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A little comment on a snippet from this article http://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/Drinks/Beer/Train-staff-to-improve-craft-beer-sales-urges-Fourpure-head-brewer

So what is it that makes craft beer different to, erm, other beer?

My conclusion:
There is only really Fast Beer and Slow Beer + Amount Ingredients. Craft Beer is therefor ‘Slow Beer’ with an emphasis on the amount and quality of ingredients, how they are used and how long that beer stays in tank.

Craft Beer is Dead, long live Slow Beer!

 

*Edit – Mike may have got there first https://chorltonbrewingcompany.com

As a business we have decided that we don’t want to sell to Wetherspoons or via SIBA into Tied Pubcos, we do sell to Wholesalers by the pallet load as they are the thicker end of the wedge versus McSpoons & Pubcos who wont pay anything like a fair price for beer.
If you consider Wetherspoons a ‘Free House’ it is, but only in so much as so long as you sell your soul for a low margin almost any approved brewer can sell to them, so I feel they shouldn’t be fully classed as real Free House Pubs.

Is the rise of the Micropub going to ever tighten the screws on Tied Pubs? Will the pub-tie eventually just fall apart? If the Pub-Tie system was outlawed when we leave Europe how would the market change?

I’m not even slagging off tied pubs, there are many great tied pubs that we would like to see our beer on the bar of, so my opening statement is somewhat ‘cutting off your nose to spite your face’, we do hope that sticking with these beliefs will keep our brand true and undiluted.

If all pubs were free to buy beer from whoever they choose it has be good for local the economy.

And… in other news!
In about 10 days or so our collab with The West Riding Refreshment Rooms in Dewsbury ‘Cellar Dweller’ will be ready in Unfiltered, Unfined and keg-Conditioned along with some casks, 7.5% with lots of Ekuanot & Citra. Double Black IPA or Double India Black Ale as we prefer…

 

Next Saturday 12th we have a special Charity Beer on the bar so the more you drink the more you/we give to Manorlands, our sales girl Dawn has been working her ass off drumming up support and has got loads of great raffle prizes from local businesses lined up. There will be extended opening hours, Band, Food, Raffle so make sure to get down here 🙂 Cheers

 

A couple of points here, Oliver from the Tapsters Promise would like us to explain the difference between types of kegs and how a beer is kegged, then one of our very good customers asked why the price of our bar’s keg beer was different to our handpulled prices.

I’ll have to tackle this in parts, first off the different types of Kegs.

KeyKeg:

• Beer in bag system, the gas you use to serve the beer never comes into contact with the product inside, serving gas collapses the internal bag pushing the beer out.
• If the brewer gets the carbonation level right when filling the beer should stay that way if handled correctly.
• Can be served using compressed air or co2  (Carbon dioxide Gas).

Regular kegs, Dolium, Stainless Steel, Molded Plastic, Ecokeg etc:

• As far as I am aware all these types of kegs require co2 to serve as the gas its self is directly in contact with the beer inside the keg.
• Not a lot to say about this unless I let my opinions start talking, there is more chance of contaminating the beer or gaining or losing carbonation in the pub cellar, if stored and served correctly there are no issues.

Now we need to talk about Carbonation and how it can be applied:

1. Carbonation with external co2 in the fermenting vessel, conditioning tank or bright tank.
2. Carbonation from natural co2 given off during fermentation with a pressure relief valve (Spunding Valve) set to a certain pressure during the later stages of fermentation.
3. Carbonation in keg from adding sugar solution to the beer prior to filling kegs, the kegs are then kept warm for 7 to 10 days while the residual yeast in keg turns the sugar into natural carbon dioxide.
4. Carbonation with external co2 added via the keg-coupler direct to each keg.

The Keg vs Cask price on our bar:

There is a rough rule of thumb, if a cask of beer sells for £80 per 40 Litres then a keg of the same beer will sell for the same £80 for 30 Litres, this is due to the extra cost & time involved in packaging (filling) kegs vs casks, I’ll show two lists so you can compare the way we do things.

Cask Only Packaging:

1. Beer is fermented until the last 1 to 2 degrees of fermentable sugar are left in the beer (this aides cask conditioning).
2. Beer is chilled down in stages, 17c for 24 hours, 11c or 4c for 24hours depending on whether we are to dry hop or not we vary the time cooling takes for whether it is going to be fined or unfined beer. Cooling beer is done via the glycol chiller unit which runs on electric.
3. Cleaning chemicals are used to clean all pipework that touches the beer.
4. All casks are cleaned externally and internally, casks are re-usable.
5. After filling all casks you are left with a dirty fermenting vessel which will require cleaning with caustic cleaning chemicals.

