperature-controlled beer fridge. The controller works by turning the power to the fridge on if the temperature gets above the pre-set temperature, then off again once it's cooled down enough. I have my controller set to 10 degrees centigrade, which is a little cooler than standard UK cellar temperature.

Tuesday - bottle barley wine

Back in January I brewed a barley wine in honour of my Grandad Joe, who was a big fan of Whitbread's Gold Label. The beer has been sat in a keg in my beer fridge since then. However, my plan was to get it into bottles so it could be hidden away to mature slowly over a year or two. The problem was I didn't have enough of the right size of bottles. Most of my beer bottles are 750ml bottles and although the beer is nice, drinking 10% barley wine by the pint is not generally a good idea! I wanted smaller bottles and couldn't bottle the beer until I found them.

Eventually I tracked down a source. The Leigh Sawmill Brewery use 300ml swing-top bottles for their The Doctor strong ale and 12 Gauge strong lager. They very kindly offered to sell me 4 dozen used bottles at $1 per bottle, which I thought was a great deal. They even threw in some spare lids and seals.

Cleaning and sanitizing 48 bottles took a long time, but I kept at it. I then carefully filled the bottles, making sure to "cap on foam" i.e. closing the cap while the neck of the bottle was full of foam, in order to minimize the amount of air left in the bottle. Since I'm intending to keep some of these bottles for at least a year I needed to pay extra attention to sanitation and minimizing the chances of spoilage due to oxidation.

Eventually I ended up with 40 bottles of beer. I created a nice label, labelled them up and have hidden them away. An odd one or two might find their way into the hands of friends, but the rest will be tucked away for future consumption!

Wednesday - clean kegs and fridge

After my marathon bottling session on Tuesday night I decided I deserved a drink, so I poured myself a pint of my Best Bitter. Sadly that was the last pint, and the keg blew dry. I now had 2 empty kegs (the Best Bitter plus the barley wine that I'd just emptied into bottles) so I needed to do some keg cleaning. I took the opportunity of a mainly-empty beer fridge to do a bit of a deep clean. The fridge had been getting pretty grubby with beer run-off etc. so I got the Mr Muscle out and gave it a really good clean both inside and out. Cleanliness is vital where beer is concerned so I felt a lot better afterwards. So now I have a sparklingly clean, although sadly almost empty, beer fridge.

All in all, quite a beery extra-long weekend, but very satisfying. Lots of good jobs done, and some nice beer drunk.

Brew Day - Anniversary Day Porter

It was Anniversary Day here in Auckland today so I got a day off which I decided to use to lay down a Robust Porter. One of my aims for this brewing year is to master 3 or 4 basic recipes which I can then tweak to create variations on a them. One of those styles is Porter - I want to master a basic porter so that I can then do variations such as Honey Porter, Chocolate Hazelnut Porter, Bourbon Porter etc.

Today's recipe was based on a recipe from the Brewing Network's Jamil Show. Jamil Zainasheff, John Plise and their guests have created some superb podcasts over the last couple of years - a great blend of goofball humour and reliable brewing knowledge. Anyway, this recipe is similar to Jamil's Black Widow Porter, but obviously I had to substitute the hops with varieties I could get locally.

The recipe is:
4kg Pale Ale malt (I used up the last of my Maris Otter, plus a bit of Golden Promise)
550g Medium Crystal (60L) malt
550g Munich Malt
350g Chocolate Malt
200g Black Patent Malt

40g NZ Fuggles @ 60 mins
40g NZ Styrian Goldings @ 15 mins
20g NZ Styrian Goldings @ flameout

This was the first time I'd done an all-grain brew of a dark beer and the mash looked amazing - see the photo below:

Sparging and lautering went fairly smoothly - the runoff was fairly slow but not too bad, and I didn't get near to a stuck sparge. The picture below shows the first jugfull of runoff - absolutely amazing colour! I could have drunk it right then and there.

My calculations (using BeerSmith software) must have been slightly off, however, as I ended up with more wort than I expect (30 litres as opposed to 28 litres) and the specific gravity was a bit lower than my target. I made an on-the-spot decision to increase my boil time to 75 minutes from 60 minutes in the hope that the extra evaporation would bring the volume down and the SG up. So into the pots it went (I'm still using the two-pot stovetop boil method as I haven't got round to converting my old keg into a kettle):

The boil went smoothly (no boilovers again) but the volume didn't reduce down as much as I'd hoped, so I ended up with 22 litres of wort going into the fermenter (after chilling), rather than the 20 I'd aimed for. The original gravity was 1.053 instead of the target 1.061. Not a disaster, just a little annoying. I'll have to tweak my calculations next time.

I then rehydrated a sachet of Safale S-04 dried yeast as I didn't have a suitable liquid yeast to hand. That was pitched and the fermenter is now sat in the temperature-controlled fridge at 19 degrees. I'll inspect it in the morning for signs of activity.

All in all a good day's brewing, and if the look (and taste!) of the unfermented wort are anything to go by, this will be a good beer!

Yeast Washing

For a while now I've been using liquid yeasts from Wyeast. These yeasts are imported from the USA and therefore they are fairly expensive. One way of reducing the impact of these costs is to re-use the yeast from one brew in one or more other brews. For my recent barley wine (Grandad Joe's Gold Label) I re-used the entire yeast cake from my brew of Palliser Pride. However, in most cases I would not want to use so much yeast for one brew, so I've investigated harvesting and washing the yeast at the end of the brew (in order to separate the good yeast from the proteins, hop bits and other gunge, known as 'trub'), and splitting it into several smaller amounts.

Today was my first shot at this. I followed the basic process from a very useful forum post but modified it slightly (I used sanitiser solution instead of boiling stuff as I didn't have enough glass jars). It went fairly smoothly although I'm concerned that I poured away too much real yeast along with the gunge at the bottom. All in all I ended up with the three jars shown above. Next time I come to brew a suitable beer (probably an English bitter of some sort) I'll make a starter using one of those jars and see how we go.

Brew Day - Electric Landlord

An exciting brew day for me yesterday, and one that went fairly smoothly. The beer I brewed takes its name from this blog, but its heritage comes from one of the greatest English beers.

One of my favourite English beers of all time is Landlord, from Timothy Taylor's brewery in Keighley, West Yorkshire. It's a perfect example of an English Pale Ale - golden in colour with a strong smooth backbone of bitterness. I always used to detect a creaminess in there plus a hint of bitter orange marmalade. Overall the keyword would be 'balance' - the malt, the hops and the yeast character all coming together well.

The beer I brewed yesterday was not an attempt to clone Landlord, although that beer was certainly my inspiration. The exact recipe for Landlord is not public knowledge, but Roger Protz's Real Ale Almanac indicates that it uses 100% Golden Promise malt, plus Fuggles and 3 varieties of Goldings hops. Of these, the Styrian Goldings lend it that bitter orange character.

