Author: WishboneAde

I was having an email conversation with Ricky the beer buyer from Bradford Beer Festival about beer, clarity, yeast and haze. Some of that conversation could boil down to one simple statement:

Is it right that good beer can be returned to the brewer for not being ‘Pin Bright’?

I’m not talking cloudy & full of unsettled yeast, I’m talking haze, a subtle little haze.
Good trading accounts have no doubt been lost through beer showing the slightest of hazes and rejected by a pub.

There is a lot more to the subject than just that of course, does haze or yeast improve or detract from the taste and aroma of a beer?

Haze (The simple explanation).

Haze mostly comes from Malted Barley, Wheat, Oats or Rye.
Haze can come from hops in large amounts.
Haze is generally fixed in beer.
Haze can be reduced with Copper-Finings while boiling or Finings-Adjunct in the fermenting vessel after fermentation.

Yeast (The stuff that makes beer).

Yeast settles out naturally with time, temperature and the distance it has to fall.
Yeast can be made to settle faster by using Isinglass Finings.
Yeast strains can sometimes be very flocculant meaning they settle quickly naturally, whereas other strains stay suspended in beer for much longer.

Reducing Haze.

Haze originally starts right back in the farmer’s fields where Malted cereals used in brewing need to have a particular amount of nitrogen, the amount of rain can effect the nitrogen levels, a lot of rain washes away nitrogen in the soil and lowers the nitrogen in the crop, and too little rain increase the nitrogen in the soil and also what is absorbed by the crop. Its seasonality that effects all farmed crops but for brewing CLEAR beer very specific levels of nitrogen must be attained in the grains.

Recipe formulation can dilute nitrogen, you could add sugar to get a specific ABV or things like Rice or Maize (Corn), now you start thinking “Hmm just like on the back of a can of mass-market Lager”, most Microbrewers won’t be diluting their beer’s flavour with anything in this way and quite the opposite they want more flavour.

Copper Finings used in the boil coagulate proteins which settle out, you get more proteins from higher nitrogen in the malted grains, then you can use Finings-Adjunct in the beer after fermenting to do the same, the proteins in the beer get clumped together making them heavier and easier to drop to the bottom. Isinglass Finings then further binds to these clumpy bits and yeast in cask which finally gives you CLEAR beer with correct cellering conditions.

*Throw a Spanner in the works with Malted grains with a too high nitrogen content and you may find that some of the steps you took to make clear beer haven’t quite been enough leaving just a subtle haze which would then follow onto returned beer, wasted beer and lost earnings. Nature did that, but the beer you made tastes bloody good… just a hint of haze.

Go back and read the statement at the top again.

Mostly before the brewer can react to a haze issue multiple batches of beer have been brewed and an increase in Copper Finings and/or an increase in Finings-Adjunct can fix the issue, by this point several batches of beer will have been committed to cask and sold into trade.

‘Hop Haze’ can be a more permenant haze for heavily hopped and heavily dry hopped beers which is probably going to be there no matter what you add to your beer.

Brewing a Hazy beer.

Do the exact opposite to the ‘Reducing Haze’ section above, increase things like Wheat and Oats, don’t use any form of Finings, hop and dry-hop the heck out of it and pick a yeast that stays in suspension for a long time. NO processing aids added to the beer and you still make tasty beer, how good is that!
Though with time, temperature, distance, and the right yeast you will get beer that is clear of yeast but a haze should remain.

Does haze / yeast improve flavour & aroma in beer?

There are lots of brewers that seem to think so, I will use my own thoughts to say why I think Unfined hazy beer will have more flavour & aroma etc.

All processing aids, Copper-Finings, Finings-Adjunct, Isinglass-Finings, Filtering (Evil Filtering! Evil! Evil Dirty Filtering!!!) take something away from beer so I guess the idea is the more naturally occurring stuff you leave in the more flavour, aroma, body and colour you keep. Then I guess you have loads of extra stuff (Haze ‘n Yeast) floating about in your pint, I’m going to suppose that that each little bit of floaty stuff is like a sponge which picks up all the good stuff you want to taste and carries it to you gob. (Citation needed by some sort of Scientist)

There! Oh and Drinking yeasty beer doesn’t give you farts and you will not be on the toilet the day after because of yeast. (Indian Take-away citation needed)

*I’ll hit Publish now and come back and edit stuff later*

From our first Brewery Tap day of January 2018 we will be tweaking our prices bar prices to better reflect prices charged in the local area. The ‘baseline’ is the price per pint we charge for Handpulled Beers and will be increased by 50p.
The exceptions to the baseline are Ingredients and Time, we could make some low ABV beers that we use a much greater amount of ingredients in and take longer in tank before being racked to cask, we will increase the price of any such beer to reflect what has gone into it.

