Why won't they brew strong?

"Why is it "traditional" English breweries won't brew anything stronger than 4.8%", it has been tweeted.

Taking a random selection of "trad" brewers -

Adnams: there's a couple of strong seasonals, currently "May Day" 5.0% ABV.

Cains: "FA" 5.0% ABV

Fullers: "ESB" 5.5% ABV

Hook Norton: "Haymaker" 5.0% ABV

Jennings: "Snecklifter" 5.1% ABV

Marstons: "Old Empire" 5.7% ABV

Shepherd Neame: "Bishops Finger" 5.4% ABV (bottle)

Thwaite's: "Double Century" 5.2% ABV (bottle)

Right, that's that canard shot and stuffed.


FWIW, we always have at least one stronger beer on. And, in fact, most proper brewers have (at least in bottle) a strong beer in their line-up, as well as their session beers.

I was talking with a local publican the other day - it's part of the job. He tells me that he has customers who come in straight from work at 4 or 5 pm, and drink 'til closing time (at least, I should think). Now I know this is a terribly déclassé drinking style, and must seem very strange to all you jaded urban sophisticates out there, but that's what happens in some pubs.

Anyway, he goes on to explain that this means that he takes 30 quid off them in a night, they have a lovely evening talking shite with their mates, and everyone is happy.

Furthermore, he points out, if he could get them to start on lovely 6.5% super-hoppy lovingly hand-crafted and challenging - whatever, they'd tilt after 3 or 4 pints. He'd take, at most, a tenner off them ('cos he's not going to charge a tenner a pint, is he?), and he'll turn his beer over at rate that would lead to wastage.

How do you like them apples?

The thermodynamic rollercoaster of beer.

Nothing's ever at the right temperature (or in the right place).

A brewery is a machine for making beer. Even a little Heath Robinson one like ours. One of the things that we have to manage is temperature. This has been preying on my mind of late since we've just had a spell of warm weather (at least that's what we call warm 'round here). Just for fun here's a not-to-scale graphical representation of this key process variable








See? It's a bugger, when you're not heating it, you're bloody cooling it. Inbetween, you're pumping it (or carrying it) from one place to another. God I love this job. Love it.

Ass U Me

I notice that the good folk at the Reading BF list one of our beers as:
West Coast Blonde 4.4%
Pale beer brewed with West Coast USA hops?

Now, I know that they're very busy people, what with trying to ensure that their enormous range of 500 beers is in good condition (good luck with that), but why make up that bit about USA hops? Will it help sell the beer? Surely US hopping has become a real cliché in English micro-brews of late? I'm sure there's now a generation of drinkers who think that beer is supposed to smell like grapefruit.

For the record - there's only one beer in which we're currently using a US hop - and it's not this one. The contents of our hop store (it's a big chest freezer actually) include:

• Northern Brewer - great quality - resinous and slightly citric, nice clean bitterness


• Challenger - crisp bitterness, I find that some straw and grass comes through. Nice.


• Hallertauer Mittelfrüh - also great quality - lightly floral, fresh.


• Goldings - Used pretty much exclusively in our "milds". I've never really got on with Goldings (which must make me a weirdo)- there always seems to be a sort of cold stewed tea tannic quality if we use a lot of them in the boil. In a lightly hopped beer though, this works for me, while the bitterness may be quite low, the quality of the bitterness keeps it interesting.


• Odds and ends of various "Styrians"


• Bobek! Boss! Unlike the other "styrians", this isn't (I gather) a fuggle variant - has it got Northern Brewer in it's ancestry? Or something. Citric yes, but not grapefruit - it's orangey / lemony - tangerine perhaps.


• Amarillo- Stinks of cat p*ss & mango. Revolting? But leave it to air for a few hours and the cat creeps out, then some distinct minty notes come through. Fascinating. The catty stuff doesn't seem to make it into beer either - but I'm inclined to let it breathe before using it for dry-hopping. The bitterness is good and all kinds of nice orangey tastes come through. Definite tropical fruit used late. Great example of how the smell of the hop in the hand is not what comes out in the beer.

And where did the "e" come from? It's blond, not blonde. It's the name of the beer, not the lady on the clip.

Down the drain...

... not beer. Trade effluent.

