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!

Batch #003 - Yankiwi Pale

I started my third batch of homebrew at the weekend. It's based on an American Pale Ale recipe but with the addition of some New Zealand hops, hence the name. The recipe is:

• 270g Crystal malt, steeped for 30 mins
• 1.8kg Light liquid malt extract (LME), boiled for 60 mins
• 1.8kg Light LME, added at end of boil
• 25g NZ Hallertauer hops, boiled for 60 mins
• 27g Galena hops, boiled for 60 mins
• 12g Cascade hops, boiled for 15 mins
• 10g East Kent Goldings hops, added at end of boil and left in fermenter

Half a teaspoon of Irish Moss was added for the last 10 minutes of the boil. The yeast used was Safale US-56 dried yeast, rehydrated in one cup of water before pitching. The boil volume was 13 litres, which was made up to 23 litres for fermentation. Yeast nutrient salts were added prior to pitching.

It's now bubbling away in a fermenter in my Fermentation Cabinet (i.e. an old fridge with a temperature controller on it). However, the temperature controller doesn't seem to be working at the moment (will try and look at it tonight) so I'm having to regulate the temperature by manually switching the fridge on and off.

The intended Original Gravity (OG) of the beer was 1.047, but when I tipped the wort into the fermenter I noticed I had some malt extract stuck to the bottom of the pot. As a result the measured OG was only 1.040, which is a bit on the weak side. The bitterness should be around 58 IBUs which is pretty damn bitter (a good thing).

I'll post updates if there is anything interesting to say as we go along.

New Year, new direction

If anyone's still out there reading this, congratulations on your persistence. In the 16 months or so since this blog was last updated, things have changed a bit. Since it was the start of a new year I thought I'd relaunch this blog.

Previously, my profile blurb at the top said "After 12 years as a project manager for a major IT consultancy I'm disillusioned with my career, and thinking of doing something crazy like buying a country pub. This blog will document my progress. Although primarily intended as somewhere for me to work out ideas and save links to useful resources, it's in a public forum so anyone's welcome to comment, provide suggestions, feedback etc. or ask questions."

Well, I did do something crazy but it wasn't to buy a pub (yet). I've moved with my family to New Zealand. Still working in IT, though.

I have not given up on the pub/bar/restaurant idea yet though and I've now taken up homebrewing, so I thought I'd resurrect this blog. Let's see what happens.

Interesting BBC article

I spotted this interesting article on the BBC News website this morning. The gist of the story is that although real ale's share of the drinks market is continuing to fall, new microbreweries are being set up at a greater rate than ever. It focusses on 2 breweries in the North of England - one new, one slightly less recent.

An interesting article with some points to ponder for those of us who might want to get involved in the industry.

GBBF 2006 - how was it?

Well, it's now a week since the Great British Beer Festival at Earls Court, and I've finally got some time to write up some thoughts and post some photos.

Overall, I definitely enjoyed myself. I went to the Trade Session on the Tuesday afternoon and to a public session on the Wednesday evening. I sampled a fairly wide range of beers and all were in good condition. There was plenty of space to move around, although the bars were as congested as ever.


This is a photo taken during the Trade Session, which was not as busy as the public sessions, for obvious reasons. It shows the view across the hall to some of the "brewery bars" - these are bars sponsored and operated by staff from a particular brewery (e.g. Sharps, Fuller's). There seemed to be more brewery bars this year than in previous years.

The photo below was taken at the Fuller's brewery bar which (rather controversially) featured beers from the Gale's brewery which Fuller's bought and closed earlier this year.


Most of the "normal" (i.e. non-brewery) bars are organised into Regions, like the one shown in the photo below:


On the Tuesday I spent a lot of my time around the South-East bar, as I was filling in tasting cards for the CAMRA regional tasting panel. This is a group that builds up a tasting notes database on beers from a particular region (in my case, London). I found that the discipline of sniffing, swirling and tasting beers slowed down my consumption so that I didn't peak too soon!

While on the subject of regional bars, I have to point out the idiocy of splitting Yorkshire across (at least) 2 separate regions. A beer from the Ossett brewery in West Yorkshire was to be found on the North-West bar, while a beer from York brewery was to be found on the North-East bar. As a fervent Yorkshireman, I found this outrageous!

Another bar I spent a lot of time at was the foreign beer bar, or Bieres Sans Frontieres as it is known (see below).

