Geography as flavour

When some friends from New Zealand visited they were bemused find a New Zealand IPA in Dartmoor. Particularly as it was made in Dartmoor.

I had to explain that in the world of beer the name of a country is often used as a flavour descriptor, not a statement about where the beer is made. "American" means made with citrussy hops, "Belgian" with phenolic yeast, and in the case of "New Zealand" it's the hop flavour again. It hadn't occurred to me until I saw their confusion that this might be considered slightly odd. Really the word "style" should be included to remove any ambiguity.

It also got me thinking to how many others there are. "English" means traditional English hops, but "New England" means hazy and fruity, and "Russian" is a term applied to stouts to say they're strong. Different American coasts are used to denote different types of "American" IPAs. Does German/Czech get used to describe different styles of pale lager? Can't say I've really  noticed it. That "farmhouse" is now used to indicate the type of flavour you'll find in a beer that's highly unlikely to have ever been anywhere near a farmhouse is also a bit strange. As is "wild" used to describe beers made with non-standard yeasts (and possibly bacteria) that may well have been cultured in a laboratory. I'm sure there are more out there.

Anyway, the beer was nice. Cheers Aub and Ruth!

Wild, wild beer

It's colder inside, a welcome escape from the blistering heat. Away from the blazing sun it's dark until your eyes adjust, revealing rows of wooden barrels stretching into the gloom where microorganisms get to work on the wild beer. The damp, dank cold makes the building  feel like a cellar, not a warehouse. A musty smell pervades the atmosphere, invoking thoughts of moist earth, mushroom compost and slowly maturing beer. Brewed on modern plant just across the yard the beer takes on a primitive, more elemental character in the barrel store. The careful controls of the brewhouse are abandoned for the primitive world of yeast and bacteria which slowly transmute the wort into wild beer.

That's it, I can't manage any more. I'm not up to this.

When I visited Wild Beer brewery I bumped into beer writer Adrian Tierney-Jones and talked about beer and beer writing as we avoided the England world cup match. At the moment he's focussing on capturing 'moments' so I thought I have a go at the moment of entering the barrel store, but I'm really not cut out for it. He can do gloriously paragraph break free streams of consciousnesses but for me it's like getting blood out of a stone, and after several hours I'm left with a modest amount of words that wouldn't look out of place as a single paragraph. Certainly not an impressively intimidating block of text that would be difficult to follow. This beer writing isn't easy.

Wild Beer were having an open day/beer festival thing and thanks to the Guild of Beer Writers I'd got free entry and ten pounds worth of beer tokens. Which didn't go very far, but that's just as well as I was driving. They're in the process of building a bigger brewery but currently are brewing three times a day on 30hl kit.

Can't be many 30hl breweries with a centrifuge

We had an excellent tour from a very knowledgeable brewer.

Mash tun and two 30hl copper/whirlpools

They have onsite bottling and canning. The canning equipment is a bit newer so actually has less oxygen pick up than with the bottling.

They also do beer in cask and keg.

There were lots of cyclindroconical fermenters...

...but also wooden vats:

'Clean' and 'wild' beers are currently produced on the same site, though they did have different colour coded hoses to help with avoiding cross contamination. It must be fun getting to make such a diverse range of beers.

There was an impressive selection of (slightly) sour beers available and a mushroom one called 'Breakfast of Champignons' which should surely win an award for the name. Certainly the wild beers were the stars of the show, though I can't help but suspect that the clean ones help keep sales high. It will be interesting to see where they do with the new brewery.

The death of keg

Once more we've been treated to someone with a vested interest saying cask beer should cost more. It may be because I spend too much time on the internet but nothing in the article seemed new. It goes through the usual craftie critique of cask beer and comes to the usual conclusion: it should be more like craft keg beer. Or bottle or can, the author doesn't attempt to define "craft beer" in any way, but I think it's safe to assume cask beer is excluded.

As is often the case in beer writing opinion is dressed up as analysis, with the dubious use of a statistic or two to give a fig leaf of credibility. Which is exactly what I'm going to do now.

We're told that:

"in 2016 cask shrunk by 3.8%, while the craft beer sector as a whole grew by 18.8%. Even more damning is the fact that cask has shrunk by 5% over the last six years."

But we're not told that keg beer sales have declined 25% over the last six years, a strange oversight as the figure comes from the same article. The death of keg is coming far faster than the death of cask. And as mentioned previously the "craft beer" is not defined at all, or the format in which it is sold.

Overall beer sales in Britain have been in decline for many years, and the proportion of draught beer sold has also been falling. Back when cask beer was showing modest growth, it was pointed out that it was in effect "defying gravity" as with massive numbers of pubs closing the amount of places in which it was sold were falling. Unlike undefined "craft beer" cask beer is almost only sold in pubs, so pub closures are inevitably going to hurt cask beer sales. Pub closures though, or the shift from draught to small pack beer, aren't mentioned at all in the article, a huge omission.

