Category: Uncategorised

I’ve written about the cost of beer before and I have seen some conversation online about encouraging brewers to make beer that can be sold at £3 a pint, I feel we ask a fair price for every cask of beer we sell and a lot of our beer could be sold at £3 a pint.

This snowy weather made me think that it would be nice if we had more local support for our beers so when the bad weather hits we can still get beers out of the door to at least some of our customers easier.
I feel the likes of Leeds and Manchester do a lot more supporting of Brewers within the bounds of the city area however a lot of the brewers outside of that area seem to get missed out, then local pubs to those brewers outside of cities struggle sell their beers in the same towns.
Its a bit sad that Localism and Local Support are city based, there are pubs in Keighley/Local that will be getting beer from 30 miles away or more on a regular basis yet they hardly ever ShopLocal.

I question whether we should brew a range of beers that may encourage local pubs to buy local beers, Ya know…. Beers with less ingredients at no more than 4% Which could all be sold at a lower price “because people don’t care what they drink” so long as the price is right… they need to get a certain amount drunk for a certain amount of money, thats it! This is certainly the case in some towns and some pubs with the clientele they have around them.

What affect would brewing cheap beers with less ingredients have on the perception of what we do?

• Maybe locally it would help beer sales.
• Ethically it goes against everything I stand for about making beer.
• Maybe it would devalue what we do.

So I guess its best to stick to our guns and brew beer in the way that feels right.

So how do we find more local support?? How do we get people outside of Cities to Shop Local??

We are considering having a Locals Night, invite only for current customers and pubs in the local area, landlords can bring their staff or a couple of their loyal customers and the beer and food will be on us.

Then there is the question, “Are all our beers Local-Friendly?” Nope, never in a month of Sundays will our beers tick the right boxes for local sales! (lots of variety and a greater mount of beers with a greater amount of ingredients)

Cycle back to the cheap beer with less ingredients! Ha!

And a slight aside to all that…..

There are brewers out there who are set in a race to the bottom, you see prices online with discounts that make you wonder how the heck they make any money let alone pay the correct Beer Duty. These brewers (they know who they are) need to get together and talk to each other about what they are doing, they are not helping themselves and only spoiling the beer market for themselves and others. Ask yourselves, How much do you value the beer you make?!

A big thanks to the loyal local customers we do have, tell ya friends 😉

The #AskSIBA question I posed was answered in a roundabout way, in the style of a politician, I can’t help but think of a certain comedian when hearing Mike Benner’s voice but can’t quite recall the specific comic.

I started thinking, having recently filled in the yearly members survey, maybe there was a section missing.

A price of Cask survey.

The First question would be, “What size of brewery are you?” (10BBL brewing 3 times per week etc)

Free Trade: (Doing a couple of different ABV ranges so we can see a rough average for up-to 4% and over 4%, maybe a 5%+ range too)

1. For a beer between 3.5% – 3.9% Cask beer how much to you charge?
2. For the same beer how much does that cost you to produce, including all fixed costs, wages, ingredients, duty etc etc?

Ask the same questions for selling to Wholesalers and include rental casks and Palletization / Transport costs, ask the same for sales to JDW, ask the same for sales via Beerflex.

Lets not include any other parts of a ‘Varied Portfolio’ like bottles or keg and stick with Cask Beer, but lets pose questions like:

• Do you consider sales to ‘X’ to be Profitable? Yes or No
• Do you sell to ‘X’ as simply a form of marketing and accept that it doesn’t make you any money? Yes or No
• If you sold your beers to include the FULL Duty rate in your pricing do you think you would sell enough beer to make a profit?  Yes or No

I’m sure their are SIBA members out there that can add to what might be pertinent questions to ask the membership so we might have real world view of the brewing industry.

In the coming months SIBA will produce their annual report, it will be glossy and positive as is the way with commercial reporting telling the members where growth is and how good certain aspects are. The bits I would like to see is the negatives, give us some balance to all the polished graphs and stats with what is actually happening for brewers, I get the impression there is a lot of discontent in the membership so brutal honest black and white may be helpful.