We hope this baseline increase will let us save up enough money to get batches of beer put into Can or Bottle so we can grow our business a little in 2018.

This will also lessen my hypocrisy when I continually tell people that beer is too cheap!

Cheers for a good 2017, onward and hopefully upward to 2018.

First off, mega thanks to our brewery staff Oliver, Dawn & Paul, thanks also to Beth and Andrew who run our brewery tap bar. Cheers.

This year is ending with a feeling of stability, evening out the peaks and troughs we have shown a steady growth, we are playing a balancing act between the amount of empty casks we have + the amount of coldstore space we have + the amount of beer we are producing. We don’t currently have about £4k to reinvest in more Casks and the cold store is the size that it is so we need to work up to having enough spare cash to be able to do some Small Pack (Bottles or Cans) and send any expansion of production towards Bottle Shops / Bar Fridges and getting our beers into people’s fridges at home.
I would expect growth to level off in 2018 because of the above restrictions, we need to get more people trying our Keykeg beers *hint* Black IPA’s are great btw!!! *ahem!*

Production in 2017 has seen us brew 114 times and 34 totally new beers, so much for a ‘core range’ though we do realise we have some customers that like the regulars and easy drinkers.

We just had our Christmas Brewery Tap and have been frankly amazed by all the people coming to us for beers over these last 3 or 4 months, so thanks to all who have been you have made it very enjoyable. If we can keep this rate of Tap-attendance up it will go a long way to helping us make the move into getting our beer bottled or canned, we would rather not have to get a business loan and if I am honest I struggle with the concept of crowdfunding if the funder doesn’t get something reasonable in return.
With Small Pack in mind we will be adding approx 50p per pint onto our brewery tap prices from January 2018.

2018…

• We should work harder at selling a bit more to Wholesalers and need to find a bigger market for our KeyKeg beers.
• There is a list of stuff about as long as my arm of things I want to buy to enable us to react quickly to any mechanical or electrical breakdowns, I bet I could spend £4k in the blink of an eye.
• We need a chunk of money to send Oliver (Brewery assistant / Brewer / Top dude) on a Brewlab course and get him to do his GCB, hopefully we can claim back half of the amount from funding after the training is done.
• I could use some more Liquor treatment knowledge so I am less reliant on the skills of others in this area.
• Small-Pack, bottled or Canned beer, I’m currently thinking of using an on-site bottler or canner, we may well try a bit of hand bottling for sample purposes.
• Dare I say T-shirts? I know a lot of you have been asking for them. Beermats are back in stock since Thursday. Hopefully we will be able to afford some more Branded Glassware.
• We need to put our Mobile Keg bar to work, its first trip out is going to be to Pendle Beer Festival, there should be a couple of Keighley Worth Valley Railway appearances too.
• I need to take a mains water feed upstairs to start with then look at getting a cold liquor tank so our summertime wort cooling is easier.
• Kit modifications; In-line wort aeration or oxygenation, an addition to the copper so we can use Pellet hops in the boil, a better more accurate Temp Probe and Readout for the HLT.
• Water & used cleaning chemical recovery so we can get a second use out of some of the water we tip down the drain to be used as a pre-rinse for dirty vessels etc.
• Hop usage from contracted hops should mean there will be a number of new punchy hop-forward beers available.
• A kitchen area in the office would be nice, a new fridge and some proper office chairs!
• Moving forward I would like us to develop some Lab skills with some education in Microbiology so that when we do put beer in bottle or can we can assure ourselves that they cleaning and brewing we have done is up to scratch and can confirm that any contamination has been introduced by a third party packager.

Thats it 2017… thanks to all our great customers, see you in 2018 🙂

This is going to be a bit free-form so bear with it while I stab at the keyboard!

I was recently reading a blog post by the ever entertaining Pub Curmudgeon with regards to quality of ingredients in beer and their worth and the subsequent price of the pint.
Also the same day I was reminded of what Small Brewers Relief on Beer Duty is supposed to be about and how the relief should be used to reinvest in people and process to further the business and should not be used to discount beer prices to pubs or wholesalers etc.

