A bit of dry-hopping!

When most people think of dry-hopping it's with whole flowers into the cask, but this is the brave new world, people, and this is the way to do it; it's consistent across every cask, takes less time to get the character into the beer, much easier to do and makes the conditioning room smell lovely.  But it doesn't half make a mess on the floor....

Latest coffee (and vanilla) beer ready to cask

Who remembers our first coffee porter?  The one where we did 10 casks coffee, 10 vanilla and coffee and 10 vanilla, coffee and almond?  Course you do.

Anyhow, Gazza has brewed another coffee porter, this one much more complex in the malt department than the previous one, and it's currently sitting in tank now ready to cask up!  This time we're not bothering with the almond extract version as it was the most artificial tasting of the three (we use proper coffee and real vanilla bean extracts, the almond extract was apparently "real" but didn't really taste that way) so this time there are 15 casks of the coffee and 15 of the coffee/vanilla for sale; get em quick as they won't last long.

There will be one single cask of Amaretto flavour but this is already allocated to the "Not the Wantage beer festival" so if you want to try it you'll have to get yourself there from 26th til the 28th September... you know you want to.

Now that's what I call a big hop charge volume 85

Today we brewed, as promised, "Who's been sleeping in my Brain?" which is a golden 4.5%-ish brew with plenty of US hops including the new Eldorado which, unfortunately, didn't really impress us that much... yes, it had a luscious fruity aroma, but it just wasn't intense enough for us!  Hey ho... we stuck the whole pack in, all 5kg, anyhow along with Cascade, Citra and Columbus for a total copper hop charge of 15.5kg as can be seen here just before Jay got in to dig it out!

Hop sauna...

Short week working, big batch brewing!

Yet again this week is a day short, thus depriving us of a brewing day, although this was more than compensated for by a proper day off and associated lie-ins!

Anyhow, to try and keep up with demand - last week was our best week ever with over 70 9's sold - we're brewing a "brew and a half", a 12 brewer's barrel (2200 litre) batch, of a new beer which utilises a new American hop (Eldorado) as well as some old-skool ones (Columbus, Cascade) and one new-wave classic (Citra).

The beer is called "Who's been sleeping in my Brain?" and is named after the album by seminal Goth band Alien Sex Fiend; it's also unusual in that this is a name request from an extremely sociable bikery-looking bloke at Cheltenham Motor Club after my meet the brewer there recently... and who am I to refuse a request of such quality, being an ASF fan myself?

Thursday sees a delivery run along the M4 to Wantage and Reading with more essential supplies of lupulins for the Thames Valley before Friday is spent loading a pallet bound for Manchester and casking up yet more beer, this time "Sharks against Surfers" and probably some more "Nelson Plus", although I may get tempted to cask some "Napoleon Complex" instead; we'll see on the day!

I really love that font!

Special visitors and happy yeast!

I've been happy to welcome two lots of visitors today to Hopcraft towers... yes, I actually welcomed people, I know it's not generally the way I do things, but these people are my friends!

First up were Elaine and Tara of Yorkshire's Mallinsons brewery; we go back a long way do Tara and I, and it's always a pleasure to have some banter with the lasses from Huddersfield, and now it looks like I'll have to go and brew a beer with them!  Oh the hardship... !

Tara under the "mezzanine"

Second up was long-time mate Jessi (and friends) of old-skool Railpunk band Eastfield who popped in to check up on "Sharks against Surfers" which was named after an Eastfield track!  A clothing exchange was completed too, with a hoodie coming my way so I can look more "yoof", innit...

Jessi with goodies

I'm now about to cask up a load of beer before heading off home, I'm leaving two beers in full ferment with very happy looking yeasties gorging on the worts of Day of the Lords and Oceanic; as I've already mentioned this week was our busiest week ever so thanks to everyone who supports us and drinks our beer...

Have a good bank holiday everyone, keep the lupulous faith!

Delivering in that there London....

Seriously, if I'd realised the route we'd do today, I'd have left the seats in the van and charged £20 a go to some bemused tourists....

Then again, we hadn't banked on being stuck in Craft Clerkenwell for an hour!  Of the 4 roads leading to it, one is blocked off by bollards, one was blocked by a scaffolding truck, one was one-way the wrong way and the other blocked by a market!  After eventually getting outside (by encouraging a bloke towing a big silver oven to move...) we were then trapped as the exit road was full of scabby white vans being loaded with all manner of tawdry crap from the market as it was dismantled... ah well, at least we had a beer and a chat whilst we waited!

That's another 30 casks dropped off, good way to end our busiest week ever with 76 casks going out of the brewery door... thanks to everyone- drinkers and publicans - for their support!

