Brew 150!

Tomorrow is our 150th brew which has snuck up on us quickly, so quickly I've not had chance to plan anything special (not that all our beers aren't special, obvs...) so the honour falls upon the pineappley, tropical riot of a brew which is "Mate Spawn and Die"... (almost) all New Zealand hops and always vanishes out of the coldstore super-quick.

It's taken us just over 2 years to get to this point and, although some may say about 1.5 brews a week isn't really that impressive, I'd argue that we have a reputation many times bigger than we should have for the size we are.

I'm hoping the next 50 brews are done in even faster time and may be right if the current sales are anything to go by with our coldstore being almost empty yet again...  best brew some more beer then I reckon!

So, cheers to everyone who has been along for the ride, and I hope you stay with us as we continue to try ans make the very best - and, importantly, most interesting - beers we can.

Cheers from Gazza and Gav.

Pre-prohibition IPA collab at Celt

Today we brewed our collaboration beer with the guys at Celt Experience of Caerphilly; the hospitality was pretty good and encompassed bacon butties, coffee, tea, chocolate cake, beer and gin in various quantities!  As for the beer, well it'll be about 7.5% and has flaked Maize, demerera sugar and lots of pale malt (1,5 tonnes!) in it, plus oodles of Cluster, Centennial, Cascade, Chinook and Galaxy hops.... should be a good one!

Gazza adding hops

Gav with a Chinese FV

Hops and sugar!

Matt messing with the copper

Gav adding hops

Gav digging the mash

Raking the mash out

Gav adding sugar

Visit to Brains....

You know the old zombie call of "brains, brains!"?  Well, that's what we said today, although in a less respectful way...

The Green Man festival in King's Cross this weekend has ordered 18 casks of beer from us, but the pallet delivery to London was scuppered for some reason (they did say why, I forget what the reason was!) and so the alternative was for us (and everyone else in Wales!) to deliver to Brains in Cardiff for them to trunk the whole lot down in one hit.

Talk about industrial scale brewing... just look at this wall of casks in their yard to see what I mean by that, and there were a lot more around too!  Certainly an experience, I'll say that....

Collabs No.2 - Caerphilly!

Not quite Philadelphia, admittedly, but next week we're off to our mates at Celt Experience in Caerphilly to knock up what we've rather grandly called a "Pre-Prohibition Double IPA"... this unlikely sounding concoction contains demerera sugar, corn and pale malt for a taste of the old times (well, sort of...) and is bittered with the oldest American hop, Cluster, for that olde-skool bitter, catty flavour!  We've then gone a bit off-piste and planned to use hops such as Citra, Centennial and Chinook, but then again this is a modern brew so no apologies from us!

We've not got a name for this yet but it'll be around extensively as we're making 30 barrels of it I think, so look out for the first of a new style of beer....  maybe...

Collabs no.1 - Transatlantic!

Well, it's not a "proper" brewing collab as you'd expect it, but it's still an exchange of ideas across the ocean which has resulted in a beast of a brew!

Gav's mate Brian in Philadelphia is a damn good artist and, as such, he's designing the clip for our "Devilfish Black IPA" which we brewed the other week.  It's a big bolshy 5.8% super-hopped up beastie with US hops Azacca and Mosaic in the copper and Mosaic for the dry-hop, a larger than usual dose too.... 

Look out for it very soon, but beware because it bites....

Out of beer, and other stories...

Well, not quite out of beer, but it's not far off!!

We've been hammered for sales this last few weeks and, owing to us gallivanting around on jollies and such things, we've just not brewed enough to fill the gaps!  Normally this wouldn't be a problem, but such have the level of sales been recently we're now on a mad beer replenishment mission...

This week we're delivering to London, then brewing twice to try and get the stocks of beer up a bit!  Wednesday sees us creating a new beer, "Path of Least Resistance", which will be a very pale brew with Summit, Chinook and Cascade then dry-hopped with a new US dwarf hop so new it hasn't even got a name yet; it's called ADHA-464 and it smells pretty damn fruity in the Citra vein, although we'll see what comes out of the casks before comparing it to anything so amazing!

The other brew will be a new version of the award-winning "Slave to the Wage" pale ale which uses lovely New Zealand hops - Green Bullet, Waimea and Rakau - and promises to be even better than the original version.  Or so Gazza reckons....

Through the porthole

A view not often seen!

This is a view into our conditioning tank 12 with Mosaic and Cascade pellets just added; within a day they will have broken up and be in suspension then, after a few more days, will sink to the bottom of the tank, by which time they will have given up their lovely fruity and citrussy flavours and aromas.

The Deutsch Projekt is reprised!

Well, you thought it had finished... and in truth, so did we.... but no, for one last time (maybe...), we present a Deutsch Projekt beer!

