Author: WishboneAde

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.

First off we are brewing a collaboration up with the guys from The Boat House in Skipton, so be sure to check their social media for when its going to be on the bar Twitter & Facebook. Its an American pale session ale at 4.2% called Tiller Pin featuring all American hops, Citra, Chinook & Cascade and a tiny little bit of Summit. This coming Wednesday the Boat House guys are coming over and putting their wellies on to help out brewing the beer, its always nice to get someone doing the hard work for ya, I’m sure they will enjoy their initiation to brewing 🙂

Next up is our experiment with Casa Espresso, our most local coffee roaster from Shipley, we have fermented and aged green coffee beans in our Clog Iron Old Ale. We had heard of Whisky Cask aged beans being roasted but never Beer-aged or Beer-fermented, the beer with the green beans in it tasted pretty bad after almost a month though that wasn’t the point and was to be expected, the beans probably introduced some wild yeast and the beer fermented further than the main batch of Clog Iron.
Amazingly the beans almost doubled in size during the month fermenting and aging in the beer, they are now being dried out before heading back to Casa Espresso for roasting so we can see what sort of character they have taken on from the beer.
We will be bringing out a proper coffee stout later in the year using roasted beans from Casa Espresso.

The firm favorite that is our Black Porter 6% Unfined and Vegan
Flux 4.1% got re-brewed again, it doesn’t stick around long!
And new Single hop pale 4.5% features Pacific Gem from New Zealand

Dog Friendly, but not in the brewing area.
Kid Friendly on Saturday afternoon, please be polite toward other drinkers and keep them under control.
We are a brewery first and foremost, we have sloped / level access but sadly our toilet facilities may not be suitable for the less able.

Leave us a review on TripAdvisor, please be kind 🙂

During some of the hoohar of a certain fluffy little cloud brewery and something about no dispense from Barrels any longer, there was a mention of ‘could it be a thing that brewers could suggest a retail price’ for their beers, RRP or Recommended Retail Price like that you get on things in shops etc.

I asked, *”Should breweries add a ‘Recommended Retail Price’ RRP to invoices and cask labels?” to see what Twitter thought about it with another survey so far its a pretty close call.

The idea being that the brewer could say what they thought the price of a pint of their beer should be so that both the Publican and the Brewer could have a fair cut. I’d say our 3.6% Blonde should retail at about £3.20 to £3.40 its not the cheapest beer we brew but also nowhere near our most expensive.
If you use twitter please vote & add your views to the excellent points some others have made already.

*Not pumpclips as my illustration above shows, thats just to fan the flames of discussion.

We currently have a little survey running over on Twitter asking if you think our brewery in Keighley would be a good place to have a permanent Brewery Tap, we would love to hear your thoughts on the subject, so give your vote, ask your friends, share the post on your social media.
Its probably a case of when you start a business your ideas are usually 2 to 3 steps ahead of where your current goals or projects are. When we originally signed the premises lease we took the First Floor on along with the Ground Floor because it looked like there might be potential in the future.

Weighing up if doing an almost complete renovation of a section of the first floor with the change of use from Industrial to Mixed use coupled with staff wages, training, creation of cellar/coldstore, bar, seating, tables, lighting, electrics, decorating, new windows, creation of toilet facilities, fire escape, emergency lighting and not to mention proper access that does not interfere with our current processes, plus signage, branding, Heating (Yeah, keeping folks warm would be great!!)… weighing up if all that would actually benefit the area and our business.

Thanks for your time, we appreciate your feedback.

We decided to shake up the brewplan in January so we could offer more to pubs supporting and drinkers drinking for #Tryanuary, we got all the recipes sorted before Christmas then back to brewing on 4th Jan. The First beer will be dry hopped in the fermenting vessel on Tuesday then heading into cask later in the week, its a Czech hopped beer using just Kazbek hops which are somewhat likened to American Cascade.

This coming week we will be rebrewing Pastiche, yeah that beers that you all loved so much will be back! We also brew Lunar Zenith, same malt bill and ABV but changed to hops for Equinox, Centennial & Amarillo… a pair of casks you won’t want to miss reserving.
Later in the month we are doing a new Session Bitter at 4.2% called Drover, we’ve let our Brewery Assistant Oliver loose on this recipe which includes Rye & Vienna malts along with British & American hops. Everyone loves a pint of our Gumption but we wanted something a bit toned down yet still be an interesting complexity, if the recipe works out we will brew it on rotation through the year. Erm… and actual LOL @ the sheep… its beer not to take too seriously.

Scwhwartz, a tiny little session Black IPA or India Black Ale if you want to be totally PC, 4.1% hopped with all German grown Cascade. I had a lovely German Cascade hopped beer from Acorn Brewery a while back, give that a go too if you spot it, lets hope our little BIPA does Das Deutsche Hopfen justice.
Early in ‘Febrewery’ we will be brewing an old style ale, very British, very Traditional, and nice and strong at 6.5%, pull up that leather-clad chair to the fire, settle down with your favourite cheese selection and feel the warmth… meet Clog Iron (My Granddad was a Cobbler and used to make Clogs).

