Would you like a job at Hardknott?

Occasionally I take a moment or two to look at what we've done, where we are going, what we've built and savour the successes. The four years since moving to Millom we have achieved a lot. Starting with a 2 barrel brewery based on tiny Grundy tanks and building it up to where we are now; several 16hl tanks, a bottling line and much improved business sustainability.

We now supply several distributors around the country, have supplied Sainsbury's and still supply Booths with beer. We export to several countries and look set to continue this upward trend. We have also created several jobs, all within an economy that has had some difficulties.

It's satisfying, but we're not done yet. We really need to replace the brew-house within the next couple of years and to justify that we really need to grow a little bigger. To get properly on-top and to make a sustainable future we need to make the whole of the business run a little more autonomously. We've got our first bar coming on-line soon¹, which means it is ever more important that I move further into a management role and away from hands on mash-tun digging and cask washing.

The problem is we could really do with several people. A lead production brewer would be very useful. Additionally a brewery maintenance bod would come in handy. A sales and administration person would take a bit of workload of Ann, and make it altogether easier for us to have one of those unusual things that I believe are known as "holidays" without us having to completely shut down the business.

In reality we might be able to afford one more person, as it stands. At a push, perhaps more than one, but we'd have to increase sales and production a bit more to justify.

Either way, we certainly need to recruit in the short term, and perhaps look into he medium term at progression and autonomy. If you think you have what it takes to contribute to our plans, and are either local to us or have a desire to relocate to the beautiful County of Cumbria then please get in touch.

For more information about the roles we have please look here.

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¹Slightly delayed due to Network Rail's solicitors becoming involved with the lease. We are told this is a formality, and will happen in due course, but meanwhile the legal professionals are generating themselves work by assuring their clients that there are multitude of glyph intersections and point additions to make.

However, the good news is we have a premises licence for the property, even if the property isn't actually ours. Slightly bizarre!

Is it lager, or is it ale?

I was asked the other day, by my children teenage delinquent offspring, which science I liked least when I was at school. Of course, I should have replied with something like "That is a bit like asking which of my darling children I liked least, my little cherubs" only their current non-human status of teenagers somewhat precluded that option.

After some thought, and after trying to remember what I did actually think all those years ago, I decided it was probably Biology. You see, Physics is certain. At least it is certain, assuming standard temperature and pressure. Chemistry is kind of fun; we got to distil alcohol when I was at school, under strict supervision I might add. We even made things explode, occasionally, although that might have been due to a lack of supervision.

I did remember getting interested in things that happened in petri dishes. I also developed a deep fascination of the nervous system, neurones, synapses and other things that made us "wired" As it happens, my "O"¹ level results showed me to be slightly better at Biology than Chemistry, which was a shock to me. Or perhaps that was the Van de Graaff generator, not sure.

The longer I spend in the beer brewing industry the more there seems to be to learn. There is knowledge needed in micro-biology, chemistry, physics and a good handful of engineering to go along with it. There also seems to be a lot of mis-information, half truths, old wives tales, urban myths and damn annoying lies from some, just to make the beer drinker think something other than the facts.

Lager is different to "ale" we are told, because it's made with "bottom fermenting yeast" where as "ale" is made with "top fermenting yeast" Other people, who are more knowledgeable, talk about bottom or top cropping yeast. However, I think even this is a flawed explanation.

As I said in my previous post, I'm no yeast expert, but I'm fascinated by the subject. I have read about the fascinating organism, I've used them in various forms and have enough experience to be sure that most beer experts and some brewers still have a lot to learn, me included.

What I know is that when yeast is at the bottom of the tank, or floating at the top, it does a very poor job of fermenting. It only ferments when in suspension. So we could all do with cutting out this top and bottom fermenting false-jargon.

I also know that it is perfectly possible, and indeed probably preferable, to bottom crop nearly every yeast. Most big breweries and some of the more progressive micro-breweries crop their yeast at the bottom, even when making "ale". There may, or may not be a crust of yeast forms on the top of the beer after primary fermentation, but some of the more modern "ale" strains, especially if supplied dried, completely fall to the bottom of the primary fermentation tank.

The use of he words top and bottom are completely misleading, in my view.

Wort, the sugary liquid on which the yeast works to make beer, has a number of various complexities of carbohydrates dissolved within it. The precise types of carbohydrates depend on a number of factors including the grain used, other carbohydrates used like corn starch and whether or not any additional enzymes are added. Broadly, in brewing terms, we talk about fermentable sugars and un-fermentable sugars. However, the boundaries are perhaps not clear.

