The Pomegranate pLambic Project

Everybody remembers their first sour beer. The special sour face, the disparaging look, the weird funky smell, the puckering as it hits your lips. Some people never get past the first taste - it's just not for them, and I get that. If I was forced to categorise myself as a beer lover I'd go with hophead rather than sourface, but there's no need to ever categorise anything when it comes to beer. I like it all, and I want to brew it all, preferably right now.

Traditional lambic beers are of course spontaneously fermented. Left to the elements in wide shallow fermentors until the wild yeast magically drifts in through the window or peeks hungrily out from its hiding place, dives head first into the cooled wort and gets to work. The process is an evolutionary one that takes months and goes through several phases of fermentation and infection.

Replicating this in a dining room in Hampshire would be a challenge. Fortunately those clever people at Wyeast have harvested and cultivated those weird wild strains and packaged them in convenient pouches, fuelling the dreams of home brewers everywhere that they can initiate the perfect lambic fermentation right there in their dining room (a pseudo lambic, or pLambic). What could be easier right?

Well, I'm not that naive. I don't have to rely on open air fermentation but I do certainly need to provide the right environment to fuel the process. A solid, authentic base beer with some room for the wild stuff to work post primary fermentation, good sanitation, a sensible recipe and of course lots of patience are all important, especially the last one. After some thought and research, I settled on this:

Despite the simple hopping schedule, this will be the most expensive brew I've made to date, so I'm determined to make it work.  Brew day was straightforward and primary fermentation is already underway. This coming weekend I'll be transferring to a carboy, adding the wild yeast and a huge dose of sugary pomegranate juice to fuel the fire. I say fire. It'll be more of a long, slow smoulder for at least the next six months. More and more pomegranate juice will be sacrificed along the way. Watch this space!

Breaking out from Home Brewing

In my 2012 Golden Pints post, I wrote that in 2013 I'd most like to brew on proper big kit, having caught the home brewing bug in a big way last year. A month before writing that, my first ever brew, West Coast IPA, clinched a bronze medal at the London & South East Craft Brewing Competition. The other beer I entered, Nelson Saison, my second brew, scored a respectable 42/60 but was marked down (rightly) for being out of style for a Saison due to the aroma being out of kilter with yeast esters that usually define it. The feedback was great though and this really spurred me on to brew more.

Fast forward six months and the bug shows no signs of going away. I'm enjoying experimenting with different grains, hops and yeast and having the flexibility to brew whatever I fancy drinking. Each brew brings new knowledge and experience, and what I love about this hobby is that I suspect I could still be learning and gaining experience twenty years from now. Every discussion with a fellow home brewer or commercial brewer simply fans the flames and drives me to want to improve.

This got me thinking, can I do this professionally? More on that in future posts. However, today, I got to experience professional brewing first hand. Not just breaking up hops and digging out mash, but thanks to the wonderfully generous and inspiring folks at Weird Beard Brew Co, actually brewing my own recipe on their kit. 

You see, Bryan and Gregg started out as home brewers. They've both been very supportive of my own efforts and I think Gregg has sampled (and in some cases suffered through!) everything I've brewed so far, giving very honest and helpful feedback at every turn. Regular readers will know I've followed and documented their transition from hobbyists to professional brewers very closely. Seeing the plaudits and praise their first commercial brews are getting has really pleased me, because, well, they bloody well deserve it for having the balls, and obviously the talent, to break out from home brewing and risk turning their hobby into a living. 

Now don't get me wrong, I'd have loved nothing more than breaking up hops and digging out mash today. This was different though. We were going to brew 1600 litres of Nelson Saison. The recipe planning we'd done before the brew day made it plainly clear that this was a big commitment financially. The malt, hops (Nelson Sauvin is like gold dust, and priced accordingly) and Saison yeast cost a pretty penny.

Today was a huge learning curve for me right from the outset. We'd discussed the recipe and made some adjustments (not just for quantity, but the hop schedule needed tweaking) in advance of the brew day. The malt sacks were counted out and the water was nearing strike temperature when Gregg asked me what water profile I'd like. "Hmm. No idea!" was my response. In home brewing, if you mess something up, you learn from it and move on. Commercially, the stakes are much higher. The cost of a failed brew can be significant. Gregg enlightened me on suggested water treatments, and we were soon mashing in. 

I learned the hard way that mashing in a 10BBL length brew is quite far removed from using a plastic spoon to swill a few kilos of grain around some hot water in a converted cool box. It was hard work.

Actually, everything today was hard work!

The basic brewing process is the same, no matter what the brew length. In a commercial brewery however, there are all kinds of valves, gadgets and switches to worry about. Brewers have to be mechanics, electrical engineers, DIY gurus, sanitation experts and not to mention natural multi-taskers. I've a lot to learn and this was painfully obvious as we got the brew underway. 