You can find out more about Tryanuary here – https://twitter.com/tryanuary and http://www.tryanuary.co.uk

Following on from the success of last year we are again hosting a homebrew competition with the Northern Craft Brewers.
The competition is to be held on Saturday 29th April 2017 and is open to all homebrewers who can bring their bottle entries on the day.

We have just had confirmation that Andy Leman the head brewer from Timothy Taylors will be doing a presentation about their brewery, its history and where they are taking things in the future. So if you haven’t heard about their 10 Barrel trial brewer kit, I’m sure you will.
Thanks once again for the support from Rob at The Malt Miller who will be supporting us and also hear on the day of competition.

Competition Rules:

• Brew: Fruit IPA
• Gravity: 1040-1070
• Bottles: 3x 500ml Unmarked brown glass bottles
  
• Entries: 1 entry per brewer, email your contact details + Fruit used to competition@wishbonebrewery.co.uk
• Hops & Malts: Entirely the brewers choice
• Fruit addition: Your brew must contain fruit, how and when you add it is up to you
• Yeast: Its entirely up to the brewer though we suggest a clean fermenting style so that the Fruit & Hops stand out well in your IPA
• On the day: Bottles to be brought to the brewery on the day of competition
• Date & Time: Sat 29th April 2017 Doors open 11am, Bar open from 12.00, Judging starts at 13.00, kickout time around 18.00
• Prizes: (TBC, Vouchers for The malt Miller) though we will be presenting engraved tankards and certificates

Again we will be raising money for local 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 and maybe something from Timmy Taylors (TBC).

We will update this post as we confirm more, cheers

We did our first brew back on the 28th August 2015, we have passed 12 months of trading and have seen a pattern of growth over that time which is encouraging but also shows us we need to work hard in the coming months.
We started with just myself & my wife for quite a while though finally got a permanent sales person to consistently hit the phones two days per week to free up more time for making and delivering beer. Next we got a permanent delivery driver again for just two days a week to free up more time for making beer. Then more recently a full time permanent brewery assistant who is now leaving me free to put my energy into working on future projects.

We don’t always take a wage as the money we make is being drip-fed back into the company to improve what we’ve already got, paying staff wages and reinvestment in process.

We will be doing some slight re-balancing of our beer prices as of 1st Jan 2017 so that our already very fair beer prices reflect the costs in making them, those costs are set to rise for imported hops due to the current value of the Pound (GBP). With this in mind as the new season hop prices come to us there may be other small tweaks as 2017 moves on and our costs increase.

Construction is ongoing with our Warm-Conditioning room and we hope to be doing short runs of bottle and keg-conditioned beers from early in the new year.

We know Landlords feel pressure to sell beer at competitive prices, we also often wonder where the fairness is in the profit share between beer-making & pint-pulling as it often seems that pubs demand the lion’s share in comparison to what the brewery makes. (Includes brewery profit at approx £25 per cask)
Brewery Cask per pint including VAT (Blonde) = £1.20 (approx)
Pub served pint including VAT (Blonde) £2.70 to £3.20+ (estimate)
@ £3.20 per pub-pint that is £146 per cask profit for the pub.

We would like CAMRA to start making a moves to address the price of a pint to the consumer so that there is fairness of profit share going back to the brewer, campaigning for beer duty reduction is always a good thing as we get to keep a tiny bit more but it shouldn’t be marketed as making beer cheaper for drinkers! Brewing a quality flavuorsome product costs money and should be reflected in the selling price of a ‘premium product’ to consumers.

I wholeheartedly refuse to make Bland-Piss-Water to a Price!

That may have descended into a bit of a rant, though I set out with this brewery to be human-faced rather than straitjacketed corporate “You can’t say that!”.

To recap: some malt prices are up, some malt prices are down, hop prices will be up, some of our beer prices will be tweaked to balance to costs of production.

Btw, I had a pint of Guinness last night, it cost £3.90 wtf! That could be a beer that is balanced on profit share! Tasted of nothing, no substance to it… We won’t do that!

Christmas Brewery Tap 17th December 12 til 8-ish, we have added a new permanent Handpull to our bar bringing the total to 6 and we are hiring a 2-tap keg dispense unit so we can add our Keg beers Divination IPA & Recap Farmhouse IPA to the bar on this Christmas Special #SaturdaySession.

Our Christmas beer ‘Nigel’ a 4% Golden Ale will be on the bar and as usual The LemonTree Café Bistro will be here doing the food until 6pm, there may be free mince pies after that 😉 And there might even be live festive music!

We hope to see you here on Saturday 17th from 12noon, Cheers