Author: WishboneAde

*Update* – Cloudy with a chance of hops, its currently our highest rated beer on Untappd!
Again I am reminded that its a lot to do with the hops you can buy that makes a beer so popular.
We threw a chunky amount of low-alpha Ahtanum and some Mosaic in the boil and then dry hopped at two stages in the FV with a little over 10g/litre with more Mosaic and Nelson Sauvin.
We fermented the beer with Windsor Ale Yeast and fermentation was vigorous and kicked off a massive amount of sulphur aromas which made me want to ditch the beer more than once, thankfully all the sulphur dissipated before it came round to packaging this beer in Cask & Keg.
Mosaic with Nelson Sauvin sounded like a match made in heaven, it was 🙂

This beer was brought to you by Wishbone, Thirst Class Brewery and the yeast advice of Rob from Lallemand, hops were harmed during this process and hair was pulled… lets hope we can get the hops with the funky flavours that people want to taste in our next hop contract.

And btw… we are up and running with our 2x keg fonts on the bar, once we get into the swing of things properly we hope to swap beers mid-session so you can try even more cracking Wishbone during one of our bi-monthly bar days 🙂

Yeaaaa the good old brewery bar, no frills pints twice a month.

Last week we had a meeting with our accountant, we found that running the bar twice a month is what in our first full tax-year of trading pushed us just slightly into profit. Not that we recall seeing it in our bank account as all we take is enough to pay our mortgage and household bills and there isn’t any extravagance.

Cask Ale per pint:
As we did at the very end of 2016 for our trade prices, adjusting for our materials and running costs and balancing the margins across our cask prices, we plan to do something similar to our Brewery Bar prices at the end of 2017. We will do this in the fair manner which we balanced our trade cask prices, some beers will stay the same and some will increase to reflect the costs incurred in producing them. It will be a mix of ABV (Beer Duty) + Materials (Hops, Malt, Yeast etc) + Time (Dry Hopping time or even Lagering time) though we will try and keep this as sensible as possible for the sake of giving change etc

Keg Beer per pint:
Keg beers will be more and priced per beer, the added cost of the Keykegs and, the time taken to fill them plus a week of Warm-conditioning all adds up so we need to be sure we don’t sell ourselves short over the bar. Keg Beer prices will be set from the out-set, read on…

With fingers crossed, I should have our 2-font keg bar up and running for Saturday 17th Brewery Tap giving us the ability to serve 6 cask and 2 keg beers at once, here’s what its cost thus far setting up:

• Pipe fittings for the font – £50
• Spray paint – £25
• Keg taps x2 – £30
• Beer-Line Cooler – £150 from ebay
• Beer Python pipe – £20 a couple of off-cuts
• Wood to build a backboard for cellar gear and shelf to keep the beer cooler off the floor – £40
• Gas-pipeing, Fob-detectors, Flowjet, Cleaning sockets, JG fittings, Beer line, Gas-Regulators – £350
• Air Compressor – £170
• Keykeg Couplers – £100

A grand total of about £900 to set up to serve 2x keg beers, add in some time & effort too! Its proper easy to fitter away a grand or so on what you think are simple, easy projects. This does add value to what we do on our bar days and we get to bring you, the drinker, a greater range and more exciting beers each time we open, we also get a quick way to taste our own keg beers rather than having to find them out in trade hoping to get to try a pint!

New beers to look out for…

More to follow later in the month 😉

The first time we opened our brewery bar was back in December 2015, it was bloody freezing.
Yesterday we held a slightly different event, we had Bingley Brewery down with their bar and had American BBQ food entertainment from three local acts, we had the food truck in the loading bay and seating out there too with the big door rolled all the way up… this is about as close as we have got to my original vision back at the end of 2015 “Deckchairs & Inflatable Palm Trees”, we don’t have Deckchairs and the only inflatable I have is a Cactus!
It was good to see our little brewery rocking with beer-drinkers and tunes, there are always new faces arriving to try the beers, hopefully the British weather will let us spread out like this again as its as close to a beer garden as we’re going to get.

Thanks to all who made yesterday a great day, same time next year?

I vaguely scrolled passed something on social media the other day about Core Ranges and with various companies and associations expecting you to have a core range.

We started out with Blonde, Bandit, Divination, Abyss & Gumption we consider this our core range. But there is always something new try so it makes it hard keep, what we first considered, our core range in stock though we do try to do have a range that tick enough boxes for our customers. There is usually a brew that people are asking for or waiting for us to brew again, which is nice.
Things change, well apart from Blonde & Abyss maybe, you could think of Flux stepping into Bandit’s shoes and Drover is hot on the heels of Gumption, we have FOUR new Blonde beers on the brewplan too just to throw a Brewer’s RJT Spanner in the works we will no doubt do a #BreweryTap Blonde Fest!

