Category: Uncategorised

We will be closing up shop 16.30 on Friday 22nd December and then back open Wednesday 3rd January 2018. You have between now and 22nd Dec to order & collect minikegs 🙂

Next week we are brewing a trio of new beers then racking them all the following week before we give the vessels some well deserved TLC.

Zoikes is 4.2% and is basically going to be an easy drinking session pale, using three American hops Columbus, Ekuanot & Mosaic.

Peat Smoked Abyss, using Peat Smoked malt for the folks that like the tar to stick to the back of their throat when they drink a smoked beer, like regular Abyss but smoked and the hops swapped to cause less confusion withe the smoked malt 4.3% Unfined, we will soon start doing our regular Abyss as Unfined & Vegan.

This will be the first outing of our Unfunk Pumpclip, a two hop combo beer, dry hopped and unfined. The first brew will use American Summit & German Magnum hops in this IPA recipe 5.5%.

This will be the third year we have held the Northern Craft Brewers Homebrew Competition, we had some 34 entries into last years competition, this is a Homebrewers-only Social Event and is NOT open to the general public.
The competition is to be held on Saturday 5th May 2018 and is open to all homebrewers who can bring their bottle entries on the day.

Here is a link to some tips on brewing a NEIPA. You might also note that the new Lallemand yeast ‘New England’ is going on general release from 6th November 2017 if you want to try for that Cloudwater vibe 😉

Competition Rules:

• Brew: New England IPA, Hazy / Low Bitterness / Juicy.
• Gravity: 1040-1070
• Bottles: 3x 500ml Unmarked brown glass bottles.
  
• Entries: 1 entry per brewer, email your contact details to competition@wishbonebrewery.co.uk
• Hops & Malts: Entirely the brewers choice.
• Yeast: Entirely the brewers choice.
• On the day: Bottles to be brought to the brewery on the day of competition (NO Postal entries, we want everyone to come and enjoy the social as much as the competition)
• Date & Time: Sat 5th May 2018 Doors open 11am, Bar open from 12.00, Judging starts at 13.00, kickout time around 18.00
• Prizes: We will be presenting engraved tankards and certificates and I dare say there will be prizes too.

Again we will be raising money for 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, all proceeds from the sale of homebrewed and our own beers will be donated to local charities.

Again we will be doing what we can to bring you some beer & brewing related entertainment from people in the brewing industry.

We will be having Rob from Lallemand Yeast and Rob from The Malt Miller coming along, maybe they should do a duet 😉 Also Dominic Driscoll Brewer from Thornbridge will be coming to have a chat to us 🙂

We will update this post as we confirm more, cheers

Saturday 16th December

12 til 9pm-ish

We will have entertainment from…

Jamie Squire

Haworth Ukulele Group

Food from…

The Lemon Tree Café Bistro Free mince pies around Ukulele time 😉
We will be serving Nigel our Christmas beer all day

We have been asked by a few other brewers how we keg our beers so here’s a little How-To.
I’ll be honest there is a little part of me that thinks, “why should I help anyone else” but then I think its good to stick to my ethic of the Internet being a sharing and helping place where people can learn from each other.

As with most brewery activities they start with thoroughly cleaning and sanitising all equipment that will come into contact with the beer you have lovingly created and cared for, but first something about the Equipment needed.

You will need:

• Vessel to put a volume of beer into, we had a 150Litre tank fabricated by Elite Stainless for the job.
• Magnetically coupled stainless steel pump from either BrewBuilder or TheMaltMiller.
• Keg coupler filling kit, including a serving coupler from KeyKeg.
• Get some food grade alcohol based sanitiser.
• Various pipe fittings are needed, I managed to do most of this from the Homebrew shops.
• Weighing Scales, Sugar, Kettle, Jug, Plastic Spoon.

Questions you need to know the answers to:

• The Kegging Vessel, you need to know exactly how much beer you put in it so the correct amount of priming sugar can be added.
• You need a means of getting the beer from its fermenting vessel to the kegging tank to limit oxygen pickup.
• You need a means of knowing how much sugar to add to your beer to attain the correct carbonation level.
• You will need somewhere warm to keep your filled kegs for 7-10 days.
• You need to now how much beer is in your Keg after filling.

