A few photos from the week...

Not a regular feature, but I thought we'd share these to show what happens down here at Hopcraft Towers!

US05 yeast starts it's ferment atop "Blanc Expression"

The state of play as told by the brewery "gen board"!

Gazza during Monday's "meet the brewer" at Port Street Beer House, Manchester

Jay digs the copper

Our new roof so we can wash casks in the rain !

Mad busy!

This week has been mad busy; we've brewed two beers, loaded and sent two pallets, a vanload to another wholesaler and another to one of my favourite pubs the Craven Arms in Birmingham, plus the usual casking up, cask washing, tidying up, admin, paperwork and suchlike....

The beers were "Blanc Expression" which is a golden one with German Brewer's Gold and Czech Vittal hops and will be dry-hopped in tank with the new highly sought-after German aroma hop Hallertauer Blanc which promises some of the white wineiness of Nelson Sauvin; we'll see!  The other was "Day of the Lords", the latest installment in Gazza's Joy Division series where the lusciously fruity Citra hop is paired with others of equal magnitude, in this case New Zealand's amazing Nelson Sauvin, plus a bit of help from Dr Rudi and Centennial to give extra complexity.

Statement of Intent is chilling down in FV1 and smells gloriously fruity, whilst in the conditioning room we have more Citraic, Sungrazer and Spanish Main plus Tidy Chinook and Deliverance.

Next week we're brewing two old beers with upgraded recipes; "Mosaic Plus" is always a good seller as the blackcurranty Mosaic hop appeals to a wide spread of drinkers, then we'll be making "Reign of Terroir" which uses the under-rated French Triskel hop (in addition to US Cascade and Centennial) to give an extremely citrussy pale golden brew, just right for summer!

Keep the faith, lupulin lovers....

Pennine Mild in cask

Today we - myself, Julie and Daigy Thomas - casked up the latest version of Tidy Bitter (version 7 if you want to know, probably the final version too!) and our Pennine light mild "So Much to Answer For"... we've also got a new "Bang Tidy" in the tanks now, although I've not yet decided what to hop it with... !

Don't forget my Meet the Brewer at Port Street Beer House in Manchester Monday; you have to ring them to book a ticket, £13, but you get food and beer plus get to listen to me ramble on about brewing and beer until everyone gets bored...  you know you want to.

Next week sees the brewing of a new beer featuring the new German hop Hallertauer Blanc, plus another new beer with lots of hops in it... surprise surprise!

First birthday brew!

It's our first birthday on Wednesday and so, to celebrate, we are going to re-brew our first ever beer, "Statement of Intent"!  

It's a kind of IPA-type thing and full of lovely US and Aussie hops although, as the first brew was a bit of a learning curve and didn't come out exactly right, this version 2.0 edition will iron out all the problems with the first one and, hopefully, result in something pretty damn special!

Look out for it at the usual places, hop fiends... happy birthday to us!

RIP whisky cask....

Sad news is that our "double hogshead" Islay whisky cask is no more!  It failed it's pre-filling checks today with a couple of minor leaks one of which developed into a bigger one, so I think that's the end of that; my lack of knowledge in keeping wooden casks alive (i.e. wet) looks to have been exposed here.

Hopefully we'll be able to acquire another one... and I wss looking forwards to putting some Spanish Main into it, too.

Clean floor! And next week's brews

Yesterday we gave the floor a massive steam clean as it's not been done for a while... OK, some paint came off, but just look at it!!  And we cleaned and flushed out the drain which has needed doing for a while, all the exciting stuff happens here....

Next week we turn into a CAMRA brewery as we're brewing Tidy Bitter and a Pennine Mild!  it's just coincidence that brewing these two has fallen on the same week, but it's still quite a turn up for the books!  The week after we hope to be returning to normality with some hoppier stuff....

Clean floor!

Do not adjust your sets...

Don't take this too seriously... ;-)

"This is the Brown Beer society, we are in control of this transmission. Do not adjust your sets.  Next week, under our direction, Hopcraft will be brewing a bitter and a mild - we think this is about time, who wants these golden "beers" that taste of lemon fairy anyway? End of transmission"

Gazza here... unfortunately the statement from the BBS is true, we're being forced to brew beers under threat of colonic irrigation with fuggles, so as you can see we have no option but to comply... So, next week sees Tidy Bitter (version 7) and "So much to Answer for" Pennine Mild being produced under the watchful eye of the twig police. Please, send help....

OK, so we're brewing Tidy Bitter and a Pennine Mild next week!  I thought that called for some piss-taking of CAMRA who probably wish we would brew them all the time...  Tidy is now into version 7 although it's just small tweaks to the recipe now, whilst the Pennine Mild is Gazza's baby and isn't traditional... as you'd expect from him!  It contains lots of strange Belgian malts plus the best UK hop, Admiral, for flavour... this should be interesting!

Big day today!

Tom's first day back meant lots got done today despite Gazza (and Ash!) being hung over and of not much use to anyone at first....

