Sometimes it's the little things that make a difference

... in this case a rather big, heavy 6mm steel plate, but it's made such a difference!

Before our mate, Hotrod builder Owen, made this behemoth for us we literally couldn't get pallets in and out of the door due to the knackered tarmac and step, as can be seen here (which is a lot worse than it looks, believe me) ...

It wasn't simply a matter of concreting up the holes as we roll casks out of the door to the coldstore and they would have demolished the concrete in a matter on months (as they have done the current floor!) and tarmac isn't strong enough either.  So, after a bit of thought, we asked Owen if he could make us a steel ramp which he did, powder coated it and even cut hand holds into it!  It weighs a massive amount, mind you, but at least now we can wheel pallets in and out of the brewery meaning we don't have to handball a tonne of malt off one pallet, through the door, then precariously stack it onto another one now, plus we'll be able to build pallets of beer inside during the summer when it's just too hot outside.  Result!

First photos of the Hopbunker

Yes, you heard that right - here's the first few photos of the current progress of our bar in Cardiff, the Hopbunker, hopefully there will be loads more of work in progress leading to completion very soon... !

Follow us here (you have to join the group)...

https://www.facebook.com/groups/hopbunker/

One of the latrines.... honestly, it is!

Work in progress

This will be our keg dispense once the keg taps are installed

The entrance when we moved in

Yet more obscure music references

The extra-pale "Mid-Atlantic pale ale" we brewed yesterday with all South Pacific hops, namely Green Bullet for it's chewy hedgerowy berryness and Waimea for a pineapple and tropical fruit hit, is now in FV1 and about to begin it's primary fermentation.  

So, we needed a name... various things had been suggested along the lines of Vic, seeing as the finishing hop is new Aussie superstar Vic(toria's) Secret - which had to be renamed save anyone thought that instead of hops they were buying frilly knickers - but nothing quite worked for me.

Then, Gav (who was helping us out) brought in some industrial CDs, one of which was Lard (look em up!) and after I'd remembered just how good they were the name jumped out at me... OK, it's not your usual nicey-nicey name and some people won't like it, but hey.... sometimes being bleak and depressing is the only way, even more so with the Soviet panelacky and high-impact font on the clip.

Look out for it in a few weeks in the usual places when it'll be dazzling you with it's super-pale colour and big hoppiness for sure!

Today in pictures

Here's a couple of photos from today!  

We casked up (racked) 45 9's of beer plus 4 kegs, washed out the tanks, then took the opportunity of an early finish to clean all the conditioning tanks with a full caustic wash.  I also secondary fined (protein finings, it takes out excess protein from the "green" beer to prevent haze) Millennium Bug ready for transferring to CT tomorrow, then it was time for some paperwork and invoice chasing.... rock'n'roll.

Tomorrow we're brewing a pale ale with Aussie / New Zealand hops which doesn't even have a name yet - as per usual!  We'll think of something...

Hop pellet trub at the bottom of a conditioning tank after casking up the beer

I call this "sunlight on casks" !

This will be going into conditioning tomorrow with dry-hopping.

"State of the Nation" at Brewdog Cardiff

We were invited to submit a beer for this event at Cardiff's new Brewdog bar in late January and so, despite some issues with which beer to supply and delivery, we finally got everything sorted and joined keg beers from such luminaries as Otley, Waen, Tiny Rebel and Heavy Industry along with newcomers Crafty Devil and Cardiff institution Pipes.

A good evening was had with much banter between the various brewers, can't be bad.

The beer board

"Something must Break" from keg in a Brewdog glass

Hops for the "Deutsch Projekt" have arrived

Yet another of Gazza's little projects is now officially underway!  He's long been interested in the new German aroma hops (Mandarina Bavaria, Huell Melon and Hallertauer Blanc) although they are notoriously difficult to get hold of being still grown on a trial basis in their homeland, which means there isn't a lot to go around!  