There is a notion that seems to pervade some Blog posts, Twitter comments and Media articles and its as if Brewers and Pubs aren’t allowed to make their businesses profitable so as to have a stable business creating something that people want.

Beer and its Ingredients, I’m going to tell you how much a couple of our beers cost to make:

Blonde 3.6% (Simple session blonde using Polish & German hops at a low abv, quick turn-around beer in and out of tank within 7 days)

• Selling Price to pub £65+vat for 40 Litres
• Price per litre for materials only £0.154p
• Cost of production per litre £0.386p
• Cost of Delivery & Pumpclip per litre £0.0925p
• Beer Duty (@ SBR) per litre £0.344p

Total = £0.9765 per Litre (£39.06  per 40 L Firkin)

We could make our Blonde cheaper than this, we could save maybe £80-100 per Ton of malt by buying from a cheaper Maltster, we could Mash cooler and make thinner beer of the same abv, we could stop using a load of Carapils Malt (Dextrine) to help add body, we could use less hops.
BUT THIS IS NOT THE POINT OF OUR BUSINESS.

Cellar Dweller 7.5% (Three Speciality malts, heavily hopped & dry hopped with American, & New Zealand hops, this beer spends longer in Tank dry hopping and chilling more due to being unfined)

• Selling Price to pub £125+vat for 40 Litres
• Price per litre for materials only £1.086p
• Cost of production per litre £0.386
• Cost of Delivery & Pumpclip per litre £0.0925p
• Beer Duty (@ SBR) per litre £0.715p

Total = £2.2795 per Litre (£91.18  per 40 L Firkin)

We wouldn’t make this beer cheaper, in fact the next time we brew it we may make it more expensive and add more Dry Hopping.

Small Brewers Relief (SBR) is meant to help growth in the brewing sector and let new brewers start producing beer without having to pay the Full Beer Duty rate, we get a 50% discount. I dare say we wouldn’t be trading if we had to pass on the full duty rate to our customers. I suppose the reality is that the SBR is being used to keep the price of a pint low as brewers pass this saving on to pubs to get business, with some pubs wrongly demanding ridicules low prices from brewers £45-55 per cask and some stupid brewers do it. Every brewer out there should charge the Full Duty rate so they can afford the money to improve their process and ultimately make better beer, though that would have a knock-on effect to price of a cask… Our 3.6% Blonde sells at £65+vat with SBR, we should really be charging £79+vat… now lets see how well that sits with pubs and bars when you tell them its a 3.6% Blonde for nearly 80 quid! I dare say we wouldn’t sell very much.

So then brewers, and I’m talking to ALL of you…. Lets do a MagicRock and put our prices up to sensible levels to ensure we all have a business in 5 years time 😉 Though if the vast majority of Microbrewers put their prices up they would end up leaving sales wide open to the Big boys again and the multinationals would fill those gaps with mediocre beer!

I have seen some comments from Shane (Assuming Cheshire Brewhouse) on the Boak & Bailey blog regarding the multinational brewers selling beer into trade at £45 a Cask, this can only be the economy of scale that allows such a low margin and clearly shows why us small independent brewers NEED Small Brewers Relief to even come close to being competitive.

Back to the SIBA statement “Our members typically invest the relief in jobs, marketing and capital investment”, in all probable reality SIBA members typically use SBR to discount beer prices to be able to compete in the marketplace and work their arse’s off to be able to reinvest in people, process and equipment.

When I was first shown the pricing formula for McSpoons supply it was ABV x 30.1 + 74 = price per brewers barrel (4x Firkins in a Brewers Barrel)

We will be closing up shop 16.30 on Friday 22nd December and then back open Wednesday 3rd January 2018. You have between now and 22nd Dec to order & collect minikegs 🙂

Next week we are brewing a trio of new beers then racking them all the following week before we give the vessels some well deserved TLC.

Zoikes is 4.2% and is basically going to be an easy drinking session pale, using three American hops Columbus, Ekuanot & Mosaic.

Peat Smoked Abyss, using Peat Smoked malt for the folks that like the tar to stick to the back of their throat when they drink a smoked beer, like regular Abyss but smoked and the hops swapped to cause less confusion withe the smoked malt 4.3% Unfined, we will soon start doing our regular Abyss as Unfined & Vegan.

This will be the first outing of our Unfunk Pumpclip, a two hop combo beer, dry hopped and unfined. The first brew will use American Summit & German Magnum hops in this IPA recipe 5.5%.