We racked 75 casks of beer plus two kegs, namely "Simcoe Plus", "Santa Muerte" and "Diggin' up the King" which were all tasting pretty good in their different ways, plus we washed all the casks first (a big job no doubt about that) before washing/rinsing/sterilising/gassing the conditioning tanks into which "Oceanic" and "Citraic" were transferred and dry-hopped... I must say the Oceanic is tasting even better than the first version and that's before dry-hopping; this season's Nelson Sauvin are the best I've ever had!

Tomorrow we're brewing "Deliverance APA", an old Pixie Spring beer which has had it's recipe totally revamped along the new policy lines, so look our for it in a few weeks; a golden beer with a soft hoppy, fruity flavour says my guess at how it'll end up!  It's full of lovely hops like Cascade, Chinook, Centennial and Citra so you can kind of guess the flavours it'll have...

Casks off to the cold store

15kg of dark sugar and 100g of peppercorns...

... gives, hopefully, 1500 litres of "Spanish Main" Jamaican stout!

It's our second go at this, the first being our fourth ever beer brewed back in June last year, so it's time - almost a year on - for a slightly amended second version of it to see the light of day.

This revised recipe still includes the dark sugar (a mixture of muscovado, molasses and soft dark brown) but has more peppercorns and a lot more roast barley to give more of a "stouty" flavour than the first edition which was lacking a bit in what I'd call typical stout character and instead was a bit too chocolatey and toasty.  Hops are German Herkules for bittering and UK Bramling Cross for flavour and aroma, there is no dry-hopping done with this one as there's no point, the malts will overshadow the hops too much so more hop will be added during the boil for flavour.

This is due to be brewed Thursday so look out for more updates then....

Almost a year!

It's less than a month now until we've been brewing a whole year and I have no idea where that's gone!  We're on target to have brewed over 70 times which means we'll have brewed over 100,000 litres of beer or 190,000+ pints!

The anniversary is the 18th June so the plan is to re-brew the very first beer, Statement of Intent, but to make it even better than the first time!  More news as soon as it's been decided upon...

Two more brews done!

First off, big thanks to Ash and Jay who've been helping out this week, couldn't have done it without them - or I probably could but I'd be near enough dead by now!

Ash and Jay

Wednesday saw a rebrew of "Citraic" as you lot love it so much!  As is usual with Hopcraft, this is yet another tweak to the recipe making it even more "awesome" with extra hops and a few substitutions too... it'll be out and about in a couple of weeks.

Today (Friday) has seen yet another new brew, so new it doesn't have a name yet! Brewed with the rare American hop Comet (along with Chinook) it smells like a fruit salad penny chew if you remember such things; all 4 fermenters are full with beer, so hopefully we'll soon have caught up a bit and actually have some to sell!

Next week will see the re-brewing of Oceanic which has gained rave reviews so far and is a deliciously mellow, tropical and juicy example of a modern-day pale ale of which the UK excels.  We'll also be brewing another dark beer with the return of "Spanish Main" - providing I can find 15kg of muscovado sugar - which was only our fourth ever brew.  Some might even find it's way into the whisky barrel...

In the fermenters today...

Today we have, in our fermenters, the following beverages...

FV1 - Diggin' up the King, India Brown Ale, 5.4% approx.  This is currently at 20c and fermenting well, it should be around 1010 tomorrow evening when the chillers can go on.

FV2 - empty, we have a defective column pump on the chiller unit although some shiny new ones have been acquired and just need fitting.  The FV also needs a NIPAC clean (phosphoric acid) to remove some beerstone which has started to accumulate, we may do this tomorrow.

FV3 - Simcoe Plus, Mid-Atlantic pale ale, 5.4%.  On chill, currently at 16c

FV4 - Santa Muerte, golden hoppy ale, 4.6%-ish.  On chill, currently at 8.5c, will transfer to conditioning tank tomorrow for dry-hopping.

What don't we want in our beer?

For those not in the know, twigs is the name for hops without much flavour or aroma so, basically, nearly everything from the UK and a lot from Europe.

These twigs have been gathered from hops used recently and arranged thusly to make their point!

Hops are a bine so they're not really twigs - in reality bits of bine - but hey, I didn't invent the name... or did I?  Ccan't remember now...

Simcoe plus makes a return!

Today we brewed a beer we've been asked to re-make for a long time; how could we refuse our public's demands?  Not very well it seems, so Simcoe Plus is now in FV3!

This version 2.0 is a bit different - read "better" - than the first one and contains more Centennial and Simcoe in various stages of the process including our new flavour hop addition which is definitely adding more ooomph to the hop character, or so the few finished beers with this tweak are suggesting!

Tomorrow sees another brew, this time maybe an India Brown ale, although Gazza hasn't decided as of 23:35 the evening before; brew schedules?  Meh, this is how we roll...

Santa Muerte is in the casa...

Massive thanks to Julie Thomas for her sterling work today and, after said work, we have a beer in FV4 called Santa Muerte or "Saint Death" in her native Mexico.  Why Santa Muerte?  It just is, OK?