The BSF bar features a wide range of bottled beers from across the world, plus some very unususal draught beers. I tried an absolutely gorgeous Japanese ale, a very smoky German Rauchbier and a wonderfully sour Belgian lambic beer, amongst others.

On the Wednesday evening I met some friends at the festival. It was much busier, as the photo below shows. I know it's a bit dark - flash doesn't work well in such a big hall!


One of the highlights of the GBBF for me is always the wide selection of excellent food. A small number of the food stalls are shown in the hoto below, but there is a huge range, and the food on all of them is excellent.


All in all, an excellent time. It certainly pays to go earlier in the week - by Friday night the beer selection weas getting a bit limited, and it was very limited on Saturday afternoon, so I'm told. With it being their first year at a new venue there were, of course, some teething troubles (such as an imbalance in the male/female toilet arrangements!) but I'm sure this will be worked out for next year.

If you've never been to the Great British Beer Festival, I do urge you all to go - it's a great evening/day/week out!

Great British Beer Festival 2006

This week is a big week in every real ale drinker's calendar - the Great British Beer Festival. This year it's being held at Earls Court, having (allegedly) run out of space at Olympia. Whatever the reason, it's certainly a good move from the accessibility point of view - Earls Court is a lot easier to get to than Olympia. One question that I will be interested to find out the answer to is how well it works with everything in one space. At Olympia the festival was spread out over three connected halls. There is a danger that the noise from the music stage (what the hell is this doing at a beer festival anyway???) might disrupt the drinking.

I'm not working at GBBF this year. Last year I did a couple of days working behind the bars (all the staff are volunteers) and, while it was fun, I didn't feel the urge to do it again this year. It can be a bit "cliquey" - the same bunch of people work together every year, and if you're not part of the gang, you don't fit in. I reckon it would be different if I could afford the time off to be able to work the whole week, but that's not going to happen in the near future.

Anyway, I'll be visiting the festival at least twice. I'll be there on Tuesday afternoon for the Trade Session. As someone who works at a club listed in the Good Beer Guide, we get an invite to this session so we can sample the beers before all the rabble get let in! I'll also be around on the Wednesday evening and maybe one other session.

I expect I'll be concentrating on the Bar Nouveau bar (beers from new breweries) and the Bieres Sans Frontieres (foreign beers including draught beers from Japan!). I hope the food stalls are as good as before - I remember some gorgeous pork pies and, of course, the garlic-stuffed olives!

Maybe see you there!

Beer on Broadway XVII

Given my vague pub-owning thoughts, working at a beer festival is good training, and can be good fun too. For the last 3 years I've been involved in the Ealing Beer Festival, known as Beer On Broadway due to its traditional location on Ealing Broadway. The festival is organised by the West Middlesex branch of CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale. This year I was more involved than ever (some would say too involved) as I took on the role of Wet Stock Controller (there were actually 2 of us acting in a joint capacity, but it was still hard work).

The job of the Wet Stock Controller is, as the name suggests, to look after the beer. A fairly important role in a beer festival, I think you'll agree. The Wet Stock Controller has several jobs:

• ordering the beer. This involves working with breweries and wholesalers to come up with a list of suitable beers. Suggestions from past visitors to the festival (via the questionnaires in the programme) and local CAMRA members are taken into account, as well as the intention of coming up with a balanced and varied list to appeal to different palates. Given that the festival was in May, we decided to order plenty of Mild ales as CAMRA focuses on this particular beer style in May.
  
• accepting the deliveries. All the beer arrives on the Monday of the festival week. We devised a system of labelling the casks as they arrived to make sure they ended up in the correct bar, and in roughly the right place so they could be lifted into place easily. This year we had around 150 casks delivered!
• caring for the beer. Real Ale requires careful handling including venting the casks (to allow the carbon dioxide gas generated during secondary fermentation to escape), and tapping the casks (so we can get the beer out!). My attendance on the cellarman's training course at Fuller's is vital at this stage.
• checking the beer quality. Real Ale takes some time to mature and is a fairly fragile product. It's therefore important to check that it's in a fit state for sale. There's only one way to do this - to pour a bit into a glass, observe it, sniff it and taste it! Sounds like a great job, doesn't it? Well, after you've worked your way through about 70 beers it becomes a bit of a chore! Beers that aren't up to standard are held back and may be the subject of various procedures to try and get them ready.
• dipping the casks to see how much has been sold. We go round with a flexible dipstick (ooerr missus!) and check the amount f beer left in each cask. This lets the festival organiser know how much has been sold and lets us know which beers are selling fast and whether we need to make more available.

