Brew 200 edges closer....

Today was "proper" brew 196 (we've actually done 199 including a few cuckoo brews, but we've not counted those under our numbers) a golden 3.8%-ish ale with US Cascade and Czech Kazbek hops, and next week we're cooking up yet another batch of Golden Pixie as it seems to be getting more popular!

After that, however, we're very close to brew 200 and so a bit of a commemoration is called for... the current plan is to re-brew our 100th brew "every hop i love is dead" with a very slight variation in recipe to reflect current Politburo diktats in the production of Hopcraft Пиво, but it's planned that the Simcoe and Cascade pairing which worked so well back in November 2014 will be used again.

So, get ready for our 200th brew in a month or so!  Thanks for sticking with us, and we hope you'll stay along for the ride a while longer as we've some good stuff coming up....

New Van....

It's not ours, it's leased, but hey.... Gazza is testing it out with a run up to Sheffield this weekend, so a full reliability report to follow!

Here's the new one and old one side by side during handover....

A milk stout needs milk!

Not Milk as in pints of white cow juice, oh no.  A milk stout is so called because it contains Lactose, which is a sugar detived from cow's milk, and gives the beer a delicate sweetness owing to the fact that yeast can't work on the lactose sugars to convert them into alcohol, leaving the beer with a full body and sweetish flavour.... so now you know!

We are 3!!!!!

Well, we've made it to 3 years old!!!

The anniversary of Brew No.1 was on Saturday and, despite us not being around to brew, we're sticking with tradition and brewing this year's vintage of the first ever brew, "Statement of Intent", as we've done for the previous birthdays, this being the 4th version of the beer.

SOI is a 5.5%-ish golden IPA with, even for us, a pretty hefty hop charge.  The hops vary with each vintage and what the brewing team reckon are the best hops of the year...  the table below shows how this has changed with each brew of this beer!

Brew 001 180613 - CTZ, Summit, Magnum, Citra, Galaxy, Cascade

Brew 072 180614 - CTZ, Summit, Magnum, Citra, Galaxy, Cascade, Chinook

Brew 133 180615 - CTZ, Summit, Amarillo, Mosaic, Citra

Brew 194 230616 - CTZ, Summit, Mosaic, Waimea, Citra

As you can see, Columbus (CTZ) and Summit are the big bolshy brutes which provide the bitterness and background flavour, whilst Citra has been a constant each brew for it's delicious fruity mangoey character... Mosaic has also been in the last two brews on account of it being plain delicious!

So, we brew on Wednesday, the first time we've not brewed on the actual anniversary but hey, we weren't coming in on Saturday to brew, although Gav was in to transfer beer and dry hop some tanks, whilst Gazza recovered from a party in Manchester!

Look out for Statement in 3 weeks or so, it's always worth a go for it's massive hop character because, as the name suggests, it's what we were set up to do.

The cold liquor tank is operational!

Well, it's been a long time coming, and a lot of planning and blagging has gone into it, but now, just in time for the real heat of summer, our cold liquor tank is operational!

Here's my original plan for it, which as you can see is very fantastic and was, surprisingly, almost exactly what happened in the end!

So, I can hear everyone asking, what's a cold liquor tank?  Well, using the diagram of the brewing process below, look at vessel 10 - the heat exchanger - and you'll see a wiggly line inside which is the cold water "exchanging" heat with the hot wort.  So, even though the cold liquor tank doesn't actually feature in this diagram, it's a pretty important part of kit as we reckon it's saving us 30 minutes per brew when running off the wort to fermenter.

New red beer

We're known, wrongly in my opinion, for just being brewers of pale and hoppy beers and our other brews scarcely get a mention in dispatches.  OK, I'd be the first to admit that we do major on the 4%-5% extra-pale hop-forward brews, principally because I like that style of beer the best, but I reckon some of our dark brews are just as good as the pales but get overlooked, criminally so on occasion.

Well, with that in mind, it's time for another "non-pale" brew to be created and so I've gone for a style which we've not really persisted with in the past, having created just a couple in 3 years, so it's definitely time "hoppy red", or "American red", or whatever you want to call it, gets - to use current trendy parlance - a "reboot"....