Golden in colour and hopefully around 4.3%, this will be a hoppy brew with Cascade, Columbus, Chinook, Centennial, Summit, Citra and Herkules to give a full-on US hop character.

Next week will see, touch wood, two more brews with Simcoe Plus pencilled into the "brewing schedule" (posh, eh?) and something else, maybe a new beer if we feel like using some of the new Comet hops.  We also need to re-brew Citraic as you thirsty lot have bought it all in a week...  cheers!

Julie digging out the copper!

Back to normal-ish

After the celebrity stardom of the meet the brewer last week (plus a couple of days of more normal cask washing, racking and transferring beer) it's back to it this week as an (almost) normal one - bank holidays excepted, obviously!

We're off delivering to London tomorrow, then hopefully brewing twice or at least once although Gazza hasn't decided what as of yet... he says he'll have a think about it tonight when he's had a rummage around the hopstore...

We're hoping to be even more back to normal next week as Tom may be returning to the brewery, this would be a great relief to all concerned and hopefully will allow us to resume pushing the beer into new pubs in addition to looking after our existing customers.

A request - if anyone has or sees any of our casks can you please let us know where they are as we're getting worryingly short at Hopcraft towers... they are either turquoise/black/turquoise plastic or steel, or we also have some purple/blue/purple metal ones too with "Nye rental" on them; cheers!

Meet the Brewer and other stories

The "Meet the Brewer" at Edinburgh's excellent craft beer bar the Hanging Bat went really well; would you believe 23 people actually paid £25 a head to hear Gazza speak for nearly 3 hours (with food and beer breaks, naturally...) about everything beer related?  I can't either, but that's what happened...

The evening was a tasting of 6 of the 17 beers on upstairs chosen by Gazza and Sam the head barman to go with the food (chorizo & chick pea stew topped with black pudding and poached egg, spicy fish wrap and finally sticky toffee pudding) whilst Gazza rambled on at length about the beers, the brewing and many other things besides!  When we finally wrapped up it was gone 22:00 and the beers had gone down very well indeed, so I think we can judge the evening a success!

The remainder of the week will be spent transferring beer and then Gazza heads off to Crewe for a collab with Michelle Kelsall's Offbeat brewery; the beer is to be a pale hoppy little number with hops from the Pacific, look out for it in a few weeks' time....

Next week is, after the bank holiday, back to normal with - hopefully, providing manpower can be arranged - two brews taking place and more casking up and delivering.

End to a busy week....

Massive thanks to Dean Roberts who has been a huge help during the past two weeks in helping us brew and generally keep going... cheers mate!

We have two more beers in the FV at the end of this week as we're not brewing next week; "Oceanic", a 4/5%-ish pale with Galaxy and Nelson Sauvin and "Five Seas" an old-skool US-hopped brew with Cascade, Centennial, Cluster, Columbus and Chinook which should come out around 3.8%.

Anyone in Edinburgh next week can come say hello to Gazza at the Hanging Bat where he's doing a meet the brewer on Tuesday evening, not sure if this is sold out though as it's a ticket-only event.

Today was a big racking day with 60 casks filled... as you can see here.

Today's racking.

Dean with his dinner - Galaxy.

Dean digs the mash...

Smooth as a smooth thing...

First off, Massive thanks to Dean Roberts who answered my pleas for help and has been an absolute star this week in the brewery as I knew he would be; we've brewed together before and he knows how to brew and, even more importantly, likes the sort of beers I like so we think the same way!

We managed to get two brews in this week, both went smoothly without any incident and, touch wood, no problems of any kind!  The first is a rebrew of Simcoe Plus as we always like to have at least one of the "plus" range in stock at any time and Mosaic+ has only today all gone.

The other was a collaboration with the lovely Sue Hayward of Waen brewery; it was a true collaboration as we had no plans or preconceptions what to make, all that was decided on the day, and the result was a 4%-ish dark beer which doesn't really conform to any of the usual styles!  It uses German Special W malt which is a Belgian-style fruitcakey tasting malt along with Roasted Barley and a few others, and for the hops we kept it European with Polish, Czech and German varieties providing the bitterness and flavour.

As it's not slottable into any style we've called it "Whatever" and it'll be around in a few weeks' time, so look out for it, or whatever...

Sue mashing in

A bit of help!

Whilst Tom is recovering from his operation for a few weeks Hopcraft Towers will be host to long-time collaborator with Gazza in brewing / travelling / drinking Dean from Newton Abbot; we'll be brewing up some hoppy delights with Simcoe Plus making a welcome return on Wednesday, albeit in version 2.0 mode, and the following week we have two beers to plan... now where's that Farams hop catalogue?

On Thursday we'll also be host to Sue and Paul from Waen brewery and will be making... no idea as of yet, but I'm hoping we can stick a load of hops in it!  This is part one of a "two-way" collab so when we're up in Mid Wales we'll be brewing up something along their style, probably with some sort of fruit in it.

So, please bear with us for the next month or so, I promise we'll do our very best to keep it as "situation normal" as possible!