British Brewer

On Tap (Jan 11th 2010)

Its been a busy week for non-beer related reasons. The job market is really picking up and I have been interviewing like crazy.  We managed to spend some great time with friends for my birthday, spending time sampling beers from all around the world. I have very thoughtful friends.  We had a great Northern California Organic Porter that won the night but my American IPA came in 2nd. Back at home we polished off the Abbot Ale, moved some ales into the secondary and bottles and started a new batch. Its time for an On Tap update.

Primary

• Flowers Original Ale clone (1 day) – my first brew of 2010 and first attempt at the classic Flowers recipe I worked on earlier this week. OG came in as expected, the yeast is doing its job, now we wait and see.

Secondary

• Draught Irish Ale (3 days) - my first attempt at Northern Brewers Irish Ale, this one is destined for the keg. FG came in slightly higher than expected as the yeast attenuation was higher than the stated 71-75% coming in at 78%. Not complaining, the sample was sufficiently robust with nutty notes, the wife will like this one.
• Dry Irish Stout (2 days) - my second batch of Northern Brewers Guinness clone and a faithful reproduction it is.  This batch is a pre-order keg for a friends poker night though I hope to get a couple of bottles for myself. Its on the money and proceeding well in the secondary
• Lord Fatbottom Ale (2 week 3 days) – 2 1/2 weeks of a 6 month rest down and already cleared.

Bottle Conditioning

• Swampswill 6X (2 days) – my first attempt at a true Wadworth 6X clone, only doing a 2.5 gl batch as an experiment which yielded just under a case.  Still excited about this one, FG is spot on, the ale is bright and on target for colour and aroma. I will reduce the quantity of oak chips in future recipes as the oak comes through a little strong but I hope everything settles out during conditioning.  Tried some Coopers carb tabs to see if I can get a more consistent carbonation.
• Dogfish Head 90 min IPA clone – (1 month, 3 weeks) Over half way through its 3 month rest, cannot wait. Still managed not to  open a bottle.

Drinking

• Sinistral Warrior IPA (3 days) – nice hoppy IPA, not quite an Imperial but its close. Became my birthday brew, an awesome, peppery IPA by Northern Brewer. Colour is bright, with smooth mouthfeel and a bunch of peppery hops. We managed to finish off almost a case with all the birthday activities and everyone that sampled a bottle gave a strong thumbs up. Its a nominee for the 2010 brew of the year.
• Chiswick ESB (1 day) – version 1.0 of my Fullers ESB clone. I am disappointed. I cracked open the first bottle yesterday and my postmortem will be the subject of a post later this week.

Beer Wars

Kevin, a good friend, professional brewer in a former life, and a former colleague of mine at Fidelity Ventures, writes posts at a great beer review blog Beer Observer. I was on the site earlier today and found a post by Kevin I had missed from early in 2009 about a documentary made by an independent film maker and beer nut, Anat Baron.  Anat is a former LA Producer who went on to work for Mike’s Hard Lemonade and knows a thing about making it in the beverage industry and making movies.

The movie is “Beer Wars” (trailer here), a documentary on the battle ranging between the mega-breweries and the small independents. The film focuses on the US market, but the theme is eerily similar to the one I covered in my recipe post on Flowers Original Bitter. The theme is closer than I thought as one of the major mega-brewers highlighted in the movie is Anheuser-Busch, makers of Bud and a whole host of other brands.  Anheuser-Busch was acquired by InBev in November 2008 by none other than the Belgium based InBev, owners of Flowers Original, making the largest brewery in the world with over 300 brands and 25% of all beer consumed in the world.

I have nothing against InBev or Bud, it is a matter of personal taste for me and I know cost for many other people.  I happen to like Real Ale and will support the breweries and home enthusiats that brew it.  This movie is important to me for one reason (minus the corporate bad, little guy good vibe which I could live without, its a free market), it does expose what people are really drinking, the fact that adjuncts are the base ingredient used in the bulk of mass produced beers on the market, not barley, so its not beer. Its important to know what you are drinking.

One way to really know what you are drinking is to brew it yourself. Its fresh, cheaper, and in almost every case, better than the mass produced stuff at the liquor store.  Go see the movie if you can or look for it when it comes to iTunes later this year. I’m off to bottle my Wadworth 6X clone, it smells good.

Recipe: Flowers Original (version 1.0)

I have decided not to give this brew my own BritishBrewer name, it is a special ale with a rich history, similar to many of the classic British Ales covered on this blog.  But the recent history around Flowers is becoming more and more common with the growth of mega-breweries, such as InBev, as many local cask brewers are acquired and then shut down to cut costs and reduce the number of brands. I don’t know what a “brand” of ale tastes like but I do know that Flowers is one of the the classic ales which unfortunalely has a very uncertain future under its new owners.