"American" red is a very different beast from "Irish" red; the US version is usually bitter-sweet and hoppy with a generally pretty repulsive tongue-curling burnt sweetness from crystal malt which, for some reason, yanks seem to love.  Irish red has this same rancid treacle toffee sweetness but almost no hops or bitterness meaning it tastes even more sickly-sweet and unbalanced...  and let's not even get into "Flemish" red which, although I absolutely adore it, would probably make most UK drinkers think they were on the Sarsons!

So, here's our latest red brew "Red Mist", but is it really American in style?  Well, in my opinion no, it isn't!  There's no crystal malt in the recipe - actually, there's never been any in the brewery full stop as Gazza loathes it - so we've made up the colour by some specialist German malts and the clever trick of "sparging over" some roasted barley to wash out colour but as little flavour as possible...

It's a red ale, but not as you probably know it... hopped with the bolshy, robust Columbus and fruity Chinook, this is a red different from most of it's peers; just like the brewery, really.

Two much-requested beers being brewed this week....

These two generate a lot of the requests we receive (although Citra plus is our most requested brew) for re-brewing old recipes, and as we love them both it seemed rude not to give them - to use modern contemporary dialogue - a "reboot"....

So, here we have "Mate Spawn and Die", named after a Lard track, which is hopped with the gloriously characterful New Zealand hops Waimea and Green Bullet, then dry-hopped with sticky, juicy, almost liquoricey Vic Secret.... New Zealand-licious!

Next up is "New Dawn Fades", obviously a Joy Division track, with the exquisite combination of tropical fruity Citra and orchard fruity Calypso.... oh yes, it's a belter is this one!  Originally brewed at Steel City in Sheffield back in summer 2012, it was re-brewed at Pontyclun in 2013, again in November 2015, and now it's back with a slightly amended - read improved - hopping regime!

So, in a rare case of no new beers this week, we give you two of our most requested brews; enjoy!

Testing a new "base" malt

Yep, a new base malt!

For those who don't speak brewing lingo, base malt makes up the majority of the beer's "grist" of grains which contain the sugars needed to make beer.  It's barley (usually grown in East Anglia) which is wet then heated gently to con the grains into thinking the season has changed and it's time to start germinating.  Malting is an extremely complicated procedure which is outside the scope of this blog (and my knowledge!) but this should tell you all you need to know should you wish!

Our beers are generally of a simple malt recipe with 90-95% being "base" malt, then 3% wheat malt (for head retention) and 3% of either Carapils or Melanoidin (for body and mouthfeel).  Some beers have other additions, such as stouts and porters with up to 20% roasted grain, but in the main it's 90%+ base pale malt.

We originally used Munton's Maris Otter blend malt, but after using it for a while decided the extra cost (around £150-200 a tonne on top of the usual £500 or so price) of Maris Otter just wasn't worth it for our beer; Maris provides a more "full" malty taste with, at it's best, a luscious honey character, but with our beers being hop-led we don't need the malt character so moved onto Crisp best ale malt.  This unfortunately has an even more pronounced flavour so that was soon jettisoned in favour of Munton's Propino and Super Pale, bought on tonne pallets direct from East Anglia, and we've stuck with them until now as the malt is pretty consistent, works well with our set-up and provides a good to great extract power (the amount of sugar produced per kilo of malt).

We were recently visited by a rep who offered half a tonne of Baird's Propino for evaluation purposes, and so - ever ones for a freebie - have gone with it to test out it's suitability for use in the brewery.  Now I've heard lots of stories, most bad, about Baird's malt but will resist any temptation to jump to conclusions and we'll be using it as a direct replacement for our usual Munton's Propino and we'll see how it stacks up!

Happy ending!

You may remember I mentioned we had a pair of Robins nesting between some casks in our dirty cask store a few weeks ago?  Well, today we had a peek between the casks and, after satisfying ourselves that there were no critters lurking within, removed the top cask.... to find an empty nest!