The cold store is bare after loading up!

Craft Beer Co, Clerkenwell

The scenic route to Pimlico...

Two brews in the FVs, now off to London!

Gazza and Jay have been busy the last couple of days brewing, palleting, cask washing, you name it!  We've brewed the much requested Oceanic again; this was a beer devised by Gazza and long-time beer acquaintance Dean Roberts a few months back and both brews done thus far have flown out; we'd like to think it was the combination of two international award-winning brewers (honestly, we are!) but it's probably just down to Nelson Sauvin and Galaxy being amazing hops...

This time Gazza has taken a machete to the recipe and trimmed out all the "filler" hops and replaced them with even more luscious Nelson and Galaxy, so here's hoping version 3.0 is the best yet... if so then don't expect it to be brewed too many times as we're reeeeealy short of both Galaxy and Nelson; not the best planning, eh?

The other rebrew is of the latest Joy Division beer, "Day of the Lords", which absolutely flew out - gaining rave reviews at the meet the brewer at Cheltenham Motor Club - so we felt it only right to brew it again, that and we didn't have the hops for the beer on the "brew planner"....

Citra and Nelson Sauvin (yes, again!) make up the majority of the hop charge for this brew which is a lusciously fruity thing of beauty and demands contemplation of it's huge fruity aroma; honestly, it smells absolutely gorgeous!  Such was the praise for the original brew we've unashamedly caved in to peer pressure and made it again with a few small recipe tweaks to improve the "user experience"...

Tomorrow sees us off to London town for deliveries to Craft Beer Clerkenwell, Southampton Arms and Snooty Fox Canonbury as well as recovering some much-needed empties along the way... rest assured the stereo is already being primed with bangin' choonz for the journey!

Gazza was sad because the Nelson twig cost him a fiver...

Bigger, better, faster, hoppier, bitterer, Oceanicer...

Oceanic version 3.0 will, hopefully, be all of those things when we brew it tomorrow!  The recipe has been pared right back to include only luscious Nelson Sauvin and Galaxy hops (plus a pinch of Magnum for bittering) and we're hoping this will be the final iteration, the final word, the definitive Oceanic!

15kg of Nelson Sauvin and Galaxy will be drowned for you hopheads, don't let it be in vain...

The stickiest Galaxy hops ever!

Collab at Waen!

Yesterday I went upcountry (perilously close to Gogland) to brew the return leg of a collaboration at the Waen brewery with Sue Hayward.

We produced a best bitter with British and German malts, plus Slovenian AND British Bramling Cross hops; it should be around 4.2% or so and will be more interesting that your average bitter; look out for it in a few weeks.

Getting out of the copper isn't easy!

Second attempt...

Quality control

Racking Swizzlestick

The only Fuggle to be added... ironically of course.

The surprise ingredient - very rare Slovenian Bramling Cross hops!

Next collaboration brew... is next week!

Tuesday 12th August sees the return leg of our two-way collab with the Mid-Wales Waen brewery; Sue came down to brew "Whatever", an unclassifiable hoppy dark beer a few months back, and now Gazza is heading up the A470 to Llanidloes where we'll be brewing.... a best bitter!  Not the most surprising collab you might think, but we're expected to turn out something mad and/or hoppy so this should be an interesting one!

We're using Challenger, Bramling Cross and even... heaven forfend.... some Fuggles!  "The Brown Beer Society" is, as you'd guess, named for the monicker given to CAMRA by some of the more militant "crafterati" and, seeing as CAMRA love bitter and all things old-fashioned, it seemed an ideal name for it!

More news next week, maybe even some photos...

New CO2 cylinder shock

The excitement never ends here at Hopcraft Towers!  One of our CO2 cylinders which we use for putting a sterile blanket of gas into the conditioning tanks has been replaced with a shiny new one... our cup runneth over.

In other news, we're transferring beers to conditioning tank this week including "15 Minutes of Flame", "Napoleon Complex" and "Sharks against Surfers" plus hopefully re-brewing Deliverance APA again as it went down so well last time and we're trying to get the recipe nailed down tight.

Stay out of the sea, keep the water clean...

Today we brewed yet another of Gazza's little projects, our long-awaited summer beer which, if we're honest, will  probably have missed the summer by the time it comes out in a few weeks!

Half Maris Otter and half German Pils malt, this is a super-pale brew hopped with bracts from the two "great" surfing regions, America's West Coast and Australia in the form of fruity Amarillo, uber-citrussy Centennial and "pineapple chunks" Galaxy; Newquay isn't included as there are, as far as I know, no hop farms there and anyhow we don't use British hops except in very rare circumstances. 