And finally, I keep hearing things about the ‘low wholesale price of beer’, meaning the mass-market lagers that get sold to chain pubs and JDW, this skews the market price for beer from the ground up so what can be done to loosen the grip of the multinationals and put more business in the hands of us small independent local brewers?

I know, I know, its all been about #Tryanuary lately, well after Saturday (Jan 27th) its all going to to be about a mini vegan beer and food fest here in the brewery with our friends from Torrside Brewery, Nomadic Brewery, Rubys Street Kitchen and HotTod Dogs and Sauces 🙂

We will all be serving Unfined Vegan beers and all the food is going to be totally vegan too!

12 til 9-ish, Keighley, here at the brewery 😉

Quality, quality or quality?

I recently stated my thoughts at a SIBA (Society of Independent Brewers) meeting regarding a few issues, one of those was in regard to SIBA’s FSQ (Food Safety and Quality Certificate) Quality Audit which is only needed for selling into Tied Pubcos via the SIBA DDS/Beerflex program. I’ll get to this in a bit more detail later.

I see ‘Quality’ as having 3 basic streams.

1. Procedure
2. Microbiological testing
3. Knowledge and skill with the use of ingredients

These three streams of quality can be combined or separated in any combination and a brewer can make either good, bad or indifferent beer with any or all. A combination of all three seems like a pretty good idea.

Procedure:
I am somewhat spoilt in that my background from Saltaire Brewery taught me a great deal of solid procedure, this procedure should be written down and followed, full and complete records should be kept. This is something that ALL brewers should be adhering to from day one of brewing beer.
Its basically Food Safety and the production of beer inline with known procedure which helps eliminate the chance of making anyone poorly. Everything Cleaned and Sanitised before beer goes anywhere near it.

Microbiological testing:
Ideally a brewer should be able to trust their cleaning procedures and demonstrate that what they make is free from contamination. Samples should be taken and various stages for analysis to verify that casks, vessels, yeast, wort are all free of contamination. The simple solution for cleaned vessels is an ATP meter and swabs that tests for protein residue after cleaning and give a score from ZERO upwards with zero being no detected protein. Samples could also be plated up in lab conditions to see if any bugs grow so they can be identified.

Knowledge and skill with the use of ingredients:
I’ll be blunt here, you can give the best ingredients in the world to a brewer and they can still make shit beer. Conversely you can give the worst ingredients in the world to another brewer who will make amazing beer.

I guess what I am trying to say is that ‘Quality’ needs to be a combination of all three points to be fully confident in the beer you produce.
Good Procedure gets you a long way, so long as its adhered to! Though you could make technically correct, contamination-free beer that still tastes pants!

FSQ:
I feel FSQ is a box-ticking exercise and I would argue that is it ‘money for old rope’ for a lot of brewers and has consequences for brewers having to spend more money on some potentially unneeded services or schemes without any real quantifiable standard being achieved.
Join SIBA each year £150 (for arguments sake as a small brewer)
FSQ Audit £300 per year
BFBi Feed Assurance Scheme £175 per year (SIBA require you to register)
Pest Control Contract £250 per year (Contract required by SIBA) *As a food producer you need to have regularly checked pest control in place*

FSQ is no use for selling to Supermarkets, SALSA or BRC would be required if Supermarkets are your thing, SALSA or BRC can be used in place of FSQ in all areas.
FSQ is not required by Bottle Shops
FSQ is not required by Free House pubs or bars
FSQ is not required for direct sales to the public

Then there is the Flying Firkin thing, SIBA just bought a controlling share in Flying Firkin Distribution, (Apparently with members money and without asking the membership) Flying Firkin sells beer to Beer Festivals and Freehouse Pubs and neither of which require SIBA membership or an FSQ audit. Though SIBA’s plan for Flying Firkin is to make all brewers who use them join SIBA and gain the FSQ, so the brewers have to jump through hoops and spend money to be able to continue supplying via FF and all the time SIBA can potentially grow its membership and gain more funds from membership fees and FSQ audits.