I have been reading quite a lot about SMaSH brewing, which stands for Single Malt and Single Hop i.e. brewing a beer using only a single malt variety and a single hop variety. I thought that this beer would be a good place to experiment with this. So the recipe brewed yesterday was:
3.9kg Golden Promise malt
25g NZ Styrian Goldings @ 60 mins
20g NZ Styrian Goldings @ 30 mins
20g NZ Styrian Goldings @ 15 mins
20g NZ Styrian Goldings @ 0 mins

Original Gravity was 1.042 for 21.5 litres, bitterness should be 36 IBUs.

The yeast I used was a limited edition from Wyeast, which I bought from Craftbrewer in Australia. It's 1469PC West Yorkshire Ale, and the rumours are that it could actually be the Timothy Taylor's house yeast. So I've got a pretty good chance of getting very close to the characteristics of Landlord. But as long as I produce a flavoursome beer I'll be happy.

As I write this the fermenter is bubbling away nicely in my temperature-controlled fridge at 20 degrees Centigrade. I'll leave it there for about a week before transferring it to a secondary fermenter and dry-hopping with more Styrian Goldings. All being well it should be in a keg in a couple of weeks time.

I also had an excellent package arrive yesterday from The Brewing Network in the USA. It was a late Christmas present to myself - a signed copy of Brewing Classic Styles by homebrewing legends Jamil Zainasheff and John Palmer, plus a Brew Strong t-shirt from their fascinating podcast. Loads more recipes to brew, and a cool t-shirt to wear while brewing them!

Kegs. That's right, kegs!

One of the few irritating parts of the homebrewing process for me has been bottling the end product. It takes ages to clean and sanitise the bottles, then there's the racking off of the beer and adding of the priming sugar, then the bottling itself. Then you have to wait at least 2 weeks for the bottles to carbonate, and probably another 4 weeks before the beer's tasting at its best. So for a long time I've been keen to build a setup that would allow me to put my beer into kegs and dispense from them.

It's not as complicated as it sounds, but I have to thank the guys on the Realbeer.co.nz forum for all their advice, as well as other local homebrewing mates and especially Barry (who let me look at his setup and answered all my dumb questions).

The basic components of a kegging setup are:

• a fridge (preferably with a temperature controller so it doesn't run too cold)
  
• one or more Cornelius kegs. There are loads of secondhand ones out there, mainly old Coca Cola kegs.
  
• a CO2 cylinder
• regulator, pipework and connectors

I picked up a cheap secondhand fridge from TradeMe. The kegs (I've got 3) came from Steve Plowman at Hallertau brewbar (and I borrowed one from Barry). The CO2 cylinder came from a place in Grey Lynn in Auckland who supplies reconditioned fire extinguishers. The regulator, pipework and connectors (I used the excellent John Guest push-fit connectors) came from CraftBrewer in Australia. There's a picture below of most of the bits and pieces, prior to assembly:


Assembling the whole thing was not hard at all, especially once I'd spotted the plastic seal for the regulator that stopped the one leak I had. I've drilled a hole in the side of the fridge for the gas-in line so I can put the CO2 cylinder in a safe place down behind my bar. I use a simple picnic tap for dispense (no fancy font heads for me!) and it works beautifully. There's nothing like being able to walk up to the beer fridge and pour yourself a pint. And the beauty of the whole thing is the reduction in time between brewing and drinking! I can throw a batch of beer into a keg in about 10 minutes, gas it up overnight and start drinking it the following night (with the obvious caveat that beers tend to take a few weeks to develop their full flavours).

SOBA National Homebrew Competition 2008

This year was the second annual running of the SOBA National Homebrew Competition, and my first chance to enter (I hadn't really got started on the brewing thing last year). I told myself I was only entering to get some feedback on my beers, not for the chance of winning anything, but that didn't stop me from being a little disappointed when the results came back.

I entered 4 beers, all malt extract-based (I hadn't got around to all-grain brewing in time). Entry involved shipping 2 bottles of each beer to Wellington, along with a completed entry form for each one (plus the entry fee of course). Judging took place in September, with the inital results coming out shortly after, followed by the judging notes and comments a bit later. I've lost the actual scores I received, but I can remember that the highest was a 31/50 and the others were in the 14-17 range.

The feedback came on full AHA/BJCP scoresheets. I would include an example because they're very interesting, but my scanner is currently out of commission. I've included a few of the key comments on each beer below:

• Extract of Daisy (American Pale Ale): Hops low on nose for style; cardboard (indicative of oxidation) in aroma and flavour; stylistic accuracy low; technical merit low.
• Storecupboard Larger (Vienna Lager): hop aroma seems inappropriate; more cardboard!; Stylistic Accuracy medium; Technical merit medium-high; "I would drink a pint of this beer"!
• 4BC Altbier (Dusseldorf Altbier): hard to detect aroma; appropriate hop; Lacking malt for style; bitterness too low for style; harsh; technical merit low; sour/acidic flavour.
• 4BeeCee Porter (Honey Porter): Chocolate, phenolic aroma - electrical fire; chocolate, vinegar flavour; medicinal aroma; Stylistic accuracy medium; technical merit low.

Well, the only way is up! I'm hopeful that next year will be a different story - my beers have certainly improved since the ones I submitted. Going all-grain has certainly helped.

Mind you, I've never brewed a beer I couldn't drink, and that's the main thing. Winning competitions is not the main objective of my brewing.

Mostly, I have been brewing....

Since I last posted anything of significance I've brewed seven different all-grain batches of beer. Some of them have been merely OK, some have been good and a couple have been absolutely amazing!

As a quick catch-up, here are the batches I've brewed but not posted about:

• 4BC Altbier v3.1. An all-grain attempt at a Dusseldorf Altbier using liquid yeast (Wyeast 1007 German Ale). Just a few bottles of this beer remain. I was very happy with it. Slightly on the pale side for style but a nice clean malty taste. I'll brew this one again.
  
• Palliser Special. An English Best/Special bitter. Again, just a few bottles of this remaining in the beer fridge. Very pleased with this one also - nice level of bitterness and the dry-hopping (added hops into the secondary fermenter) with NZ-grown Styrian Goldings hops worked well. Lots of hop aroma.
  
• Saison Du Diable. Possibly the favourite beer I've brewed so far. Recipe was based on Jamil Zainasheff's award-winning recipe. Yeast used was a Wyeast special edition - 3711PC French Saison. I fermented it at ambient temperatures in my shed (which were around 20-22 degrees in a warm Auckland spring) then ramped it up to 28 degrees by bringing it into the conservatory and turning the heating on for the last few days. This resulted in it fermenting out very dry, which was the objective. It's a lovely pale golden beer with tons of funky aroma, lots of fruit but a clean dry finish. Very chuffed with this one.
  
• Oh Vienna! A Vienna lager. Had some problems with this one - the liquid yeast (Wyeast 2206 Bavarian Lager) failed to kick off. I left it for a few days and tried raising the temperature but no joy. So I pitched a rehydrated sachet of Saflager S-23 and this kicked fermentation into life. However, I have no ide4a what the interaction of the two yeasts would do. This was the first beer to go into my new kegging setup (of which more later) and was the first beer I inflicted on my fellow SOBA brewers when they came round to my place, but I wasn't all that happy with it. A distinct rubbery/sulphury aroma, persisting into the flavour. A lack of malt sweetness also. I'll give it a few weeks in the keg and see if it comes right.
  
