The black malt in the copper mystery solved

My current boss, has been a brewer for many a year, occasionally drops a fascinating fact into the conversation. He started out working for Courage, so Imperial Russian Stout occasionally crops up, and I'm pleased to say that last week the mystery of black malt in the copper was solved.

For those of you unfamiliar with brewing Imperial Russian Stout the instructions tell you to add black malt to the copper (kettle) two hours into the three hour boil. Nowadays it might be common for hops to be added at just about any stage of brewing but having malt anywhere but the mash tun is decidedly odd. As indeed my boss said when he talked about it. He couldn't work out why until he realised that the malt in the copper acted as an abrasive agent to scrub off some of the crud that builds up on the heating element during a long boil of a strong wort so restoring some efficiency.

I for one have been able to sleep easier in my bed knowing this. I wonder if he ever brewed an AK in his Courage days?

Golden Pints 2019

The Golden Pint is not made
but grows on a green tree:
A strong man with his crystal eyes
is a man born free. 

The oxen pass under the yoke
and the blind are led at will:
But a man born free has a path of his own
and a house on the hill. 

And men are men who till the land
and women are women who weave:
Fifty men own the lemon grove
and no man is a slave.

And to think they gave Herbert Read a knighthood when he can't even get a rhyme right, the women should clearly have been waving. Just shows how ridiculous the honours system is. Anyway, the Golden Pints are not something I take notes for but I'll see what I can dredge up from my memory for the past year.


Best UK Cask Beer:

I have undoubtedly drunk more from Thurstons brewery than anything else but this year but a pub I go to in Dorking has started regularly, but not always, having Timothy Taylor's Landlord on and my eyes light up whenever I see it so it's got to be Landlord.


Best UK Keg Beer:

The have been at least three occasions this year when I have suckled from the Devil's drainpipe, a couple of them even of my own free will. The Hog's Back beers drunk under duress when I went to see the mighty Hawkwind weren't anything special and cask would definitely have been an improvement. Thurstons trial of their Saison on keg was a must and if it becomes a regular thing could imperil my immortal soul. But the winner is one from Abbeydale. After a long session on Harvey's excellent cask beer I was tempted into the Rake for one more. As the cask there isn't great I couldn't help but think it was a disappointment. So we eyes wandered to see what was in the over chilled and carbonated section. Spying a Brett. beer I went for it and I have to say it was well done. So the winner is a bretty pale ale from Abbeydale.


Best UK Bottled Beer:

Small pack beer for me this year has mostly been stuff blagged from work. Beer's so much cheaper when you don't pay for it! Mostly I think it was Ridgeway beers, I've definitely developed a taste for one of the Bad Elves. The winner is one my favourite sister bought me though: Tynt Meadow. I'd wanted this beer for a long while and it's very good indeed.


Best UK Canned Beer:

Again, work has proved fruitful for cans thanks to Laine brewery so I'll go with All For One from them.


Best Overseas Draught:

Did I go overseas this year? Oh yes, Germany. Can't say I was overwhelmed with any of the normal lagers but I was quite taken with the Schlenkerla so that.


Best Overseas Bottled Beer:

For this one the winner's got to be Obadiah Poundage though, what a beer.


Best Overseas Canned Beer:

Hmmm...did I have anything canned from overseas. Don't think so.


Best collaboration brew:

Not really my thing.


Best Overall Beer:

Lovely, lovely Landlord.


Best Branding:

What's Lindsay at Too Much Black Coffee done this year? Oh yes, VIPA.

Best UK Brewery:

I know Landlord won best beer but I've never been as keen on the rest of their range so Thurstons can have this one. The Milk Stout's too sweet mind.


Best Overseas Brewery: 

Let's stick with Schlenkerla.


Best New Brewery Opening 2019:

No idea.


Pub/Bar of the Year:

It can only be The Champion Pub of Surrey: The Crown, Horsell.


Best New Pub/Bar Opening 2019:

No idea for this one either.


Beer Festival of the Year:

The GBBF wasn't a vintage year for me this this time round, but it's still the best festival.


Supermarket of the Year:

Not had much call for supermarket beer this year.


Independent Retailer of the Year:

I've used it as a pub more than a shop but Cobbetts Real Ale.


Online Retailer of the Year:

Not bought any beer online.


Best Beer Book or Magazine:

Boak and Bailey's Balmy Nectar mentions me by name, thus making me even more famous. So it should be a shoe in, but unfortunately for them also published this year was The Craft Brewing Handbook, surely one of the greatest books ever written, so it's got to be that.


Best Beer Blog or Website:

Martyn Cornell has had some cracking posts recently, making a trip to try Mercers Meat Stout  and breaking the fantastic news that confirms Fuggles aren't a continental interloper and that they're descended from Goldings so demonstrating that Farnham Whitebines really are the daddy of them all. Well, mummy really.
But no competition can see off Boak and Bailey in the blog stakes, they tirelessly bring out a stream of interesting stuff to read, so they're the champions this year.