Various yeast strains are able to digest different carbohydrates, in different environments, with various degrees of success. It is mainly to do with the enzymes that the yeast cell generates. And, just to complicate things, there are enzymes available that will allow a brewer to ferment just about anything, irrespective of the yeast used.

It is true that a traditional lager yeast will drop to the bottom of the tank and will crop at the bottom.

It is true that in traditional ale making the types of yeast used would readily crop from the top and quite a lot of the yeast remained on the top of the beer after fermentation.

Generally ale yeast is known as Saccharomyces cerevisiae and lager yeast as Saccharomyces pastorianus or Saccharomyces carlsbergensis. However, there is some reading I have done that suggests that they really are all the same thing and just different strains of the same yeast. All strains have different behaviours.

However, the key real practical differences seem to be to do with temperature of fermentation and ability to attenuate the wort.

"Ale" yeast, or what I would prefer to call "warm" fermenting yeast is normally fermented at perhaps 20 degrees centigrade and fermentation might be done in 3-7 days.

"Lager" yeast will work at perhaps 5-12 degrees and might take a little longer to get around to turning all those sugars into alcohol, perhaps a couple of weeks with very long maturation times.

However, I can assure you, "ale" yeast does not stop working at 12 degrees and there are brewers who will deliberately ferment "ale" at lower temperatures to achieve required flavour profiles. Equally, modern lagers are often made much more quickly than the traditional lagers and this can only be done with at least some of the fermentation being done at a higher temperature. The line is not as clear as the beer geek would like it to be.

But, what we can say about lager over other beers, is that it tends to be much more attenuated. That is to say the yeast has got to more of the sugars and turned them into alcohol. The beer is drier and has less calories. Perhaps that's the major difference with lager yeast; the fact that it makes a drier beer.

Perhaps, but remember those enzymes you can buy? They'll help just about any yeast turn wort into a dry beer. For that matter, miss out a whole load of barley and add in easily fermentable sugar made from corn starch, and away you go. This is probably the process used by most bigger brands of beers and, interestingly, even small brewers are encouraged to add enzymes to help out with difficult fermentations. Certainly measured amounts of enzymes would tighten up ABV variations. No doubt if a brewers bonus² depended on satisfying over a hundred different QA checks, he would be tempted to use it.

Of course, there are other ways of fermenting down lower in gravity, as in the case of Orval and lambics, other yeast strains or even bacteria might consume more sugars and dry the beer out.

I may have some of my facts wrong in this piece. I apologise and I am very happy for the more technically adept reader to chip in and correct me. What I am trying to do here is show the reader that to pigeon hole beers by some notion of exactly which yeast strain is used is perhaps less certain than it might be.

Lager is dryer than ale and can use more delicate hops as they are not overpowered by excess sweetness. Ale is sweeter than lager, generally and needs more hops to counter the sweetness. That, perhaps, is all you really need to know.

I hope I've broadened the readers mind a little.

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¹For you young people, "O" levels and CSE qualifications were later replaced by GCSEs. I know most of you won't remember that far back.

²Perhaps another indicator of craft?

Meeting demand

This isn't a complex or long winded post, it is quite simple really; we've created a demand for a product we are unable to make fast enough. Infra Red doesn't sell well in cask locally, although we can make it and get it to customers quite quickly. Making bottle conditioned beer takes a little longer when it is a dry hopped beast. Transport logistics add to the problem of satisfying the demand.

Today we note that myBreweryTap have already sold out of Infra Red, except for what they have in mixed cases. There have been reports of intermittent supplies at The Rake and UtoBeer. BeerMerchants do have some stock, although I'm not sure there is much left. The trouble is I have not a single drop left in the brewery. Furthermore, I am unlikely to get around to brewing more anytime soon as a local cask market also expect to be satisfied.

Of course, Zak Avery has unwittingly added to this whole dilemma by disguising a guitar as a mandolin. I'm considering my perspective as a result of that.

The whole problem is somewhat compounded by the very late availability of increased brew house capacity. We expected a 3 fold increase in production capacity by the end of June at the latest, but this is still to be delivered. However, that is just me making feeble excuses, why should you care that I can't satisfy your insatiable demand for my beer?

All I can do is apologise and promise to brew harder. Oh, and nag Ann like hell to buy me more stainless steel. And a bottle labeler. And more bottle filling heads. And a fork lift truck. And a sink (no really, I didn't get one yet) And a steam boiler. And. And. And..........

Heath Robinsonness

It's probably because my parents were brought up in the war. Most of you won't remember it, it was a long time ago, even before I was born. But back then there was austerity. No, real austerity. I mean, you think things are tough now because the council won't repair the pot holes and your benefit cheque just doesn't pay for the damage to your low profile wheels. For goodness sake, you can't even afford your mobile phone contract any more. Well, during the war, so I'm told, it was much, much worse. It was really bad then, you had to eat your pet rabbit just to survive.

