Warmer climes...

No, not Wales (although it is today...) but Gazza is off to Mauritius for the rest of the week so Jay is in charge of Hopcraft Towers!  All the usual stuff will be happening; bottling, casking, transferring and suchlike... so it's business as usual as far as we're concerned.

Next week will see two brews with the much-requested return of "Mate Spawn and Die" plus another brew of "Citraic" as we've sold the lot in a week!

Double it, maybe double it again?

That's what is happening with our bottling at present!

We started by bottling a single cask into 330ml bottles (we get about 120 bottles per cask) but soon decided that this just wasn't enough and so went to two casks of each beer, or about 240 bottles which gives 13 cases of bottles.

We're now at the point, a mere 4 months into the project, when we may have to start bottling at least 3, maybe 4, nines of each beer; this is 162 litres or 1 brewer's barrel (an eighth of the total batch) and will be getting on for 500 bottles!  We'll probably try 3 casks first, but even so the growth of sales in bottles - and, to be fair, kegs too - has surprised us immensely, although several people did say we'd soon be overwhelmed with demand... Sue from Waen Brewery was right!

So, expect to see more of our bottles around very soon as they're now on their way to wholesalers, but even so they'll still remain  a fairly small part of our output... albeit a growing one which we're keen to encourage.

Two more favorites return!

Here at Hopcraft towers we've got rebrew fever!

Put that down to lack of inspiration in new recipes if you want - you'd be wrong! - but the fact is that drinkers and customers have been asking for some of our beers again.  Top of the list seems to be our gloriously fruity display of the luscious Vic Secret hop "Mate Spawn and Die" (which will re-appear shortly, we promise) but, first, we have two very different beers in case you missed them first time around or liked them so much you want them again...

First up is a variant on Graveyard Eyes (our chocolatey Sorachi Ace porter) "Gazza and Jay's Maple Porter" where we take a 700 litre tank of Graveyard and then add Maple Syrup flavouring to it as well as, when casking/kegging/bottling, yet another squeeze of maple syrup goes into the containers (although not the bottles, that would take way too long....)

If there are any requests for rebrews then let us know, and we'll consider them!  Some beers will never be brewed again for various reasons, but there are plenty we are either planning to make again or are in the "maybe" pile so are ripe for suggestion!

Something old, something new.

That's what we have brewed this week!

Well, okay, this new brew of "Deutsch Projekt" is the same recipe as the previous two, but this time it will showcase the third new German hop, the exotic-sounding Hallertauer Blanc, which promises Nelson Sauvin-esque nuances; I'm not convinced, having used a small amount before, but this time there is a lot more (150% more to be exact!) in the conditioning tanks so we'll see...

The other is a beer which always sells really well when it's released, probably owing something to it's sessionable strength and uncompromising hop character!  "Temple of Love" is a golden brew with Cascade, Chinook and Summit hops (we couldn't get any Belma which were in the original brew but hey ho, Summit and Chinook are a good alternative) and should give equally as good a result.  Temple has been so popular that we may even make it a permanent beer... although maybe that's going a bit far for a brewery which never wanted a permanent beer range! 

Next week we'll be brewing up another repeat, this time it's the super-pale and super-citrussy "Party Line", full of Cascade and Centennial lemon/limey goodness... 

Bottling!

Yesterday we completed a mammoth bottling session of "Sunday League Relegation Playoffs", "Oceanic", "Deutsch Projekt Huell Melon" and "Midnight in Antarctica"... long day, but 700+ bottles now conditioning in their boxes!

Now all we have to do is label them and sell them.... 

Brewing next week!

I'm happy because next week we're brewing one of my favourite beers, one which is still pretty unique from my experience, and one which always goes down well.

What is it you ask?  It's Graveyard Eyes, our Sorachi Ace porter, that's what! I've been playing with the recipe as I don't think we had the bitterness and hop flavour right last time, so hopefully I've nailed that with the lovely Polish Junga hops rather than the slightly too hedgerowy Green Bullet.  The malt grist is pretty much the same as last time, although we're using Propino malt this time, along with loads of lovely Weyermann Carafa Spezial 1 and 3 de-husked chocolate malt.  We owe a gratitude to Dean Roberts, long-time friend and beery colleague, as Gazza copied the idea from one of his homebrews!