We then get on to the fact that cask beer is sold for less than keg beer. I've always been of the opinion that this is proof that god loves us and wants us to be happy, but on a more mundane level when keg beer was introduced it was sold as a premium product compared to "normal" cask beer and was sold for a higher price. Keg beer has always cost more than cask and it's nothing to do with CAMRA, though the author does take a swipe at CAMRA discounts, something that are only offered voluntarily by pubs because it makes business sense to them.

Next comes the pernicious argument popular with crafties that more expensive beer is better beer, and he waxes lyrical about a delicious, but expensive to make, pint of Cloudwater cask beer. The best pint I ever had was also cask beer, but it was made in a giant beer factory in Burton so I doubt it had huge production costs. What with cask being cheaper than keg beer is unusual in that price and quality are not linked, and it's possible to drink world class beers for less than inferior global brands.

CAMRA's mysterious role in controlling beer prices crops up again:

"If CAMRA is serious about cask growth, it has to make the market sustainable for the innovators who will bring it to a new generation. Either the price of cask goes up, or beer duty has to go down." 

So a beer consumers organisation is being told it needs to campaign for higher beer prices. An odd one that, and though I'm not an economist I can't for the life of me see how higher prices will increase demand. The increase in price will it seems be linked to an increase in quality:

"Of course, if the price of cask beer were to rise, the quality would have to as well"

Which is nice, though no mechanism is given for how this will come about. We're told "many reputable writers" have said finding well kept cask beer is increasingly difficult, though that quote only links to a single writer and my own experience is certainly different from his.

Then it's back to CAMRA who we're told should invest in a hare brained scheme to provide training and equipment for pubs, making the common mistake of confusing a consumer organisation for an industry body. After that it's the tired old line that CAMRA aren't interested in quality, including a swipe at their own beer festivals, ignoring the fact that they've invested heavily in beer cooling equipment.

With incredible insight it's revealed that the Great British Beer Festival is mainly a cask beer festival, and rare foreign beer sell out fastest. Then it gets to CAMRA needs to embrace keg to save cask. Or cask should be more like keg. Or more craft or something. That the 2018 ratebeer second best brewery in the world abandoned cask is a huge blow to its reputation apparently. Will cask beer be able to recover from such a mortal wound? Did anyone else even notice? We're also informed that CAMRA need to highlight beers made by breweries often found at their festivals (yes, bit of an odd one that).

I do get cynical when I see brewers and distributors saying cask beer should cost more. Personally I'd rather seem beer be made freely available and distributed on the basis of need. I will of course need a lot! At least in his post the author didn't include the awful statement that "beer is a luxury item" but as you may have guessed I wasn't overly impressed with the article.

An outsiders' view on pub life

An Australian/Dutch couple share their thoughts on pub life after running a pub in England for six months:

I don't think they were overwhelmed by the experience: "Every day in the pub the same geezers, over and over again, the same faces, the same drinks, the same bad jokes, over and over again." But they do admit they met a lot of interesting people they wouldn't otherwise have met, and got to see real English culture: "the pub is the centre of the universe...the pub is life...the pub is like the church for the English people."

Carnivale Brettanomyces 2018

Back in 1911 (or was it only June?) I was at the Carnivale Brettanomyces in Amsterdam again. "A beer festival dedicated to Brettanomyces and other wild things" it fits in well with one of my beery obsessions.

Brettanomyces and other wild things

Taking place over several days and in several venues it's hard to judge the size of the festival but it seems to be bigger every time I go.

After Boak and Bailey flagged up the prices in Amsterdam I paid more attention to how much I was spending this time and sure enough some of the prices were outrageous.

I had to wince when I got a round in at Walhalla brewery. Thimblefuls of beer cost more than what I can get a pint for in my local.

This was four Euro's worth

Nice little brewery though:

As well as the general boozing there's also lots of events and a technical lecture programme. I did a talk on the many ways that people have come up with to make alcohol from starchy plants.

I should really write it up, but I've covered a lot of the stuff on the blog already: malting, home malting, beer brewing, sake production, and chicha de muko. I also touched on acid hydrolysis and the use of exogenous enzymes to complete the set.

I also managed to get to a few lectures myself, though not as many as I'd planned, what with the networking to be done.

I really should write them up too.

Maybe one day.

The lectures were recorded so should be available online soon.

I had a wonderful time at the festival and I'm looking forward to the next one.

Fermenter Geometry

It's a while since I've done a post about technical beer nerdery, what with more important things getting in the way. But I think I've slowly reached an understanding about why fermenter geometry is significant so it's time for another.

It's a term used in text books, usually shortly before launching into descriptions of the various weird and wonderful types. Yorkshire Squares and Burton Unions often get a mention, and what the hell was going on Spherical fermenters? Most beer is made in cylindro-conical fermenters though nowadays.