• Pale Beauty. A beer which is difficult to pigenhole to a BJCP style. In theory it's an English IPA but it tastes unlike most IPAs I've ever drunk! Not that it's a bad thing - I think I've created a damn fine beer. It reminds me a lot of Daisy Cutter from Twickenham Fine Ales, one of my favourite UK beers. It shares a name with another Twickenham beer, although it doesn't taste like Twickenham's Pale Beauty. As it's name suggests it's a pale straw colour and has a big hit of hops on the nose. There's a pronounced passionfruit aroma from the Riwaka hops and a lovely creaminess. At 5.7% it's a little strong to quaff, but it's very tempting to do so!
  
• Palliser Pride. My attempt to get close to one of my favourite beers of all time, Fuller's London Pride. I used Wyeast 1968 London ESB yeast which is rumoured to be the same strain as the Fuller's house yeast. The beer has turned out very nice, though perhaps closer to Fuller's Chiswick Bitter than London Pride - lacking a litle richness and body, perhaps. It's a mighty fine beer for quaffing though, and is currently on tap in my beer fridge!
  
• Grandad Joe's Gold Label. This is my currently-fermenting brew. Named in honour of my grandfather who, in his last weeks, took a liking to Whitbread Gold Label. It's not an attempt to recreate that beer, just an attempt to brew a good English barley wine. There's a lot of Pale Ale malt in it, and not a lot else ( a hint of crystal malt and a bit of sugar to stop it being too cloying). If all comes out well it will be somewhere between 10%-11% and will be aged for at least 6 months.
  

If you want any more details of any of the beers (recipes etc.), drop me a line.

Back after a long absence

Well, if anyone reads this stuff you'll no doubt be wondering why the lack of updates. Well, life got a bit too busy. Brewing has still been going on but has been interspersed in between family visits, lots of work etc.

But it's a New Year so I'm resolving to catch up a bit. Hard to believe that I haven't written anything since September! Hopefully, postings over the next few days will cover:

• further forays into the world of all-grain homebrewing
• my less-than-stellar performance in the National Homebrewing Competition
• construction of my home keg system

More soon!

Tasting OK so far

Well, I just transferred Palliser Bitter from the primary fermenter to a secondary one, and took a small sample along the way. To check the specific gravity (SG) of course, but also to have a little taste. And it seems to be doing fine on both counts. SG has dropped from 1.040 to 1.012 in 4 days so if it finished there I'd be happy, but it might creep down another couple of points during secondary fermentation and that's also OK. More importantly, it tastes good! Lighter body than I expected, but a nice mellow fruitiness with a bit of citrus around the edge. Not too bitter, but fairly well balanced.

I've dry-hopped this beer, adding 20g of NZ Styrian Goldings hop pellets to the beer in the secondary fermenter. This should give a big boost to the hop aroma. Styrian Goldings are one of my favourite hops, and feature strongly in Timothy Taylors Landlord. The beer will sit in secondary for about 10 days before bottling.

I also received a nice package in the mail today - a secondhand copy of Graham Wheeler's classic book "Home Brewing - the CAMRA guide" that I picked up on TradeMe. It's a bit old (1990) but is acknowledged as a classic. I've seen it selling for ludicrous amounts (£100+!!) in the UK - suffice to say I picked it up a fair bit cheaper than that. It'll be my favoured reading matter for the bus journey to and from work for the next couple of weeks!

First all-grain batch

This weekend was a momentous occasion in my fledgling homebrewing career - my first all-grain batch (that is, brewed using just grain instead of malt extract). It's something I've been aiming towards for a while - I want to get the greater malt flavour, as well as the additional flexibility that not being reliant on malt extract gives.

The key piece of equipment needed for all-grain brewing is a mash tun - a way of extracting the sugars from the grain and then separating the liquid (wort) from the grain. A classic homebrew technique is to convert a chilly bin (esky, picnic cooler, whatever you want to call it). That's the route I went down. To extract the wort without bringing the grain with it I used the braided metal screen from a hose - lots of people have apparently done it this way. See the picture below:

What to brew for the first all-grain batch? I was keen to get an every day drinking beer in stock, so I went for a Best Bitter which I've called Palliser Bitter. The recipe was:

• 3.5kg UK Pale Ale malt
• 0.4kg Crystal malt
• 0.4kg Munich malt (for a bit of complexity)
• 100g Wheat malt extract (OK, I know it's an all-grain batch but I had some wheat extract which needed using up and I thought it might help the head retention)
• NZ-grown Fuggles hops at 60 mins, 30 mins and 10 mins to about 40 IBU
  
• Dry-hopping with NZ Styrian Goldings hops in the secondary fermenter
• Good old Safale S-04 dried yeast

I got all my equipment together, gave it a good clean and prepared for an exciting day. However, it turned out to be pretty stressful and not all that successful.

I tipped the grain into my mash tun while I brought two large pans of water up to temperature. The temperature of this 'strike water' is very important as the enzymes within the malt are very temperature sensitive. You need to keep the mash temperature within a fairly tight range in order to get the sugars out with the right level of unfermentable dextrins (which provide body to the beer). I got the water to temperature and 'mashed in' (added the water slowly to the grain).

Then came the first panic of the day - the probe thermometer I was using was giving radically different temperatures at different points in the grain bed - several degrees either above or below my target mash temperature. Fortunately the mash thermometer I've bought but not yet fitted to my mash tun gave a more consistent reading, which was at the lower end of my range but I like my beers dry anyway.

After an hour the time came to drain the wort from my mash tun. It smelt bloody lovely! The first couple of litres came out OK, and I tipped these back into the grain bed to recirculate (and clear them up).

However, after only another couple of litres of runoff the flow rate slowed to a trickle and then stopped entirely. Disaster! I had a mash tun full of gorgeous wort that I couldn't get out! I tried tipping in some of my sparge water to see if this would free things up but no joy. The only way I could get any flow at all was to stroke the braided screen with a spatula, but even then I only got a trickle. I was contemplating the total loss of the batch but decided to try an alternative approach - I ladelled the mash in batches into a fine sieve and flushed it through with my sparge water. This got the wort out but my carefully worked-out sparge volume calculations went out of the window, so my volumes were a bit off. I ended up with less wort than I expected and at a slightly lower specific gravity (SG). To compensate I added a bit of extra water and a bit of extra wheat malt extract, but the SG was still a bit on the low side (1.040 as opposed to the target 1.043).

After that everything proceeded OK. I had to split the wort between two pans as I haven't yet finished my converted keg which will act as a full-size brew kettle.

As the wort cme up to the boil I noticed a definite difference from my extract-based batches - the amount of 'hot break' (proteins forming a skin on the surface just before boiling point) was much more dense, which is a good thing.

