Wishbone Brewery – Keighley, Yorkshire, UK

It seems like a while since my last beer update on here, Paul just doesn’t nag as much as Dawn did!!!

River of Worth 4.6% British Hopped Brown Ale turned out a bit good, we started building in malty toasty flavours from the very start in Oliver’s recipe, so that when we added all the toasted bread all the flavours complimented well with one another. We have Keighley Big Local, Aire Rivers Trust, River Worth Friends and the local Co-Op to thank for doing all the toasting and supply of the waste food that saved it going to landfill. Its a worthy contender for these chilly weeks as the autumn leaves are falling.

Steely Dan Mondays 3.5%, its a Pale ale / Session IPA brewed with Enigma, Citra & Taiheke hops with a nice 6g/Litre Dry hop, brewed especially for the 5th Birthday of The Record Cafe from North Parade, Bradford. This beer is nicely different, and fairly dank, thanks to the Aussie Enigma and New Zealand Taiheke hops. The Record Cafe Birthday weekend runs from 22nd to 24th this weekend!!!

Yeah, its that time of year again soon, we brewed this year’s version of Nigel 4% ‘Hoppy Christmas’ with Cascade, First Gold and Jester hops and it should be even more drinkable than last years, we are taking pre-orders and its already over half sold so be quick if you want a cask, we will also have it on our Christmas Brewery Tap bar and a limited amount of minikegs will also be available to order / buy.

Leading us nicely onto Christmas, we will be open Saturday 14th December for all your drinking needs between 12 and 9pm, The Lemontree are on food duty and we will again have the fabulous Haworth Ukulele Group with us for some festive fun. Our mobile keg bar will be on in addition to our regular bar, we hope 8x keg and 6x cask (with beer changes) will be enough to keep you entertained 🙂 The very last keg of BA Black Imp 10.2% will be on too!!!!

Cheers

As some of you may know Dawn (our sales girl) has gone to pastures new to help her friend out in a cafe, Paul (our Driver) has thankfully agreed to do extra days and take over the sales role too, so our weekly emails will be coming from Paul@…. instead of Dawn@…. If you didn’t get the new email this week then please check your spam folder. Hopefully Dawn will still give me a nudge from time to time to tell me I need to write a new Blog post 😉 But yeah…. thanks to Dawn for always looking after our customers in her typically Dawn way 😉

New beers…

Sky Wizard 2.8% Session IPA, our first go at a low ABV beer, Mashed hot to retain body this beer drinks way stronger than the 2.8%, dry hopped and unfined/Vegan, a trio of hops from America make a very satisfying gob full. Its a bit like brewing a 4% beer all the same ingredients and a heck of a lot of hops. There are a limited number of Casks and mostly keykegs of this beer.

Replacement Tears 4.4% Raspberry Sour, again this is another first for us with our first Sour beer!! And its turned out a treat, Brewed with a Trappist style Belgian yeast a really nice balance of sour and body, the Mosaic & Citra BBC dry hopping takes a back seat with the sour and Raspberries being more upfront, and its a lovely dusky pink colour too. This is almost totally Keykeg beer, and obviously Unfined and Vegan.

I should mention that we have brewed our German-style Smoked beer Boilerplate with a Lager yeast this year and its in Cask and Keykeg, I might even stick one on the brewery bar for this weekend for the Smoke fans. Unfined, Unfiltered & Vegan.

Whimsy 4.7% Session IPA with Enigma, Nelson Sauvin & Mosaic hops, brewed with Jim from Salford Beer Fest its tasting great nicely different hop combo that breaks away from a lot of other beers.  Available from next week (apart from in the Manc area as thats for Salford Beer fest only) in cask then a limited amount of keykeg about a week later.

• A little rundown of the remainder of the year, we have The Lemontree back on the food for our remaining Saturday bars of 2019.
  This Saturday 12th October – 12 til 7pm
• 9th November – 12 til 7pm, this is going to be an epic bar day as we have soooo much going on, there will be a beer Launch of a Trad-brown Ale made with waste food (Toasted bread to be exact) wich is a tie-in with a Litter-Pick as we did before with the River Worth Friends / Keighley Big Local and Aire Rivers Trust who will be bring river models to look at / play with and there will be a talk too….. then if thats not enough from 5 til 7pm there is a Free Electronic Music Set from MylarMelodies with Eurorack Synth gear.
• 14th December 12 til 9pm is our Christmas Bar and we have the amazing Haworth Ukulele Group with us again for some raucous festive fun.

Cheers.

 

Hello 🙂 It seems a while since we’ve updated you on what beers are new….