You will need to watch this Video:

And watching this one is also good education for the future:

https://youtu.be/Okbff9pT4kI

You can find the parts you need on these Websites:
www.brewbuilder.co.uk
www.themaltmiller.co.uk
www.keykegshop.eu/filling/keykeg-filling-head.html
www.esfabrications.co.uk

What we do to fill our unfined, unfiltered KeyKegs:

• Beer should be at a stable terminal gravity.
• Clean and sanitise all equipment, vessel, pipework, filling head etc.
• Ensure beer in fermenter is roused with co2 to avoid any flavour stratification and distribute yeast in suspension (Roused via cleared Racking point on FV).
• Weigh out priming sugar and dissolve in boiling water, I use a simple iPhone app to calculate amount of sugar.
• Using gravity of transfer pump fill the kegging vessel from its base and add the dissolved sugar while filling.
• I calculated a Dip-Table so I can measure down to a specific distance and ensure the correct amount of beer is added to the kegging vessel, stir well when full.
• Fill kegs as per the first video above.
• Weigh kegs to ensure you have an accurate fill with no fobbing.
• Put in our purpose built warm room for 7-10 days, its useful to fill a plastic pop bottle so you can have an occasional squeeze to see how the pressure is building up /carbonation forming.
• Clean all your equipment and put away in a cleaned and rinsed state.

You just made CAMRA-friendly Keg beer, give yourself a pat on the back and shout #EvilKegFilth 😉

I’ll give credit to Andy Parker of Elusive Brewing for his blog and showed me the way to the little Homebrew Pump www.graphedbeer.com

Going on from my opening statement, this isn’t even good business sense… teaching your competitors how to do things when all the time we are still finding our market for Keg beer.

Cheers 🙂 For other info on kegging see here.

It seems the ‘Black IPA’ or India Black Ale, as we prefer to call them, is just so 2014…. Which is a massive shame because Cellar Dweller Double India Black Ale 7.5% is bloody marvelous. Citra, Ekuanot, a little Sorachi Ace and Waimea with a blend of Belgian Special B, Weyermann CaraMunich III & Carafa Special III malts its a thing of beauty. Originally brewed with the Westriding Refreshment Rooms.

Motueka is probably my favourite beer of the moment, crisp, hoppy, smooth and very moreish, brewed with our usual yeast so not really a lager, its got restrained hopping a lager-like malt bill and our brewing water is treated to a lager profile.

Lupulonimbis is kinda the no frills solid DIPA using American Cascade & Chinook heavily in the boil and dry hop.

N-Star-2 has turned out to be one of our best IPA so far on Keg, its nice enough on Cask but its flavours display so much better on Keg at cooler temperatures with the added carbonation, a thing of beauty.

Most of these beers are available in 30L Keykegs, and we will be re-brewing some of them over the coming months.

Paying staff, bills and making sure we have enough money to pay our mortgage are obviously really important but there is another thing that no one seems discuss.

Cask Taint, a cask that seems to give an earthy or funky taste or aroma to a beer.

I’ve spotted this on plenty of brewers beers served in good pubs, it can be fairly subtle and sometimes mistaken for the character of the yeast.

Brewers sometimes get their used casks back after many months, or a shorter period of warm weather and cleaning them can take a bit more effort due to them being full of fly eggs, mold, even live maggots in some cases. The reason for all of this is that the casks have been left unsealed after the beer has been sold. The brewer now has to tackle this Earthy, rank, foul-smelling mess and turn it back into a vessel that is clean and sanitised to put fresh new beer into.

They are de-bunged and their dregs tipped down the drain.
Jet-washed externally while paying particular attention around the Shive and Keystone holes.
They are put on the cask washer and given a high pressure internal rinse through a sprayball to removes the thickest of the muck inside, then a Hot Casutic wash followed by a final fresh water rinse and drain.
Casks are inspected inside visually with a torch and given a good sniff to check for any off-smells.
If there is an off-smell or any part of the cask that is not clean the cask must be re-washed until it is fit to put fresh beer into.