Hops were split between the two pans using a bit of guesswork on volumes! I used NZ-grown Fuggles hops as they are a traditional hop for good honest bitter. After an hour's boiling I fished the hop bags out and left the pans to cool with the lids firmly on. I'd decided to use the 'no-chill' method - instead of using an ice bath or a copper coil with cold water running through it to cool the wort I just let it cool down over night. Ideally I'd have transferred it to my sanitised fermenter to do this but I had no way of doing so without aerating it (which introduces the risk of oxidation) so I decided to take a risk (of exposure to airborned bacteria) and leave it in the boil pans overnight. Time will tell if this was OK.

The following morning I transferred the now-cool wort to the fermenter (with plenty of aeration) and pitched the rehydrated yeast. I then put the fermenter in the shed (ambient temperatures are pretty good at the moment). When I checked on it about 6 hours later it had burst into bubbling life so I was pretty pleased.

All in all it was a pretty stressful and disappointing day. I was really looking forward to my first all-grain batch and it could turn out tohave been a total disaster. There seems to be a design flaw with the braided hose, in that the holes are too small for the wort to get through, or they block up too easily. I will have to investigate an alternative approach before my next all-grain batch, which I want to do within the next couple of weeks. Any hints and tips from blog readers would be welcomed!

Yankee yeast

I recently decided to splash out and order some liquid yeasts from RealBeer. They're Wyeast yeasts imported from the USA. The guys at RealBeer consolidate orders from homebrewers and microbrewers across New Zealand then place a single order every two months. The yeasts are sent in a temperature-controlled shipment from the USA then distributed by the RealBeer guys. This useful service gives us access to a range of yeasts that would otherwise be hard to get hold of down here.

Why would I want to use liquid yeasts anyway? What's wrong with my trusty Safale S-04 dried yeast? Well, nothing really. For a lot of beer styles a dried yeast will definitely do the job. However, there is a limited range of dried yeasts so if you want to authentically recreate some of the more unique beer styles, a liquid yeast is the only way to do it. So I've ordered 3 yeasts which you can see in the photo below:

The three yeasts are:

• 3711PC French Saison
• 1007 German Ale
• 2206 Bavarian Lager

I also got a small amount of yeast nutrient.

The yeasts are "smack-packs". As well as the liquid yeast they contain a sealed bubble of yeats nutrient. When I'm ready to use the yeast I need to hit the pack hard so that it breaks the bubble, releasing the nutrient and getting the yeast ready for use.

The yeasts cost me about 3 times as much as a sachet of dried yeast, so I need to plan my recipes very carefully and aim to harvest the yeast for re-use. Sounds like fun!

Wild weather & wild beer in Auckland's west

Today Auckland has been battered by the worst storm in a decade (allegedly) - high winds and heavy rain have led to weather forecasters advising people to stay indoors and only travel if absolutely necessary. So thankfully it was absolutely necessary that we drove over to Hallertau bar & restaurant to sample some of the most amazing and unique beers I'll ever get to wrap my tastebuds around.

Hallertau brews a range of pretty fine beers and serves some excellent food, so it's worth a visit at any time. However, at the moment it's also serving three rather special beers which makes a visit even more essential.

The first of these is a traditional German Bock which was the winner of last year's SOBA National Homebrewing Competition. Dan from Gore won the competition with this beer and part of his prize was to get it brewed by Hallertau on a commercial scale.

The other two beers are a pair of IPAs brewed as a challenge by Luke Nicholas (owner/brewer of Epic) and Steve Plowman (brewer at Hallertau). They each undertook to brew a strong IPA, Luke using American ingredients and Steve using New Zealand ingredients (malt & hops). Both beers were brewed at Hallertau and launched at the Malthouse in Wellington last week. They made their belated arrival in Auckland on Thursday at Hallertau, hence my burning desire to be there this weekend come hell or high water (and the water was pretty high under the Riverhead bridge!).

An very pleasant afternoon was spent sampling the three beers along with some excellent food and excellent conversation with Barry (fellow SOBA member) and Steve the brewer. Even my wife liked the beers, and my son played happily in the Hallertau lounge. It really is a great place. I then picked up a takeaway bottle of each beer and resolved to sit down and conntemplate them in a bit more detail this evening.
The photo shows the three beers. From left to right: Bock, Maximus Humulus Lupulus (Steve's IPA), Epic Armageddon (Luke's IPA).

So after sitting down with a wineglass of each beer here are my thoughts:

• Traditional Bock. 6.3% ABV. Moderate aroma of coffee/chocolate with a little raisiny alcohol sneaking through. Creamy light-brown head sitting on a reddish-brown beer. Slight haze, possibly a chill haze. Flavour is very well balanced with strong chocolatey malt balanced by a backbone of underlying (but not over-evident) bitterness. While starting sweet and chewy it finishes dry with just a hint of raisiny alcohol. A nice beer. Perhaps just a fraction too much alcohol in the finish, but very drinkable. 17/20
  
• Maximus Humulus Lupulus. 6.66% ABV. Big hop aroma. Quite perfumed though, rather than heavily resined. Citrus tends towards bitter orange. Not a lot of head on this sample (although it was a complete bitch to pour in the bar - the staff were cursing Steve, with a smile on their face!). On the pale side of amber in colour. Rich and round with an oily mouthfeel, the hops coming through slightly later to elongate the flavour and push on into the finish. Bitterness is assertive but not overpowering. Lots of floral (jasmine?) notes in there. Long lasting finish is pretty balanced. A superb beer. 18/20
  
• Epic Armageddon. 6.66% ABV. The hops climb out of the glass and cuff you around the head before you can even get your nose in the glass. Lots of hop resin, lots of grapefruit. Decent off-white head on top of a dark amber beer, darker than the Maximus. Doesn't start as sweet as the Maximus and the hops kick in faster and harder. A creamy mouthfeel is blasted away by coating hops. Balance in this beer is all about running along a tightrope in hobnail boots. It's a hell of a ride. The bitterness lingers in the mouth for hours. 17/20
  

So, to sum up, this was an amazing demonstration of what New Zealand-brewed beers can do. Each beer was stunning in its own way. If I had to choose a favourite I'd lean towards the Maximus Humul Lupulus. It's the Jaguar E-type to the Armageddon's Bugati Veron - not as outrageously fast, but a little more stylish.

Brew Day - 4BC Altbier v2.0

Just realised this post from a few months ago was never actually published! So I'm going to publish it now. The beer has all gone - it didn't turn out that well unfortunately. The yeast substitution referred to in the last paragraph didn't really work, as the weizen character (spicy, phenolic) dominated.

==========

I had a bit of time today so I thought I'd strike while the iron was hot, and get my first partial mash brew on. A bit of a step up for me this, as all my previous brews have been extract-only or extract plus steeped grains. Today I was using "proper" Pale Ale malt which contains enzymes which help to extract the sugars from the other malts, as well as from the Pale Ale malt itself. This is a step towards all-grain brewing, but because it's only partial mash I still needed some malt extract to make up the fermentable sugars.

For this brew I decided to try a partial mash variant of a beer I'd made (and very much enjoyed) before - a Dusseldorf Altbier. I'd previously made this beer with malt extract but a fair whack of steeped grains, so moving to partial mash was not a big step, but would hopefully make a difference to the depth of flavour.