Simon Johnson Award for Best Beer Twitterer:

For coming up with a beer that's truly innovative (I mean, have you ever heard of another beer made with hop leaves?) Danielle Bekker @BinaryBotanical has got nothing but stick on twitter. Those crafties love innovation provided it tastes of American hops. Yet despite all the stick she's never told anyone to go do one which surely deserves an award. So here one is.

The New IPA by Scott Janish

Scott Janish's The New IPA is a welcome addition to the literature available on hops. Subtitled "A scientific guide to hop aroma and flavour" it covers where hop flavours come from and how they're affected by the various processes and parameters of brewing. This does make the scope of the book rather extensive, and in addition to chapters on hop components and the effect of hop additions at different times information on the effect of things like liquor treatment, grist composition and yeast strain on hop flavour is also included.

I found the details on how addition timings affects the concentration of various hops oils and which varieties are high or low in different compounds particularly interesting. Another step has been taken on the long journey to turn hop additions from an art to a science!

The information in the book comes from a variety of sources. There are well over 300 references cited many of which, if I ever have the time, deserve further study. The author also details his own practical experience and experiments, both as a home brewer and as a professional brewer, and in the final chapter other professionals also provide their tips. This does mean that some of the information provided has more weight than others and I did have to raise an eyebrow on reading that limit dextinase is considered more important for wort fermentability than beta-amylase. It is perhaps best to think that the text provides signposts for further research rather than definitive conclusions, but when looking at something as complicated as beer flavour practical experience in your own brewery will always count the most.

The book is self published, and though a good job has been done, there is room for improvement - I'm sure underlining text is now considered a crime against typography! My criticism are however minor and I would strongly recommend this book as an addition to any brewer's bookshelf.

A new definition of Craft Brewery

In the excellent The Craft Brewing Handbook editor Chris Smart puts forward a new definition of "craft brewery" that gets closer to the real meaning of "craft", and indeed reality. First he rapidly demolishes guff about brewing less than 6,000,000 US barrels a year (7,000,000 hl), or crap about which particular capitalists own the company.

Instead he puts it down to something that surely makes more sense to any definition of craft: what the brew length is:

Brew length, the amount of wort produced for fermentation in each batch, seems a more equitable metric to me. It’s hard to argue that a brew length of just 10 or 20 hL isn’t craft. By comparison who would consider a brew length of 500 hL as craft? Not many, so, the number and perhaps a workable definition lies somewhere in between. It is worth noting that beer produced by a larger brewer in a pilot facility or smaller brewery would be covered within this definition as craft, personally I’m very comfortable with that. It is pretty arbitrary but I would consider anything below a brew length of 50 hL is craft, anything bigger than, say, 200 hL is possibly not, and we can all argue about the middle ground, preferably over a nice pint (or half a liter if you’re metric).

It does make more sense to me, though it's still not without problems. Is a flashy automated 50hl brewery that does eight brews a day really craft? And we have muttered at work that having to dig out the mash tun by hand provides an elegantly simple way of telling if a brewery is or isn't craft. But having said that just going on the brew length does work rather well, and if there is a grey area I quite like the suggestion that it should be argued about over a nice pint.

Woking Beer Festival 2019

Shortly before attending this year's Woking Beer Festival I had the misfortune to waste five minutes of my life reading an article moaning on about CAMRA, their festivals, and the state of real ale in general: "the beers too warm, the people are too old, cask is doomed, blah, blah, blah".  I'm not going to link to the article but if you have an excess amount of life and want to waste some I think it was in the Brewer's Journal.

With what seemed to me to be rather dated and inaccurate whinging fresh in my mind I was curious to see what the event was like and who turned up to it.

Sure enough, the casks had proper cooling on them, as they've done for some time. I could be wrong on this but I thought it was CAMRA policy now. As to who attended I was delighted when without any prompting from me one of my friend piped up that there were more women and young people than there used to be. Which agrees with my thoughts about what I've seen at CAMRA festivals in recent years.

This is all anecdotal evidence of course, but it's not the first time I've read things about cask beer that just don't fit with what I'm seeing. Perhaps Woking is out on a limb as a cask stronghold? We do have the Champion Pub of Surrey after all. And come to think of it we had an American style brewpub serving beer from tanks years ago so we must be the cutting edge of craft too. Yes, there you have it: Woking, the beer capital of Britain, pizzas fit for princes, prone to destruction by martian invaders.

One thing that does concern me about the festival though is the number of volunteers was worryingly low, and not many of them are spring chickens. I didn't do my usual Friday session this year as I was at a work do. I might have to miss out on going as a punter and volunteer for the Saturday next year if there's another clash.