The RSPB guide to Robins says two weeks from hatching to fledging, so looks like we've got a happy family of Robins around the brewery now!  All well and good, as we really needed the empty casks back which they'd been using for the past month; next time, though, maybe a nest box would be an idea?

the empty nest....

A very full fermenter....

Today we brewed a big batch of "Temple of Love", our 3.8% bitter, hoppy, juicy session pale ale which has, through simple customer demand, become one of the very, very few members of our core range of beer.  So far, so good then.

The problem we have with Temple is that we always make too much of it! The malt we use, Muntons Propino, somehow always conspires to contain more sugars than we expect with the result we have to "liquor back" our brew in the copper.  This sounds complicated, but in essence it means that the resulting wort (unfermented beer) is too high in sugar which means, once fermented, it will be too strong for the beer specifications (temple is 3.8%, HMRC customs allow a brewer 0.5% ABV each way on the declared alcoholic strength if they test it) and so we need to add water to bring it down to the desired sugar concentration.

This is done by adding water from the mains and/or hot liquor tank whilst the wort is still at almost boiling point (so the added water is sterilised) until the required amount (which is worked out with our Beersmith software) has been added, reducing the sugar concentration to the required level; in this case, 1035.5° is the specification.  Today, after adding 175 litres of liquor (what brewers call brewing water, plain "water" is used for washing the floor), we ended up with 1035.7° which is near as damn it!  This should, after fermentation, give us 3.8% ABV which is exactly what it should be, yeast permitting!

The only minor issue with liquoring back is that the total volume of wort increases and, with a big brew, this can mean we're pushing the limits of our fermentation vessel capacity!  Today was one of the largest additions we've done and, as you can see, we're not far off the top.... and that's without the yeast head which has yet to form!

It's a bit full....

200 more casks on order

We've been putting it off for about a year and can't really afford it, but we have finally accepted the inevitable and ordered another 200 casks!

At present we have approximately 580 casks which may seem a lot but, under the old "rule" of brewery cask management, is actually woefully inadequate; it was always said a brewer needs 2, preferably 3 casks for every one he has out in trade which, given we sell approximately 200 casks a month, would mean we would need a minimum 400 others.... which we don't have.  

Now bear in mind this equation was based upon ye olde times when brewers distributed their casks locally and they "turned over" (got them back) very quickly - generally within a few weeks - whereas now casks go to wholesalers hundreds of miles away and may not be seen for months on end; for example, last month we sent pallets of beer out to Manchester, Preston and Stoke, casks we probably won't see again for at least a month, probably two, meaning the old cask equation should really read 6 casks for every one out in trade, meaning we'd need an unfeasible 1500 casks (or thereabouts) to sustain our business.

We're pretty good at retrieving casks and turning them over quickly, but even so some weeks we're stretched to the limit with our casks and just can't rack enough beer to build up any stock.  This means casks being filled then going straight onto pallets and out the door which isn't the way I want to operate, as these casks won't be conditioned enough unless the wholesaler / pubs let them sit for a few weeks once they arrive (we've had no complaints so guessing this is probably happening....).

What we need in order to build up a level of stock which enables us to properly condition our beers and also have a decent list of beer to sell (recently, on occasion, we've been down to our last ten casks of beer to sell which is a ludicrous situation to be in) is more casks, and lots of them.  Given that I don't like metal casks the solution is therefore plastic, and more correctly Brewery Plastics casks.... but, even allowing for their reasonable price of just over £30 a cask, this is still a £6200+VAT investment in casks, money we don't really have.... 

Just imagine if brewers could, rather than giving 50% of their turnover to the government each month, reinvest some of this money in new casks and equipment?  Fat chance of this happening, but it would make life so much easier and enable us to grow our business so much better than we are able to at present.... we can dream!