Flowers Brewery opened in 1831 as Flower & Sons on Brewery St in Stratford Upon Avon, home of the British Bard William Shakespeare. In 1954 the brewery was acquired by J.W. Green and changed its name to Flowers Breweries and then shortly after acquired again by the growing Whitbread empire in 1961.  As part of Whitbread’s cost cutting they closed the original brewery in Stratford and moved the operations 45 miles SW to Whitbread’s Cheltenham Brewery (previously known as West Country Brewery Ltd before also being acquired by Whitbread in 1963 and becoming the Flowers Brewery). I wonder the effects the move had on the quality of the original ale given the changes ground water, equipment, and possibly ingredients.

In 2000 Whitbread, along with the large Bass empire, sold all its brewery holdings to the Belgium brewing conglomerate, InterBrew, who consolidated all of its cask brewing operations into the home of Boddingtons Beer at the Strangeways Brewery in Manchester, some 130 miles to the North (founded in 1778 and eventually sold to Whitbread in 1989 by the Boddington family), becoming the only remaining cask brewery in the Interbrew empire.  In 2004 InterBrew merged with another global mega-brewer, the Brazilian AmBev, to become InBev, the largest brewer in the world by volume.  In Sept 2004 InBev announced it was closing Strangeways and brewing for the brands they retained moved to either Glasgow, Scotland or South Wales (except Boddingtons which moved to Hyde Brewery in Manchester).

So now Flowers is an orphaned ale with no home, its heritage a tale driven by corporate cost cutting and shareholder value rather than quality and taste. It is a very popular ale with a strong following, a point not lost on InBev, who recently revived the Flower lineup (Original and IPA) and commissioned Badger Brewery (owned and operated by Dorset independent brewers and pub owners, Hall and Woodhouse, makers of the exceptional Badger ales and Tanglefoot cask ale) to brew both IPA and Original for the UK market.  So for now the ale is safe, it is a classic and maybe its heritage is something we can retain by recreating the recipe for homebrewers for generations to come.

Researching the ale was hard as InBev does not post ingredients or even acknowledge the existence of the Flowers Original on any of its web properties.  I had to rely on a couple of dedicated all-grain homebrewer’s and Roger Protz “The Real Ale Almanac” to piece together the recipe. (ingredients and process can be found here)

The Almanac provides the following tasting notes:

A strong, fruity bitter with some acidity… Fat malt in the mouth with hop edge, dry finish with some hop character with raisin and sultana notes.

The almanac lists the hops as Stryian Goldings and Target, Pale Ale base malt with Crystal and cane sugar. OG 1044.  I found the ABV listed by online retailers as 4.3%. So we should be able to calculate the FG using a brewing calculator.  SRM is up in the air.  The homebrewer’s I found who had tried an all-grain version listed the SRM as 9. This seems a little light to me, the colour reminded me more of a Fullers London Pride, i.e. a burnt gold, giving more of a 13 SRM.  I have decided to use Wyeast Thames Valley yeast for this batch given its proximity to Cheltenham and high attenuation to provide the dry finish. I used the recommendations of 2 online homebrewers for IBU and will use the hops specified in the almanac.

So given this is the least we have ever had to go on here is the recipe. (We will be following the same logic used in the previous recipes tp calculate the specific quantities of DME, hops etc to save on the words)

Flowers Original Bitter (BJCP Beer Style: Special/Best/Premium Bitter, category: English Pale Ale)

• 2.5 Gallon, 60 min boil
• OG 1043, FG 1010
• 4.4% ABV
• 30 IBU
• 13° SRM (Burnt Gold)
• Ready to drink in 6-7 weeks

Base Malt and Fermentables:

• 1 lb 12 oz Light Dry Malt Extract (60 mins)
• 4 oz Cane Sugar (at the end of the boil)

Specialty Grains:

• 6 oz Crystal Malt – 120L
• 4 oz Torrified Wheat

Hops

• Bittering Hops – 0.25 oz Target, 0.125 oz Styrian Goldings (60 mins)
• Flavour Hop – 0.125 oz Styrian Goldings (15 mins)
• Aroma Hops – 0.25 oz Target, 0.125 oz Styrian Goldings (1 min)

Yeast

• Wyeast Thames Valley Ale (#1275) (Attenuation 77%, Flocculation: Medium Low)

Other Additions

• 1 tsp Irish Moss (30 mins)
• Packet of Isinglass Liquid (to help remove any lingering proteins given the low flocculation level of the yeast)

Process

• Please follow the process guidelines outlined in my post here.  You will require all the equipment specified here.
• Primary Fermentation: 5-7 days at 65-75°
• Secondary Fermentation: 1 week in the same location as the primary
• Prime and store in the bottle for at least 2 weeks before consuming
• Peak flavour will be reached after 4 weeks in the bottle

Old Ale

I must say to have a liking for “Old Ales”, when I was a young man in England I was partial to Theakston’s Old Peculier. It was, and still is, a warm, malty ale with a big heart and fruity finish. Not a session brew by any stretch, but something to warm the bones on a chill winter night.