Other bits of news…

Doing our first few keg-conditioned beers is letting us see the ultimate limits (Terminal Gravity) of our fermentations which is really good and allowing us to fine tune our recipes and process, my inner geek is happy 🙂 We get to tweak our mash temperature and duration, tweaks to starting and finishing gravity, the amount of yeast we pitch, all of which helps bring more accurate consistency to what we make.
To explain that, for Keg beers we totally ferment out the beer so it won’t ferment any more, prime a batch with dissolved sugar and pump into Keykegs before keeping warm for 7-10 days while they warm condition to carbonate. This lets us accurately set the carbonation level of our Keg-conditioned beers and vary the amount of carbonation to suit the style of beer and goes really well with Unfined, Unfiltered, Unpasteurised & Naturally carbonated. (Though we have nothing against adding co2 under pressure)

Parallax DIPA sold amazingly well, yet again this illustrates my point that the availability of hops that drinkers like the flavours of sells beer. We have another DIPA recipe on the brewplan using different hops and going to go a little heavier on the dry hopping this time too 12g/Litre into a 7.5% beer.

This week we brew a Collaboration beer with Thirst Class Ale and its going to be no holds barred using a shed load of Nelson Sauvin & Mosaic for the dry hop 🙂

On the Saturday 20th May Bingley Brewery are joining us here in the brewery for a special event, Bingley are bringing their beers and bar down so we will have 11 handpulled beers in total with more beer in reserve so we can change beers as the day goes on.

We have The Yorkshire Pit doing lots of smokey BBQ with meaty and vegie options.

Then there is the entertainment, Niamh, Jamie Squire and Twenty Yards Behind will be musically punctuating the day starting around 2-2.30pm.

The Wishbone Brewery & Northern Craft Brewers Homebrew Competition 2017

On Saturday 29th April a group of mostly northern homebrewers gathered with their beer bottles here at the brewery, the type of beer they all had to brew was a Fruit IPA, each brewer brought 3 bottles and in total we had 33 entries into the competition which gave our 5 beer judges a hard task.
We had a couple of homebrewers come all the way up from London and some came down from Newcastle for the day, while the beers were getting judged we ran a charity bar with all donations being split between The Stroke Association and Keighley Cat Care, 4 of the beers were donated homebrews and 2 of the beers were our own Wishbone brews.

We ended up raising £430 for our chosen charities so well done to all 🙂

Here are the results

First Place went to Lance Blackman for his Mango IPA

Second place went to Ricky Ball for his Mango, Orange & Grapefruit IPA

Third place went to Pete Nevison for his Pineapple IPA (who’s Prize was collected by Richard Page because Pete had to leave early)

There were two ‘Honorable Mentions’ for close joint 4th places Elliott Collett & Tom Yates, no prizes just that warm fuzzy feeling that beer gives 😉

Each winner got an Engraved Glass Tankard from us at the brewery and some amazingly generous Homebrew Vouchers from The Malt Miller homebrew shop.

We would like to thank the following people who kindly givae their time and services for free in the aid of charity and homebrewing:

Rob for the brilliant Malt Miller prizes.
Our beer judges, Oliver our second brewer, Dave Sanders who brews at Tapped in Leeds, Russ Clarke from BeerHawk, Gavin from the Triangle in Shipley and of course Andy Leman head Brewer at Timothy Taylors here in Keighley.

Thanks to our Homebrewers who brewed beer for the bar, Clarke Longbottom, Wayne Barnes, Paul Shore and Paul Taylor, its very much appreciated.

The Northern Craft Brewers organise group competitions and meetings for homebrewers in the north, you can check them out here.

 You will have to wait and see what we can organise for the next Wishbone Brewery / NCB competition.

SIBA, the ‘Society of Independent Brewers’ run a scheme whereby they have agreements in place with Tied Pub Companies which allow Brewers to sell beer into some Tied pubs, each Pubco has its own pricing structure and SIBA get something out of it too. Click Here for more.

As a company we are in two minds about selling via SIBA DDS/Beerflex, it seems restrictive to small brewers to get started due to the setup costs, especially in the first 12 months. I’ll list some costs below to try and explain things, thanks to Steve from Beer Nouveau for the figures as I seem to have misplaced the ones I was keeping in my emails from SIBA.

