Author: WishboneAde

I’ll be honest here, our starting lineup of beers is mostly made to have wide appeal without offending anyone’s tastes. I had no intentions to run before I could walk, the beers have been received well and only really minor tweaks are being made to the recipes of Blonde, Bandit, Gumption with a bigger re-balance of hopping and bitterness for Divination IPA, Abyss might well stay exactly as it is.

We have expensive food-grade glycol in our chiller system now so the knock-on effect of this is we can drop the temperature of our beers lower at the end of fermentation to settle out more yeast prior to filling casks, we are currently chilling to 8c for a day or two. The aim is to be able to chill to around 0c so we can carbonate for kegging, we will probably have to add some further Glycol to the system (carbon-dioxide gas gets into solution quicker at lower temperatures).
I’m really looking forward to getting the kegging of our unfined and unfiltered beer beers going as it opens up the range of beers we will brew and I can start having some fun with recipes, kegging requires me to learn a little more and perfect certain cleaning regimes and processes to ensure we produce a consistent and well-made product…

Slow progress on our brewery bar as things like sales and deliveries take precedence, the bar top was constructed and requires two more coats of varnish before we attach it to the rest of the bar structure, after that the Eddison-style funky bulb lighting needs hanging and wiring up, then we need to cut loads of MDF circles to fit in the top of our plastic casks to make seats, tables and pint-shelves to construct, we need to buy a load of glasses and a glass-washer, and some bits of safety stuff to do, get our massive banner put up, handpulls to plumb up with beerlines to the coldstore…. a few things, I probably shouldn’t have made a list! eek!

Yesterday was interesting, I got up early to get a 10bbl brew of Wishbone Blonde done so I had time later to go out delivering…

Things didn’t go to plan, near the end of my mash run-off a main fuse blew and dropped a phase on the 415volt electric so probably lost an hour and a half while the electrician got a new fuse and checked out the circuits.
After that the brew went without hitch and hit all our targets, I was just coming to the end of transferring my Hop-sparge (Recovering flavour and fermentables from the wort soaked hops) when a lady from Bradford Council’s Environmental Health turned up to do a spot inspection. It was probably and hour or so that passed while she asked questions about our process and checked out all our written cleaning procedures. She left after writing her report giving us a very big thumbs up with 3 really minor things to attend to, fit a door closer on the toilet door, keep our malt hopper covered even when empty, and clear some tools away once we have finished our fit our of the premises.
It was good to know we are doing things right 🙂

We also had our brewery bar top made and the beer pumps have been ordered from EWL in Keighley, plus the one that I grabbed from ebay, we will have 5 Handpulled beers on our bar to begin with so we can serve Blonde, Bandit, Gumption, Divintion and Abyss all together from cask. Future additions will be Keg lines to increase the range and styles we can offer.

After all that I finally went out with my delivery and got home after 6pm!

We brewed our Blonde and IPA last week, and a little something else that we are going to keep mostly in-house for when our Brewery Bar events start. The Blonde is 3.6% with a mix of Polish & German hops and Divination IPA is rammed full of American hops… and dry hopped too, its 5.6%.

Yesterday we brewed an all British-hopped Bitter ‘Gumption’, something English, something solid, weighing in at 4.5%, well now the weather is drawing in… ‘they are taking the roads in’ too so you’d best grab a pint and settle in.

Tomorrow we brew Bandit, Bandit is a 3.8% American Style Pale Ale, easy drinking but with plenty of hops complimented with Munich, Wheat & CaraGold malts.

We are going to need more of our Blonde to, it tasted mighty fine while filling casks on Monday.

Cheers

We were meant to be brewing yesterday and today though sadly we weren’t quite ready, we were very close, there were leaks around the chiller system connections that were proving rather bothersome and we discovered we had some particulate matter in our Yorkshire Water supply.
As of yesterday I think we have the leaks addressed and today we are fitting an inline filter to keep the bits out of our water while Yorkshire Water hopefully address the issue, in any case we should be good to brew next weekend.
Next jobs are to get the Cask Washer plumbed in and hand the cold store fan unit…

More fun stuff was the print proofs for our plumpclips arrived from Colourscan 🙂

Its been a bit hectic and I’ve not had time to think about updating the website with all efforts going into getting to the point where we can brew!


All our brewkit and fermenting vessels have been through passivation cleaning a thorough Hot Caustic CIP (Clean In Place) so they are ready to be used, the temperature controllers are working on the fermenters too and its just the final small pieces of chiller system plumbing to complete and hopefully we can commission the chiller system this coming week and get brewing next weekend 🙂

If all goes to plan it will go like this:
Brew 1 – Saturday 22nd Brew 2 – Sunday 23rd
Beers ferment for approximately a week
Beers racked into casks 29th & 30th (Also brew 3 & 4)
Casked beer left to cold condition in our cold store for 1 week
Deliveries of Keighley’s newest beer to local pubs Drink! (Responsibly of course)
Our first two beers will go equally well with a good Curry or a delicate fish dish
YAY!!!

This means we could be about a Month away, maybe less,  from our first brew!!!!