The Old Ale has a long history reflecting. not only the history of beer making in Britain, but a glimpse of the social history of the country also.  Back in the 1800′s, before the time of the industrial revolution, stock ales, matured in oak casks, were served as a complement to mild ales, often with the landlord serving the customer a blend of the sharper stock ale with the fruitier, sweeter mild ale to the customer’s taste.  The breweries caught on and began to produce their own stock ales, which became known as “Old Ales” due to the length of time they were conditioned in the cask. Old Ales were also considered the “top shelf” ale with the workers drinking the weaker common or mild ale during the week and then cracking the Old Ale on pay day.

To understand the process used to brew an historical Old Ale one has to understand a little of the All-Grain style of brewing, something I hope to get time for (and money for some neat equipment) later this year.  For our recipes created to date we have substituted the base malt with some form of Malt Extract, e.g. DME.  In the case of All-Grain brews the barley, typically Marris Otter or English 2-Row, are steeped in warm water for an hour or so to extract the sugars. Next the water, now called wort, is drained into the brew kettle (the first runnings) ready for the boil, a process known as “mashing“.  Imagine brewing a cup of tea but instead of using a tea bag in a tea pot you have 100 lbs of grain in a steel mash tun.  As the water is run off many of the sugars are left behind, attached to the grains, so more hot brew water (know as liquor) is used to rinse the grains and allowed to filter slowly into the kettle until enough wort has been collected to begin the boil, a process known as “sparging“. Think brewing a teabag for a 2nd time.

So back to the pre-industrial revolution brewery. To make Old Ale the brewery would take only the first runnings from the mash and brew a really strong, rich, high alcohol, brew (first teabag).  Due to the high alcohol content the ale was left to condition for long periods of time in oak casks gaining almost sour, lactic acid flavour from the continuing fermentation in the cask. The breweries would then sparge the grains with enough liquor to create a second batch of weaker ale, known at the time as “Common Ale”, a process known as “parti-gyle” brewing (the second teabag).  If the first runnings created a particularly strong brew a rinse was used to create a “Small Ale”.  This process is still used by the Belgiums today to brew the Tripel, Dubbel, and Blonde (old, common, small).

Old Ales are still brewed today but using more moden, efficient methods.  The strength and character vary widely with Old Ale filling the gap between brown ales, porters and barleywine including winter warmers, dark milds, and lower gravity barleywines. Some popular brews include Old Peculier, Fuller Vintage Ale, and J.W. Lees Moonraker.

I have brewed the New Old Ale recipe from Northern Brewer, voted my #1 brew of the year for 2009, and a VERY popular drink at my house and with friends.  I plan to investigate a couple more Old Ales over the year, starting I hope with my favorite, Old Peculier

On Tap (Jan 3rd 2010)

The kids have been off for a second week and we have had a friend over, its been a pleasant, and dare I say it, restful week.  We managed to polish off the Kentish Best to some good reviews, though I still think there is work to be done. The Greene King clone goes down really easily and the keg is almost done, looks like I will be out of ale again. At least I have 4 cases conditioning in the cellar and a healthy pipeline in the works.  Its time for the first “On Tap” of 2010.

Primary

• Draught Irish Ale (5 days) – my first attempt at Northern Brewers Irish Ale, this one is destined for the keg.
• Dry Irish Stout (4 days) – my second batch of Northern Brewers Guinness clone and a faithful reproduction it is.  This batch is a pre-order keg for a friends poker night though I hope to get a couple of bottles for myself.

Secondary

• Swampswill 6X (1 day) – my first attempt at a true Wadworth 6X clone, only doing a 2.5 gl batch as an experiment which should yield just under a case.  Primary fermentation completed with the FG on target and the taste and aroma close, but we need to wait for the secondary to complete before we can begin to get excited.
• Lord Fatbottom Ale (1 week 3 days) - This 13% beauty cleared completely in the first week. 1 1/2 weeks of a 6 month rest down
  

Bottle Conditioning

• American Style IPA (1 week 3 days) – nice hoppy IPA, not quite an Imperial but its close. Still needs another week at least but the sample showed promise after a week in the bottle. I will have a couple of six packs up for grabs next week if anyone wants some.
  