Keg Only Packaging:

1. Repeat steps 1 through 5 above with the extras below.
2. Wait for two gravity readings the same which are 24 hours apart so you can ensure a stable Terminal Gravity (Negligible fermenation activity, there beer does not ferment further).
3. Cool the beer further, slightly cooler and for a longer time, to ensure the appropriate clarity of beer is ready for packaging. (Steps 2 & 3 can tie up a fermentation vessel for up-to 5 extra days)
4. Clean the tank and all pipework you are going to use to keg the beer from, again caustic cleaning chemicals are used.
5. Buy carbon dioxide or sugar for priming, which is used to carbonate the beer.
6. Buy the One-Trip kegs and snap on dust caps.
7. Fill the kegs, each one is 30 Litres and take about double the amount of time it takes to fill a 40 Litre Cask.
8. After filling all your kegs you are left with a dirty kegging tank which must, yet again, be cleaned with caustic cleaning chemicals.
9. *Options* If the beer was directly carbonated with co2 the beer is ready for sale when the brewer feels it is right.
10. *Options* If the beer was primed with sugar the kegs must been kept warm for 7 to 10 days while the beer naturally carbonates its self, we do this in our purpose built Warm-room using an electric heater to keep a temperature of between 20c-24c.
11. Kegs are then cooled in our coldstore for a minimum of 24 hours before being available for sale.
12. Sometimes extra branding, ‘Point of Sale’, Keg Badges will need to be purchased, we try to minimise this and use our regular pumpclips where we can though a properly made Keg Badge finishes the job off more professionally.

So that completes the comparison of Casked & Kegged beers with their associated production procedures.
Cask = 5 steps
Keg = 16 steps
When we price a keg beer for our bar we should not sell ourselves short as this simply wouldn’t be fair on us, our aim for next year is to ensure we carry this fair approach to our brewery-tap-served cask beers.

I hope that helps open drinkers eyes to why Keg beer can cost more than cask, Cask prices have been punished severely by the likes of Wetherspoons over many years and it is a growing opinion that Cask beer should be valued higher which would balance this entire Cask vs Keg pricing thing 😉

Talking of Keg beer, our naturally keg-conditioned Double IPA ‘Lupulonimbus’ 7.5% will be available in about a week after its warm conditioning.

 

Well Koru NZ Blonde just kept flowing at yesterdays Brewery Tap! You lot managed to sup your way through 2 full casks of the stuff, and you sapped just about all the casks we had on!

Marvin our American Red was also very well received, I think we may add a little more to the dry hopping for the next brew.

Cheers to all who came and good to have the CAMRA Holiday group for a brewery tour.

New brews this week!

1776 an American Hopped Blonde 3.8%, part of our ‘Around the World Blondes’ working up to having a ‘Blonde Fest’ in the Brewery Tap. And with July the 4th just around the corner you can celebrate Independence day with 1776.
Marvin an American hopped Red Ale 4.2% based around the Malt bill from Whero but a little darker with Centennial & Ahtanum. Free Pint to the first Brewery Tap customer to tell us why its called Marvin 😉
Lupulonimbus Double IPA 7.5% Unfined and Hazy, some German Magnum in at the start of the boil then lots of Cascade at the end followed by two dry hopping stages using Cascade & Chinook to the tune of 12.5g/Litre in the FV. This beer will mostly be heading into 30L Keykegs with just a few casks.

 

*Update* – Cloudy with a chance of hops, its currently our highest rated beer on Untappd!
Again I am reminded that its a lot to do with the hops you can buy that makes a beer so popular.
We threw a chunky amount of low-alpha Ahtanum and some Mosaic in the boil and then dry hopped at two stages in the FV with a little over 10g/litre with more Mosaic and Nelson Sauvin.
We fermented the beer with Windsor Ale Yeast and fermentation was vigorous and kicked off a massive amount of sulphur aromas which made me want to ditch the beer more than once, thankfully all the sulphur dissipated before it came round to packaging this beer in Cask & Keg.
Mosaic with Nelson Sauvin sounded like a match made in heaven, it was 🙂

This beer was brought to you by Wishbone, Thirst Class Brewery and the yeast advice of Rob from Lallemand, hops were harmed during this process and hair was pulled… lets hope we can get the hops with the funky flavours that people want to taste in our next hop contract.

And btw… we are up and running with our 2x keg fonts on the bar, once we get into the swing of things properly we hope to swap beers mid-session so you can try even more cracking Wishbone during one of our bi-monthly bar days 🙂

Yeaaaa the good old brewery bar, no frills pints twice a month.

Last week we had a meeting with our accountant, we found that running the bar twice a month is what in our first full tax-year of trading pushed us just slightly into profit. Not that we recall seeing it in our bank account as all we take is enough to pay our mortgage and household bills and there isn’t any extravagance.