Well, we've now acquired 5kg of each hop in convenient T90 pellet form for dry-hopping, so once we've got the next few brews out of the way we can begin to experiment with these!  The running order will probably be Blanc, Melon and Bavaria although this may (and probably will) change on the whim of the head brewer!  The base beer will be kept simple and rather understated to allow the hops to show their true character, so look out for the first one in a month or two and see how far European hops have come.

Tap Takeover photos

A grand night was had by all (I assume!) when we hit London town with a pallet-load of our beers last Thursday at the Fox on Kingsland Road, E8.  Here's a few photos from the evening, thanks to everyone who supplied them as I forgot to take many.... I was too busy having fun, apparently, which I assume means drinking lots of beer.

Our first single-hop beer

Let's get one thing straight - I'm not a massive fan of single hopped beers, to me hops are (usually) good at bittering, aroma or flavour and not many of them can multitask, which I suppose makes them male... (actually, hop cones only grow on the female plants, the males are  not needed; hops are dioecious, which means they have separate male and female plants. Only the female produces the flowers that are used for brewing).

So, against all that's gone before, yesterday we brewed a single-hop beer!  And not only that, we used a hop which is quite rare and not often used, Millennium.  It's a reasonably new US hop which is used in dark beers over in America but not seen on our shores often, so when Jay suggested using it and Gazza found we could get some the project seemed a goer!

It's a high alpha bittering hop at 17.1% alpha acids (the stuff that gives beer it's bitterness, this is a very high figure) but we used 10kg in the copper and a further 5kg will be added to the tanks for dry-hopping.  We were pleasantly surprised with the almost Pacific character we got from the cones, with pineapple and tropical fruits coming off during the break-up.

So, although the beer doesn't have a name yet, "Millennium" is sat in FV2 about to commence primary fermentation and it should be an interesting one alright... look out for it in about 3 weeks' time when it gets casked up.

Tap Takeover at the Fox E8

That's right, it's another first for us in the form of a "tap takeover".  On reading up about such things Gazza has come to the conclusion that they are like a meet the brewer except the brewer doesn't have to give speeches or anything else so energetic; sounds like we roll up, drink lots of beer and "press the flesh" as it were... we'll see if this is true next week!

Anyhow, we'd love to see everyone there so the details are as follows..

Thursday 29th January 2014 from 18:00

The Fox Craft Beer Pub
372 Kingsland Road, Haggerston, E8 4DA London

We should have at least 12 beers on, maybe more, during the evening plus Gazza and Jay will be there to berate or buy beer for accordingly.

https://www.facebook.com/events/668121469979964/

The beer list will feature some (or all) of the following;

On Keg...

Belma & Brewise 4.7% golden hoppy
Citraic 5.2% - Citra and Mosaic
Who's been sleeping in my Brain? 4.7% - Golden, hoppy, fruity
Exercise One 5% - golden big fruity hops
Slave to the Wage 4.3% - New Zealand hops, full malty body
Temple of Love 3.8% - big hoppy session beer
Profits of Doom coconut edition 4.5% - sweet lactose stout with coconut flavours
Gazza and Jay's Maple Porter 5.2% - toasty porter with maple syrup
Red Water 4.7% - very pale, rare Waimea NZ hops
every hop i love is dead 5.2% - our 100th brew, almost all Simcoe
Graveyard Eyes 5.2% - Sorachi ace porter
Oceanic v4 4.8% - extra pale, huge nelson Sauvin taste

As for cask...

Mosaic Plus 5.2% - pale, big fruity hops
Cloister Enkel 4.4% - Belgian style "single"
A Good Rogering 6.1% - Black IPA, loads of hops, first in the "insult to history" series
Tidy Bitter 4% - Tasty "standard" bitter, Euro hops
Golden Pixie 3.8% - easy-going session beer with fruity hops in the finish
Whole Hop Project no.1 4.1% - lots and lots of citra!

The Party Line

Today we brewed our latest pale & hoppy little number which, for reasons best known to Gazza (although it's suspected his love of Commie iconography is to blame) is named "The Party Line".