Anyhow, we've just ordered 200 new 9 gallon plastic casks (plus 6 extra 4.5 gallon casks which are mainly used at our bar) which will be slightly offset by us returning as many of our 100 rental casks as we can lay our hands on (that'll save us money and get rid of a lot of metal casks in one go) but, even allowing for this, we'll still have extra casks and that'll take some of the pressure off and, hopefully, allow us to build up some stock and sell more beer, which can only be a good thing.

This has been yet another post in our "Crap brewers have to put up with that you don't know about" and I hope it's been educational!

And finally....

Well, here we are, blog post 300!

Rather than launch into a lengthy monologue or rant, however, I'll be tapping the rich seam of sentimentality which newsreaders call "and finally....." to create a schmoozy sickening kind of post...

Anyhow, here it is.....

We seem to have acquired a brewery pet, and will soon have quite a few more!  A family of robins has taken up residency (literally, they've built a nest!) between two dirty casks in our cask store and was only discovered when Gazza noticed the twigs between the casks and lifted the top one up to see what was going on, to be met with a very angry Robin defending his nest!  The cask was quickly replaced and, despite being very low on casks, we've left them to get on with things and, hopefully, soon they'll be away and we can wash our casks for reuse!

We did add a suet treat for them to eat near to the nest as we're really nice like that.  Even though they're taking up 4 of our precious casks....

All together now, awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!!!!!

"Why bring politics into beer?"

So said one bloke - presumably a Tory - at my recent meet the brewer when I proffered my opinion I was glad Thatcher was dead....  well, IMO politics is, or SHOULD, be in everything we do and say.  I know there are those who have no opinions and simply spout what the papers tell them, or just don't care about politics (look where apathy got in 1930's Germany...) but I disagree; the effects of the stupid decisions of politicians matter to everyone and if you're not informed, with an opinion, then you may as well bend over and take whatever is coming your way, and I guarantee it won't be a box of chocolates.

Anyhow, in this vein, we have brewed a beer with local newcomers Twt Lol (in Welsh this means, vaguely, "little joke") and, in a departure from Phil's normal traditional beers, we've cooked up a hoppy amber ale with the luscious US Mosaic and Chinook hops.  The pumpclip features a photo of the nearby Port Talbot steelworks in South Wales, currently threatened with closure due to Tory inaction, and it really does feel like a case of the last stand for UK industry down here.... 

So, to all those involved in the fight to keep a UK steel production capability, we dedicate this hoppy amber IPA and may steel not go the same way as coal... although I'd not hold my breath with a Tory government in charge.  

See, politics is in everything.

The latest dark brew....

Despite rumours to the contrary, we always try to have a dark beer on sale at all times as

a) people like them

b) they round out our range

c) they stop people taking the piss that we only brew pale hoppy beer
d) they smell really nice when you're brewing them, and

e) we actually like them!

So, with our current offering "Aur Du" (Black Gold, an oatmeal stout) down to single figures in the coldstore, we decided it was time to brew up a replacement... but what?

We thought about another coffee porter but don't want to get typecast (again!) by always brewing coffee beers, so went instead for a porter/stout concoction hopped mainly with the totally bizarre Sorachi Ace hop, one of Gazza's favourites but one that is notoriously difficult to use as it takes over everything else, plus it doesn't taste right in 95% of the pale beers it's used in (says Gazza).

Sorachi Ace is a fascinating little critter; originally developed by Sapporo in Japan (along with it's now extinct sibling Furano Ace) but now grown on the west coast of the USA and, even more interesting, it's flavour continues to develop; years back it was all lemon sorbet, then it morphed into dill and herbs, whereas now the dill is still there but a most bizarre coconut/gorse bush character is coming to the fore and it's bloody gorgeous!

We already have a Sorachi porter, "Graveyard Eyes", but this new brew is a very different animal with all the other hops cut out (except one!), a lower ABV and a very different malt makeup so we'll be very interested to see how it comes out in a few weeks time....

Another "third tank" one-off...

When we brew big batches (12 barrels, 2300 litres) of "Temple of Love" or "Golden Pixie", and occasionally other beers we generally sell 2 of the 3 tanks as the mother beer - i.e. what it's actually called - and the final tank we have a play around with by dry-hopping with either a single hop or mixture of hops we don't normally utilise for this beer, just to see what we can come up with!  These are called "third tank" beers.