So, it's a pretty full-on job. Good fun, but hard to fit in with a "real life". This year I think we did pretty well from a beer perspective - we presented a good range of beers in good condition and sold most of it. If anyone readers did visit the festival I'd be really interested in your comments.

Below are a few photos from this year's festival.


This is a photo showing the back of the stillage (rack of barrels) in the main hall. You can see the fleecy jackets over the barrels as part of the cooling system we use. This circulates chilled water (from the coolers you can see to the left of the picture) through saddles which sit on the casks. The fleecy jackets trap a layer of cold air around the cask which keeps the beer at the optimum serving temperature.


Here you can see some of the hard-working volunteers acting as bar staff in the main hall. The cards on the front of the casks indicate the beer, its strength and the price. That stack of barrels always looks impressive!


And finally, my favourite shot of the festival - closing time on the last day! It was fun, but hard work.

After doing some limited clearing up on the Saturday night we carefully moved the remaining beer down to another room where we were planning a party on the Sunday afternoon. After packing everything away and loading 4 vans with stuff, we sat down to a well-earned curry and few beers on the Sunday (see photos below). All over for another year (although I may take a year off next year).




Finally, my congratulations to Graham Harrison, the Festival Organiser, for somehow pulling everything together, and my immense thanks to Tom Madeiros (talented Head Brewer at Twickenham Fine Ales) - my partner-in-crime as joint Wet Stock Controller - who made the job just about do-able.

On this day....

I don't normally pick up on these things from other people's blogs, but this meme spotted on Misty's blog seemed quite interesting. You go to Wikipedia and look up your date of birth (excluding the year) and then list:
- 3 facts
- 2 births
- 1 death

So, here's mine:

Facts:
1930 - Betty Boop premieres in the animated film Dizzy Dishes.
1963 - Great Train Robbery: In England, a gang of 15 train robbers steal 2.6 million pounds in bank notes.
1976 - Boston, by the rock band Boston is released. It will become the #1 best-selling debut album in history.

Births:
1902 - Paul Dirac, English physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1984)
1961 - The Edge, Irish guitarist (U2)

Death:
2004 - Fay Wray, American actress (b. 1907)

If anyone else feels like having a go, leave a note in my Comments.

Empty pub

I walk past this pub twice a day. It used to be called the Princess Victoria but was renamed some time last year. Since then it went steadily downhill (at least from the outside - I've never been in it) and appeared to be open at random times. It now appears to have been shut for a couple of months or so and it's beginning to drift into dereliction (a couple of windows have been broken).

The reason I mention this is that it's got me to thinking how one might find out if a pub is on the market, and how much it's going for. When I first started looking into this "running a pub" idea, I just looked in Dalton's Weekly. I assume there must be specialist estate agents or the like for pubs - wonder if this pub is in one?

Not that I'm all that interested in this particular pub. Although it's location is pretty good there are several other pubs nearby so competition would be pretty fierce (which is maybe why it struggled before). Anyone got any ideas as to how I might find out whether it's up for sale (and how I might find other available pubs also)?

Redditch Winter Ales Festival 2006

Redditch Winter Ales Festival 2006
Originally uploaded by mgbridges.

I enjoy both attending and working at Beer Festivals. At the weekend I visited the Redditch Winter Ales Festival. It was a fairly small festival, but worked pretty well. Not a huge selection of beers, but all the ones I sampled were in good condition.

Spam spam spam spam, spam spam spam spam,.....

Recently I've been receiving a fair amount of comment spam, almost all of it from one person - Michael Trol, who runs a financial blog. He keeps dumping foreign exchange related guff pointing to his site in my comments. So I've taken the decision to implement word verification which should stop automated comment spam.

One of the upsides of this is that you might get asked to enter a rude word as part of the word verification, as seen in this story from The Register. I have to say I prefer this one. You'll have to leave some comments to find out!

So, comment away and if you ever meet Michael Trol, give him a slap from me.

Piglet rules!

Yes, I've been very quiet for a while again. I've drafted 2 or 3 posts but never got around to finishing them off due to my character flaw of being a total perfectionist - if you can't do it right, don't do it at all seems to be my motto, which means I don't get much done.

Anyway, something has spurred me into action, and that is a small pig. The original problem was this article. I'm all for racial and religious tolerance but banning Piglet is a step too far in my book. So when Misty suggested a way of registering our outrage, I had to join in. So, if I've mana