The recipe for 4BC Altbier v2.0 is as follows:
1.8kg Muntons Light LME
1.5kg Pale Ale malt
0.5kg Crystal malt
0.5kg Munich malt
0.5kg Vienna malt
50g Roast Barley (added because I had some left in the cupboard!)
40g Pacific Jade hops @ 60 mins
30g NZ Hallertauer @10 mins
Irish Moss @ 10 mins

I was planning to use SafAle K-97 like I used for my last Alt, but apparently it has been discontinued so I'm using Safbrew WB-06, which is a weizen yeast.

Bottling Day: 4BeeCee Porter

So today was the day to bottle my honey porter, which I'm calling 4BeeCee Porter. It has been cold-conditioning for the last couple of weeks, which is a bit longer than I'd planned but I just haven't got around to bottling it.

One difference with today's bottling process was that I used honey as the priming sugar. Normally I'd use dextrose (corn sugar) but I wanted to boost the honey flavour - there's no point in calling it a honey porter if there's no detectable honey flavour, I reckon. So when I took a hydrometer sample to check the final gravity I tasted it and decided it still needed a bit more honey.

The final gravity was a bit higher than I'd expected (1.019) but I guess that this is because there are quite a few unfermentable sugars in honey. The mouthfeel was noticeably thicker and richer, which again points to the presence of those unfermentable sugars.

Anyway, bottling went fine so I have 30 bottles of porter waiting to be labelled up and put into storage. See photo below:

As you can see from the sample in the photo, it's not overly dark. I would have liked it to be a bit darker but it tastes OK. There is a definite sweetness up front from the honey before the roasty bitterness comes through behind. Once this has had a few weeks to mature I'm sure it'll be tasting great.

I now have 3 empty fermenters sitting in the garage, but I've already been to the brew shop (Brewers Coop in Mt Wellington, with a couple of extra bits from Hauraki Home Brew) so the next brew shouldn't be too far away. This one will be my first attempt at partial-mash brewing, so that should be exciting.

Brew Day - 4 BeeCee Porter

Wow, it hardly feels like two weeks since I last brewed (!), and here we go again.

I've been meaning to lay down something strong and dark for the winter - there's something about the long winter nights that calls for a warming kick of alcohol and a rich dark beer. I'd decided on a porter (a Robust Porter if you want to get all BJCP style guideline pedantic on me) but I decided I wanted a bit of a twist on the traditional. I found an excellent recipe on the internet for a whisky & vanilla-infused porter but I was a bit concerned that the whisky would overwhelm the porter. In the end, with a little bit of advice from Jim's Homebrew Forum I decided on a honey porter, and came up with the following recipe:
2 x 1.8kg cans Muntons Light Liquid Malt Extract
400g Dark Crystal Malt
200g Chocolate Malt
200g Black (Patent) Malt
150g Roast Barley
30g Pacific Jade hops @ 60 min
20g NZ Fuggles @ 10 mins
1 tsp Irish Moss @ 10 mins
500g honey (added after the heat had been turned off)
2 x Safale S-04 English ale yeast

Here's a photo of the assembled gear:

The speciality malts (crystal, chocolate etc.) were steeped in grain bags at 75 degrees for 30 mins, resulting in this luscious black liquid:

The grain bags were then removed - you can see the final dregs of goodness seeping from them in this photo:

After that it was just a matter of topping up to the boil volume and adding the malt extract ready for boiling:

(there's something dodgy about the perspective on that photo - I'm sure that pan is way bigger than my stomach in reality!)

After that it's the same old brewing process: boil, add the hops, add the irish moss (to try and get rid of some of the haze-forming proteins), cool the wort, rehydrate the yeast, pitch it and off we go!

This is another prospective entry in the SOBA National Homebrew Competition, so let's hope it turns out OK. It's tasting good so far - I drew off a sample to check the original gravity (bang on the button at 1.055) and it tasted pretty good. A definite hint of honey, but not overpowering and the hops were also present. Another successful (if tiring) brew day.

Brew Day - Extract of Daisy

This is actually a bit of a retrospective entry as I actually brewed this a couple of weeks ago.

This is a beer I've been meaning to brew for while. It's an attempt to get close to one of my favourite beers from the UK - Twickenham Fine Ales "Daisy Cutter". It's a beautiful, very pale ale with a lot of American hops, created by my good friend Tom Madeiros. My difficulties in recreating it in a homebrew setting here in New Zealand are twofold: as an extract brewer (rather than all-grain) it is very difficult to get pale beers as even the lightest malt extract is amber in colour by the time it gets here! Secondly American hops are in short supply worldwide, never mind here in NZ.

So, I was resigned to not brewing this beer until I went all-grain, by which point maybe we would also have some American hops available. However, in conversation with Mike Ellwood (from the excellent Brewers Coop homebrew store in Mt. Wellington, Auckland) he mentioned that he had some Weyerman's Pilsner Malt extract. Fairly pricey, but it might get me closer to the colour of Daisy Cutter. I've also started to seriously discover the native New Zealand hops, such as Motueka and Riwaka, so I decided to go for an all-kiwi hop ensemble.

Tom (the brewer from Twickenham Fine Ales) had very kindly given me some hints on the recipe so taking this into account I had a tinker around in my BeerSmith software package and came up with the following recipe:
4kg Weyerman's Pilsner Liquid Malt Extract
0.5kg Light Dry Malt Extract
0.25kg Wheat Dry Malt Extract
30g Pacific Jade hops @ 60 mins
30g Motueka @ 30 mins
20g NZ Hallertauer @ 30 mins
20g Motueka @ 5 mins
30g Riwaka @ 5 mins
2 packets Safale US-05 dried yeast

Here's a quick photo of the ingredients:

Everything went OK but I overestimated my top-up water after the boil so I have a larger batch size than I expected, but a lower original gravity (1.055).

The yeast kicked in very quickly and primary fermentation was completed in just over 3 days. It's currently undergoing secondary fermentation - I racked it off from the primary fermenter last weekend so I'll keep it at normal fermentation temperature for a couple of weeks before dropping it to 1 or 2 degrees centigrade for a few days to try and settle out as much of the yeast as possible before bottling.

Brew Day - BSB

Brew day once again, and this time the beer will be called BSB - Bog Standard Bitter! I wanted to see if I could quickly knock together an extract-only bitter to boost my beer stocks without too much fuss. I'm taking advantage of the fact that as we're now in mid-autumn, the temperatures in my shed have dropped to a level where I can safely brew without needing the temperature-controlled fermentation cabinet. This means that Storecupboard Larger can continue conditioning in the cabinet while BSB gets on with fermenting in the shed.

The recipe for BSB is simple:
- 2 x 1.8kg cans of Muntons Light liquid malt extract
- 25g Galena hops for bittering (just what I had in the fridge)
- 25g East Kent Goldings hops added late in the boil for aroma
- Safale S-04 ale yeast

Original gravity was measured at 1.042. Yeast was rehydrated then pitched at 23 degrees. The fermenter is wrapped in a foam blanket and in the shed where the ambient temperatures are mid-high teens centigrade.