I think it is time that SIBA offered a simple membership option for those brewers that wish to support their petitioning of government on Taxation and Beer Duty issues but don’t feel like any other part of SIBA is of benefit to them.

When I started homebrewing making beer was all about experimenting with different combinations of ingredients to see what you got in the finished beer. For me this is still what brewing beer is about, albeit commercial brewing is guided by procedure, quality and record keeping.

Our 5x Beer ‘Core Range’ we started out with lasted about 12 months, the next 12 months moved up a notch and a heck of a lot of new beers were brewed, I believe the next 12 months will be different again though we do have some pretty funky hops to play with during 2018 that is not going to stop us from experimenting with other varieties that don’t always get the same degree of exposure as the Citra/Simcoe/Mosaic/Galaxy/Nelson Sauvin’s of the hop world.

We designed the Unfunk pumpclip (and its Recipe) expressly for this purpose and you will see different combinations over many brews, guaranteed they will all taste like beer and it will show drinkers what these flavour combinations are like, look out for:

• Summit & Magnum (Brewed late Dec)
• Admiral & Cascade (Currently Dry Hopping in FV)
• Citra & First Gold (Future brew)
• More to follow…

We will not be bound by brewing only with the crowd pleasing hops, though if we did I dare say we could make our business climb the ranks a bit faster. Thats not to say that we won’t brew a Citra & Mosaic Unfunk, its about flavour experiences so the more the merrier.

All the above doesn’t do a heck of a lot for your overall Brewery-Score on things like Untappd and RateBeer so although having a high brewery score is obviously very nice we are going to try not worry about that too much and just keep doing what we do.

If you do rate our beers on one of these websites/apps then please leave us constructive comments, and rating a beer 1-Star because its simply not your thing is just dumb and if thats the case please leave a comment with NO rating 😉 Consider all beers separately within style and appreciate that once a beer leaves the brewery we loose control and many variables start to come into play.

You can of course expect a load of big hoppy punchy beers from us this year 😉

New Year, New Beer

We are supporting Tryanuary by brewing all new beers for our Saturday Brewery Tap day on 27th Jan, we did the same last year and released a load of new brews which helped set the scene for the year.

Because we were shut over the festive period we brewed Zoikes, Peat Smoked Abyss and our first Unfunk Summit & Magnum before Christmas.

Zoikes on Cask.Unfunk Summit & Magnum on Cask.Peat Smoked Abyss on Cask.

Then the first week back in January we brewed with Neptune Brewery from Liverpool to make a Double Abyss Stout, also we are brewing Chasm a NEIPA 3.8%.Double Abyss on Cask.Chasm on Keg.

This week we will be brewing Doppler Dark British Hopped Bitter, Muddle which is a New Zealand Hopped ESB, also another incarnation of our Unfunk recipe but this time with Admiral & Cascade hops.Doppler on Cask.Muddle on Cask.Unfunk Admiral & Cascade on Cask.

Then just to top things off we will have a re-brew of Cloudy with a chance of hops. Cloudy with a chance of hops on Keg.

You will probably have to wait for our Mini Vegan Fest on Saturday 10th February to try the new NEIPA Riders of Murk.

I was having an email conversation with Ricky the beer buyer from Bradford Beer Festival about beer, clarity, yeast and haze. Some of that conversation could boil down to one simple statement:

Is it right that good beer can be returned to the brewer for not being ‘Pin Bright’?

I’m not talking cloudy & full of unsettled yeast, I’m talking haze, a subtle little haze.
Good trading accounts have no doubt been lost through beer showing the slightest of hazes and rejected by a pub.

There is a lot more to the subject than just that of course, does haze or yeast improve or detract from the taste and aroma of a beer?

Haze (The simple explanation).