It hints at our ethos which, as you've probably guessed by now, is generally hops and more hops!  This one was brewed from super-pale malt, a touch of wheat, then Magnum, Cascade, Centennial and Belma in the copper and will be dry-hopped with either Centennial or Cascade depending on availability.  As it was a 12 barrel brew (2200 litres) we'll be splitting one tank off to be made into the second of our "Whole Pack Project" beers with the hop in mind this time being Ahtanum which we've never used before.

Next week sees a brew with the rare US hop Millennium which smells pretty damn fruity, although the big question is always if this luscious smell translates into the beer... sadly, this isn't always the case.

We're also doing a tap takeover in London next Thursday, see the next post for details.

About to dig the copper with 17kg of hops down there!

Twig of the Week!

We're obsessed with twigs, as are all craft brewers, so here's the latest contender fresh from a pack of American Cascade hops today...

First bottling day!

After a few test runs we finally bit the bullet today and bottled 3 9's of beer!

It's been a long time coming; regular readers of this gibberish will recall we bought the bottles and bottling kit back in March (or, if not March, then sometime a long way back!) but owing to various happenings, both planned and less so, it's taken us until now to actually bottle some beer on a semi-commercial scale...

We are now the proud owners of 340 bottles of beer which, after a few weeks of conditioning and the necessary quality controls, will be released into the wild... we  already have buyers for the majority of it and so may have to increase volumes next time we bottle; bear with us regards to supply and carbonation as we're still learning the ropes!

So, "Whole Pack Project #1 Citra", "Oceanic" and "A Good Rogering" are now in bottle and we can't wait to test them out in a few weeks' time...

The bottling line!

Jay with the end product

Oceanic in bottle

Jay capping

Some fat bloke pretending to work

The Hopbunker

Well, here's the big news that some already know...

Work began this week on our brewery tap in Cardiff. It's on the Kingsway, opposite the castle and close to the end of Queen Street, and is (for those who remember such things) the old Bogiez (and before that, Barfly) rock club. For those that don't know, it's a concrete cellar below what is now student accommodation, hence the name Hopbunker - it really is like a nuclear shelter down there! We'll be "decorating", if that's the right word, in an industrial fashion which should fit right in with the surroundings.

There are still a few things to be ironed out but we're 95% certain that everything will fall into place and we'll open sometime in February; obviously the plan is to open for the rugby at the beginning of the month... We have a star-studded team being assembled to run it with a very special boss-man who many will already know!

The plans are for UP TO (not necessarily all the time!) 12 cask and 20 keg beers with - obviously - the emphasis on Hopcraft and Pixie Spring beer accompanied by guest beers from far and wide. Our favourite Welsh brewing comrades will be featured prominently but we'll also have brews from all over the UK (sourced from my many contacts!) and there will hopefully be some meet the brewer events and suchlike to sample.

We'll be updating you with more info about this exciting project as soon as we have some, so finally I'll say we hope you can come visit us and sample our beers as an integral part of Cardiff's flourishing craft beer scene.

Cheers, Brothers and Sisters of Myrcene!

To the drain I commit thee....

It's never nice to tip beer away, especially when you know how lovely it was, but we've had a few comments that the final tank of "Slave to the Wage" wasn't tasting quite right so we decided to investigate just what was going on.

It's one of the big batches we brewed late last year and the final tank sat on the dry hops too long through an oversight; normally this wouldn't matter, but Nelson Sauvin pellets seem to change from superbly fruity to overly grassy very quickly.  Add to this a hint of oxidation which has got into the tank somehow from, I'm guessing, not being flushed with CO2 well enough when it was filled up and you get beer which doesn't meet our exacting standards.

So, the remaining five 9's were today committed to the big drain in the sky.  Lessons have been learnt for sure, and I'm confident that it won't happen again - or, as sure as you can be when dealing with a live substance like beer!  I had a sniff of the casks as they were emptied and, whilst I'm sure many brewers would have sent them out without a qualm, I wasn't 100% happy with them so down the drain they went.

To put a positive glint on things this was only 10% of the total batch we brewed, we've learnt plenty about dry-hopping and CO2 flushing of CTs along the way and I'm happy to be preserving our reputation for quality beer rather than sending out second-rate beer.