The Session 15 - Where It All Began

This month's instalment of The Session, hosted by Boak & Bailey, is themed around how did it all begin. That is, how did one get interested in decent beer.

I'm really pleased that Boak & Bailey chose this theme as it has given me an opportunity to revisit my beery past, and to trawl through my memory to figure out where and when it all began. It's a long, drawn out story but working through it has been very enjoyable for me. It has brought back many good memories, some of them quite surprising. So even if you don't find this article interesting, I certainly enjoyed writing it!

My first exposure to regular drinking (as opposed to the odd glass of dodgy Bulgarian Riesling with Sunday lunch at my grandparents') was in the late 80s. Not a good time to be starting drinking. Like many a British teenager I started drinking in pubs before I was old enough to do so (shock horror!). I've always been a big lad, and this meant it was easy enough for me to get served in pubs from the age of about 16 onwards. Also like many teenagers, my first forays into the world of booze did not lead me to quality beer. I recall rum & blackcurrant and McEwans lager! Strangely, I also recall Youngers No. 3 and pints of “mixed” - half bitter, half mild – in some of the less salubrious pubs of Huddersfield town centre (I'm sure A Swift One will be able to guess which ones!).

Anyway, I sort of muddled through my late teenage years with the only exposure to decent beer being pints of Tetley Bitter at the local bowling club (that's crown green bowls for you foreign types). I will always remember the taste and more importantly texture of that beer, which owed a lot to being served through a tight sparkler and with the use of an Autovac system. Now I'm not trying to re-open the sparkler debate, but that beer has certainly left its mark on me. However, at the time I would certainly not have considered myself to be a real ale drinker – dodgy lager formed a significant part of my consumption (which, to be fair, was not all that copious).

After much pondering and reminiscing I think I can trace back the development of my interest in good beer to one place and one beer. Sure, there were plenty of other places and beers along the way, but none played such a big part as the establishment and the beer I'm going to discuss here.

The place was The Crescent pub in Salford, and the beer was Holt's Bitter.

I was first introduced to The Crescent some time during my first year at university in Salford, Greater Manchester. This would be either late 1988 or early 1989. It was (and still is, I believe) a fairly scruffy pub but with a wide range of real ales. My memory is somewhat hazy (I wonder why?!) but I seem to recall there being about 6 real ales on handpump at any one time. One of them was always Holt's Bitter from the local brewery, and they often also served the Mild from the same brewery. The other beers rotated fairly frequently – Cropton's Two Pints stick in my mind for some reason, as does Moorhouses's Pendle Witches Brew. At first I didn't drink in The Crescent all that regularly - I lived a fair distance away and so could only get down there during the college day, and it was a bit of a trek to get there of an evening. However, over my 4 years at university my visits increased in frequency.

During my final year I moved onto the university campus, in theory so that I could focus more on my studies but I'm sure it was no coincidence that it meant I would be living a mere 10 minutes walk from The Crescent! During that year I became a pretty much permanent fixture in the Crescent of an evening and I built up a really good relationship with some of the regulars there. They were all real ale drinkers and they encouraged the growth of my interest in decent beer. I remember a railway trip to the superb station buffet at Stalybridge – surely the only reason in the world to go to Stalybridge?!

Although I drank my way through most of the guest ales, I kept returning to my beloved Holt's Bitter. I'm sure that part of the reason for this is the price – when I left Salford in 1992 the bitter was still 89p per pint and to a poor student like me that was important!

But more than that, Holt's Bitter was a proper bitter. A proper Northern bitter, to be precise. Low gravity (less than 4% if I remember rightly) but as bitter as hell. “Uncompromisingly bitter” as it was described at the time. Pure, fresh and uncompromising – this is what excited me about real ale then, and it still does now.

I left university in 1992 and moved to London, where my interest in beer went from strength to strength. I joined CAMRA and started going to beer festivals on a regular basis. A few years later I was helping to run a real ale bar in my spare time and helping to organise beer festivals. Then I fled the country (OK, emigrated) last year and now I'm involved in the quality beer scene here in New Zealand – a member of SOBA, a homebrewer and an advocate of quality beer wherever I can. It's a long way from The Crescent twenty years ago, but it has been a most excellent journey.

The Session - Beer people

This month's Session (hosted by Stonch's beer blog) is all about beer people. I've chosen to write about a beery acquaintance of mine who I am proud to be able to call a friend; someone who has educated me and inspired me in the ways of beer, and someone I have shared many a happy pint with.

I first met Tom Madeiros soon after getting actively involved in my local CAMRA branch (West Middlesex branch) back in the UK in 2003 (or it may be 2004 - my mind is somewhat hazy!). At the time Tom was head brewer at the now-defunct Grand Union brewery. I met Tom at a branch meeting and soon after the bar I helped to run (the Questors Grapevine Bar) began stocking Grand Union beers - initially as guest ales, then on a more regular basis. The standard bitter (Grand Union Bitter) was delicious - a beer bursting with citrus hops and extremely flavoursome , especially given its low gravity. We quickly added it to the regular rotation of session ales, and continued to occasionally stock other Grand Union beers as guest ales.

Tom left Grand Union in 2005 and was out of work for a while. During this period he and I were both working at the Ealing Beer Festival, dealing with setting up and looking after the large number of real ales. I was extremely glad of Tom's assistance and I learnt a huge amount from him during that week. Tom is especially good at detecting faults and off-flavours in beers - don't put a beer containing diacetyl anywhere near him! He can sniff it out at a hundred yards! One of our main jobs at the festival was to carry out quality checks on the beers, making sure they were ready to be served to the public. Tom and I had a few 'robust' discussions with the bar managers who were keen to get as many beers on sale as possible, while we were keen to ensure that only beers in good condition were served. Having someone with Tom's knowledge and experience to back me up was very useful.

At that festival we had a few beers from the newly-established Twickenham Fine Ales. Sadly they were not in good condition. Tom spotted numerous technical flaws with the beers. Brewers always like to get constructive feedback on their beers so Tom gave TFA a call to discuss the problems. As it turns out, their brewer was looking to move on so in a supreme moment of serendipity Tom joined as the new head brewer. Pretty soon he had tweaked the existing beers and sorted out their quality problems, then he set about formulating and launching new beers. Twickenham Fine Ales has gone from strength to strength since then, their beers regularly winning awards at local beer festivals. The pinnacle of their success (so far) was at last year's Great British Beer Festival when Crane Sundancer won the Silver award in the Bitter Category of the Champion Beer of Britain.

Tom and I worked together again at the Ealing Beer Festival in 2006, as described in this blog entry, although by now Tom was very busy at TFA and unable to help out quite so much. This year's beers from Twickenham certainly didn't suffer from the same faults as the previous year's!