We were soon recirculating the first runnings and the hops were weighed out and separated in to bags for each of the six additions. Around an hour later, the kettle was filled with 1750 litres of wort and the huge kettle elements put to work. Digging out the mash tun was interrupted periodically as a timer told me when to leg it up the ladder with the next hop addition. The wort was smelling better and better with each increasingly bigger bag of Nelson Sauvin thrown into the boil, the last of which, a hefty 1.75Kg, went in at flame out.

The heat exchanger was employed to chill the wort as it transferred across to the fermenter. Gregg expertly tweaked and fiddled with flow rates to ensure the wort was reaching the other end at the optimal temperature. We soon had all 1600 litres of wort transferred across. But the day didn't end there. Brewing at home is a messy task and cleaning out the mash tun and kettle takes a good 20 minutes or so. Cleaning out the mash tun and kettle in a 10BBL brewery takes a lot longer than 20 minutes and makes your back hurt. You have to climb inside things, scrub them, host them down, scrub them again, flush them, rinse them, scrub them again, take them apart, clean the parts, re-assemble the parts, hose them down again and, well you get the picture.

It's bloody hard work.

Did it put me off wanting to brew for a living?

HELL NO!

Nelson Saison should be ready in around four weeks. There's lots of it and I really hope it turns out as well as Weird Beard's first few brews have and, most importantly, that they're able to sell it all!

A huge thanks to Bryan and Gregg for giving me the opportunity to collaborate with them on this brew. Look out for the Elusive Brewing name appearing somewhere on the pump clips and labels. What's Elusive Brewing all about you might ask? I hope to answer that soon.

Weird Beard Brewing - flying out of the blocks

Last October, I posted that Weird Beard Brewing hoped to be brewing by the end of last year. Alas, further delays (all well documented on their blog) meant this wasn't to be. However, after putting in lots of hard work overcoming hurdles and much cajoling of suppliers, Bryan Spooner and Gregg Irwin are finally able to call themselves professional brewers, and I'm sure they're absolutely delighted about that.

Mash tun, complete with home made hopper

On visiting the brewery today, I was taken aback by the transformation the space has undertaken since I was last there just a few weeks prior. Back then, the brewing vessels were in place but nothing had been installed. The cold room was half built and the place felt huge with lots of open space. 

Fast forward a few weeks and it has been transformed into a fully operational brewery. Pallets of casks, kegs, bottles and malt have been squeezed into every corner. The cold room is full of packaged beer and the fermenters are full. Anyone passing by this industrial unit on a quiet trading estate in Hanwell would never guess the hive of activity lurking within. As I walked through the door, Mike of Ellenberg's Brewery was busy cleaning down the bottling tank to prepare it for another bottling session and Gregg was hosing down the floor, washing away the traces of last week's brewing and packaging marathon.

Gregg pulling a sample of Mariana Trench

Bryan and Gregg have brewed four different beers since the first sack of malt was poured into their improvised hopper and have many more planned. I was able to sample all four, which are at various stages of the fermentation and conditioning process.

Single Hop Series No. 1: Chinook (a.k.a. Boring Brown Beer) is a fascinating English style ale that's been dialed up to imperial territory at 7.4% and massively hopped to a theoretical 100 IBU's. The classic banana and toffee nose offers no clue as to the bitter beast that lurks within. Faces may be melted when this hits the bar.

Miss The Lights is a 6% IPA with a delicious fruity aroma. It's perfectly balanced and offers a lovely rasping bitter finish. These first two beers have been packaged and are conditioning in the cold store.

Black Perle is a milk stout aged on coffee beans. The nose on this is wonderful, immersing you the roasty notes of the Costa Rican beans, locally sourced from London's Alchemy Coffee. I have a feeling this is going to be pretty special on cask.

Mariana Trench is a 5% Pale Ale that smells and tastes like freshly squeezed oranges. I really liked the prototype of this beer and can imagine that sinking a few nicely chilled keg-dispensed pints on a warm summer's day would be a pretty cool way to spend an afternoon. Ah, I wish this cold weather would bugger off!

Upcoming brews include Fade to Black (a Black IPA) and Saison 14, both of which will feature Gregg's favourite hop, Sorachi Ace. Fade to Black was a beer I first sampled almost a year ago at their first meet the brewer event at The Rake, and I thought it was brilliant. I'll definitely be seeking that one out when it's released.

If these first four brews are anything to go by, Weird Beard aren't going to ease themselves in and ramp things up slowly by playing it safe. It's going to be full on nose to the grindstone stuff with bold beers and fantastic branding to match. 

It may have taken them some time to reach the start line but ladies and gentlemen, Weird Beard have arrived, and they've absolutely flown out of the blocks!