Most recently we brewed a Cucumber Kolsch 4.8%, we had the cask version on our bar last Friday and it saw lots of action along with the non-cucumbered version on Keykeg being the biggest selling beers of the session. I’ve tried a couple of other cucumber beers and to be honest ours wins hands down, masses of fresh summery cucumber on the nose followed in the mouth and the really easy drinking of the Kolsch recipe, unfined and vegan but our cask settled out as near as bright as it could be within a couple of days. Available in Cask and 30L Keykegs.

Titus Red 1772 was brewed with the lovely guys from the Square Chapel Arts in Halifax, its a big ass Malty Hoppy gob full brewed with Crisp Malt’s Dark Munich malt which really swings some heft in the malt stakes, then Citra, Chinook, Ekuanot and Columbus scream their way through to an eventual 9g/litre Dry hop in the FV giving it a lovely hoppy nose before descending into Hops and Malt in the mouth, also weighing in at 4.8%, Unfined and Vegan, this one should serve with a nice but subtle haze. Available in Cask and 30L Keykegs.

TP2 or Tiller Pin 2, we went all ‘Supersize my ass’ on this, Tiller Pin is good and TP2 is MORE GOOD! Big Fat Dry Hop with Citra and Chinook BBC hop Pellets and 6.2%, the guys from The Boathouse were invited around to brew this with us cos we thought it only fitting with our history of Brewing Tiller Pin 4.2% for them. A totally cracking beer that we will definitely brew again. This one is also Unfined and Vegan, definitely has a good-looking haze to it, available in Cask and mega-limited quantity in 30L Keykeg.

Things coming up in the near future….
A collab, more details will be released nearer the time, it will be a Fruity Kolsch though 😉 Feel free to guess who we are collaborating with….
We will be brewing a Raspberry Sour with a Belgian yeast which will be mostly be heading into Keg, sooooooo if you want a Cask of it you need to be telling us RIGHT NOW!!!! Thanks

Don’t forget this Saturday we have Mozzafella bringing the Fresh Baked Pizzas to our Bar day, 10th Aug 12 til 7pm, you can come and get your Cucumber Kolsch Keg fix too!

Then there is no Friday Bar in September because we wanted to go drink some booze at Leeds International Beer Festival then the week after its Saltaire Brewery’s massive yearly Beer fest, so our special Brewery Birthday Bar is going to be on Saturday 21st September, details here. Think lots of keg beer and some epic beers on offer along with Top Food from Rubys Street Kitchen.

October is your last Friday bar of the year, just Saturdays through November and December…. Shit!! Its nearly Flippin’ Christmas, but, but, but its still August!!!

Our November Saturday will be one not to miss too, we will be starting the day a bit early supporting  Keighley Big Local / The friends of River Worth and the Aire Rivers Trust, so the early part of that day will be the launch of a beer made with Waste food and a litter pick with River Models for you to look at / play with out in our loading bay, food will be from our friends at The Lemon Tree. Later that day on Saturday 9th November we will have something pretty different to what we have done before, I’ve always been into electronic music and have played around with music gear and music making for years so between 5-7pm we will have the excellent Mylar.Melodies bringing us his electronic synth music in the form of his Modular Eurorack gear, check him out on Social Media and his regular electronic music Podcasts.

We will be 4 years old as a brewery at the end of August but we had to be polite and not clash with other peoples events so we moved it some time back to Saturday 21st September.

We hope you will come and join us while we roll out the Mobile keg bar in addition to our regular beers on offer so you’ll get a total of 14 beers to make your way through 🙂
This will let us put on the likes of; Dassler, Cucumber Kolsch, Cloudy with a chance of hops, The Black Imp, Barrel Aged Black Imp,  TP2, Wibble, Bleep, etc all on Keg at the same time along with 6 of our excellent Cask beers 🙂 And thats not even all the different keg beers we ‘could’ put on!

There will the the amazing #Streetfood from Rubys Street Kitchen.
And thanks all for getting us from nothing to the 4 year mark, we literally couldn’t have done it without you, Cheers

Here are the latest Lab results from the test of our Greenflute Gluten Free Beer

Just to explain this, if we take off 36.05% we get 8.96ppm and if we add 36.05% we get 19.047ppm, these are still within the required limit of 20ppm. All the info is there, you can make an informed decisionbased on the ingredients and the results. Thanks

It was last year sometime that we initially said we were going to crowdfund to get us over the hump to start Canning our beers, things changed and we were able to Can our beers without the need for crowdfunding. (I’ll talk a little about cans further down) What we did do last year was shoot a load of video clips from around the brewery so we could put together a Youtube video to promote starting a Crowdfunding effort, we still hope to use some of this and crowdfund to be able to open a local Bar/Micropub/Pub… The bit I’m not looking forward to doing is sitting talking to a camera or recording a voice-over, I mean… WTF do I say?!