Also, as it went so well last time and people have asked for it - plus I quite liked it too! -  we're extending the brew to 12 barrels (around 2300 litres) to make a tankful of Gazza and Jay's Maple Porter!  This will be available first as it isn't dry-hopped, and will also be available in keg as we think that dispense suits it very well.

Have a good worker's weekend everyone, keep the hoppy faith...

Organised Chaos

.... is what it's been at Hopcraft Towers today!

We've racked 3 tanks of beer (Deutsch Projekt Huell Melon, Sunday League Relegation Playoffs and Bang tidy Sorachi) plus Citraic and Sharks against Surfers are in tank and dry-hopped. All tanks are cleaned down, that's two FVs and 3 CTs, floor washed, everything put away....

Time for a coffee and a sit-down I reckon!

This time, we're using the right yeast!

We are, I've already checked the packet!

Those who have been on this journey with us for a while (since May last year actually!) will remember we brewed a "Belgian American brown ale" with loads of lovely hops in it... well, what we didn't tell you was there was never supposed to be anything Belgian about it at all!  

It's all Gazza's fault for not checking the yeast pack before pitching, although if they were different colours it would be a distinct advantage!  Basically, a pack of T58 Belgian yeast went into the brew rather than the intended US05, giving it a spicy, estery character which - although it admittedly worked and the beer was popular - wasn't what we intended, so we're having another go almost a year later.

The malt recipe has been amended slightly and the hops are... well, pretty much totally changed from last time in addition times and amounts although the same blockbuster trio is in use; Summit, Columbus, Chinook, with the dry-hop not yet decided but we're leaning towards Citra or Mosaic for a huge fruity blast.

So, stay tuned for all the exciting news on whether this attempt is any more what we intended it to be than the last one... which isn't difficult, to be honest.

Two old favourites return!

This week sees two brews at Hopcraft Towers and, in a rare case of unadventurousness, we're re-brewing two beers which we've done before!

First off is "Sharks against Surfers"; this is named after a song by punk anarchists Eastfield and showcases super-pale malt alongside modern American and Australian hops to give a dry, fruity and complex beer which belies it's straw colour in the flavour stakes.

Second will be perennial favourite "Citraic" which - as the name suggests - uses the lusciously fruity American hops Citra and Mosaic to produce a hugely flavoursome brew with a very modern, fruit-driven flavour all over a pale golden body with modern UK malts.

Both went down very well on their previous outings and, therefore, have been selected by Gazza for rebrewing with the usual slight recipe tweaks; Sharks is now all super-pale malt rather than lager malt, whilst Citraic uses the new UK Propino malt.  All hops are the same as before; surely a first!

Collab with Wild Weather - the away leg!

Last Wednesday saw us travel down to Reading to deliver some beers to our customers down that way and then partake of a few beers with Mike and Iain from Wild Weather brewing of Silchester.  We ended up, as predicted, in the wonderful Nag's Head where Jody plied us with all manner of cask, keg and bottled beers of varying degrees of awesomeness; some of the samples from new brewers proved that some of them need to do a lot of work on recipes and pricing!

Thursday was brewday and, after a slight delay, we mashed in with Maris Otter, Carared and Melanoidin malts and hopped with Liberty, Chinook and Mosaic; the dry-hop will also be Mosaic and a touch of Sorachi Ace which is never a bad thing!  The resulting beer will be a Red IPA with plenty of hops...

The name for both beers has been decided as "Sunday League Relegation Playoffs"; this is a piss-take on the "premier division" brewers who have all the money and power whilst us little guys make do with the scraps left over!  And I bet you never thought there was discord in brewing, did you?

Anyhow, our "home" collab, the orange session stout, goes to conditioning tomorrow with the orange extract and Mandarina Bavaria hops (plus a dash of Sorachi Ace too) and we're in the planning stages of a dual release event in Reading in a months' time or so; stay tuned for more information on this.