Haze mostly comes from Malted Barley, Wheat, Oats or Rye.
Haze can come from hops in large amounts.
Haze is generally fixed in beer.
Haze can be reduced with Copper-Finings while boiling or Finings-Adjunct in the fermenting vessel after fermentation.

Yeast (The stuff that makes beer).

Yeast settles out naturally with time, temperature and the distance it has to fall.
Yeast can be made to settle faster by using Isinglass Finings.
Yeast strains can sometimes be very flocculant meaning they settle quickly naturally, whereas other strains stay suspended in beer for much longer.

Reducing Haze.

Haze originally starts right back in the farmer’s fields where Malted cereals used in brewing need to have a particular amount of nitrogen, the amount of rain can effect the nitrogen levels, a lot of rain washes away nitrogen in the soil and lowers the nitrogen in the crop, and too little rain increase the nitrogen in the soil and also what is absorbed by the crop. Its seasonality that effects all farmed crops but for brewing CLEAR beer very specific levels of nitrogen must be attained in the grains.

Recipe formulation can dilute nitrogen, you could add sugar to get a specific ABV or things like Rice or Maize (Corn), now you start thinking “Hmm just like on the back of a can of mass-market Lager”, most Microbrewers won’t be diluting their beer’s flavour with anything in this way and quite the opposite they want more flavour.

Copper Finings used in the boil coagulate proteins which settle out, you get more proteins from higher nitrogen in the malted grains, then you can use Finings-Adjunct in the beer after fermenting to do the same, the proteins in the beer get clumped together making them heavier and easier to drop to the bottom. Isinglass Finings then further binds to these clumpy bits and yeast in cask which finally gives you CLEAR beer with correct cellering conditions.

*Throw a Spanner in the works with Malted grains with a too high nitrogen content and you may find that some of the steps you took to make clear beer haven’t quite been enough leaving just a subtle haze which would then follow onto returned beer, wasted beer and lost earnings. Nature did that, but the beer you made tastes bloody good… just a hint of haze.

Go back and read the statement at the top again.

Mostly before the brewer can react to a haze issue multiple batches of beer have been brewed and an increase in Copper Finings and/or an increase in Finings-Adjunct can fix the issue, by this point several batches of beer will have been committed to cask and sold into trade.

‘Hop Haze’ can be a more permenant haze for heavily hopped and heavily dry hopped beers which is probably going to be there no matter what you add to your beer.

Brewing a Hazy beer.

Do the exact opposite to the ‘Reducing Haze’ section above, increase things like Wheat and Oats, don’t use any form of Finings, hop and dry-hop the heck out of it and pick a yeast that stays in suspension for a long time. NO processing aids added to the beer and you still make tasty beer, how good is that!
Though with time, temperature, distance, and the right yeast you will get beer that is clear of yeast but a haze should remain.

Does haze / yeast improve flavour & aroma in beer?

There are lots of brewers that seem to think so, I will use my own thoughts to say why I think Unfined hazy beer will have more flavour & aroma etc.

All processing aids, Copper-Finings, Finings-Adjunct, Isinglass-Finings, Filtering (Evil Filtering! Evil! Evil Dirty Filtering!!!) take something away from beer so I guess the idea is the more naturally occurring stuff you leave in the more flavour, aroma, body and colour you keep. Then I guess you have loads of extra stuff (Haze ‘n Yeast) floating about in your pint, I’m going to suppose that that each little bit of floaty stuff is like a sponge which picks up all the good stuff you want to taste and carries it to you gob. (Citation needed by some sort of Scientist)

There! Oh and Drinking yeasty beer doesn’t give you farts and you will not be on the toilet the day after because of yeast. (Indian Take-away citation needed)

*I’ll hit Publish now and come back and edit stuff later*

From our first Brewery Tap day of January 2018 we will be tweaking our prices bar prices to better reflect prices charged in the local area. The ‘baseline’ is the price per pint we charge for Handpulled Beers and will be increased by 50p.
The exceptions to the baseline are Ingredients and Time, we could make some low ABV beers that we use a much greater amount of ingredients in and take longer in tank before being racked to cask, we will increase the price of any such beer to reflect what has gone into it.