• Chiswick ESB (1 week 3 days) – version 1.0 of my Fullers ESB clone I covered in an earlier post. The 1 week sample was a disappointment, the sample has darkened and was not as bright as I had hoped.  It still seems a little sweet and the carbonation is flat. This brew is really puzzling me as the primary showed so much promise.
• Dogfish Head 90 min IPA clone – (1 month, 2 weeks) Half way done, cannot wait
  

Drinking

• Abbots Special Ale (3 days) - this is my first attempt at a Greene King Abbot Ale clone. It has proved to be a very pleasant, smooth ale, though not quite a Greene King.  Its almost done as we had friends over New Years to help us drink it, proved very popular.

Water – the forgotten ingredient

Its funny because homebrew authors and bloggers alike talk a lot about yeast, hops and malt but very little time is given to the ingredient that makes up over 90% of a brew – the water.  Water chemistry has a strong influence on the mouthfeel of an ale and has a big say in the performance of the fermentation and final conditioning of an ale.

Major brewing industries have grown up around geologically favorable sites with the right mix of rock type to filter the water from naturally occurring springs and wells and supply the optimum minerals from brew water.  Areas such as London and Burton on Trent in the UK, the Czech town of Pilsen, and the towns of Dortmund and Munich in Germany have very distinct water favorable to the brewing of specific styles of beer. In John Palmers online reference “How to Brew” he outlines how the water chemistry found in these towns is balanced with the malt and hops to make the distinctive beers such as Guiness and Pilsner.

Pilsen - The very low hardness and alkalinity allow the proper mash pH to be reached with only base malts, achieving the soft rich flavor of fresh bread. The lack of sulfate provides for a mellow hop bitterness that does not overpower the soft maltiness; noble hop aroma is emphasized.

London - The higher carbonate level dictated the use of more dark malts to balance the mash, but the chloride and high sodium content also smoothed the flavors out, resulting in the well-known ruby-dark porters and copper-colored pale ales.

Burton-on-Trent – Compared to London, the calcium and sulfate are remarkably high, but the hardness and alkalinity are balanced to nearly the degree of Pilsen. The high level of sulfate and low level of sodium produce an assertive, clean hop bitterness. Compared to the ales of London, Burton ales are paler, but much more bitter, although the bitterness is balanced by the higher alcohol and body of these ales.

There are two important ingredients found in brewing water.  The first is Calcium which helps create the acid required to balance out the alkaline phosphates in the malt.  Acidity is needed to promote enzyme activity in the wort and to promote flavour, clarity and stability to the finished beer. The second ingredient is Magnesium and important yeast nutrient in small doses.

Most homebrewers do not have access to abundant naturally purified fresh spring water or wells. We make do with the towns best, tap water. Unfortunately tap water can contain ingredients that are not favorable to the brewing process. Chlorine is used to prevent the build up of bacteria in the water supply but in high doses can lead to bitterness in beer and can kill the yeast.The good news is Chlorine is highly volatile and can be removed by simply boiling.

So how do we as homebrewers begin to think about the water we use to brew our ales?  A good first step is to grab a copy of your towns water quality report and check the level of hardness (found in the Calcium and Magnesium levels) and the level of Chlorine. In many cases the answer will be nothing, the Chlorine will come out during the boil along with any other impurities and most town water falls within acceptable levels of water hardness.

If you want to check the pH level of your brew water buy a pH testing kit from your homebrew supplier and check the level of the wort during a boil. I take a sample using a turkey baster.  Make sure the wort is properly cooled to ensure an accurate reading.  An optimal reading is in the 5.0-5.5 range.  If the levels are outside you can use calcium carbonate to make more alkaline or an acid.  The pH levels will only change between 0.2-0.3 during the boil, so you will be all set once the pH in the acceptable range.

For those who really want to optimize the water mineral content to match the style of beer being brewed consult the chart and attached spreadsheet on John Palmers site here.

Given this is the BritishBrewer and we focus on classic British ales is there an effective and simple way to replicate the water of a London or Burton?  The quick answer is yes and I have been playing around with various techniques including adding calcium and gypsum.  But I finally stumbled upon a magical little powder called Burton Salts, containing all the essential minerals in a single package.  The process is simple, for a 5 gallon batch:

• The night before you intend to start the brew bring to the boil 6.5 gallons of tap water in the kettle, this will remove all the unwanted chemicals and purify the water
• Add the recommended dose of salts, then check the pH (again ensure the water has cooled). This is a bit of a chicken and egg situation because it is hard to predict the final pH level of the wort once malt and hops have been added.  I find a pH level for the brew water of 5.8 works for me.  Remember to check the wort pH on brew day and make adjustments for your next brew. You can also adjust the pH of the wort by adding more salts.
• Now boil the water for 15 mins
• Once boiled leave the water to cool ready for brew day

Water treatment really does make a difference, the brew flavours are sharp and fresh and the colour brighter.  Have fun and over the next few weeks we will begin a review of different malt types and start a series of deeper dives into some favorite British Brew styles, their history and some classic recipes.