This series of brews - tomorrow's is number 5 - was devised to showcase the new wave of German hops which are challenging the accepted wisdom that all German hops taste like chewing a privet hedge (well, to be fair most of them do...) and that there might be something else to offer in the hop department from the world's biggest hop producing nation, namely some new world-esque flavours.

All beers have had a very similar - sometimes identical - malt base (mainly low colour Propino with a touch of wheat and Melanoidin), and a 3 out of the 4 have had the same base hop (Opal) to keep comparisons between the hops fair.  

So far, we've had....

1 - Mandarina Bavaria; orangey, green tea, flowery

2 - Huell Melon; wild strawberry, subtle

3 - Hallertauer Blanc; lean, leafy, some citrus and petrol

4 - German Cascade; this had German Cascade as the base hops too; citrus, tangerine, green tea.

And there we thought it would end.  However, we'd used Opal as the base hop in brews 1 to 3 which had caused a flutter of interest as it seemed to be quite orangey and characterful despite not being one of the "new wave" hops, albeit it's only 12 years old!  So, a quick board meeting later, and DP5 was on the cards...

Return of the little bloke

It's been a while since we brewed Napoleon Complex, but quite a few people have been asking for it to return and so, being eminently reasonable fellows, we decided that this was a plan of action worth following, albeit with a few provisos....

The original recipe had been, let's just say, cobbled together as a "store cupboard clearout" brew and so included all manner of hops in small quantities.  Gazza spent an hour going through the recipe and working out a better one although as similar to the original as possible and so, eventually, v3.0 was writ in stone (or more correctly in Beersmith)!

The major change is with the dry-hop; previously, the new German hop Polaris was used (amongst others), but as this tastes like chewing an Eucalyptus bush we've sensibly done away with it and gone 100% with a hop which was in the original so shouldn't alter the finished beer too much... the illustrious Nelson Sauvin.

Pixie on Parade brewday

Tuesday 4th August saw us welcome the two Kevs and Tufty to the brewery to brew up a split batch of beer; one half would become Golden Pixie, whereas the other half would become a special for Newport RFC's beer festival in late August.  This splitting would be done in conditioning tank with Golden Pixie receiving Cascade and Citra hops whereas the Pixie on Parade would be dosed with a larger amount of Cascade with an addition of blackcurranty Mosaic hops.

The brewday went well, the beer ended up in FV1 almost exactly on gravity, and all being well the beers will be out and about in a couple of weeks; Newport RFC beer festival is held at the club's Rodney Parade ground on Friday 21st / Saturday 22nd August, see here for details and if you can make it there will be a good range of mainly local beers.

Kev Jarvis mashing in

Dean (Tufty), Kev and Kev enjoying the refreshments

Kev and Dean add the yeast

Kev, Kev, Gazza and Dean

Fermenting!

Gazza swapped for Gav...

Kegerator is go!

For those who don't know, a "kegerator" is an American term for a contraption which dispenses beer from a keg, via some kind of cooling mechanism, to a tap.   Ours has been in the conception phase for months as Gazza has next to zero practical skills, and it's taken Gav joining to push the project through into completion....  which says a lot about Gazza's practical value to the brewery.

But, you ask, how does it work?  Well, the keg sits in the conditioning room where it's plugged into the CO2 ring main, 3/8" beer line goes through the insulated wall, through the back of the bottling bench and into an undercounter chiller, then from there into the tap mounted on the side of said bench; it's a simple way to achieve this and, as the whole line run (which is important as less run means less beer sat in the lines getting oxidised and warm) is probably about a metre.

The end result of all this jiggerypokery is that we now have one keg beer on tap in the brewery permanently (with a second to follow when we get the correct connectors) which could be very dangerous, especially when it's really warm weather... rehydration and all that kind of thing.  

When it was all installed, cleaned and tested we had to go through one final difficult decision... what beer to put on!  After a quick look through the available kegs there was only one real winner in the list and so on goes Citraic.... :-)

Just in case anyone was wondering, the reason we don't have a "caskerator" is that we'd never drink it before it turned, whereas the beauty of keg - one of them - is that it'll last weeks (and theoretically months, although I can't see it lasting that long) so we don't have to rush through it... unfortunately.

Note also the lovely bit of driftwood which Gav has fashioned into a pull.... we've affectionately named it the giant twig!

The finished Kegerator!

A little training needed...

Worst. Boyband. Ever....

Well, that's what we look like....  here's a few photos from our joint tap takeover at the Nag's Head, Reading last night with Mike and Iain from Wild Weather.

Jay, Iain, Mike, Gazza and Gav

Meet the brewer(s)!