The Austrappist

Today was my 7th all grain brew and this post is a quick précis of the day. The most exciting bit was getting to use my new kettle. Father Christmas (well, my Mum and Dad) kindly got me one of these, a Thorn Electrim Boiler. This is going to be a massive time saver, compared to heating and boiling using a large pot on an electric hob. 

The unit comes with a single regulated heater element and a plastic tap. I decided to replace the plastic tap with proper ball valve and barb, and add a hop filter to the rear of this via a coupler to allow me to easily remove wort from the kettle post-boil and leave the hops and trub behind. You can see these modifications below.

These optional extras ran to about £30 but will be re-usable should I upgrade to a keggle in future. As mentioned in a recent post, I wanted to brew an Australian hopped beer and split it, fermenting half with trappist yeast and half with chico yeast. On the day, I decided to keep things simple and brew just one, opting for the trappist. The recipe was finalised (below) and the brew day kicked off after a quick leak test of my handwork on the kettle!

Given I intend to brew this again and ferment with chico yeast, I removed the final Topaz addition as I only have 100g to hand and needed to save half. The Belgian version won't be dry hopped as I want the aroma from the yeast to be prevalent.

The brew day itself went fairly smoothly. I ran into the same issue I have in previous brews with the run off getting stuck due to malt getting under the false bottom in my mash tun. This was particularly frustrating as having identified the root cause, I forgot to fix it! I need to extend the length of the hose attaching the false bottom to the barb on the back of the ball valve, so that the false bottom sits clear of the tap recess. I'll sort this and post a photo to illustrate the problem and fix ahead of my next brew.

I was really pleased with the new kettle. I used it as a HLT and it heated up 17L to 72 degrees in about 30 minutes. Once I'd collected the wort, it reached boil in a little under 40 minutes - roughly twice as fast as before. Once the boil was done, I let it rest for 10 minutes before transferring to my trusty old pot for cooling. I ended up with 16 or so litres of wort at a starting gravity of 1.087 (above target - oh well!) and pitched the Wyeast 3787 smack pack at 20 degrees. Fingers crossed for a good fermentation and a slightly bonkers beer.

Partizan Brewing

I first met Andy Smith a couple of years ago at a BrewDog Burns night supper at the White Horse in Parson's Green. Andy was then working at North London's Redemption Brewery and I recall him telling me how his passion for food (he's a former chef) served him well as he started out as a brewer.  Since then, Redemption has built a strong reputation for producing flavourful beers at a consistently high quality. Andy credits Head Brewer Andy Moffat for developing a solid brewing process, ensuring the recipes he designed (Big Chief being a personal favourite) really sung in the glass.

Earlier this year, while discussing his next career move with Moffat, the idea of potentially going it alone was born. Andy is quick to credit his former boss with helping him to get Partizan off the ground but what really made his mind up was being offered Kernel Brewery's old 4BBL brew kit. Many a tasty brew has emerged from those tanks since Kernel started in 2009, but an expansion earlier this year meant it was surplus to requirements. As it turns out, the kit only had to move less than a mile to its new home, a converted railway arch in Bermondsey's Almond Road - a five minute walk from the tube station.

Kernel's old kit being put to good use

Eye-catching branding!

Partizan's first brew in November was a big one - a 8.6% stout. Andy explained that he got better efficiency that he was expecting, and the starting gravity was therefore higher than planned. The beer is an absolute belter and I did a double take when I read the ABV on the bottle. It drinks a couple of points less than that for me - I could drink a few of these but session them at your peril! 

The second brew was a pale ale brewed with Citra, Pacific Jade and Cascade, weighing in at 5.1%. These two beers made up the initial launch, in bottles only, as Partizan won't be kegging or casking their beers for the foreseeable future, and these are now available to buy at the brewery on Saturdays, or from a good pub or beer retailer near you. 

The third beer is another pale ale, this time using the Wakatu hop from New Zealand (formerly known as Hallertau Aroma) with Cascade, and comes in at a slightly higher ABV. These are currently awaiting labels but should be released soon. I sampled this at the brewery and the aroma is fabulous! The fourth beer, a porter, was fermenting away when I visited and should be available in a few weeks. Andy is currently planning a Saison and intends to take a very seasonal approach to what he brews, with lots of variety and experimentation. This is great news for London's thriving scene and I for one will watch and drink with interest.

The brewery is open to the public on Saturdays (drop a tweet to @PartizanBrewing to check if you're planning on visiting). You can expect a warm welcome and some great beer. Go visit!

Elusive Brewing

It's been a while since my last post on home brewing, so I thought I'd provide an update on my most recent and also upcoming adventures.

My fifth all grain brew, Imperial Stout, didn't quite follow the path I described. The base beer itself turned out well. Beyond that, I sat it on some dark roast coffee beans and some French oak chips that had been soaked in Maker's Mark Bourbon. The chips were soaked for about 5 days and the beer was sat on the coffee/oak combination for a week. The beer at that stage had a massive coffee nose that over-powered everything, although this was less present on the palate. 