I’ll practice my best half stuttered robot fashion delivery…

*Hello I am Adrian from Wishbone Brewery.
*We would really like to start a local Bar but we don’t have any spare cash.
*Will you help us make the leap from just having our monthly brewery events to having a permanent location for our beers?
*What we offer is a few sweeteners for your goodwill and we’ll try our best to make it worth your while.
*We, like you, want whatever we do to be a benefit to us as well as the local community.
*We all want that warm fuzzy glow, preferably from a few good beers 😉

See! Look! I can write it on a Keyboard easy enough, Camera / Filming / Mutter-Mutter / My Arse!

When I have time, I will rekindle the Bar Funding idea and tell you all about it.

Honestly, Cans.
Well the canning day didn’t completely pan out as I have previously blogged about, we really aren’t ‘sales people’ which probably doesn’t help and the best we can do is to talk about our love of beer and what we put into it. We did our best to send little can ‘care-packages’ around to some great pubs…. did we get any reaction to this care-packages you ask? Not really, a couple of places were good enough to maybe follow us back on Twitter or talk to us on an email but for the most part we didn’t even get a thank you, no feedback, no nothing.
We don’t do pushy sales, we don’t want to continually pester people.
Having beer in Can should have opened new doors, it has opened some but no where near enough to feel like its notched us up a gear, I’m a bit sad about this to be honest. Cans should have been a gateway into pubs to sell them Cask and keg beers…. Maybe we should be Pushy annoying sales people!

There is a massive chunk of the current beer / can market that is full-on Uber-Craft, not just Craft, definitely not Real Ale, it seems to sell into some of these places you have to be always producing a Double Mango Milkshake IPA at 8% ABV in a 440-500ml Can that looks like a kids colouring book on steroids… Thats not to say i don’t appreciate good and interesting design, because I do, I’m just trying to make a point. I keep seeing the term FOMO, the Fear Of Missing Out on that new beer, if it not new and 8% you may as well not bother! Weird Craft-Market insular bubble.

Our cans… Our Dassler NZ Helles lager is epic, but a load of places wont or can’t sell canned lagers, there’s no margin in it and people can buy any old industrial piss from a supermarket shelf. Zoikes American Pale is basically BBQ beer, its mega easy drinking and you could happily sup a load of them all afternoon while the smoke of the BBQ fills your garden.

We’ll keep plodding on, doing what we do and doing the best we can, we hope you lot appreciate that we (I) set out to have one foot on each side of the ‘Craft Fence’ there’s not really a reason to ignore our classic styles of beer or do stupid things like renaming a Bitter to be an Amber.

Btw… we have a Kolsch-style beer and our first Sour beer on the brewplan in July 😉

A few of us brewers have discussed doing this before (but with Videos), here is my take on keeping cask beer using cask-widge extractors with casks in the vertical position, our coldstore is set to 11c.

I have written this as a conversation piece, feel free to improve or correct my procedure, point out anything that you consider to be blatantly stupid etc. Feedback to – info@wishbonebrewery.co.uk

• Put cask in position in coldstore/cellar and leave for at least 24 hours, it could have just been delivered and be pretty shaken up due to transport and its probably warmer than you want it.
• Ensure all Taps, Pegs, extractors etc that will touch the beer are clean and sanitised, this includes cleaning and spraying sanitiser on the Shive and keystone.
• *At this point if your were traditionally stillaging your Cask beer on its side you would use a Hard peg to Vent the cask followed by hitting the Tap in, if the beer is lively it may be best to just leave it in the vented state and put the tap in later once the beer has had time to settle down*
• Using a soft faced mallet so as not to damage your Taps or Extractors you hammer the cask-widge into the keystone. We use a short length of pipe and a plastic tray to catch any beer as you open the vent tap on the Cask-widge. Its at this point where you find out if the beer is lively or not and a decision is made on how long to leave the vent open for the cask to breath. Some beers will just give a little light hiss and its fairly fair to say they will be in a serve-able state within 24 hours, other beers will spew out many pints of foam and its obvious that they must be vented for longer to allow a sensible serve through the hand pump. If we feel the need we can also take a taste sample at this point
• *At this point with a traditional stillaging you would be checking for the taste, aroma and clarity from the cask tap, should clarity be appropriate to the beer in question*
• In our setup we only check for clarity when pulling the beers through to the Handpumps on the bar, fined beers should be clear, Unfined beers can be clear / hazy / cloudy, taste is key and serving an appropriately looking beer that your customers find acceptable for style.
• Soft Pegs are used while serving to let air but no debris into the casks, these can be replaced with Hard Pegs for traditionally stillaged or closing the vent valve on our Cask-widge when serving has finished. Putting the hard peg in or closing the valve helps the beer retain its condition for the next session of serving.