We hope this baseline increase will let us save up enough money to get batches of beer put into Can or Bottle so we can grow our business a little in 2018.

This will also lessen my hypocrisy when I continually tell people that beer is too cheap!

Cheers for a good 2017, onward and hopefully upward to 2018.

First off, mega thanks to our brewery staff Oliver, Dawn & Paul, thanks also to Beth and Andrew who run our brewery tap bar. Cheers.

This year is ending with a feeling of stability, evening out the peaks and troughs we have shown a steady growth, we are playing a balancing act between the amount of empty casks we have + the amount of coldstore space we have + the amount of beer we are producing. We don’t currently have about £4k to reinvest in more Casks and the cold store is the size that it is so we need to work up to having enough spare cash to be able to do some Small Pack (Bottles or Cans) and send any expansion of production towards Bottle Shops / Bar Fridges and getting our beers into people’s fridges at home.
I would expect growth to level off in 2018 because of the above restrictions, we need to get more people trying our Keykeg beers *hint* Black IPA’s are great btw!!! *ahem!*

Production in 2017 has seen us brew 114 times and 34 totally new beers, so much for a ‘core range’ though we do realise we have some customers that like the regulars and easy drinkers.

We just had our Christmas Brewery Tap and have been frankly amazed by all the people coming to us for beers over these last 3 or 4 months, so thanks to all who have been you have made it very enjoyable. If we can keep this rate of Tap-attendance up it will go a long way to helping us make the move into getting our beer bottled or canned, we would rather not have to get a business loan and if I am honest I struggle with the concept of crowdfunding if the funder doesn’t get something reasonable in return.
With Small Pack in mind we will be adding approx 50p per pint onto our brewery tap prices from January 2018.

2018…

• We should work harder at selling a bit more to Wholesalers and need to find a bigger market for our KeyKeg beers.
• There is a list of stuff about as long as my arm of things I want to buy to enable us to react quickly to any mechanical or electrical breakdowns, I bet I could spend £4k in the blink of an eye.
• We need a chunk of money to send Oliver (Brewery assistant / Brewer / Top dude) on a Brewlab course and get him to do his GCB, hopefully we can claim back half of the amount from funding after the training is done.
• I could use some more Liquor treatment knowledge so I am less reliant on the skills of others in this area.
• Small-Pack, bottled or Canned beer, I’m currently thinking of using an on-site bottler or canner, we may well try a bit of hand bottling for sample purposes.
• Dare I say T-shirts? I know a lot of you have been asking for them. Beermats are back in stock since Thursday. Hopefully we will be able to afford some more Branded Glassware.
• We need to put our Mobile Keg bar to work, its first trip out is going to be to Pendle Beer Festival, there should be a couple of Keighley Worth Valley Railway appearances too.
• I need to take a mains water feed upstairs to start with then look at getting a cold liquor tank so our summertime wort cooling is easier.
• Kit modifications; In-line wort aeration or oxygenation, an addition to the copper so we can use Pellet hops in the boil, a better more accurate Temp Probe and Readout for the HLT.
• Water & used cleaning chemical recovery so we can get a second use out of some of the water we tip down the drain to be used as a pre-rinse for dirty vessels etc.
• Hop usage from contracted hops should mean there will be a number of new punchy hop-forward beers available.
• A kitchen area in the office would be nice, a new fridge and some proper office chairs!
• Moving forward I would like us to develop some Lab skills with some education in Microbiology so that when we do put beer in bottle or can we can assure ourselves that they cleaning and brewing we have done is up to scratch and can confirm that any contamination has been introduced by a third party packager.

Thats it 2017… thanks to all our great customers, see you in 2018 🙂

This is going to be a bit free-form so bear with it while I stab at the keyboard!