Occasionally a cask will smell of earth or mold when you come to fill it, if we detect this we aim to keep hold of the cask and not sell it into trade so if there is any issue it is our own issue rather than a customer. Things like this slip through the net occasionally with any brewer out there.

Our brewery isn’t graced with a brewery yard so out of politeness to our neighbours in the building we pre-wash all dirty casks the week before we need to re-fill them, this means that we leave them coated with Caustic Cleaner inside and then the following week we Hot Casutic wash them again followed by a fresh water rinse.
We NEVER detect any off-smells in our casks with our current procedure, it may seem labour intensive but we don’t want beer flies in the shared access we have with our neighbouring businesses, and it leaves our casks looking and smelling great inside.

All that is not to say that an occasional cask will leach out a bit of an earthy smell into the new beer, I would say stainless steel casks are best and its plastic casks that hold the taint most, this could be something that plastic cask manufacturers could look into, Brewery Plastics, Emerald etc.

As I say, its something most breweries will come across, and I would say is my biggest concern in packaging beer for sale.

The simple solution to this is ‘Training’ staff that casks should always be re-sealed, and it doesn’t mean you have to be PubCo or regional brewery supplied with Corks and pegs a simple roll of Duct Tape will do or screwed up plastic or paper towels, just bung those cask holes up with something to stop flies and stuff getting in.

Cheers 🙂

I get told off if I don’t blog frequently enough so here is some stuff about our Mobile Bar build 😉

Building a mobile bar is something I’ve wanted to do for a good while though we got a kick up the arse from Keighley Worth Valley Railway so we could be one of the brewery bars at Ingrow Station as part of their yearly Beer Festival. We will be in good company with our friends from Old Spot Brewery along with Freedom Brewery, the full beer listings are here.

Building the bar has been fun, we purchased most the parts for the bars from CFBS in Keighley, I had previously bought the scaffolding from www.scaffolding-direct.co.uk and the stainless steel plate was laser cut for us by RMD Fabrications in Silsden, a few of the keg taps came from eBay and a few smaller parts which I already had were from EWL in Keighley too.

I designed the Banner sides for the front bar and got the printed by Fat Cow Signs on at Hawkcliffe corner, so doing our best to keep things local.
We can currently have 6 keg beers and 2 Handpulled beers on the go with this setup, at a later date I will fit a Glass Rinser so we can refresh festival-goers glasses with clean, chilled water before pouring another beer and there is still room on our chiller unit for 3 more kegs should we ever want to expand on what we’ve got.
We obviously need to give this a trial run before the beer festival later in the month, so either Friday 6th or Saturday 14th *Probably both!* we will have an extra few Keg beers on the go in the brewery. Don’t forget on the Friday we also have The Courtyard Dairy from Settle doing their amazing cheeses and Edward St Bakery from Saltaire with all manner of baking in the brewhouse, then on the Saturday we have Casa Espresso from Shipley who will be doing their coffee thing along with our regular foodies The Lemon Tree.

*Disclaimer: Please respect our food guys by not ordering a takeaway or bringing your own food for these sessions, thanks very much.

Motueka, a Faux-Lager recipe 5.2% in Keykeg and Cask. We want this to be supped with that bit of extra carbonation on unfined, unfiltered Keg. The Motueka hops from New Zealand come across and floral and spicy when used in the boil but dry hopping with them adds something different and rather nice. Eventually we will use a proper German Lager or Kólsch yeast on this and maybe our Bruce Aussie Blonde too.

The big brother of Night Star 3.7% is going to get brewed at a more IPA-ish 5.5%, same idea just bigger and more, meet N-Star-2.
Then more into next month we are throwing the Chinook hops of of our original American Pale ‘Bandit’ and swapping it for some Citra… that’ll be a Citra-Bandit then 🙂

On 28th August we silently passed our 2nd Birthday, we should probably be celebrating that with a special brewday or an event or something.
As it happens it was Emma’s Birthday so we were in Scotland on holiday leaving our small skilled team of minions to fend for themselves (Oliver, Dawn & Dave).