This Wednesday evening (29th July) sees us traipse down the M4 to one of our favourite pubs in the whole universe, the amazing Nag's Head in Reading, for a meet the brewer along with our besties Mike and Iain from Wild Weather brewing... we'll be taking over the pumps (and taps!) for the evening - and beyond maybe - with hand-picked examples of our wares which will vary, in our case, from a 3.1% orange session stout to a 5.9% IPA... 

So, you know you want to, get yourselves down to Reading on Wednesday to meet us all - hopefully both Gav and Jay will be there - and sample some lovely beers!

Click here for the info...

No expense spared...

.... on the brewery doughnuts!!

Sharks against Surfers - v3.0

Yes, hop fans, tomorrow we brew one of our most popular beers and one which has certainly got us some excellent feedback!  So, what could possibly make us want to change a winning recipe?

Well, it's the usual problem of lack of hops, unfortunately... Basically, we have run out of lusciously fruity Amarillo hops, and so have to substitute in something else... after having a good think about this thorny issue Gazza has decided to try out Chinook as a replacement as they have a similar fruitiness albeit more a "rhubarb and custard" character but, still, should fit into the general scheme of things pretty well...

The other hops remain the same, namely Columbus, Centennial and Galaxy, so we're pretty confident that any changes will be very minor and the beer will be just as pale, fruity and hoppy as you've come to expect from us and our summer brew!

Citra Plus - new image!

With the re-awakening of the "plus" range (well, one of them....) Gazza thought it was time for a new image as the old clips had been done back in the very early days and were looking a touch rubbish compared to more recent efforts....

So, here we go, the new clip for Citra Plus, and who knows maybe more in the future?

More rebrews.....

I suppose it's my fault for listening to people but, hey, in business isn't that what you're supposed to do, in the main?  So, after some impassioned arguments for various rebrews, we've settled on the following two which are being done this week and next...

Citra Plus 5.4% - This was last brewed in February last year and was destined never to see the light of day again after the scrapping of our "plus" range on the grounds that Gazza was bored of them and the names were crap, but a few people have said how much they liked it and so, in a rare moment of munificence, we've dusted off the old recipe, updated it in line with current policy diktats, and so Citra Plus v3 is now sitting in FV2 waiting to dazzle you all with it's triumphant return to the field...

Sharks against Surfers 4.8% - Needs no introduction, really, as we only brewed it a few months back, but in case you've been under a rock on Pluto recently here's the gen; It's named after an Eastfield track and, so Gazza thinks, has the perfect name for a summer beer and is in itself the epitome of what we think summer is about beer-wise, namely super-pale and super hoppy!  With hops from America and Australia this brew is waaaaaay too drinkable and fruity...

After that we're brewing another batch of Tidy bitter as it's going down well in the Hopbunker, plus then there may be, finally, some more new beers!  We've plenty of ideas so no worries about that... and also pages of potential names too!

Coffee Porter

I know everyone makes one these days, but to be fair we did brew it last year so it's not entirely a matter of bandwagon-jumping.....

So, on Thursday we're brewing "Crema Extrema", our coffee porter, although this year things will be a little different as we're (hopefully!) using beans from our local coffee roasters, Ferraris of Bridgend - which we intend to buy tomorrow - rather than the random assorted stuff we used last time!  We're off there tomorrow to secure supplies of "Cafe Classico" and, hopefully, talk them into letting us roast our own blend on their cute little 10kg roaster for a special beer...

5kg of coffee will go into the 8 barrel (1400 litre) brew as well as lots of lovely roast barley, Carafa special, Melanoidin, Carared and the "Black forest gateaux" hop of Junga to hopefully create something pretty damn good; we can't wait!

Welcome Gav!

With Jay off to pastures new (helping to run Waen brewery's new Swansea bar) we welcome long-term friend and helper-outer Gav to the team!  As he's been helping out in the brewery occasionally for the past few months he knows pretty much what to expect....

So onwards and upwards; Jay will still be involved with the brewery one day a week (that's the plan at present) but from now on, Gav's the man!

Another new beer, another new hop

Liking, as we do, new hop varieties, when offered a brand-new American hop from the USDA dwarf hop breeding programme Gazza just couldn't say no!

To be honest, first impressions aren't that great; on a positive note Jarrylo are probably the oiliest, stickiest hop ever (over 3% oil) but.... well, they don't really smell of much, and what they do smell of isn't that thrilling!  Ah well, the cascade they were paired with were some of the best we've had for ages with that old-timey lychee and lemon character booming out of the bag, so if the Jarrylo don't bring owt to the party then, hopefully, Cascade will save the day!

Look out for this in a few weeks, but first it's going to be dry-hopped with yet more Jarrylo whereupon the hop gets a chance to show us all up for dullards who know sod-all about hops... it may do, but we'll see!