Extra-pale, dry, citrussy and refreshing, this is the beer for the summer which just ended so please drink it up as we'll be stuck with it otherwise and have to drink it ourselves... which would be just terrible.  Honestly.

The name comes from punk band "Eastfield" and the track includes the lyrics below which, having a dislike of the whole macho surfing scene, Gazza wishes he'd written had he any discernible songwriting ability.

"Surfers Against Sewage campaign for clean, safe recreational waters, free from effluents, toxic chemicals and nuclear waste. 

Sharks Against Surfers campaign for clean, safe recreational waters, free from surfers..."

Keep off the sand, this is not your land - sharks against surfers 

Stay out of the sea, keep the waters clean - sharks against surfers 

Don't ride the waves, you'll meet an early grave - sharks against surfers 

Put a stop to your tricks, you'll get ripped to bits - sharks against surfers

Beach life isn't cheap, it'll cost you an arm and a leg 

In trendy clothes shops and in the open water 

Tear down the blue flag and hoist up the black flag 

To lead the surfers out to the slaughter

Our most unusual beer to date and a bit of a rant!

We're not really ones to go out on a limb; Gazza doesn't take kindly to the all-pervasive attitude currently sweeping the UK beer scene which has presumably slunk into the country hidden in some container from the states, which means that rather than brewing good-quality beer with lots of flavour and drinkability brewers seem to think they have to, for want of a better phrase, "fanny about" with beer making it some or all of the following;

• strong/weak
• sour
• with spices / fruit
• tongue-blasting flavour
• calling beers "imperial" (whatever that is)
• using crystal malt in IPAs when, using UK malt, we don't need it
• barrel aged
• ludicrous made-up style carcrashes which don't work

..... and many more I don't even want to think about!

Now in the US this kind of thing is positively encouraged as the drinking culture is different and people expect more "bang for their buck" and for craft beer to taste approximately 200000% more than Bud or Coors... but here?  Really? We can brew, I'd say, the best sub-5% hoppy beers in the world yet brewers are rushing headlong into a knob-waving contest to see who can make the most undrinkable beers; 11% barrel-aged sour IPA anyone?  Yeah, I can see that going down well on handpump, there'll be a queue of customers drinking pints of that...

Not that I've got a problem with these beers, I actually enjoy some of them, it's more that some brewers concentrate on them rather than sorting out their regular beers first... but hey, what's all this ranting to do with our most unusual beer you ask?

Well, feeling a bit left out, I thought we'd unashamedly jump on this bandwagon and brew something... well, a little more "awesome" to use the proper craft beer terminology, and so - after discussions with various people but mainly Julie Thomas - Ryevolution RPA was born!  It's made with pale Rye malt, Maris Otter barley malt, a touch of Wheat and a smidgeon of Belgian Aroma malt (which tastes like well-done toast!), mainly Brewer's Gold hops, plus a whole aisle-full of orange, clementine and red grapefruit zest and juice and even some caraway seeds seeing as they go so well with Rye!

So, as you can see, we've well and truly embraced craft brewing with this one; it's not been tasted properly as yet but we are hoping for something well worth the effort involved!

Brum Beer Bash, brewing and barreling....

That sums up this week nicely.

We're brewing tomorrow, casking up beers on Thursday and then Gazza is off to the Brum Beer Bash on Friday and Saturday.  This is one of these new-style festivals where the beer list reads like a who's who of the cutting edge brewers, but more importantly - and this is why these festivals are so much better than CAMRA run ones - both keg and cask beer is on sale with no stupid ideological browbeating going on; if the beer is good then it's on sale no matter what dispense method!

Plus there's food but, this being a new-wave festival, it's called "street food" which means it's twice the price for the same thing in a cardboard tray.  Nice though....  

And then there's the customer demographic which CAMRA would give their right arm for... beautiful (well, some of them are) young things drinking beer, talking about beer, not caring whether it's cask or keg.... 

If you're there come find me, I'll be around somewhere; I'm theoretically working but my definition of working and most peoples isn't generally a close match!

http://birminghambeerbash.co.uk/

New casks!

We can't really afford em, but you can't sell beer without it being in a barrel and ecasks cost a bit too much (£6.40+vat) to use too many.... so, meet the first vanload (50) of our latest batch of Brewery Plastics casks!

These turquoise lovelies should mean we can get more beer into cask and therefore sell more; we've been really struggling for empties recently and this 100 should ease the shortage although, in reality, we really need another 200 at least and, at £31 each, they're not cheap (although half the price of steel casks).  Still, these should help ease the precarious cask situation immeasurably.

