Table Porter

After the success of our 6% Black Porter we wanted to do something with all the flavour of a good Porter but at a lower strength, a recipe was designed, we brewed it, tasted it in the Fermenting Vessel and thought…“Oof, maybe a bit too roasty for some folks”. Though after having a good drink of it dispensed as it should be from Handpull its a moreish little beast, bags and bags of toast and roast character which brings a firm dryness across the palette from the malts then the aftertaste begins and lingers so by the time you’ve had a half you can feel a second pint coming on… Thats no bad thing 🙂

A little critique and update from Pastiche, or Piss-Tache, Pistachio or however you want to pronounce it! It was a piss-take of Craft Beer and proved its point that to a fair extent its the flavour of certain hops that make drinkers rave about and rate some beers so highly, and we thank you for all the kind words and high ratings.
This does raise an interesting question, “Should we invest in thousands of pounds worth of funky hops to further our little business?” There are brewers with deep pockets, ours are almost like McDonalds Staff Trousers… ‘Sewn Shut’ with the money we make going back into the business to improve what we already do and invest in the future so we can bring you bottle and keg-conditioned beers (our current short term goal) with longer term goal of adding a cold liquor tank to our setup. So while buying a load of funky-ass hops is very appealing we have to ground ourselves and focus on the nuts and bolts of business and process, the funk will come but we will be staggering it through the year.

For those that don’t know, ‘Hop-Contracting’ its a fun subject… you say “Please Mr Hop Merchant, can I have a Years supply of Hops that you store for me until I need them”, this can total many 100s of Kilos and many thousands of pounds, quite possibly the scariest prospect I have to deal with as a business owner and brewer. Our first year, very speculative, hop contract worked out fairly badly with me contracting far too many kilos for our first year of production. So our next 12 months of hop contracting is based around real-world figures for what we actually used over the last year (Over 500kg in case you were wondering) to this I ask for other hops to be added to our contracting so we can brew more en-vogue beers like Pastiche. The Hop Merchant will then reply in writing telling us what hops they are able to supply us, we hope it will be a favourable response and not “You can have Fuggles but NO Citra and NO Simcoe and NO Mosaic etc etc etc”. So we await the first hop merchant’s response then we panic for a short while and go around the other 2 or 3 suppliers to see if we can pick up what we need or desire.

Fun & Games!