Well, we've done it again with the last brew of Temple, so thanks to the magic of dry-hopping will you welcome "Citracana"!  The name is a simple mash-together of the two hops used for dry-hopping; Citra, the mangoey, sweet fruity darling of many a brewer (and consequently difficult to get hold of...) plus Olicana, one of the new UK hops from the Faram's breeding programme, which has the usual European grassy character with some additional soft fruits.

On initial tastings these two hops seem to have come up with something pretty special indeed!  The base beer gives a strong bitterness and oily hoppiness, but the aroma and top-notes of the flavour are all tropical fruit and sweetness; to say Gazza is happy with it might be an understatement, but the bad news is that of the 14 casks and 2 kegs, within 2 hours of filling them we are all but sold out... 

So, if you manage to defy the odds and find some "Citracana", let us know what you think!

The eternal wheel

Brewers are modern-day alchemists (well, some are...) turning this

Into this.....

With a lot of work inbetween.....

Two brews this week

That's right, owing to sales far exceeding expectations recently we've got to brew twice this week to keep the tanks topped up!

First up will be "Golden Pixie" as we've totally sold out and as it's one of the supposed regular beers at Hopbunker we thought we'd best brew some more!  Second will be the return of an old favourite in the form of "Slave to the Wage", a New Zealand-hopped brew with a subtle balance between malt and the fruity hops; this is always a good seller when we make it so get your orders in now ;)

Next week we're still considering what to brew, although it may just be something very hoppy yet again.... we'll see.

Week of catchup!

Owing to Gav being away we're not brewing this week, but hopefully we'll get lots of things sorted out and in order to get straight back into it again next week!  Sales have been crazy this week and, as a result, we have almost zero stock so need to get brewing and refill the tanks to replenish our supplies...

Next week we'll be brewing a big batch of Golden Pixie (as the last one has already sold out) plus another brew, hopefully - if the hops are available - the return of one of Gazza's favourites.  We'll also have to brew Citra+ again as the whole lot (bar a couple of casks) has been sold already, and some isn't even in the barrels yet!

Our collab with Twt Lol is currently on chill and tasting lovely (plus it's being dry-hopped with Mosaic which will make it indescribably lovelier), it doesn't have a name yet but we're working on that!  No rush....

A tonne of malt is on it's way so we'd best get planning some beers!

The UK hop beer now has a name!

If you know of the band Killing Joke you'll recognise the picture.... if not, then this beer is named as a joke against us in that we are well known for our vociferous opposition to British hops as they just don't taste of enough for us.  All well and good, but this brew has been made with over 90% UK hops in the form of the superstar of the new UK hop varieties, Jester, which is very un-British in it's character!

Think rhubarb, gooseberry, squishy tropical fruits and a soft bitterness and you'll have a fair grasp of what this tastes like!  Jester present very much like a New Zealand hop in that they have a soft, tropical fruity character, and we're dry hopping with a dose of another new UK hop, Olicana, which we've not used before but promises peachy aromas... hopefully it'll deliver on that to give us a new UK classic!

Collab with Twt Lol

This week, with Gav away on holiday, things are a bit quieter than normal at Hopcraft Towers but Gazza is still washing casks, filling them up, and all the other assorted things which running a brewery involves doing, all the messy, time consuming things which most people don't know about!

But, amongst all the other stuff, we need to brew some beer so Gazza will be hosting Phil from new local brewer Twt Lol in Treforest; Phil is known for his traditional beer, some of which use local hops, but this time we'll be cooking up a Red IPA with Mosaic and Chinook hops in the copper which most definitely aren't traditional!  The return collaboration in Treforest will be a pale ale using the New Zealand hops Green Bullet and Waimea, sometime in May.

There's no name for this beer as yet, and not even a definitive recipe until Wednesday morning, but everything will be alright on the day I'm sure of it.... the malt, hops and yeast are here so whatever happens we'll make something tasty!