Its been an entertaining couple of years and there is always something to think about, we brewed around 47 different beers and about 187 brewdays in that time, that 200th brew is fairly close too so we have Oliver working on a Milk Stout recipe which will almost tie-in with his 1 year anniversary of working with us.

We’d like to thank all our customers for letting us try our ideas out on you, special mentions to The Cap & Collar in Saltaire and The Boathouse in Skipton.

2 years have passed and we still haven’t got any beer in bottle! Sorry about that, its a whole side of the business we have yet to develop. Since the start of this year our kegged beer range has grown, having our little tank for doing small batch keg-conditioned beers is great, we are still working on having a more consistent marketplace to sell them into… if we were bottling already the marketplace for Keg & Cask would have already been much more open as we would have been able to give bottled samples away which would open doors to customers that won’t buy before they try!

We’ll get there eventually!

Divination IPA got brewed for the first time this year and will be available in Cask from Monday, keg-conditioned 30L KeyKegs will be ready about 10 days from now. In some ways I feel the”Core Range” is a thing of the past, we have re-jigged our hop contracts to leave us more open to change for 2018.

We brewed with Motueka hops from New Zealand this week in what I’d like to think of as a Fake-Lager (Working title, Faux-One, yeah it might be a bit of a shit name!) We mashed at quite a cool temperature to help the beer finish with a nice crisp dry edge to it and we will be dry hopping this beer subtly in the FV before casking and kegging.

Our mobile bar is taking shape, though the coming weeks I need to work on the back-bar which will have 6 keg taps on it to compliment the 2 handpulls we have for the mobile front bar.

Cheers 🙂

I think the Title of this post should really be “Brewers, Pubco Distros, and the unspoken problem with beer distribution in the UK”

The Cask Mountain in Pub’s yards and Cellars…

When bought new:
1 Plastic Beer Cask costs between £30-£40 each
1 Metal Beer Cask costs between £55-£70 each

Each of these casks is an investment by the brewery so unless they make it back to the brewery after distribution it is basically a lost investment, lost profit or you move passed lost profit and it turns into minus figures so you are out of pocket on the sale.

A lost cask is instant lost profit and also that cask cannot generate future profit for the brewer!

We deliver our own casks and track where they go so we can get them back and send them back out in this continual cycle, sometime casks disappear from Pubs so you have to think there are a number of scenarios for their disappearance:

• Casks collected by other brewery by mistake
• Casks stolen (Homebrewers, Metal Thieves even other brewers)
• Keg Watch uplift (They then charge you to bring back your property)
• Pubco Distribution teams uplifting casks they don’t own (Even though we periodically check with these big distributors, Carlsberg, Heineken, KNDL, Tradeteam etc etc I think we are mostly just fobbed off)

I’m sure this list could be added to.

Wholesalers & Brewers Wholesaling…

We use Wholesalers and Brewers that we wholesale to who then distribute our casks to their customers, we are then stuck with the same risks of the list above but with the added uncertainty that we no longer know where our casks go to and have to rely on what is basically a Gentleman’s Agreement that they will bring our casks back.

Those brewery-owned Casks, which we send to Wholesalers, remain the property of the brewery and we send those in Good Faith trusting the wholesaler to be diligent and collect them all back in.

We know of one wholesaler who has at least a 40 foot shipping container stuffed full of pallet loads of empty brewers casks that they cannot really be arsed to get back to the brewers, there is no money in taking casks back… only money in selling beer!
Lets say you could get 400 Metal Beer casks in a Shipping container each costing £55 each, thats £22’000 worth of brewers property just leisurely sat there doing nothing for the brewer/owners. Multiply that by 10 wholesalers/brewer-wholesalers and you can see its a massive issue!

Pubs suffer and really struggle with cask-mountains.