This will be the third year we have held the Northern Craft Brewers Homebrew Competition, we had some 34 entries into last years competition, this is a Homebrewers-only Social Event and is NOT open to the general public.
The competition is to be held on Saturday 5th May 2018 and is open to all homebrewers who can bring their bottle entries on the day.

Here is a link to some tips on brewing a NEIPA. You might also note that the new Lallemand yeast ‘New England’ is going on general release from 6th November 2017 if you want to try for that Cloudwater vibe 😉

Competition Rules:

• Brew: New England IPA, Hazy / Low Bitterness / Juicy.
• Gravity: 1040-1070
• Bottles: 3x 500ml Unmarked brown glass bottles.
  
• Entries: 1 entry per brewer, email your contact details to competition@wishbonebrewery.co.uk
• Hops & Malts: Entirely the brewers choice.
• Yeast: Entirely the brewers choice.
• On the day: Bottles to be brought to the brewery on the day of competition (NO Postal entries, we want everyone to come and enjoy the social as much as the competition)
• Date & Time: Sat 5th May 2018 Doors open 11am, Bar open from 12.00, Judging starts at 13.00, kickout time around 18.00
• Prizes: We will be presenting engraved tankards and certificates and I dare say there will be prizes too.

Again we will be raising money for charity, have 6 handpulls on our brewery bar so we would like 3-4 homebrewers who want to brew a beer for the bar to be served alongside our own beer, all proceeds from the sale of homebrewed and our own beers will be donated to local charities.

Again we will be doing what we can to bring you some beer & brewing related entertainment from people in the brewing industry.

We will be having Rob from Lallemand Yeast and Rob from The Malt Miller coming along, maybe they should do a duet 😉 Also Dominic Driscoll Brewer from Thornbridge will be coming to have a chat to us 🙂

We will update this post as we confirm more, cheers

Saturday 16th December

12 til 9pm-ish

We will have entertainment from…

Jamie Squire

Haworth Ukulele Group

Food from…

The Lemon Tree Café Bistro Free mince pies around Ukulele time 😉
We will be serving Nigel our Christmas beer all day

We have been asked by a few other brewers how we keg our beers so here’s a little How-To.
I’ll be honest there is a little part of me that thinks, “why should I help anyone else” but then I think its good to stick to my ethic of the Internet being a sharing and helping place where people can learn from each other.

As with most brewery activities they start with thoroughly cleaning and sanitising all equipment that will come into contact with the beer you have lovingly created and cared for, but first something about the Equipment needed.

You will need:

• Vessel to put a volume of beer into, we had a 150Litre tank fabricated by Elite Stainless for the job.
• Magnetically coupled stainless steel pump from either BrewBuilder or TheMaltMiller.
• Keg coupler filling kit, including a serving coupler from KeyKeg.
• Get some food grade alcohol based sanitiser.
• Various pipe fittings are needed, I managed to do most of this from the Homebrew shops.
• Weighing Scales, Sugar, Kettle, Jug, Plastic Spoon.

Questions you need to know the answers to:

• The Kegging Vessel, you need to know exactly how much beer you put in it so the correct amount of priming sugar can be added.
• You need a means of getting the beer from its fermenting vessel to the kegging tank to limit oxygen pickup.
• You need a means of knowing how much sugar to add to your beer to attain the correct carbonation level.
• You will need somewhere warm to keep your filled kegs for 7-10 days.
• You need to now how much beer is in your Keg after filling.

You will need to watch this Video:

And watching this one is also good education for the future:

https://youtu.be/Okbff9pT4kI

You can find the parts you need on these Websites:
www.brewbuilder.co.uk
www.themaltmiller.co.uk
www.keykegshop.eu/filling/keykeg-filling-head.html
www.esfabrications.co.uk

What we do to fill our unfined, unfiltered KeyKegs:

• Beer should be at a stable terminal gravity.
• Clean and sanitise all equipment, vessel, pipework, filling head etc.
• Ensure beer in fermenter is roused with co2 to avoid any flavour stratification and distribute yeast in suspension (Roused via cleared Racking point on FV).
• Weigh out priming sugar and dissolve in boiling water, I use a simple iPhone app to calculate amount of sugar.
• Using gravity of transfer pump fill the kegging vessel from its base and add the dissolved sugar while filling.
• I calculated a Dip-Table so I can measure down to a specific distance and ensure the correct amount of beer is added to the kegging vessel, stir well when full.
• Fill kegs as per the first video above.
• Weigh kegs to ensure you have an accurate fill with no fobbing.
• Put in our purpose built warm room for 7-10 days, its useful to fill a plastic pop bottle so you can have an occasional squeeze to see how the pressure is building up /carbonation forming.
• Clean all your equipment and put away in a cleaned and rinsed state.