The return of historic porter

Multi-national corporations may well spread misery around the world but they don't half have good marketing budgets. So I was delighted to get an invitation to the launch of Goose Island's (ABInBev) Obadiah Poundage porter, named after the writer of a famous 1760 letter on porter, though the beer was brewed to an 1840 Truman's recipe.

The evening kicked off appropriately enough at a pub with Truman's branding, though I passed on the chance to drink a revived Truman's beer: there was Landlord on! I always think it's a result when I spot Landlord in a pub so I was delighted with such a promising start.

An awful lot of beery people turned up, though people from the Brewery History Society were amongst the earliest arrivals. I sure this was entirely due to our thirst for knowledge. After a couple of pints of networking we went on a tour of the site of Truman's brewery led by Derek Prentice, a former Truman's brewer. 

It was big. And there are brewery tunnels running under Brick Lane. I doubt they'll beat the Bamberg tunnels though.

Then it was on to the main event at Goose Island's brewpub.

I was a bit disappointed when I saw two handpumps without pump clips on the bar. I feared a re-run of the horrors of Hampstead. But salvation lay at the far end of the bar where they had a Truman's mild and bitter on draught. The cask mild in particular was flying out, clearly showing there's a vast untapped demand for it.

There were even more beery people in the pub and I reached GBBF levels of bumping into people I know. This time there was no power point presentation for us to see, instead Mike Siegel of Goose Island, Derek Prentice and Ron Pattinson were interviewed about the beer by Beer Writer of the Year Emma Inch. It worked really well, except for when it came to getting those in depth technical details I know you all love.

Mike

Ron

Derek

The beer was made with heritage barley, old English hop varieties and historic malting techniques. Though probably not that much brown malt, unlike when I had a go at making historic porter. A portion was aged in oak vats where it underwent a secondary fermentation with Bretanomyces clausenii (probably my old friend WLP645). This was then blended with a freshly made version as the porter brewers did back in its heyday at a ratio of 1:2. If you haven't seen it there's a video about the making of the beer here.

The beer had an off white head, a Bretty smell, a slight smokiness with a roasted astringency and some background sweetness. God I hate writing tasting notes. I really enjoyed the beer though.

There was more networking after the presentation, and on the way back home I popped into The Pride for a swift half of ESB.

I'm sure you'll be as pleased as I was to see that the special feature is still in place:

Beer in the dark (mild) ages

If you've been drinking beer as long as me you might recall that back in 2013 we had barely emerged from the dark mild ages. But going back even further than that is hard to remember. I have vague memories of huddling round the fire in the cave that served as my local pub, communicating in grunts (not much has changed there admittedly) and swapping chickens for murky brews made with twigs. To find more exciting things to drink you had to go to beer festivals. But what sort of beers did they have on?  Well having recently rediscovered the programme for the 1990 Pig's Ear Beer Festival I can tell you.

Hop Back Summer Lightning was on, an experiment in making a golden cask ale, something which sadly never caught on. This was after all the days of dark mild. Though it seems modern craft brewers are now giving it another go and it could turn out to the saviour of cask. Hurrah!

King and Barnes were still going, as were Mitchells and Maclays. The latter might explain why the St Austell range looks rather different to how it is now. I did drink some St Austell beers down in Croyde back in those pre-Roger Ryman days and I have to say they weren't very good. 

For those too young to know the ancient art of working out the alcohol content from the original gravity you subtract 1000 from the mysterious four figure number after the beer name and divide the remainder by ten to get the approximate ABV.  

Belhaven was still independent, and their marketing department really went to town on the beer names, having all of  60 up to 90 shillings (shillings were the recently introduced money unit they had in Scotland. They were worth 12d each which could take some effort with the maths, but it was certainly less effort than having to carry chickens around). Bruces brewery was the Firkin brewpub chain. It's a shame brewpubs never caught on. Exmoor Gold was another doomed attempt at golden cask ale. Didn't these people know all everyone drank was dark mild? 

Gales still existed, and put on a light mild for those getting bored of dark mild. Fullers had their trilogy of parti-gyled beers and there's a couple of breweries, including Harvey's going for the classic offering of mild and bitter. Brown bitter would finally come into its own, overtaking dark mild in sales figures around the back end of 2012, before beings swept away by craft keg in 2013. 

Thwaites had not just a mild but also a best mild for those looking to move from around 3%  to close to 3.5% ABV. And Titanic had a couple of beers on that weren't plum flavoured.

Looking at the ticking I was very abstemious, only drinking three halves, which does conflict slightly of the recollections that the the Pig's Ear was an alcoholic wipe out. I guess I'm suffering from false memory syndrome. 

Curiously, considering we were middle of the dark (mild) ages CAMRA were promoting mild in the programme. Not sure what's going on there. It's almost as if even as far back as 1990 mild was rarely seen. Nah, that can't be right, must be that false memory syndrome again or something.