We find that a half full cask if left for a week is not quite right to be served over the bar as the air has oxidized the beer and it doesn’t taste as fresh as it should. However, not all beers are the same, some darker and stronger beers will be more resilient to oxidation and sometimes a 3/4 full cask will be perfectly good after that same week, beers should be diligently tasted before being put on the bar each session and if a beer is not right it should not be served.
I have thought about getting some Cask Breathers for our brewery bar so we could keep beers from the first Friday of the month to the second Saturday, we decided against this because we prefer to have a changing range each time we open the brewery bar but thats not to say that the beer couldn’t be kept in good condition because of that little added co2 blanket from the cask breathers. If we ever start a proper pub I think we would go the Cask-breather route to keep our beers in the best possible condition.
We note that a well settled cask can be tapped and served within 5 minutes, it is not ideal as the beer could be more lively, we have 2 sizes of Sparklers to deal with this and the sparkler can be removed altogether for particularly lively pours.
Its quite possible to have vented a non-lively cask for 2 days prior to serving and it will still be a lively pour through the handpull.

Thanks

 

Don’t worry, we didn’t change the sheep, its the same sheep you know and love… in your own ways.

We are changing the ABV of Drover, it will be 3.9% rather than 4.2% from now on so that is differentiates it from Gumption Bitter at 4.5% a bit better, we didn’t want to loose the character of the original so we have increased the amount of Vienna Malt we use in it to compensate and then just balanced the hop bitterness to the new ABV. You’ll notice that we are referring to ABV as ALC too so as to edge closer to the Trading Standards preferred way of expressing alcohol percentage, it means exactly the same thing 😉

Our latest batch of Greenflute Gluten Free Pale hopped with Citra Mosaic & Simcoe has come back with flying colours again after the Lab Test, <10ppm is below the measurable limit and you have to be below 20ppm to pass the test.

Available in Cask & Keykeg while stocks last 🙂

Photo courtesy of https://twitter.com/Copeasaurus

There are just too many questions around Buyouts and Supermarkets, multiple questions and multiple answers / opinions, which questions are right to ask? and what are the answers? I’ve tried to have a balanced view of both sides here…

Lets think Positive:

Multinational brewer buys high profile indie brewer, leaves brewer alone to do what they do, that brewer now gets into all manner of tied lines in pubs and supermarket shelves. The price of their beer comes down and makes more people able to drink it. Consumer Win! Brewery fortifies the job security of their employees.
Supermarkets now have such a good range of beer that any regular shopper can try beers that were previously only available in bars and specialist bottle shops. Win for Consumer!
Small indie producers now fill the market gap that the recently bought out brewery used to fill and all the small and local businesses flourish. You can get your ‘main stay’ beers from the supermarket shelves then you go down to your local Pub or Bottle shop to get the more varied and interesting beers. Overall the introduction of more choice in supermarkets is good for the industry and make a whole range of new consumers aware of beers amazingly varied and different attributes, this brings in a new group of consumers. Industry Win.

Lets think Negative:

Multinational brewer buys high profile indie brewer and makes their beer available in may more places, supermarkets have such a great range of beer on their shelves that anyone can buy beer at supermarket prices while ordering their shopping online. Consumer Win! Now the consumers don’t have to leave the house, they no longer bother with the specialist bottle shop they used to spend their hard earned coin in, the no longer go to that little Micropub where they used to try all the different beers and made so many new friends in the process.
The brewer now makes less per Can than they ever have, the overall price point at wholesale of beer drops and creates a market where small operators find it increasingly difficult to enter the market and sustain a business unless you can afford to drop your prices to supermarket levels. You only have to watch Dragons Den on TV to see the Dragons eyes light up with ££-signs when they find out they already have a Supermarket deal… unbridled capitalism right there! Kerrching!
Small indie businesses die out leaving only the large scale production breweries. Consumer choice slowly dwindles to that which big business sees fit to give us.

Now what about the Multinational business that bought the high profile indie:

Where does the profit go, Does it move out of the country and into the pockets of shareholders?
What are the credentials of the big business behind the new owner, we hear of less good stuff about their support of various regimes in certain countries.

Where does your beer come from:

As a consumers we are all becoming more savvy and asking where the products we buy come from, who makes it, who owns the business, is it ethical, is it vegan, is it local, etc, etc…
We want to know the names of the people that make the stuff we put in our mouths, we want it to be local and the local support we give to these indie businesses to have the knock-on effect of feeding back into the local environment and community.

What does it all mean? I’ll be stuffed if I know, maybe you can tell me….

We are obviously going to see a lot more buyouts over the coming years, I’ll be honest, on a personal level it makes me sad. I won’t avoid the beer from bought out brewers but I will favour the independent producers.

Whats for sure is consumers want Maximum flavour for Minimum effort, consumers will take the shortest route from A to B.