I have a great amount of respect for Tom as a brewer. He does the basics well - his core range of beers is varied and interesting with plenty of flavour across the range. When he was at Grand Union his beers were characteristically hoppy - in fact he launched the innovative One Hop series of guest ales, with each beer using the same basic recipe but with a single (changing) hop variety. This was a fascinating study in the effect different hops can have on a beer. Since moving to Twickenham he has introduced a broader palate, with more malty and balanced beers. Favourite amongst these for me is the glorious Daisy Cutter - a pale strong beer with a huge American hop hit. I could drink that stuff all day.

As previously mentioned, Tom is a constant innovator. He recently told me that he was trying out New Zealand hop varieties such as Riwaka, which will become more important if there are problems with the northern hemisphere hop harvest again. Regular visits to Belgium to sample the beery delights there no doubt spark ideas for new beers. Yet he resists the urge for constant tinkering and new beers - the core range and seasonals at Twickenham Fine Ales has remained fairly steady over the last couple of years - a very good thing in my book.

Since I moved to New Zealand I have kept in touch with Tom, although sadly I can no longer sample his excellent beers. He has been very encouraging of my nascent homebrewing adventures and I look forward to trying out some recipe tips he has given me when I get fully into all-grain brewing.

Tom is one of the good guys. He produces excellent beer, he knows his stuff and he's always happy to share the benefit of his knowledge, his passion and his experience.

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.....

Cold conditioning

4BC Altbier has been successfully transferred to a clean fermenter for 4 weeks cold conditioning at 2 degrees centigrade. This will hopefully accomplish 2 things:

• clean up some of the byproducts of the primary fermentation, making the beer cleaner tasting
  
• cause some of the yeast and other particulates to precipitate out, making the beer less hazy

Will it work? Let's wait and see. My only concern is whether such a long period of conditioing will leave enough yeast in suspension to work with the priming sugar and generate CO2 when I come to bottle it. All part of the learning experience!

NZ Beer Festival

Yesterday I went along to the NZ Beer Festival at Ellerslie racecourse in Auckland. The weather gods had conspired against it, with driving rain and high winds meaning that everyone was crammed into the 2 halls where the bars were. As a result it was very difficult to find space to relax and chat.

I had an enjoyable afternoon, and it was good to see Greig again (and meet his missus) plus we got chatting to a few fellow lovers of good beer. Luke from Epic seemed to be having a good time too - there were certainly plenty of people round his stand.

However, I couldn't help feeling that the event missed the mark in several ways. The whole ethos of the festival seemed to be geared towards drinking and partying, rather than discovering interesting new beers. There were several stag/hen parties there and tons of people in fancy dress knocking back large quantities of Miller Genuine Draft. There were several small breweries present, but not as many as I would have expected, and the beers from some of them were distinctly average.

It's saying something that two of my favourite beers of the day were Epic Pale Ale (which I've had lots of before) and Hofbrauhaus Dunkel from Germany. The others that stick out in my mind are KEA Porter (from a now-defunct brewery) and Wigram APA (which is not one of their regular beers).

Quite a change from some of the beer festivals I've visited (and worked at) back in the UK.

Ticking along nicely

The fermentation for 4BC Altbier seems to be proceeding nicely. It took about 24 hours for it to kick off and it didn't get as frantic as I've sometimes seen fermentations, but the airlock has been bubbling away steadily. When I checked it this morning it appeared to be slowing down a bit so it looks like primary fermantation could be ramping down.

My plan is to check the gravity over the weekend to see if primary has indeed finished, then rack the beer to a clean fermenter for cold conditioning. In keeping with the style I plan to give it 4 weeks at close to freezing temperatures. Hopefully the wait will be worthwhile.

Batch #4 - 4BC Altbier

Brewday again. I'm getting quite comfortable and confident now, hopefully not over-confident. I still refer to The Bible - John Palmer's "How To Brew" a lot but it's all becoming a bit more instinctive now.

Today's beer is a Dusseldorf Altbier (or at least that's what I'm aiming for). The recipe is:

• 2 x 1.6kg cans John Bull Pale liquid malt extract (LME)
• 0.5kg crystal malt (120L - quite a dark one)
• 0.5kg Munich malt
• 0.5kg Vienna malt
• 50g NZ Hallertauer hops (boiled for 60 mins)
• 40g Motueka B-Saaz hops (boiled for 10 mins)
• 1 tsp Irish Moss
• 5 tsps yeast nutrient salts
• 1 packet Safale German Ale yeast (K-97)

The speciality malts were steeped in 8 litres of water at 70 degrees centigrade for half an hour. Here's a photo of yours truly dunking one of the grain bags (fashioned from my wife's nylons!) into the pot.


And here's a photo of the resulting wort after 30 minutes steeping. As you can see it's pretty dark, but that's spot on for the style I'm aiming for.


This time I was very careful to ensure that the malt extract was fully dissolved. The first can was added after the steeping as I brought the wort up to the boil. The second can was stirred in 15 minutes before the end of the 60 minute boil period. When I came to pour the wort into the fermenter, no malt extract was stuck to the bottom of the pot so I seem to have solved that problem.

Yeast was rehydrated in warm water prior to pitching. Thanks to Kieran for the tip on the K-97 yeast - hopefully this will give me something that tastes close to the intended style.


The fermenter was then transferred to my hi-tech temperature controlled fermentation chamber (i.e. a fridge with a temperature controller) and left to ferment at 20 degrees for a couple of weeks.


I drew off a sample to test the Original Gravity - spot on at 1.046. I also had a quick taste of the sample - yum!! This is the best tasting beer at that stage that I've done. Lots of maltiness, underscored with a bit of hop bitterness. I'm hopeful that this could be a cracker!

(Inevitable?) disappointment

When I was back in the UK, Young's Special London Ale was my favourite bottled beer of all time. A beautifully rich hoppy drop, perfectly balanced. I had it in bottles many times and was lucky enough to have it on draught at a couple of beer festivals, thanks to the friendly people at Young's brewery.

However, Young's sold out their heritage (in my opinion) and moved their brewing operations from Wandsworth to Charles Wells in Bedford. They inisted the beers would be unaffected - they were taking their yeast strain with them and the brewers at Bedford had been working hard to match the beers. Initial experiences were not encouraging. Young's Bitter (known as Ordinary) seemed to lose it's citrus bite. But at first, SLA seemed unaffected. Maybe because they were still selling Wandsworth-brewed stock.

Recently, Kieran (a Kiwi beer blogger, homebrewer and beer judge with an exceptional knowledge of English beers, who shares my love of Special London Ale) posted the distressing news that Bedford-brewed Special London Ale had lost its soul. Maybe I was in denial, but I had to taste for myself. So today I finally picked up a couple of bottles of SLA which said "Brewed in Bedford" on the back.

And I was devastated. They've ruined it. I could hardly drink it. I am nowhere near as skilled a judge of beer as Kieran, so forgive my dodgy tasting notes (not helped by the half bottle of red wine I've consumed since tasting the SLA). Unlike Kieran, I felt that the major change was a loss of balance. The hops seem to overwhelm the beer with a medicinal, almost soapy flavour. Previously the big hop hit was balanced by a rich malty depth, but that seems to have gone. In fact there appears to be a big gap between the malt and the hops, a gaping chasm which separates the two flavour elements. There is a cloying sweetness from the alcohol, but it seems thin. Maybe I've had a bad bottle but it certainly was NOT good and was a million miles away from the nectar of the gods I've had under this label before.