If we deliver to a far away pub it sometimes means we can’t get back to that pub in a reasonable timeframe so there will always be the odd 1 or 2 casks that stay out in trade for longer than we want. Thankfully our own list of far-away casks is literally about 2 casks that we have delivered ourselves, a diligent delivery driver helps loads mopping up the empty casks to be filled with more ‘tasty beer’ 😉

Though think of the pubs and landlords stressed out that all the casks that brewers and wholesalers won’t / can’t collect, think of the rental casks (Ecasks) delivered by wholesalers that linger in yards and cellars too. Its not surprising that some bars and pubs say stuff it and call in KegWatch and clear out casks from yards with a broad brush stroke.
The average pub probably has 20 empty casks and some many many more, that could be £1000 per pub-worth of brewers casks… how many Free House pubs are there in the UK? lots, ok, and the rise of the Micropub with little to no storage space is growing! Micropubs & small bars have the hardest time with empty casks and will get the most grief from councils if they leave empties on the street.

The Brewery Trade as a whole need some sort of Wholesaler/Cask/Pub Amnesty.

SIBA, the Society of Interdependent Brewers could possibly help along with Keg Watch and the big-boy distributors.
Mind you, brewers mostly feel that paying KegWatch for their own property back is a form of Blackmail… I guess we should all try to appreciate the logistics, transport and storage that goes into what KegWatch do… though that is not to say that KegWatch don’t always get it right and will uplift a brewers casks that the owning brewer was on their way to collect, this can usually be resolved with a phone call. KegWatch will be called in when a Pub shuts down and clear all the empties off site, mistakes are bound to happen.

Back to the Amnesty!
ALL Pubs and bars, Brewery & Wholesaler’s Yards need clearing out.
A database of brewers casks built.
Brewers given the chance to get their property back.

Even Ecasks (Casks to be used Once and sent into Wholesale Only), ‘Close Brewery Rentals’, could have their own Amnesty of sorts, they could allow brewers to collect empty ecasks and get them filled with beer and back into the Wholesale Trade for a limited time period, this could clear a quarter of some pubs cellars, and be a short term benefit to brewers and a slightly longer term benefit to ‘Close Brewery Rentals’ as they too would start seeing their long-outstanding casks returning to base.

The bit that will smart some brewers eyes! Some brewers take the piss with their use of Ecasks, filling them many times, delivering them to customers directly rather than the instructed way of selling into wholesale only! The amount of Ecasks you see some brewers deliver direct to pubs make you think that they wouldn’t have a business if they can’t actually afford their own casks, so a big Cask Amnesty would help with this.
I guess you could say that it pisses me off seeing other brewers using Ecasks like their own casks when we use them the official way. So suck that up!

The long and short of it…

• Casks = Brewer’s Property.
• Brewers-Wholesaling/Wholesalers distributing our casks = Responsible for their Return? Have some respect for your fellow brewers casks.
• Cask Mountains in Pubs, Wholesalers and Brewers yards = Massive tied up brewers investments that could be making money.
• Probably some naming and shaming of bad Ecask users 😉 After an Amnesty period.Surely its that simple? (probably a mahoosive logistical nightmare to be honest)

All of the above is an industry wide issue, we should all do something about!

• Brewers! Pick up your local brewers casks and TAKE them back to them.
• Wholesalers! Actually uplift ALL empties, with exceptions to casks not being where you sent them.
• Pubs/Bars! Make an Empties List & tell brewers they must collect.
• Homebrewers! Stop stealing brewers investments! Take those casks back.
• Pubco / Distros! Publish an Open List of all Independent Brewers Casks you hold.

*Edit*

One of our brewing friends in West Yorkshire was collecting 3 of theirs from K & L Wakefield today – reckons there must be 4-500 casks from small micros like us just sitting there – with
15-20 more EACH from the slightly larger micros Acorn / Abbeydale / Ossett
and the like, plus more than that from the big regionals.

That’s just 1 K & L yard!

And lets not even think about Kegwatch in Doncaster – 20,000 or more we’re
told – and so many arriving they can’t keep on top of the admin. to know
what they have.

*End*
When you are told this sort of thing you can see how much of a problem the Big Distributors are causing by uplifting casks that don’t belong to them making the Independent Microbrewing sector really suffer due to their cask uplifting policy, I dare say this is the biggest problem for those Microbrewers using the SIBA Beerflex system to sell into tied pubco pubs.

That probably all sounds like a whinging rant but small businesses like ourselves feel it when casks go missing.

Cheers