Collab with Wild Weather - home leg

Thursday saw Iain and Mike from Wild Weather brewing of Berkshire make the long trek down the M4 to a drizzly South Wales (default weather then!) to brew up the first leg of our 2-way collaboration set of unusual brews.

This one is a bit of a weird one in that we don't quite know what style it would fit into... but as I'm the kind of brewer who thinks beer styles are for obsessives with nothing better to think about we don't really care!  It's a 3.4%-ish dark beer, very dark, with 7 different malts including 2 types of de-husked chocolate, Melanoidin, Carared, wheat and a few others I can't remember.

Hops were kept simple with Columbus for first wort then the oily, herbaceous Czech Vittal for flavour and aroma, then at 90c we added a whole load of zested and chopped oranges just for a bit of added interest!  Dry-hopping will be with German Mandarina Bavaria and a hint of Sorachi Ace, so it should be a complex little beastie.

It has a working name of "Second Division Collaboration", which will probably change by the time we come to design the pumpclip, the name is a piss-take of the "premier division" of brewers which exists nowadays whilst us second division guys struggle along without the royalties.... if you excuse the crap fussball analogy.

The second leg is happening next week down in Silchester, Berkshire, when we'll be cooking up a hoppy Red IPA.... stay tuned to this frequency for more mudanity, hop lovers!

Quiet zone

Apologies for the lack of updates, but Gazza has been on holiday for a week of much-needed time away from the non-stop brewing life!

Next week we host Wild Weather brewing for a collaboration low-ABV stout with oranges which is pretty damn craft in our book... then we're off for a return collab the following week which will be a Red IPA.

This week we're racking Straight to the Light, Oceanic and Deutsch Projekt and transferring to conditioning tank "Midnight in Antarctica", our white porter, and the latest batch of Tidy bitter...

More news coming soon including more info on the Hopbunker and when it's due to open.

Meet the brewer in Chester

Well if you didn't know about this then you've missed it... !  

Last Thursday Gazza teamed up with Sue from Waen brewery of Llandiloes to do a joint meet the brewer at the Cellar Bar in Chester.  We made it a little different than your usual event with a light-hearted competition which saw "weird foods" matched with one of Sue's cask beers against one of our keg beers with a vote on the best one (which was very one-sided due to Waen having a big fan club there!)

The food included Teriyaki crickets, horse jerky, smoked pork scratchings and chocolate cake and, although in my opinion you can't really match beer with food to the extent some people claim you can, the beer snacks did go rather well with some of the beers and the crickets went down much better than we'd imagined!

Steel City collaboration brew

Apologies for the lack of updates recently, but we've been way too busy to blog about stuff...

Anyhow, today (Sunday 15th) was our first ever weekend brew and definitely the first time on a Sunday which, so it turns out,  isn't really a position of strength seeing as all the butty shops are closed!  Despite the lack of porcine sustenance, however, we managed to knock up a very unusual beer indeed; a white porter!

Well, I say white porter, although that's a bit of a piss-take really as it's more a pale ale with some unusual flavourings, but as it's the second in our "Insult to History" series the more bizarre-sounding category definitely sounds better... so, in essence, it's a golden-coloured beer, around 4.8%, with flavour from locally-roasted coffee from Ferrari's of Bridgend plus vanilla, coconut and, if we can get some, Sorachi Ace hops too; this should be one unusual brew alright!

The coffee is added in two steps; the bulk of it, 5kg, was added into the copper at 95c - that being the optimum temperature for brewing coffee - plus an extra kilo will be added into the conditioning tanks after a few days of "cold steeping" in water which extracts different flavours than the "hot steeping" and ensures all the lovely coffee character is installed into this brew and giving it a "darker" flavour than the colour might suggest!

For a beer which tastes a lot darker than it looks we decided on the slightly unusual name of "Midnight in Antarctica"; hopefully this will reflect what this creative brew means not just conjure up images of a bloke saying "I may be gone some time"... time will tell.

The crushed coffee ready for adding

6kg of locally-roasted coffee!