I was recently reading a blog post by the ever entertaining Pub Curmudgeon with regards to quality of ingredients in beer and their worth and the subsequent price of the pint.
Also the same day I was reminded of what Small Brewers Relief on Beer Duty is supposed to be about and how the relief should be used to reinvest in people and process to further the business and should not be used to discount beer prices to pubs or wholesalers etc.

There is a notion that seems to pervade some Blog posts, Twitter comments and Media articles and its as if Brewers and Pubs aren’t allowed to make their businesses profitable so as to have a stable business creating something that people want.

Beer and its Ingredients, I’m going to tell you how much a couple of our beers cost to make:

Blonde 3.6% (Simple session blonde using Polish & German hops at a low abv, quick turn-around beer in and out of tank within 7 days)

• Selling Price to pub £65+vat for 40 Litres
• Price per litre for materials only £0.154p
• Cost of production per litre £0.386p
• Cost of Delivery & Pumpclip per litre £0.0925p
• Beer Duty (@ SBR) per litre £0.344p

Total = £0.9765 per Litre (£39.06  per 40 L Firkin)

We could make our Blonde cheaper than this, we could save maybe £80-100 per Ton of malt by buying from a cheaper Maltster, we could Mash cooler and make thinner beer of the same abv, we could stop using a load of Carapils Malt (Dextrine) to help add body, we could use less hops.
BUT THIS IS NOT THE POINT OF OUR BUSINESS.

Cellar Dweller 7.5% (Three Speciality malts, heavily hopped & dry hopped with American, & New Zealand hops, this beer spends longer in Tank dry hopping and chilling more due to being unfined)

• Selling Price to pub £125+vat for 40 Litres
• Price per litre for materials only £1.086p
• Cost of production per litre £0.386
• Cost of Delivery & Pumpclip per litre £0.0925p
• Beer Duty (@ SBR) per litre £0.715p

Total = £2.2795 per Litre (£91.18  per 40 L Firkin)

We wouldn’t make this beer cheaper, in fact the next time we brew it we may make it more expensive and add more Dry Hopping.

Small Brewers Relief (SBR) is meant to help growth in the brewing sector and let new brewers start producing beer without having to pay the Full Beer Duty rate, we get a 50% discount. I dare say we wouldn’t be trading if we had to pass on the full duty rate to our customers. I suppose the reality is that the SBR is being used to keep the price of a pint low as brewers pass this saving on to pubs to get business, with some pubs wrongly demanding ridicules low prices from brewers £45-55 per cask and some stupid brewers do it. Every brewer out there should charge the Full Duty rate so they can afford the money to improve their process and ultimately make better beer, though that would have a knock-on effect to price of a cask… Our 3.6% Blonde sells at £65+vat with SBR, we should really be charging £79+vat… now lets see how well that sits with pubs and bars when you tell them its a 3.6% Blonde for nearly 80 quid! I dare say we wouldn’t sell very much.

So then brewers, and I’m talking to ALL of you…. Lets do a MagicRock and put our prices up to sensible levels to ensure we all have a business in 5 years time 😉 Though if the vast majority of Microbrewers put their prices up they would end up leaving sales wide open to the Big boys again and the multinationals would fill those gaps with mediocre beer!

I have seen some comments from Shane (Assuming Cheshire Brewhouse) on the Boak & Bailey blog regarding the multinational brewers selling beer into trade at £45 a Cask, this can only be the economy of scale that allows such a low margin and clearly shows why us small independent brewers NEED Small Brewers Relief to even come close to being competitive.

Back to the SIBA statement “Our members typically invest the relief in jobs, marketing and capital investment”, in all probable reality SIBA members typically use SBR to discount beer prices to be able to compete in the marketplace and work their arse’s off to be able to reinvest in people, process and equipment.

When I was first shown the pricing formula for McSpoons supply it was ABV x 30.1 + 74 = price per brewers barrel (4x Firkins in a Brewers Barrel)