Author: WishboneAde

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!

Yeah, yeah I know I have babbled on about “Is it Craft Beer?” before and I’m still not convinced that someone can put a definition to it.

SIBA have recently brought out their certification of ‘Assured Independent British Craft Brewer‘, of which we are signed up to, but as far as I can see there is no solid meaning other than that you are independently owned and operated with scale of production not really in the equation or the beer you produce.

If I was to set a scale factor on how big your brewkit can be to be allowed in the ‘Craft Beer’ club I would say 30BBL (approximately 5000 litres) per brew though unlimited on the amount of times you brew each week.

Everyone wants Craft Beer to be something more than session blandness, more of a movement or an ethos generated by brewers and drinkers who discerningly crave for flavour in all its forms and modes of presentation.

So with all that in mind we will be brewing a light-hearted piss-take beer named ‘Pastiche’, we may do a ‘Homage’ to the worthy sometime too, its going to have lots of Citra, Simcoe & Galaxy with an up-to 5g/litre dry hop and we’re not going to fine it either so suck that up!

Tell us whether you think it is craft beer or not, it will be a small brew for cask, I guess we could think to carbonated it and put it in KeyKeg… but thats a whole other kettle of fish KEGS! Just because you put bubbles in a beer and keg it does not instantly turn it into Craft Beer or Craft Keg.
‘Fizzy beer’ isn’t an appealing term for any beer *Hashtag #EvilKeg* 🙂 The carbonation creates an effervescence that helps present the aroma and flavour followed by mouth-feel in somewhat the same way as a Sparkler does on a traditional Handpull. Bla Bla Bla 🙂 We hope you enjoy this beer, look out for it in October.

Our recent brew of Flux Session Ale flew out of the brewery faster than you could say Flux-Capacitor so its back on the brewplan for September so some more of you lovely people get to try it.

We brewed with a relatively new British Hop this month called Epic, no although it maybe doesn’t live up to its name it does however make for a well balanced easy drinking beer, 5 kg of Epic went into about 820 litres.

We brew Waitomo next week a New Zealand hopped IPA, this has its roots in an old homebrew I did which displayed sweet fruity orange notes from lots of Pacific Jade hops, it also has a few other NZ varieties in the mix which help us s-t-r-e-t-c-h our hop supplies.

The guys at Peterborough Beer Festival have give our Rascal Session IPA their Gold Award for New Breweries www.peterborough-camra.org.uk Thanks a lot guys 🙂 Thats our first proper award.

We do love Rascal, though sadly with all the big brewers with deep pockets buying up all the funky American hops it is only going to be an occasional brew for us, though if you are a Hop Merchant like Charles Faram or Simply Hops feel free to let us have some Citra & Equinox (Whole Hops and Pellet T90s) and we’ll make Rascal a more regular brew 😉 We designed Rascal with a broad palette of American hops some that are down right funky and some that you wouldn’t expect to help us brew a beer with longevity rather than just a one-off fleeting #FunkFest #HopBomb that we couldn’t keep brewing. Our pockets don’t stretch to contracting for a Metric Ton of Funky hops, but we do love a Rascal 😉

How’s about this for an idea for Keighley Brewers, Pubs and the town in general…

Brewing is a pretty friendly business and this Keighley Worth Valley Railway Steam & Ale Trail event gets me thinking, wouldn’t it be great if the breweries and pubs of Keighley somehow worked together to bring Keighley back to being a ‘Destination for Beer’, to have a common goal which would help support the local economy.
I’m not saying I know how to do it but would like to see Keighley mentioned with the likes of Huddersfield for its pubs, just look at all the pubs in Keighley and think how good it could actually be, a Real Ale & *Ahem* Craft Beer utopia. I’ll quote the ‘Sparrow effect’ here and how that the introduction of The Sparrow Bar to North Parade in Bradford kick-started a mini revolution.
There are at least 20 historic pubs within walking distance that if all of them served well made independently brewed beer our little town might just start changing.

A pipe dream, maybe… just throwing the idea out there, this is only a blog post after all.

Please share this and Hashtag it #Keighley

After a comment from some folks from London who were really impressed with our brewery prices while drinking in our brewhouse I thought I’d write a little blog about the reasons behind our pricing and the differences between Brewery-served beer and Pub-served beer.


The Brewery Bar @ £2 a pint
Rough & Ready, it may be flipping cold we have concrete floors & wooden seats with pallets for tables, we have 1 toilet and hire in Portable Toilets, we like to keep things simple with the giving of change, our staff get paid in kind, we only serve our own beer with a little Wine & Cider thrown in.

The Pub @ £3 a pint
Comfy Seats, Carpet, Posh bar, multiple staff that are paid in money and not beer, proper toilets, comfy, warm, open fires, a proper coffee machine, regular food service, a great range of beers, wines and spirits to choose from, a posh cash register (EPOS) for tallying up and giving change, pub games.

You can really appreciate the time and effort Landlords put in to make the pub what it is and also see where that difference in price comes from, so go appreciate your pub & Landlord the next time you are having a pint.

Cheers 🙂

*Keg beer: When we get our keg bar built we will sell it for £1 per Third, £3 a pint, for most beers due to the extra time, expense and effort that it takes to put carbonated beer into keg. There will be exceptions to this where a beer is particularly strong or the ingredients or process were more expensive, these beers will be fairly priced accordingly.

Last Monday we brewed our first collaboration with the guys from the Cap & Collar in Saltaire… it is a British Hopped Oatmeal Session IPA, an experiment in using British Hops in the ways you would normally think of using American hops, Upfront and In-Yer-Face.
We brewed, we Dry hopped and it will being going into casks tomorrow and out for delivery later in the week.

This first brew of Collarbone will be available at the Cap & Collar and a few other select places along with our brewery bar.

Each time we open the brewery bar we see a whole host of new faces from outside of Keighley, people finding us for the first time, we even had a minibus load come in from Wibsey (You know who you are!), Bradford City Footy fans passing through on a match-day, people that were heading into Leeds but then thought ‘stuff it lets give Wishbone a go’, and it seems pretty regular that our brewery-drinkers head off to the Cricketers & Brown Cow to carry on after we call time.

Thanks all for coming to see us and do tell your local landlord if you enjoyed our beers, watch out for dates for Friday evenings along with our #SaturdaySessions, Cheers.

Thanks to @BigAdeBrewing for passing this on to us, it seems we were in the top three at Dudley Winter Ale Fest 🙂 Cheers

Put your (Responsible) drinking boots on straight from work and join us from 4.30 to 10pm Friday 1st April, thats next Friday!
No food on site this time so order in your favourite take-away 🙂