You just made CAMRA-friendly Keg beer, give yourself a pat on the back and shout #EvilKegFilth 😉

I’ll give credit to Andy Parker of Elusive Brewing for his blog and showed me the way to the little Homebrew Pump www.graphedbeer.com

Going on from my opening statement, this isn’t even good business sense… teaching your competitors how to do things when all the time we are still finding our market for Keg beer.

Cheers 🙂 For other info on kegging see here.

It seems the ‘Black IPA’ or India Black Ale, as we prefer to call them, is just so 2014…. Which is a massive shame because Cellar Dweller Double India Black Ale 7.5% is bloody marvelous. Citra, Ekuanot, a little Sorachi Ace and Waimea with a blend of Belgian Special B, Weyermann CaraMunich III & Carafa Special III malts its a thing of beauty. Originally brewed with the Westriding Refreshment Rooms.

Motueka is probably my favourite beer of the moment, crisp, hoppy, smooth and very moreish, brewed with our usual yeast so not really a lager, its got restrained hopping a lager-like malt bill and our brewing water is treated to a lager profile.

Lupulonimbis is kinda the no frills solid DIPA using American Cascade & Chinook heavily in the boil and dry hop.

N-Star-2 has turned out to be one of our best IPA so far on Keg, its nice enough on Cask but its flavours display so much better on Keg at cooler temperatures with the added carbonation, a thing of beauty.

Most of these beers are available in 30L Keykegs, and we will be re-brewing some of them over the coming months.

Paying staff, bills and making sure we have enough money to pay our mortgage are obviously really important but there is another thing that no one seems discuss.

Cask Taint, a cask that seems to give an earthy or funky taste or aroma to a beer.

I’ve spotted this on plenty of brewers beers served in good pubs, it can be fairly subtle and sometimes mistaken for the character of the yeast.

Brewers sometimes get their used casks back after many months, or a shorter period of warm weather and cleaning them can take a bit more effort due to them being full of fly eggs, mold, even live maggots in some cases. The reason for all of this is that the casks have been left unsealed after the beer has been sold. The brewer now has to tackle this Earthy, rank, foul-smelling mess and turn it back into a vessel that is clean and sanitised to put fresh new beer into.

They are de-bunged and their dregs tipped down the drain.
Jet-washed externally while paying particular attention around the Shive and Keystone holes.
They are put on the cask washer and given a high pressure internal rinse through a sprayball to removes the thickest of the muck inside, then a Hot Casutic wash followed by a final fresh water rinse and drain.
Casks are inspected inside visually with a torch and given a good sniff to check for any off-smells.
If there is an off-smell or any part of the cask that is not clean the cask must be re-washed until it is fit to put fresh beer into.

Occasionally a cask will smell of earth or mold when you come to fill it, if we detect this we aim to keep hold of the cask and not sell it into trade so if there is any issue it is our own issue rather than a customer. Things like this slip through the net occasionally with any brewer out there.

Our brewery isn’t graced with a brewery yard so out of politeness to our neighbours in the building we pre-wash all dirty casks the week before we need to re-fill them, this means that we leave them coated with Caustic Cleaner inside and then the following week we Hot Casutic wash them again followed by a fresh water rinse.
We NEVER detect any off-smells in our casks with our current procedure, it may seem labour intensive but we don’t want beer flies in the shared access we have with our neighbouring businesses, and it leaves our casks looking and smelling great inside.

All that is not to say that an occasional cask will leach out a bit of an earthy smell into the new beer, I would say stainless steel casks are best and its plastic casks that hold the taint most, this could be something that plastic cask manufacturers could look into, Brewery Plastics, Emerald etc.

As I say, its something most breweries will come across, and I would say is my biggest concern in packaging beer for sale.

The simple solution to this is ‘Training’ staff that casks should always be re-sealed, and it doesn’t mean you have to be PubCo or regional brewery supplied with Corks and pegs a simple roll of Duct Tape will do or screwed up plastic or paper towels, just bung those cask holes up with something to stop flies and stuff getting in.

Cheers 🙂