Cask Ale per pint:
As we did at the very end of 2016 for our trade prices, adjusting for our materials and running costs and balancing the margins across our cask prices, we plan to do something similar to our Brewery Bar prices at the end of 2017. We will do this in the fair manner which we balanced our trade cask prices, some beers will stay the same and some will increase to reflect the costs incurred in producing them. It will be a mix of ABV (Beer Duty) + Materials (Hops, Malt, Yeast etc) + Time (Dry Hopping time or even Lagering time) though we will try and keep this as sensible as possible for the sake of giving change etc

Keg Beer per pint:
Keg beers will be more and priced per beer, the added cost of the Keykegs and, the time taken to fill them plus a week of Warm-conditioning all adds up so we need to be sure we don’t sell ourselves short over the bar. Keg Beer prices will be set from the out-set, read on…

With fingers crossed, I should have our 2-font keg bar up and running for Saturday 17th Brewery Tap giving us the ability to serve 6 cask and 2 keg beers at once, here’s what its cost thus far setting up:

• Pipe fittings for the font – £50
• Spray paint – £25
• Keg taps x2 – £30
• Beer-Line Cooler – £150 from ebay
• Beer Python pipe – £20 a couple of off-cuts
• Wood to build a backboard for cellar gear and shelf to keep the beer cooler off the floor – £40
• Gas-pipeing, Fob-detectors, Flowjet, Cleaning sockets, JG fittings, Beer line, Gas-Regulators – £350
• Air Compressor – £170
• Keykeg Couplers – £100

A grand total of about £900 to set up to serve 2x keg beers, add in some time & effort too! Its proper easy to fitter away a grand or so on what you think are simple, easy projects. This does add value to what we do on our bar days and we get to bring you, the drinker, a greater range and more exciting beers each time we open, we also get a quick way to taste our own keg beers rather than having to find them out in trade hoping to get to try a pint!

New beers to look out for…

More to follow later in the month 😉

The first time we opened our brewery bar was back in December 2015, it was bloody freezing.
Yesterday we held a slightly different event, we had Bingley Brewery down with their bar and had American BBQ food entertainment from three local acts, we had the food truck in the loading bay and seating out there too with the big door rolled all the way up… this is about as close as we have got to my original vision back at the end of 2015 “Deckchairs & Inflatable Palm Trees”, we don’t have Deckchairs and the only inflatable I have is a Cactus!
It was good to see our little brewery rocking with beer-drinkers and tunes, there are always new faces arriving to try the beers, hopefully the British weather will let us spread out like this again as its as close to a beer garden as we’re going to get.

Thanks to all who made yesterday a great day, same time next year?

I vaguely scrolled passed something on social media the other day about Core Ranges and with various companies and associations expecting you to have a core range.

We started out with Blonde, Bandit, Divination, Abyss & Gumption we consider this our core range. But there is always something new try so it makes it hard keep, what we first considered, our core range in stock though we do try to do have a range that tick enough boxes for our customers. There is usually a brew that people are asking for or waiting for us to brew again, which is nice.
Things change, well apart from Blonde & Abyss maybe, you could think of Flux stepping into Bandit’s shoes and Drover is hot on the heels of Gumption, we have FOUR new Blonde beers on the brewplan too just to throw a Brewer’s RJT Spanner in the works we will no doubt do a #BreweryTap Blonde Fest!

Other bits of news…

Doing our first few keg-conditioned beers is letting us see the ultimate limits (Terminal Gravity) of our fermentations which is really good and allowing us to fine tune our recipes and process, my inner geek is happy 🙂 We get to tweak our mash temperature and duration, tweaks to starting and finishing gravity, the amount of yeast we pitch, all of which helps bring more accurate consistency to what we make.
To explain that, for Keg beers we totally ferment out the beer so it won’t ferment any more, prime a batch with dissolved sugar and pump into Keykegs before keeping warm for 7-10 days while they warm condition to carbonate. This lets us accurately set the carbonation level of our Keg-conditioned beers and vary the amount of carbonation to suit the style of beer and goes really well with Unfined, Unfiltered, Unpasteurised & Naturally carbonated. (Though we have nothing against adding co2 under pressure)

Parallax DIPA sold amazingly well, yet again this illustrates my point that the availability of hops that drinkers like the flavours of sells beer. We have another DIPA recipe on the brewplan using different hops and going to go a little heavier on the dry hopping this time too 12g/Litre into a 7.5% beer.

This week we brew a Collaboration beer with Thirst Class Ale and its going to be no holds barred using a shed load of Nelson Sauvin & Mosaic for the dry hop 🙂