Obviously yeast collection techniques will differ with different shaped fermenters, Ale yeast traditionally skimmed off the top, lager yeast scrapped out the bottom. With cylindro-conical fermenters the yeast sediment can be drawn off from the bottom of the cone and they are now commonly used for both ale and lager brewing. 

But that's not really what I was interested in. I wanted to know what does the fermenter shape do to the beer flavour. Having started out as a microbiologist I know that bugs don't read the text books so will at times behave strangely, but how does the shape of a fermenter affect this? It seems the main difference between different fermenter types is not so much due to the shape as due to the depth of the wort.

Traditional fermenters are quite shallow and lager maturation was carried out in horizontal tanks so not much depth of wort.

Not deep

As cylindro-conical fermenters are often big...very big (6000hl)...they can get very tall too. Up to 15m apparently (and even 40m if used for maturation/conditioning).

Deep

Greater depth means greater hydrostatic pressure which affects how the fermentation progresses. Carbon dioxide concentration increases resulting in greater mixing of wort due to gas lift. As the height to diameter ratio increases, so does natural agitation and the fermentation rate. This rapid fermentation can mean medium gravity ales can be produced with unseemly haste (30 to 49 hours). Beers made rapidly in tall fermenters with higher pressure contain less esters, as these figures for ethyl acetate show:

Ethyl acetate content of beer resulting from shallow and deep fermentation
Wort height (m) Ethyl acetate (mg/l)
3                        20
18                      12

This demonstrates how putting the same wort into different fermenters can make different beers. There are other factors that affect ester production during fermentation so things such as oxgenation rate, temperature and pressure can be adjusted to compensate.

I also recently learnt that greater surface area at the top of the fermenter means greater loss of hop volatiles if dry hopping in tank. As one of the purposes of traditional lagering is to get rid of unwanted volatiles will it also have an effect there? Certainly horizontal tanks were favoured over vertical ones. There may be more mysteries to fermenter geometry yet.

A visit to Harvey's Brewery

After the warm up at Burning Sky the main event was at Harvey's the next day. We were meeting at 11 am in the brewery tap before the BHS AGM at noon. Or at least that was the plan but a couple of leisurely pints of mild before getting down to business was not to be for me. A points failure meant my train slowly sauntered south and there was only time for a swifty before things kicked off.

Despite running late I stopped to take the obligatory photo of the brewery from the bridge in Lewes, correctly assuming that by the time I staggered back I'd completely forget about it.

Good, innit?

Though not quite up to IBD speed standards the AGM was mercifully brief. If only the committee meetings were like that.

If the BHS embraced keg beer there'd probably be more young people or something

A tour of the listed brewery followed the AGM

The extension to the tower only dates from the 80s though

We heard more from Head Brewer Miles Jenner before going inside:

He talked about when they were flooded. The tank behind him was ripped out of the concrete.

The flood level is marked by the plaque above the head of the gentleman on the right:

They still have a copper Copper, though it's relatively recent, dating from the 90s if I remember rightly. Miles was worried switching to all stainless steel might upset the yeast so replaced the old Copper with a new copper one.

They have a stainless Copper too.

and a steam engine they fire up once a year.

Old and new mash tuns too:

as well as a Sugar Dissolving Vessel with syrups and blocks of invert sugar:

This is where the sacks of malt enter the brewery:

Some of the hops come from The Hampton Estate so bear the Farnham bell.

A map on the wall from 1980 showed where hop farms were then:

Good old Bastard East Kent is there but shockingly no mention of Farnham.

This crime is then compounded by a diagram saying the Farnham bell is used for hops from Hampshire:

I believe all the hop farms in Hampshire are now gone, though the number of hop farms in the Farnham area in Surrey has recently doubled. Sadly only to two though.

Inside a mash tun

More of the copper Copper

They use open fermenters. The parachute shown below is used for yeast cropping. It can be lowered into the yeast head and the yeast runs into it and then down a pipe to where it can be collected below.

The gravity is given in Pounds Per Barrel, which I think makes it 48.6 in degrees Sacch. They still use Fahrenheit too.

Here's a parachute in an empty Fermenting Vessel, with an attemperator to cool the beer on the left, and what looks like some beer stone at the back.

Lots of dipsticks:

Harvey's are the only brewery in Britain to still use returnable bottles.

The 1948 chiller on the left

The recently returned to kegging to satisfy the demand of people who prefer beer that is not the pinnacle of the brewers art. They sell around a thousand barrels of keg a year.

The filler is from Lambrechts

As all good brewery tours do we ended in the sample room, where I'm delighted to say Tom Paine was on despite the fact we'd not quite reached July. I used to have a pilgrimage to Lewes with my dad every July to drink that beer.

The winner for beer of the day was Armada in the brewery tap though, but then the magic of cask beer is not something for mortals to understand.