Brewery on the telly

The excellent West Berkshire brewery was on food writer Nigel Slater's programme tonight. You can watch it here.

Designing a beer

Working as a brewer I sometimes get asked how I come up with the recipes for new beers. So here's how I designed our stout:

First there was the extensive field research into existing beers of that style to see what sort of taste I'm after.

Then I used my detailed knowledge and extensive training on the materials used in making beer to have a brain storming session on which ingredients to use :

Next I reviewed the brewing literature:

Then I performed a series of complex calculations regarding the strength, bitterness and colour:

After that it was time to give it a go. And there you have it:

Lovely!

Ballast Point Calico Amber

I ended up in a Wetherpoons on Saturday and was pleased to see that their beer festival was on. Pick of the bunch was Ballast Point Calico Amber. It had the distinctive powerful citrus taste of American hops and was great on cask, which made me wonder why some people think beers like this taste best when they're kegged. I couldn't see how more carbonation and chilling would improve it myself. Oh well, each to their own.

Growing hops

I planted some hops yesterday. I thought with Spring intermittently arriving it was about time.

On reading the instructions I see they should have been planted in Winter. Oh well, hopefully they'll be fine.

The variety is Prima Donna, though the hops are sold as First Gold. I got the plants from Essentially Hops.

Experimental archaeology

As my experiments at making unhopped ale have rather surprisingly met with approval I thought it was time to taste it again myself.

This was the next surprise. It'd gone sour. Instead of the unpleasant mawkishly sweet taste I've come to expect from unhopped ales it's definitely got a touch of the lambic about it. Is this what ales tasted like? Did sourness make up for the lack of hop bitterness?

I'm sure that back in the day ales wouldn't have been stored in bottles for months until they went sour, but would they need to have been? Without access to modern cleaning and sterilisation chemicals and almost certainly without pure yeast cultures I'm sure ales would have soured very rapidly, or even started out sour.

There may have to be a re-think before I make the next one.

Barley beer

It's like wheat beer but made with barley.

My studies on fermentation have lead to to the suspicion that most of the characteristic taste of wheat beers come from the yeast not the wheat. So to investigate this I decided to make a beer with a wheat beer yeast but all barley malt. As I have no doubt that this is an entirely original idea I look forward to seeing my innovation included in next years beer style guides.

The wort for the barley beer was too hoppy really and the hop flavour came through strongly. Who'd have thought wheat beer yeast was one of the ones that are good for hop character? Underneath the hops the 'wheat beer' taste was very evident though. The beer also poured clear, confirming my suspicion that a lot of wheat beer haze is due to wheat proteins not the yeast.

I passed round a few bottles for the visiting CAMRA members on Saturday and it proved surprisingly popular. Could I be onto the next big thing in the world of beer nerdery? Black IPAs are so old hat, barley beer is where it's at!

"Punk's not dead...

...it just smells like it is", as someone once said to me at a Subhumans gig.

The "new" Punk IPA from Brewdog has arrived in my local Sainsbury's so I had to give it a go.

I was delighted when I first discovered Punk IPA in the early days of Brewdog. Since Safeways had become Morrisons and ready access to Goose Island IPA had ended I'd seldom seen American style IPAs so it was good to see one made by a British brewery.

Having said that, I can see why Brewdog want to change the recipe. When I got round to trying a direct comparison of Goose Island and Punk it was like seeing a competition between Picasso and an enthusiastic kid with a spray can. Compared to the complexity of Goose Island the Punk seemed a very basic beer.

Now Brewdog are more experienced I was interested to see what they'd done in their major revamp of Punk.

It pours with a strong aroma that reminded me of mint. That's a new one on me for beer so I got quite excited. The beer is hazy, which is a little off putting, and the taste...well the taste is something else. Apparently the new version is less bitter than the old but the taste was so hoppy it was almost undrinkable. It's like someone has taken a load of American hops, put them in a liquidiser and sieved the liquid into a beer bottle.

That may well be to the taste of some of my fellow beer nerds but the flavour was so strong I didn't find it pleasant. I won't be bothering to try the canned version when that appears.