Very very sad.

Planning batch #4

No sooner is one batch in the bottle than I'm thinking about the next batch! After some thought and research (and some advice from you lot) I decided to go for an Altbier. There are loads of good recipe collections around the internet - the Recipator is a one I refer to quite a lot. I eventually found this recipe which I tweaked using the recipe function in BeerSmith. This is a very useful function as quite often you can't track down exactly the same hops as in the recipe, or exactly the same malt extract etc.

So then I went to place the order with my favourite local homebrew shop - Hauraki Home Brew. Unfortunately their website was down (I found out afterwards that their provider has had a major outage) so I had to phone it in. As it turned out this was a good idea as I got to discuss some aspects of the ingredients, For example, I usually use Muntons liquid malt extract as it is known to be very high quality. Tiffany at Hauraki said they were out of stock because their distributor was also out of stock. The first alternative was John Bull malt extract. This is not quite as high quality as Muntons, and the stock they had was quite old (and so would be slightly darker) but I decided it would do the job.

I had to compromise on the hops a bit too - typically an Altbier would use Spalt hops but Hauraki don't stock them so I'll be using Saaz hops as an alternative. The final compromise is on yeast - it is possible to get a proper Alt yeast from Wyeast but it has to be imported from the USA and is relatively pricey so I'll be using good old dried Safale-S04 yeast. I won't be bang on for style but the colour, maltiness and hoppiness (IBUs) should be correct.

Assuming the delivery arrives OK I'll be kicking this brew off at the weekend. I'll let you know how I get on.

Yankiwi Pale is bottled

Batch #3 of my homebrew has been bottled today. I'm calling it Yankiwi Pale because it's based on an American Pale Ale recipe but with some New Zealand hops.

The bottling process did not go entirely without incident, but hopefully it's all OK. First of all I racked the beer off from the fermenter into a second fermentation vessel containing a measured amount of sugar water (a priming solution used to generate CO2 in the bottles). There's a picture of the setup here:

Anyway, the beer started running down the siphon tube into the second fermnter (from where I would bottle it) but then stopped. At first I thought I'd got n airlock but I quickly realised that something was blocking the tap on the top fermenter. It turned out to be the hop "teabag" I'd used to add some extra hop aroma during fermentation. I had to quickly sanitise a stirring paddle and free the tap.

This was a bit annoying as it stirred up some of the sediment at the bottom of the fermnter. I'd just spent 2 weeks cold-conditioning the beer to settle the sediment out, so stirring it up again was very annoying.

Still, the beer does look fairly clear, as you should be able to see from this photo:

I also measured the final gravity using the hydrometer which you can also see in the photo. I used the calculation tool in the BeerSmith software I use to work out the alcohol content of my beer. Due to the problems I had with undissolved malt extract (see earlier posts) the strength was lower than I planned - 3.4% ABV.

After that I was left with 22 litres of primed clear beer which I put into a variety of bottles. It now needs to sit for at least a couple of weeks to condition and for the CO2 to be generated. Based on my experience to date, I'll be trying to leave it for at least 4 weeks before I drink it, but I'm not sure I'll hold out that long before I sneak a sample! When I tasted it straight off the fermenter it tasted pretty good, so I'm fairly hopeful that it will be better once it has had time to condition.

What to brew next?

In about a week's time I'll be bottling batch #3 (Yankiwi Pale) and so it's time to think about what to brew next. Once again it will be a brew based on malt extract but hopefully with some steeped grains.

At the moment I'm thinking about one of 2 options:

1. A German Altbier
2. A strong, hoppy golden ale in the style of Hop Back Summer Lightning or Twickenham Daisy Cutter from the UK.

If there are any of you reading this blog, feel free to make some suggestions of recipes or things to try.

Cold conditioning

My Yankiwi Pale has completed fermentation. I've decided to experiment with cold conditioning this batch. I've set the temperature controller on my fridge to 2 degrees centigrade and I'm holding the beer at that temperature for about 2 weeks. The idea is that the suspended yeast will go dormant and sink to the bottom so the beer will be nice and clear for when I bottle it. I won't be putting any finings in this brew so we'll see if the cold cconditioning (in conjunction with the Irish Moss I added at the end of the boil) will fix the haze problem I had with the last batch. I plan to bottle in just over a week's time so we'll see then.

Tonight I'm off out for a beer at my favourite Auckland pub - Galbraith's Alehouse. It serves proper English-style real ale and is a must-visit for a beer lover in Auckland.

Quite a beery weekend

We had a great weekend, very relaxing, and managed to drink some pretty decent beer.

On Saturday the weather was better than had been forecast so we caught the car ferry across to Waiheke Island. It's a beautiful place and we'd love to go back and spend more time there, as a day is nowhere near enough to properly experience it. There are apparently 30 wineries on the island but we only made it to one of them - Cable Bay. The wines were nice (though not amazingly spectacular) and the kinetic sculpture exhibition was excellent.

After that we had a lovely meal at Vino Vino restaurant. Despite the name I drank beer, and was pleased to see that they had a beer from the island's only (I think) microbrewery. It was pretty nice so after the meal we went to the bottle shop next door and picked up a couple of big bottles. We got the Baroona Pale Ale and the Wharf Rd Wheat Beer. The Pale Ale was good - not quite as bitter as some examples I've tasted, with a good level of fruitiness. We didn't have time to go and visit the brewery, but I will certainly try next time we're over there.

On Sunday the weather was less promising, but we decided to head out to Hallertau brewery bar & restaurant. It had been on my "must do" list for some time and I was very glad to finally make it out there. We had a tasting paddle of their 5 house beers (including the seasonal wheat beer) and they were all excellent. I struggled to find a favourite - the Luxe kolsch-style beer was excellent, but so was the Deception schwarzbier. The American Pale Ale and Red beer were also very good. The food was excellent too, and they even had a small playground to keep my son entertained. We rounded off the visit with a few takeaways from their excellent beer fridge, stocked with bottles from numerous New Zealand microbreweries. An excellent day out - if you're ever in Auckland and you like beer, Hallertau needs to be near the top of your itinerary!

Temperature controller fixed

I managed to fix the temperature controller on my fermentation fridge. It was a simple matter of a loose wire on the back of it.

In case you were wondering what it is, it's basically just a temperature-controlled switch which sits between the power outlet and the fridge. When the fridge temperature (measured by a probe) goes above a set level, the fridge is switched on. When it has cooled down enough, the fridge is switched off again.

This is used to keep the fermenter at a suitable temperature. In the summer in Auckland the ambient temperature is generally too warm for beer fermentation. I'm aiming for about 20 degrees centigrade - much higher and funny flavours can be produced.

The temperature controller can also be used to control a heater belt, which I might need in the winter time. Either that or I'll just switch to brewing lagers which need a much lower temperature!