Dave bashes the coffee in a maltsack with the mallet

Dave adds the coffee to the copper after the boil

Dave adding the final hop charge

Racking Dance with the Devil

Today we racked (casked) up three tanks of beer, nearly 2000 litres in all.  The beers in question were "The Party Line", "Millennium Bug" and our new red IPA "Dance with the Devil", a collaboration brew with new Cardiff micro Crafty Devil.

It was our first taste of this brew and we were all dying to see how it had come out after 10 days maturation in conditioning tank 8 with 2kg of Citra and a kilo of Columbus pellets...  pretty well, it turned out, with a lush fruity, mangoey citra nose, smooth rich maltiness and a solid bitter, hoppy character; this will intensify in cask so we're very hopeful of something pretty damn special in a few weeks' time!

This week we're brewing twice to re-stock the tanks after a busy few weeks; first up is an as yet unnamed brew using the new American "hop of the year" (if internet gossip is anything to go by) Azzacca, then we're doing the final brew - until the new season hops arrive in summer - of perennial favourite Oceanic with Nelson Sauvin and Galaxy hops... the brewery is going to smell lush this week methinks!

The twig box runneth over

...well, almost....

To explain for those that live under a stone on Uranus (hur hur), we find twigs rather amusing, but especially hop twigs which a lot of brewers use as a derogatory phrase for boring old man's brown beer as it's made with UK hops which, so the story goes, are half twigs, 33% leaves, 20% hop cones and the rest random organic (and occasionally non-organic) material.  

Well, to be honest, ALL hops come complete with twigs - especially American ones - which have some whoppers hiding in them!  They're not actually twigs,  usually parts of the hop bine itself, although twigs is a far more evocative name for them!

Anyhow, we've been collecting all the wood we harvest from our hops in our very own twig box and, as you can see here, it's getting rather full now...

We do a jokey "twig of the week" post on Facebook where we show a photo of the week's best twig for the jollity of the populace at large, examples of which can also be seen below.

More serious stuff next time, I promise.  Oh yeah, we brewed our chocolate rye oatmeal stout today, if you're interested...

See, it's a bine!

Finings tests in glorious colour!

I've talked about finings tests before (at some length!) so this photo is only on here as I like the picture... plus it's a good indication of what we do to ensure the beer leaving us will clear down in cask the way most customers expect it to and thus be served reasonably clear, or at least as clear as the hop oils in suspension allow!

We use the minimum amount of finings we can get away with as they strip out flavour, mouthfeel and body from the finished beer - and anyhow, who wants fish guts dissolved in phosphoric acid in their beer? - although brewing the kind of beers we do, VERY pale and hoppy, the lower limit is a tad higher than I'd like as any clarity imperfections are very obvious in the style of beers we generally produce, meaning we must add more than I'd really like to (actually, I'd love to add zero, but the UK isn't ready for that as yet except in a very few cases)...

In the photo here you can see the finings are clumping the yeast together into floccs which are heavier than the individual yeast cells themselves and, consequently, sink to the bottom of the bottle (or cask, or keg, or silo, or whatever you put the beer in) in a matter of hours rather than the weeks it would take for the yeast to settle out under it's own violition (and it still wouldn't be totally clear after a few weeks); fining is, in essence, the process of making yeast (and protein) do what it would do in weeks in a matter of hours.

On the left we have "Mate Spawn and Die" and on the right "Dance with the Devil"; MSaD was casked up today, DwtD was transferred from fermenter to conditioning tank.  We do a finings test at this point to check the protein fining in the fermenter has worked and taken out the majority of the haze causing protein which, as you can see, it has!

More beers on the way!

Regular readers won't be surprised to hear this, seeing as we don't really do the traditional "standard range" thing, but I thought this week's brew was worthy of a bit of a plug seeing as it's not a pale & hoppy one for a change, plus a reminder what's going on with the rest of the brews we've completed recently.