The feedback I got was that it needed to be a little sweeter, so I decided to introduce cocoa to the mix. Like most things in home brewing, there are many ways to add cocoa into a brew but given where I was, my only real option was to rehydrate some dried cocoa and mix it in. Now, given this brew was for my wife, I felt compelled to use her favourite cocoa (Cadbury's) for this, although that went against the advice I got to use low fat powder to avoid head-killing oils getting into the final product. I gambled on that point and went for it, adding 100 grammes of rehydrated cocoa after transferring the beer off the coffee and oak chips. Then I left it for another week before bottling. The resultant beer is probably my best to date. I think using a starter gave me a good, clean fermentation and the coffee and cocoa combine well on the palate and on the nose to provide decent flavour with hints of oak coming through right at the end. My only error was that it seems some of the bottles have over-carbonated. This is probably due to not ensuring my priming sugar was evenly distributed. The photo above shows a pour of the final beer.

My sixth all grain brew was effectively a revisit of my third, which went a bit wrong (see previous post) and had to be ditched. American Pale Ale is a favourite style of mine and screwing this up had been playing on my mind as I was happy with the recipe and confident I could make a better fist of it with a second attempt. I tweaked it slightly and had to tweak it further on the brew day as I misplaced some Maris Otter (of course I found it 10 minutes after I no longer needed it) so subbed in some DME at the start of the boil.  Here's the final recipe (left, click to enlarge). 

The brew day went very well but I learned that using pellet hops in the boil with my set up is not a good idea. The pellets didn't settle out properly in the cooled kettle, so I lost a lot of wort leaving the trub behind while transferring for fermentation. In any case, fermentation went well with another first for me - dried yeast! The starting gravity was a bit high (1.060), probably as I added too much DME, but I didn't liquor back. The final beer is 5.9% and has just been bottled. The Centennial dry hops and late Apollo addition have combined to give it an aroma that reminds me of those fruit salad penny chews I used to eat as a kid, and I'm happy about that!

The final update I wanted to provide was the plan for my next all grain brew. One beer I really enjoyed this year was Summer Wine's Surfing Monk, an Australian hopped Belgian blonde ale. Given I've just got my mitts on some Galaxy and Topaz and still have some Wyeast 3787 (Belgian Trappiste, High Gravity) in the fridge, I thought I'd have a go at brewing my own version. I'm thinking about splitting the batch however, and ferment ing half with my go-to yeast, Wyeast 1056 (American Ale). The draft recipe is below and I'm hoping to brew this before the turn of the year. 

One more thing before I sign off. The title of this post is the new name I've given my home brewery. I probably don't need a name for it, but hey, it's my brewery and I'll do and brew whatever takes my fancy, so there!

Bristol Beer Factory Milk Stout Beef Stew

There's something about pairing beef with stout that creates flavours even greater than the sum of the parts. Bristol Beer Factory's Milk Stout is a delicious example of the style, with some lovely sweet roasted coffee and chocolate flavours. I thought I'd try it in a beef stew and well, it turned out really nice so I'm sharing the simple recipe.

Photo from BBF website

Ingredients (serves 4)

400g stewing beef

3 large carrots, cubed

1 large parsnip, cubed

1 large onion, chopped roughly

1 leek, halved and sliced

1 small swede, cubed

1 clove of garlic, finely chopped

1 tin of chopped tomatoes

1 beef stock cube

1 500ml bottle of Milk Stout

2 bay leaves

Tablespoon of plain flour

Salt, pepper, cumin, and dried ground chilli to taste

Method

Heat some oil in a large pan on a medium heat and throw in the leek, onion and garlic. Cook gently for 5 minutes then add in the carrots, parsnip and swede for a further 10 minutes, stirring frequently (the aim is soften, not brown the veg).

Remove the veg and set aside. Up the heat a bit and add more oil to the pan. Brown the beef until sealed then add the flour to soak up the oil and juices from the beef. Add the veg back in along with the tin of tomatoes, stirring as you go. Pour in the bottle of stout and fill the tomato tin with water (about 400ml) and add that in too, crumbling the stock cube in while stirring.

Finally, add a pinch of salt, a generous twist of pepper, a teaspoon of cumin, the bay leaves and chilli to taste. I used dried chilli but fresh will be fine. The aim is to just bring a little warmth rather than end up with a spicy dish, so go easy on it.

Bring gently to the boil then turn the heat down to a simmer and cook gently for 2 hours. Like most stews, if you can resist temptation, allowing it to rest overnight and re-heating the next day really allows the flavours to meld together. Serve hot with a fresh crusty roll for mopping up the juice and of course, another bottle of Bristol's finest!