British Brewer

Pretty Things

It was with great sadness that I recently learned Buzzards Bay brewing down in Westport MA had stopped brewing their own brands. Great ales in a beautiful farm setting. The place was owned by the Westport Rivers Winery guys (great wines also) who still appear to be going strong but alas the brewery was not to be.  I took a tour down their a couple of years ago and sampled some brews fresh from the kettles, yum.  It appears they are now a contract brew location opening up the brewery to third parties and appear to have launched a new brand called Just Beer.

So it was with great pleasure that I learned over the weekend that Buzzards Bay Brewing is contracting with the Pretty Things Brewery. A great project brewing fantasic ales.  Just as BritishBrewer is re-creating and brewing authentic real ales, Pretty Things is going one step further and actually brewing ales using authentic old recipes and techniques, researched by top beer historians, using traditional methods.

This past Saturday evening, thanks to my friend and great ale critic Mike Chase who I use to critique my own fare introduced me to Pretty Things and poured a few bottles of their ST BOTOLPH’S TOWN Rustic Brown Ale, only batch #2 bottled last April.  It reminded me of Theakstons Old Peculier, the brew I happen to be avidly researching as my first experimental Brown/Old Ale recipe.  So I come home and fire up the internets and what do I find but the brew master of Pretty Things was a former brewer from Yorkshire, England, and the Rustic Brown is actually inspired by Old Peculier and a couple of other rustic darker Yorkshire ales, right down the use of Yorkshire malts and the northern england fermenting technique of open Yorkshire squares. It was a fantastic beverage, and I only wish we had more because when the word got out about (via the oohs and aahs) there really was not enough to go around.

Check out Pretty Things at these locations. I am really looking forward to the London Mild inspired by the Milds brewed in 1800’s London and something I briefly mention in my post on Brown Ale.

Beer Comic – or everything you ever needed to know about beer

I good friend sent me the following link this morning.  Its laugh out loud funny and manages to impart some history and methodology around beer making in the process.

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/beer

Hope it puts a smile on your face.  Have a great weekend

Brown Ale

For those of you who are regular readers you know we have spent the last 8 weeks or so looking into classic British Pale Ale recipes such as Fullers ESB, Pride, Flowers, and Wadworth 6X.  Next up we will be focusing on Brown Ales and their big brother, Old Ales (which we covered in a previous post). I hope to get some great recipes together and have been hard at work researching the best ones to try out.

But before we move on this post is for those of you that enjoy a glass of brown ale or two (its my wife’s favorite ale) whether its Smuttynose Old Brown Dog or a Newcastle Brown from back home in the UK.  I thought it would be worthwhile to highlight a little of Brown Ales rich history, which dates back to 1600’s Britain, before getting into some recipes.

But first, what is Brown Ale?  The BJCP classification of English Brown Ale encompasses the Northern and Southern English varieties along with Mild Ale. The Southern Brown Ale is described as:

A luscious, malt-oriented brown ale, with a caramel, dark fruit complexity of malt flavor. May seem somewhat like a smaller version of a sweet stout or a sweet version of a dark mild.

with the Northern:

Drier and more hop-oriented than the southern English brown ale, with a nutty character rather than caramel.

Whatever the classification Brown Ales have a cult following and are among one of the most popular styles for homebrewers, following stouts and porters.

The term Brown Ale was first used by brewers in the late 1600’s London to describe the beverages they sold at the time such as Mild Ale, a lightly hopped sweet beer made entirely of brown malt.  This type of beer died out in the early 1800’s with brewers moving to pale malt which proved cheaper due to higher sugar yields and is still used by modern brewers today.

The term “Brown Ale” was revived again in the early 1900’s by the London brewer Mann, who create Mann Brown Ale (still available today and brewed under contract by Thomas Hardy Burtonwood).  By the 1920’s Brown Ales were very popular again with large brewers such as Whitbread began brewing strong browns, far stronger than the modern browns brewed today with an ABV of over 5%. The popularity of Mann Brown and Whitbread Double Brown continued through WWII at which point breweries began to produce weaker, cheaper Brown Ale (I suspect due to rationing and the economic conditions of the time) all but wiping out the expensive, more premium forebears. Today, with the exception of homebrewers, the strong Brown Ales are hard to come by, being replaced with Porters, Stouts and Old ales.  Great examples of Northern English, strong, Brown Ales would be Samuel Smiths Nut Brown Ale and Newcastle Brown.  Mann’s Original Brown Ale would be a good Southern example.

It is actually in the USA that Brown Ale has seen a resurgence, mainly from the legion of homebrewers like myself who like to brew strong flavoured, robust ales. The grass roots movement has not gone unnoticed by the micro-brewers who have developed a broad array of full-bodied Brown’s for the American public. American Brown Ales tend to be drier than either of their English counterparts, with a slight citrus aroma and bitterness due to American varieties of hops used.  Popular American varieties include Petes Wicked, Smuttynose Old Brown Dog, Sam Adams Brown and Brooklyn Brown. A whole host of Brown Recipes are available online also.

So my quest will be to recreate a selection of Old and Brown Ales in the coming months and I welcome any suggestions for brands you would like me to try.  I fully intend to attempt at least Samuel Smiths Nut Brown and possibly a Smuttynose.  Should be fun. Would love to get a Brown and an Old onto my completed recipes page.

A Short History on Bottled Beer

The Zythophile has a great post (short for him) on the history on Bottled Beer.  Check it out.

Beer Wars ctd

As we have been discussing over the last week in both the plight of the Flowers Ale and the Beer Wars movie post much appears to be getting lost in the race to become the biggest brewery in the world.