This week we'll be brewing "Straight to the Light", a chocolate rye oatmeal stout, which will hopefully come out as lovely as it sounds right there!  Specialist German chocolate rye malt and UK malted oats will be combined with East Anglian pale malt and some unusual Polish hops - Junga - to produce a stout with a difference, or at least not your usual boring "dry stout" with no hop character and a mere hint of roasted barley...

The following week will see the deployment of a brand new hop which comes highly recommended by random people on the internet, which is important as no-one I know has actually used it yet!  Azzacca promises to be a big fruity beast and we're hoping for great things from it... hopefully it'll be as good as new Aussie behemoth Vic Secret which has lent it's catty, fruity and luscious character to "Mate Spawn and Die" which we casked up today; beers generally taste better after a few weeks in cask, but this one tasted amazing straight out of the conditioning tank today, albeit with a mouthful of hop bits to contend with!

Our collab with Cardiff's Crafty Devil brewery "Dance with the Devil" is on it's dry hops now and will be casked up next week alongside the final tanks of "Millennium bug" (lean fruitiness) and "Party Line" (zesty lime marmalade!) for your delectation....

Keep the faith, hop lovers...

Start of the Deutsch Projekt

We like projects, or even projekts; they glue together a series of beers with a tenuous link and make it look as if we know what's going on with brewing and in the wider beer world.  Yeah, that's right, of course we know what's going on...

Anyhow, fresh on the heels of the "Whole Pack Project" - in which silly amounts of dry-hopping (5kg per 650 litres) is added to the conditioning tanks to infuse the brew with  massive amounts of hop aroma - comes our latest endeavour, the "Deutsch Projekt".  Now the more multilingual amongst you - or, to be fair, anyone with a modicum of common sense, seeing as a hell of a lot of English comes from German - will have realised that this is our "German Project", but what could that be?

Well, it probably won't surprise you to learn that it's about hops.  When you think about German hops you'd probably imagine the classic Magnum, one of the world's finest bittering hops, but it's hardly a sublimely luscious "hollywood" hop as is Citra or Centennial, for example.  You may think of Brewer's Gold which is, admittedly, a pretty damn good flavour and aroma hop although it's still quite European in it's restrained, leafy way, or maybe one of the many "noble" lager hops such as Tettnang or Spalt which have, for years, ruled lager production.  So, you may rightly ask, why the hell are we making beer with these kinds of hops?

We're not.  Well, actually, we are using Magnum, but only because it's a fantastic bittering hop and Gazza loves it, but the main thrust of the project - sorry, projekt - is the new German "wunderhops" which have recently been released and, presumably, are supposed to transform the German hop industry, already a world leader, into a world leader with some new-world style hops; we've had a quick dabble in the past with Hallertauer Blanc and weren't that impressed but this time we've got enough hops to do it justice - hopefully!

So, the project - or projekt - will encompass three of the new German varieties (we're not using Polaris as it tastes like cactus in a not very nice way) and also the one that started it all, Cascade, but these particular cones were grown in Germany!  Hopefully we'll do all the individual hops justice - principally by adding loads of them as dry hops - so look out for the beers in the coming months and, as is usual, we always enjoy feedback both good and bad!

Click the names to see the official info on Mandarina Bavaria, Huell Melon, Hallertauer Blanc.

Collab brew with Crafty Devil

Today we hosted Adam from Cardiff's latest micro brewer, Crafty Devil of Canton, when we cooked up what should be a right tasty Red IPA together.  The brewery was positively seething with people as Jay and mate Gav were also in attendance, meaning Gazza could actually deal with emails and sort out some paperwork rather than digging the mash!  Well, that's his excuse for lazing about...

Anyhow, the resulting beer should be around 5.5% and it's definitely red, a difficult thing to achieve in beer believe me!  It's hopped with Centennial, Amarillo and Columbus and will be dry-hopped with Citra and more Columbus to give a very hoppy, bitter and well tasty brew!  As is par for the course it's not got a name as yet but there's loads of time for that.

Jay and Adam mash in

About to start breaking up the hops.... Gav, Gazza and Adam

Jay and Adam with the mash

Adam digs out the mash

A tasting session whilst the transfer was on!

Fermenting!