• SIBA Membership £149.27
• SIBA Joining Fee £30.00
• SIBA FSQ Annual Fee £300.00 (Not added are the yearly BFBI Feed Assurance Scheme and Contract Pest Control which I believe are required for FSQ)
• Cyclops Annual Fee £30
• First 5 Beers tested by Cyclops £300 + Additional beers over the course of 12 months @ £30 each £210
• BeerFlex Enrolment £200.00
• First Sales Fee £200.00

SIBA Beerflex & Cyclops Fees: £1,419.27 So that is the amount of money you need to make from sales to Tied pubs through SIBA to break even on your first year ‘investment’. The second year figures would work out a little better. Cyclops is a SIBA company that taste tests brewers beers. FSQ is the SIBA Quality Audit, basically an audit to check you are keeping complete and appropriate records which all brewers should be anyway.

Basing things on a 3.6% beer, like our Blonde which retails at its very reasonable £65+vat, SIBA/Pubcos will pay the brewer between £37 to £57 per Firkin (72 Pints).

Very roughly speaking, if we could do higher end sales to the better paying Pubcos, it would take us to sell around 12 casks per month each month for a year just to break even from all the SIBA/Beerflex/Cyclops costs. And profit per cask sold to a tied pub would be between £0 to £12 per cask, our regular profit per cask to free houses is approx £25… it keep the lights on and food on the table. *If you happen to brew really hoppy beer with expensive ingredients then the amount of profit you get will decrease to pathetic amounts for the beers priced on ABV*

There is a spreadsheet available from SIBA which lists a lot of the tied pubs that can buy your beer via SIBA but the brewer has to put in the leg/phone/email/social/postal work to encourage sales to said pubs, I suppose you could factor in this time and effort which would probably blow the figures above out of the water.

You could consider BeerFlex deliveries as ‘Van filler’ so they go out on deliveries while you are out delivering your higher value sales which will offset the delivery costs a little… I’ll have to keep telling myself this 😉

We occasionally deal with Beer Wholesalers though we decided NOT to deal with Wetherspoons as JDW don’t pay the brewer anything near what you would consider a fair price using their Price Formula, the formula would make you laugh if you saw it compared to the costs to make a cask of beer and you can see why a lot of the beers in McSpoons are *brewed-to-price or selling to them is seen as an advertising or marketing tool. (*That is not to say that some beers are beautiful creations at already reasonable prices)

So considering all of the above and an eye on the amount of work you need to do to earn enough money to live:

• Current Higher Value sales = Steady amount of work
• SIBA/Cyclops/Beerflex sales at low value = Increasing workload for little money

This seems a funny place to leave the blog at the stereotypical “Work, Life Balance” statement above, though if you are flogging yourself to death and not enjoying what you do there is no point doing it.

As I say we are on the fence on this one and would love to hear other brewers feedback info@wishbonebrewery.co.uk

The bits we did so far; we joined SIBA, we got 5 of our beers tested for cyclops, then we became somewhat disillusioned with the series of monetary hurdles SIBA require to gain “Access to Market”. “Access to Market” is an interesting term, SIBA seem to have evolved it a bit after getting feedback from members with a hint that they might try to fight for “Access to market at a fair price for brewers”.
Though ‘Pubcos’, Pubcos are mostly driven by their shareholders so the changes they make are to furnish their shareholders pockets rather than benefit the Landlord or Brewer so the fear is that “Access to market at a fair price for brewers” is a tough bargain to make with the devil.

Shit, I used to Blog about #Homebrew, now this is one of the things that drives me to blog!

Again, cheers to Steve from Beer Nouveau for the figures.

Here is a response from Buster Grant @siba.co.uk with some corrections to the current fee-structure, it seems we actually got our beers Cyclops accredited just before Cyclops was dropped as being necessary to join DDS/BeerFlex, a news snippet that seemingly passed us by, we based our actions on information given to us in SIBA email communications some of which must have been out of date by the time we got round to it.

Just to quickly correct one major misapprehension – Cyclops (An organisation in its own right, with many members, only one of which is SIBA, and to which SIBA makes no financial contribution, unlike many of the other members) is no longer a pre-requisite of BeerFlex membership. This came about after an AGM motion in 2016, which effectively called for a review of SIBA’s participation in Cyclops. As a Board Member, I was tasked with chairing the group, which thoroughly investigated the situation and the conclusions were presented at this year’s AGM (and can be found on the ToolBox). The conclusion was that Cyclops should not be used, and a free to use system for brief (and longer) beer descriptions should be held by BeerFlex for use by those customers that require them.