We also have 6 pins which, despite being the same price as the 9's, are pretty much essential as some pubs like stronger beers to be in them plus we can cask up any "bin-ends" and either blend them or sell them as a pin to whoever wants one!  They're also useful for testing out ideas such as pellet dry-hopping or other such bizarre ideas...

New casks in the van

And pins, too! (20 litre casks)

Paperwork and Planning

Is what I've been doing today.  Paperwork in the form of invoicing, orders, stock control, that kind of thing, although I've still yet to manage to type in the backlog of cask numbers and where they've gone... !

Planning has consisted of trying to plan some beers for the month ahead; so far, provisionally at least, we have a Rye beer, one with all the hops added at the same point in the boil, a re-run of an old favourite "Napoleon Complex" plus some more which are still on the drawing board.

This week we only brewed once, but it should be a pretty damn good one going on the smells drifting out of the fermenter where it's just begin it's fermentation....

Next week should see the brewing of "Nelson Plus" which, as you'd expect, is full of lovely winey, fruity, tropical Nelson Sauvin in both the copper and dry-hop; can't wait for that one!

This week we are mostly...

... sending out and delivering beer, brewing "Slave to the Wage" and a million and one other things which most people think just magically happen (or wouldn't even think exist) but still take time; for example changing Peracetic in the CIP tanks, printing cask labels, taking gravity readings on beer in the FVs, writing recipes, working out what ingredients we'll need to brew for the next few weeks, emailing/contacting customers selling beer, updating the sales sheet.... and so on.  You get the idea.

Here's a pallet which I assembled today and has departed to London on the overnight Pallex run; all lovingly wrapped, strapped and sealed, only now do I see I've got the bottom cask pointing the wrong way with the shive (round white thing, nearest cask on bottom row) pointing outwards!  This is bad for 2 reasons, 1 if it blows out then it might hit someone/something and 2 if it's knocked it might also blow out, so I'm hoping it gets there in one piece.

New beers coming soon!

Three new beers which are brewed and are currently treading their way through the brewing process are "Blanc Expression", "Slave to the Wage" and "Day of the Lords".

Blanc Expression is a European pale ale with Munich malt to add a soft grainy body allied to European hops in the form of Czech Vittal and German Brewer's Gold.  Dry-hopping comes in the form of a very new German aroma hop, Hallertauer Blanc, which promises fruity, Pacific-style character; they did smell very nice going into the conditioning tank, but we'll have to wait and see if they deliver on aroma!

Slave to the Wage which has been knocking around for a few months in  recipe development but has now emerged, butterflyesque from it's cacoon, blinking into the sunlight.  It's a pale brew with lots of lovely fruity, tropical South Pacific hops such as Kohatu, Green Bullet and Sticklebract which should result in a mellow yet hop-forward fruity little number...

The latest in Gazza's Joy Division series, done principally as the clips are easy to make (!), is yet another where the luscious mango fruitiness of the Citra hop is used alongside a carefully chosen lupulous compatriot, in this case the fabulously winey, tropical Nelson Sauvin.  Together they should make something a little bit special befitting of this series of beers which has had some very good feedback thus far.

We have also brewed the latest version of Mosaic Plus, Reign of Terroir which has already been blogged about (keep up!) so look out for those very soon.

Blackcurrant and Lemon chewits....

Honestly, that's what the mix of Centennial and Mosaic hops smells like, peobably the fruitiest thing in human history!!  

We're brewing Mosaic Plus, today is a good day....

Allez, Allez...

Why the French, you may ask?  Well, not a lot of people know that the French have a growing micro-brewing scene with hundreds of brewers producing an increasingly interesting range of beers.  It follows, then, that these brewers will need hops and therein lies (or lay) the problem; until recently French hops meant Strisselspalt and... erm... that was about it.  

Strisselspalt is a lager hop and has many of the flavours you'd expect of something used by the big brewers - a gentle grassiness with not a lot else.  Now the new brewers in France wanted something more and it took the decision by a multinational brewer to stop buying Strisselspalt to kick the French hop growers up the arse (in true Bishop Brennan style) into producing some new varieties which were concocted with the help of esteemed UK hop scientist Peter Darby.  Several new varieties have appeared with Bouclier, Aramis and Triskel being the most promising.

We like Triskel.  It's understated but has enough citrus and evergreen character to make it interesting and, combined with Cascade and Centennial, it really shows it's colours.  "Reign of Terroir" is brewed with these three hops to give a golden ale full of citrus character but with an additional bit of French attitude...  

This new version will be weaker than the original but has more hops so it's not all bad, plus we've tweaked the hop additions too which should give more flavour.