Well almost on cue Heineken, not wanting to be outdone by InBev and SABMiller, announced on Jan 11th the acquisition of Mexican brewery FEMSA Cerveza, owners of such brands as Dos Equis and Sol, in a transaction worth $7.6 billion assuming the closing price of Heineken stock and the value of the FEMSA’s outstanding debt.

This merger will create the second largest brewery in the world behind InBev, with over $24 billion in revenue, infront of SABMiller.  Wonder if the URL www.mexicanbrewer.com is free, hmmmm it is, what to do.

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

Top 10 Brews of 2009

I am not much into lists but it seems to be the rage around this time of year.  I thought I would compile my list of favorite brews/recipes we brewed over the last 12 months as rated by myself, my family and friends.  Despite ranking I would recommend all of the following recipes, so lets get to it.

#10 Pale Ale Kit from OakBarrel.com – This was one of my families favorites, a full bodied, full flavored Pale Ale, uses American yeast and hops and produces a very smooth ale that improves with age. I have made 2 batches over the last 18 months.

#9 Nut Brown Ale from OakBarrel.com – This was a favorite of the wife, an American style Nut Brown, really smoothed out with age, full bodied with a great nutty malty taste.

#8 London ESB from NorthernBrewer.com – This would have been higher but I some issues with the ESB yeast during the summer, it is a little fussy when the heat spikes.  We had builders coming in and out of the cellar all summer which really messed with the climate.  Once I finally got the brew right it produced one of my favorite keg beers of the year.  Its a strong ale that drinks like a session brew, be careful with this one as it creeps up on you.

#7 Peat Smoked Porter from NorthernBrewer.com – A rich porter I brewed twice this year.  You can really taste the peat in the smoked barley, adding some single malt whisky notes to the finish.  A very smooth, incredibly rich drink with strong coffee and chocolate flavour, makes a great after dinner drink.  Could have been higher but it really is very rich and not something you may want on a regular basis.

#6 Kentish Best Bitter from BritishBrewer.com – This was the Christmas brew in the house and very popular gift with friends and family.  My parents liked the fresh medium-bodied, real ale like mouthfeel that left them wanting a second glass.  It is light, well balanced ale made from a single hop variety.  I personally loved the colour, its the brightness, clearest ale I have ever made.  Its a beautiful, crystal clear light copper/red.  I did not place it higher as the recipe still needs work.

#5 Dry Irish Stout from NorthernBrewer.com – I may never need to create a Guinness recipe clone while we have this Northern Brewer kit available.  It is a very refreshing stout, clean, dry and goes down really smooth with all the coffee flavours of the original. I serve this chilled with a stout tap and BeerGas in the keg.  One of my favorite stout recipes ever and one of the most popular brews I’m commissioned to make for parties and events.

#4 English IPA from NorthernBrewer.com – This is a big ale from Northern Brewer.  A full bodied IPA, not as spicy as its American cousins. Its a refreshing, fruit laden beverage with a hoppy aroma. The malt comes through with age leading to a full-bodied ale that pairs nicely with a spicy curry in the late night hour.

#3 Sinistral Warrior IPA from NorthernBrewer.com – I have my second batch of the year bottle conditioning as we speak and I hope to crack a bottle on my birthday.  This is an ale in the tradition of DogFish Head 60min IPA, a little overly hopped, peppery with a bright rich golden colour.  Its a potent brew that goes down a little too easily.

#2 Spitfire Ale from the Clone Brews book – I brewed this for my dad earlier this year and it quickly became a family favorite.  A clone of the classic from Shepherd Neame Brewery in Kent. Its hard to describe, both an explosion of fruit and roast malt mixed up with a caramel butterscotch aroma that is both refreshing and smooth.  You want more, a lot more. It did not last long but nothing does when the family is over visiting (Happy New Year Dad). I have this recipe waiting on deck early in 2010 and will provide a full write-up for the blog.

…and the number one brew of the year is!!!!

#1 New Old Ale from NorthernBrewer.com – It is very rare when everyone, and I mean everyone, loves the same ale.  This was my most popular seller this Christmas, consumed at many a Christmas party, the overall family favorite, and my own personal fav of the year.  It is a complex dark brown ale that needs to be aged and has an ABV nearing a barleywine. I had this one conditioning in the bottle for over 2 months before consuming.  The addition of Jamaican brown sugar leads to a rum flavour at the finish to complement the full-bodied, rich toffee-like malt, balanced out by the sweet Galena hops.  The colour is a beautiful deep brown red that looks glorious in a glass.  This is an ale equally as comfortable in a brandy snifter as a pint glass.  The history of Old Ale is also something quintessentially British, it seems even more appropriate to be the first winner of the British Brewer Brew of the Year (and will be the topic of a future post).

Happy New Year one and all.  I have many resolutions and dreams for the upcoming year. I want to get a job, mainly to fund dreams two and three namely produce my first all-grain brew and perfect a recipe for Fullers London Pride and serve it from an Oak Cask in my own house.

Thanks for reading this blog, I would welcome your own lists in the comments for favorite brews both homebrew and commercial. Raise a glass to the 2000’s and welcome the new decade.

Merry Christmas

I just got an email from an old family friend back in England providing some detail to the village Christmas Eve celebrations ahead which seemed to revolve heavily around time spent with friends in pubs drinking ale.  Another reminder of home and the differences between England and the USA.  This Christmas is looking to be a white Christmas for all of us in New England and England alike and as a toast to our old family friend I am going to crack into my Kentish Best Bitter this evening with friends at an annual tradition of our own, the Sheer family Christmas Eve party.  Merry Christmas one and all and drink responsibly.

‘Twas Christmas broach’d the mightiest ale; ’twas Christmas told the merriest tale; a Christmas gambol oft could cheer the poor man’s heart through half the year. – Sir Walter Scott, Scottish Novelist and Poet