Just to clarify, although it would cost £300 to have had your beers assessed under the old scheme, as a brewer you would only have paid £100 of this, with SIBA subsidising the rest of this cost.

I’m not sure if the other costs you quote are accurate either – please feel free to contact Rachel in the Commercial team to get up-to-date costs for your brewery via rachel.harriott @siba.co.uk . She should be able to answer any other questions you have. For example, the joining fee (you’ve listed an enrollment fee and a first sales fee totaling £400) is actually £300, of which £100 is paid up front, with the remaining £200 deducted from sales, to aid your cashflow.

Speed Blog Post!

Updates:

1. Parallax Collaboration Double IPA 7.5% is released on Cask & Keg next week.
2. Night Star 3.7% is tasting really good in FV, probably dry hopping on Monday then later in the week we will be filling Casks & Kegs.
3. We have put a small amount of Table Porter into KeyKeg to see how well it presents kegged, which will be available in about a week.
4. Tiller Pin is brewing again next week and this time its a big brew so more of you people can try it.
5. the week after next we brew Gojira (Japanese for Godzilla and my stated reason for visiting Japan) its a Sorachi RyePA, the Sorachi cut with Australian Ella so its not completely Bubblegum Booze, lots of Rye Malt in the mash.
6. Homebrew Competition on 29th is for homebrewers only *Private Event* we will turn general drinkers away as this it NOT for you.
7. Put 2oth May in your Diary, Bingley Brewery and bringing their beers down for a joint bar with 8 beers on tap and more in reserve, Food from BBQ ‘Low&Slow’ Old Yorkshire Pit (Otley), we are lining up entertainment too, the first of which is talented local girl Niamh.
8. There will be something dark and strong coming, laced with liquorice and dates 😉
9. We are going against my common sense and planning a series of session blonde ales, we may do a brewery tap where we serve 5 different blondes!

So whats not to like!

Starting and running a brewery.

1. You put a lot of time, hard work and money into starting up… (nothing happened fast)
2. You brew beer and sell beer…
3. You learn a lot more about selling beer than you ever wanted to…
4. You become a self-sustaining company (broadly speaking)…
5. You buy various things to keep you running and improve what you do…
6. You employ people so you have time to do other things to further develop and progress the business…
7. You spend money on maintaining the equipment and things that break…
8. You plan things two or three steps ahead in the future and wonder how you will fund those plans…

 

Now nearly 5 months from the time I wanted it to happen we have just started small-batch Keg-Conditioning the first of our beers using the little FV above for Priming and pumping the beer into KeyKegs, we already do full-batch Force-Carbonated keg beers, though this little FV is our small step into bottle-conditioned beers. Having small-pack beer, Bottle or Cans has been on our radar since beginning our journey into brewing but having a readily available chunk of money available to throw at small-pack beer hasn’t been the easiest thing to budget for when almost everything else keeps getting in the way. We will be doing some bottle conditioned test runs of beers soon to see which beers present themselves well for the small package 🙂

A few brews to look out for over the next month or two, and American Mocha Stout using coffee from our friends at Casa Espresso and then a big strong stout or porter with something fruity and something rooty!

On Wednesday we brewed with our friends from Elusive Brewing in Reading, Andy & Jane are on a mission with a few collab brews and Meet the Brewer events up and down the country.

We had an idea for a nice easy drinking session ale, 7.5%-ish Double IPA… *Evil Grin*

Its got an OG of 1067 and we are hoping for a a FG of 1010 which will put us in the region of 7.4-7.5% ABV, a simple malt bill (Extra Pale, Munich and Carapils) with some Dextrose sugar added, hopped with Columbus, Citra and Equinox in the boil then we will be dry hopping this beast in the fermenter with more Equinox and Vic Secret at around 10g/Litre.
The plan is to Cask and Keg this beer, it will be the first use of our Warm Room to Keg-Condition to naturally carbonate our beer in KeyKegs prior to it going out into trade. All being well on Tuesday we will take delivery of a little 1BBL vessel that we will use to batch prime the beer before pumping it into Keykegs, this is also the vessel we will use for bottling our beer from…. Yeah, yeah, we mentioned bottling ages ago! The vessel should have been delivered in December, finally last week it arrived only to find they had made it wrong…. so we’ll get there eventually but its been things beyond our control that have been slowing us down.

Clog Iron at 6.5% was our biggest beer to date, Parallax is even bigger with more bitterness and a massive amount of hops, be sure to check out Elusive Brewing on Twitter too.