Onwards and upwards.... 

New year, new ideas (and lots of old ones)

First off, happy new year from everyone at Hopcraft / Pixie Spring!

Now the pleasantries are out of the way I can run through a few of the things we're hoping to achieve this coming year...

• Open a bar in Cardiff - more news on this soon we hope
• Revisit some of our old recipes and rebrew them with all necessary tweaks
• Brew recreations, as near as possible, of recipes from 1910; we're doing this with the help of Ron Pattinson, the top man and law of what beers used to be like, and although the recipes from the Hopcraft brewery of Brackley are missing presumed destroyed we have recipes from a similar regional brewer of the time and so are using those!  An IPA and Stout will be first.  Warning: may contain Goldings.
• Improve consistency and stability of the beers in cask
• Increase kegging to 15-20% of production (currently around 5%)
• Do some more collaborations, both home and away

There are plenty more things we're hoping to do, but that's enough for now...

Keep the faith, Brothers and Sisters of Myrcene!

Have a good Yule / Xmas break!

This is the final post for 2014, a year which has seen some massive upheavals in the brewery but we've come through it stronger and having learnt a lot so expect 2015 to continue along the same tracks we've been ploughing with plenty of one-off pale and hoppy beers, the odd dark one, and some surprises which we'll let you know about next year!  

Oh yeah, and collaborations too... we've loads in the tentative planning stage so we need to firm those up and get some beers brewed.

So, to all our customers - both trade and personal - may we wish you all a happy Yule and hope you get to enjoy plenty of hoppy beer over the period (as well as other stuff too...) and we'll see you all next year, raring to go, but for now... CHEERS!!

Gazza and Jay, the brewhouse team.

Wrapping it all up

Excuse the terrible pun, but this is indeed our final week before we shut down for the Xmas break until new year, a day here and there notwithstanding.

So, it's time to wash all the casks we have and fill them up with beer ready for next year, give the brewery a full caustic brew then put it to bed until new year when it all starts over again!

The coming weekend sees the final deliveries of the year (probably) to Sheffield plus Gazza will be at the beer scooper's Xmas piss-up around Sheffield on Saturday 20th so come and buy him a beer or throw things at him, your choice...

Two M4 trips in less than a week...

I sit writing this knackered from a 12-hour, 400 mile day delivering another load of casks to our lovely customers in Devizes, Reading, Wantage and Rowhook!  We generally do a vanload per month to London but, this month, we filled the van twice and probably could have done another run if someone had inserted another day into the calendar...

Anyhow, we're brewing tomorrow - the first and only time in December as we stocked up on beer during October and November - and it'll be a Black IPA, the first one since "Ta Moko" in October 2013 and only our second one ever... unless you count "Graveyard Eyes" Mk.1 as one (you'd have a good argument if you did...)

It'll be a 5.5%-ish beast with 100+ IBUs from the glorious combination of Citra, Summit, Cluster and Columbus hops and Weyermann Carafa Spezial No.1 and, as you've probably guessed, it doesn't have a name yet although we'll think of one eventually.  I love Black IPAs but, for reasons unknown, they haven't featured on the brewing schedule as heavily as I'd have liked; hopefully this will remedy that situation!

"Goldings Balls" is in cask

Guessing this isn't the kind of name you expect from us, eh?

Well, that's what collabs are about, taking something from each participant and creating something both can put their name to... which is, hopefully, what this will end up!

Anyhow, it's in cask and tasting mellow, malty, softly fruity and with a gentle bitterness and yellow/gold in colour... it'll be out and about from next week so watch out for it and please let us know what you think if you get to try it!

Dry-hopping in the FV

Is something we've only tried once before (it didn't really work) but, for our Mumbles collab, we decided to give it another blast with the soft fruity Waimea hops from New Zealand.

OK, it looks like an algae-covered pond, but I'm sure it'll taste lovely!  We've given it a stir a couple of times and each time it's returned to this state so that's it - we're leaving it alone until Friday when we cask it up!