I had to work out our discharge volumes the other day, so that the nice folks at United Utilities could figure out how much to charge us. It's not a complicated sum, but it's quite instructive. Your mileage may vary.

Of the water that comes in, about 15.5% goes in product (beer) or is lost in evaporation, around 2.3% goes out in by-products (spent grain, waste yeast) and 82% goes down the drain.

I know that doesn't add up to 100, but that's rounding error for you.

Or to put it another way - each pint of beer we produce means we need 6.5 pints of water, and gives rise to about 5.3 pints of effluent.

This is actually pretty good for a tiny brewery. And of course, we're not short of water 'round here.

Eeuw, nasty.

I was in a pub recently, drinking some beer that we'd made. It's a particularly flavour-packed fairly high ABV little number with some quite forward esters bordering on the solventy (N.B. this wasn't a mistake - was intended). It had about 10 weeks on oak chips in stainless, then re-racked into our plastic casks where it passed another few months. It's been interesting.

But this one, eeuw, what's that nasty smell? Some people couldn't smell anything wrong. Becky didn't like it but couldn't name it. One person referred to laundry. I smelled damp cellar, musty, something.

I'm guessing that here we have a hint of
trichloroanisole (TCA). You'll observe that this looks a lot like those chlorophenols that come up when chlorine based sanitisers are allowed to come into contact with the beer (or with wood). It might be derived from an undetectable trace of chlorophenol, methylated by some kind of bug, giving us TCA, which is incredibly smelly - detectable at parts per trillion.

Our noses are all different, and thresholds for detection of TCA vary by orders of magnitude, which is to say that I might not be able to detect something that you find utterly horrendous. Also, many people get used to TCA quickly, so after a few sniffs, it might stop bothering you (or not).

It's quite possible that the bad smell had got into the beer via dispense equipment, or was even migrating through beer lines which might be perfectly clean on the inside, if they were in contact with some minging gunk.

To be on the safe side, we need to make sure that our casks aren't building up scale (or beerstone) which might be giving a home to bugs, or impeding the rinsing away of sanitisers.

Since we normally use a chlorinated caustic cleaner which doesn't have anything special to restrict scale in it, we're starting an acid wash on the casks - every few trips. This gave me an excuse to go shopping at one of our excellent local agricultural supply and engineers. I wanted a John Deere hat but all I got was this stupid milkstone remover.

Mais qu'est que c'est exactement...

... a black IPA? Let's call it a BIPA. And let's not hear anything about "Cascadian Dark Ale". That's a really stupid name. Although to be fair, one Lisa Morrison gives good argument here The original may have been Rogue’s "Skullsplitter" (and that's not even an original name of course).

So what is it then? Is it original? Is it new? Is it a hoppy kind of stout? Or a very dark kind of hoppy bitter? How hoppy should it be? Like an American IPA? Or not? Should it be roasty?

And all this gets me thinking. What is an IPA? What colour should it be? And for that matter, what is a stout? Does a (dry) stout have to have roast barley? Or at least get a noticeable chunk of it's astringent bitterness from high-roast goods?

I can't answer any of these questions, so we've posed them in the form of "Paint it Black", our take on a BIPA. It's out there somewhere. If you see it, drink it, and report back.

Oh, and is a lightly hopped dark ale a mild? I say yes. Even if dry. We don't make sweet beer. So look out for our "Go! Mild" special, and our regular "Dark Country".

Oh, why didn't I listen to Woolpack Dave...

See, a while ago the big element on our copper cut out during the boil. We managed to limp along on the little one (which will keep the boil going). I can't get at the head where the connections are without moving the copper (that's as much fun as it sounds) out of the corner where that nice Mr. Porter put it, so it wasn't until the next day that I managed to get in there with my trusty roll of insulating tape and bodge things up.

Job done?

Mr Woolpack pointed out that I should have used heatshrink as it's less prone to slip. But I hadn't got any - that's a bit silly. I didn't get any - that's really stupid of me.

And of course, it's just come back and bitten me. i.e. it's gone faulty again. We're not even boiling, there's 650 litres of wort in the thing (weighs a lot) so it's an immovable object.

Back of envelope calculations suggest that it's going to take something like 4 hours to come to the boil, and I'll probably have to boil for at least two hours rather than the 90mins that we usually do. I'm not exactly sure when I'm going to get home, but it'll be late.

Learning is fun!