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We currently have a little survey running over on Twitter asking if you think our brewery in Keighley would be a good place to have a permanent Brewery Tap, we would love to hear your thoughts on the subject, so give your vote, ask your friends, share the post on your social media.
Its probably a case of when you start a business your ideas are usually 2 to 3 steps ahead of where your current goals or projects are. When we originally signed the premises lease we took the First Floor on along with the Ground Floor because it looked like there might be potential in the future.

Weighing up if doing an almost complete renovation of a section of the first floor with the change of use from Industrial to Mixed use coupled with staff wages, training, creation of cellar/coldstore, bar, seating, tables, lighting, electrics, decorating, new windows, creation of toilet facilities, fire escape, emergency lighting and not to mention proper access that does not interfere with our current processes, plus signage, branding, Heating (Yeah, keeping folks warm would be great!!)… weighing up if all that would actually benefit the area and our business.

Thanks for your time, we appreciate your feedback.

We decided to shake up the brewplan in January so we could offer more to pubs supporting and drinkers drinking for #Tryanuary, we got all the recipes sorted before Christmas then back to brewing on 4th Jan. The First beer will be dry hopped in the fermenting vessel on Tuesday then heading into cask later in the week, its a Czech hopped beer using just Kazbek hops which are somewhat likened to American Cascade.

This coming week we will be rebrewing Pastiche, yeah that beers that you all loved so much will be back! We also brew Lunar Zenith, same malt bill and ABV but changed to hops for Equinox, Centennial & Amarillo… a pair of casks you won’t want to miss reserving.
Later in the month we are doing a new Session Bitter at 4.2% called Drover, we’ve let our Brewery Assistant Oliver loose on this recipe which includes Rye & Vienna malts along with British & American hops. Everyone loves a pint of our Gumption but we wanted something a bit toned down yet still be an interesting complexity, if the recipe works out we will brew it on rotation through the year. Erm… and actual LOL @ the sheep… its beer not to take too seriously.

Scwhwartz, a tiny little session Black IPA or India Black Ale if you want to be totally PC, 4.1% hopped with all German grown Cascade. I had a lovely German Cascade hopped beer from Acorn Brewery a while back, give that a go too if you spot it, lets hope our little BIPA does Das Deutsche Hopfen justice.
Early in ‘Febrewery’ we will be brewing an old style ale, very British, very Traditional, and nice and strong at 6.5%, pull up that leather-clad chair to the fire, settle down with your favourite cheese selection and feel the warmth… meet Clog Iron (My Granddad was a Cobbler and used to make Clogs).

You can find out more about Tryanuary here – https://twitter.com/tryanuary and http://www.tryanuary.co.uk

Following on from the success of last year we are again hosting a homebrew competition with the Northern Craft Brewers.
The competition is to be held on Saturday 29th April 2017 and is open to all homebrewers who can bring their bottle entries on the day.

We have just had confirmation that Andy Leman the head brewer from Timothy Taylors will be doing a presentation about their brewery, its history and where they are taking things in the future. So if you haven’t heard about their 10 Barrel trial brewer kit, I’m sure you will.
Thanks once again for the support from Rob at The Malt Miller who will be supporting us and also hear on the day of competition.

Competition Rules:

• Brew: Fruit IPA
• Gravity: 1040-1070
• Bottles: 3x 500ml Unmarked brown glass bottles
  
• Entries: 1 entry per brewer, email your contact details + Fruit used to competition@wishbonebrewery.co.uk
• Hops & Malts: Entirely the brewers choice
• Fruit addition: Your brew must contain fruit, how and when you add it is up to you
• Yeast: Its entirely up to the brewer though we suggest a clean fermenting style so that the Fruit & Hops stand out well in your IPA
• On the day: Bottles to be brought to the brewery on the day of competition
• Date & Time: Sat 29th April 2017 Doors open 11am, Bar open from 12.00, Judging starts at 13.00, kickout time around 18.00
• Prizes: (TBC, Vouchers for The malt Miller) though we will be presenting engraved tankards and certificates

Again we will be raising money for local 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 and maybe something from Timmy Taylors (TBC).

We will update this post as we confirm more, cheers

We did our first brew back on the 28th August 2015, we have passed 12 months of trading and have seen a pattern of growth over that time which is encouraging but also shows us we need to work hard in the coming months.
We started with just myself & my wife for quite a while though finally got a permanent sales person to consistently hit the phones two days per week to free up more time for making and delivering beer. Next we got a permanent delivery driver again for just two days a week to free up more time for making beer. Then more recently a full time permanent brewery assistant who is now leaving me free to put my energy into working on future projects.

We don’t always take a wage as the money we make is being drip-fed back into the company to improve what we’ve already got, paying staff wages and reinvestment in process.

We will be doing some slight re-balancing of our beer prices as of 1st Jan 2017 so that our already very fair beer prices reflect the costs in making them, those costs are set to rise for imported hops due to the current value of the Pound (GBP). With this in mind as the new season hop prices come to us there may be other small tweaks as 2017 moves on and our costs increase.

Construction is ongoing with our Warm-Conditioning room and we hope to be doing short runs of bottle and keg-conditioned beers from early in the new year.

We know Landlords feel pressure to sell beer at competitive prices, we also often wonder where the fairness is in the profit share between beer-making & pint-pulling as it often seems that pubs demand the lion’s share in comparison to what the brewery makes. (Includes brewery profit at approx £25 per cask)
Brewery Cask per pint including VAT (Blonde) = £1.20 (approx)
Pub served pint including VAT (Blonde) £2.70 to £3.20+ (estimate)
@ £3.20 per pub-pint that is £146 per cask profit for the pub.

We would like CAMRA to start making a moves to address the price of a pint to the consumer so that there is fairness of profit share going back to the brewer, campaigning for beer duty reduction is always a good thing as we get to keep a tiny bit more but it shouldn’t be marketed as making beer cheaper for drinkers! Brewing a quality flavuorsome product costs money and should be reflected in the selling price of a ‘premium product’ to consumers.

I wholeheartedly refuse to make Bland-Piss-Water to a Price!

That may have descended into a bit of a rant, though I set out with this brewery to be human-faced rather than straitjacketed corporate “You can’t say that!”.

To recap: some malt prices are up, some malt prices are down, hop prices will be up, some of our beer prices will be tweaked to balance to costs of production.

Btw, I had a pint of Guinness last night, it cost £3.90 wtf! That could be a beer that is balanced on profit share! Tasted of nothing, no substance to it… We won’t do that!

Christmas Brewery Tap 17th December 12 til 8-ish, we have added a new permanent Handpull to our bar bringing the total to 6 and we are hiring a 2-tap keg dispense unit so we can add our Keg beers Divination IPA & Recap Farmhouse IPA to the bar on this Christmas Special #SaturdaySession.

Our Christmas beer ‘Nigel’ a 4% Golden Ale will be on the bar and as usual The LemonTree Café Bistro will be here doing the food until 6pm, there may be free mince pies after that 😉 And there might even be live festive music!

We hope to see you here on Saturday 17th from 12noon, Cheers

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