Today we are in a period of austerity at Hardknott, not because we can't sell our beer, but probably because I've spent too much money on pipe fittings. Much as I'd like to get a proper mezzanine floor installed for my grist store, and have my old fermenting vessels fitted with proper cooling jackets, I can't. My fork lift truck is well down the flipping list. Unfortunately we need to sell more beer before we can afford anything else. More over, Ann seems to be selling beer as fast as I can make it, so I need to spend most of my time making it, leaving my spare time to either fix up the brewery, or go to the pub. For some reason the pub seems to win. Development of my in-situ fermentation gravity measuring system will have to stay in the planning stage and replacement of the flexible hoses with a more elegant solution will remain a pipe dream.

Luckily, my meagerly ancestors have taught me to mend and make do. It does have the advantage that I can get stuff working with minimum expense. String and sticky tape is great. The pictures here show most of my brewery in its current state, awaiting further vessels to be delivered so that I can organise the brewery into an efficient quality beer production facility. I might even run the cables neatly then.

Notice the mallet on top of the casks. It used to be my Grandfather's, and he's been dead 15 years. I suspect the mallet is some number of decades older. I doubt it'll last the year out with the number of shives I'm having to bash in with it every week.

Brewers objects of beauty no3 - grist case and mash wetter

I don't know if readers of this blog are particularly interested in my excitement over the improvements I'm making to my brewery, but then, should I care? This is my blog and if I want to wax lyrical about the things that I think are good, then I'm going to.

Today we are brewing. The demand for our beer is increasing as we push into new markets. I'm trying hard to ensure that every brewday makes as much beer as possible, which involves mashing in as much grist as possible. The maximum my current mash tun can hold is about 110kg of grist, quite a lot to mash in by hand, although many brewers do. I have help today in the form of my nearly-14-year-old son, Alfie. You can see him in the background of the picture weighing out the grist. Despite his help I think the whole job of making the mash is so much easier with a grist case and mash wetter or mash hydrator if you want to be posh.

I have talked to brewers who are happy to mash 250kg by hand and they can't see the point of changing what they do. Sure, it's a good work out but there are bound to be temperature and consistency variations throughout the mash. I find, after mashing in even 100kg by hand, I'm getting to the point of thinking the mix is good enough, even though I know it isn't. It is quite hard work and the resultant mash often has sticky lumps when dug out, which is a sign of reduction in extract.

With the very Heath Robinson affair I have created, once I set the slide that controls the grist flow, and with the strike water at full flow, the mash tun fills almost without my intervention. Just a few turns with the mash paddle and a top up with hot water if required, and a mash at 65.5^OC with homogeneous consistency is achieved.

If you brew beer commercially and you have the head room for it, get a grist case and mash hydrator, trust me on this one.

My grist case will hold about 100kg of grist and is made from one sheet of 18mm water proof board. It could do with being extended a little. The hydrator is made from standard 110mm drainage pipe fittings and a copper spray head inside. The hot strike water simple sprays on the falling grain as it travels down the pipe.

Warning, do not make a grist case out of MDF, it will swell with the humidity.

You can take the Landlord out of the Pub

I might like to think of myself as a strong willed stiff upper-lipped English male-chauvinist bloke, but I'll admit I shed a tear on Friday. We've been the owners of The Woolpack Inn for 6 years, 1 month, 1 week and a few days. It has been an experience. The 19th of February 2010 saw us hand over the keys to the new owners of our pub. Once the solicitor confirmed that completion had occurred and we could move into our new house, we stood for a while, hand in hand, and contemplated our time at our fine ancient hostelry. "Nobody can accuse us of not having a go I said" as the hundreds of memories flashed through my mind and my eyes turned watery.

We've spent the weekend putting our new home the way we want it. Our worldly possessions have been slowly moving into the building that also houses my brewery. Today we managed to move some of the larger heavy items into the house. It's nice to wake up in a place that can really be called our own - you can never truly call a pub a home when there are members of the public passing through every day. You can never call a place your home when you can't just lock the doors and hide away from the world if you really want.

But on Friday night I needed to do something important, I needed to go to The Pub. Which pub? Perhaps that doesn't matter, any pub would do, although I knew which one would be my choice. Beer has become incredibly important to me, not in an alcohol dependancy way but in a way that is defining my life. Break me open and I expect you will find "beer" writ large through my core.

I'm looking forward to giving my liver just a little bit of a rest, but for this weekend I've been mourning the end of an era with the only drink that makes sense to me; beer. So you might be able to take the Landlord out of the pub but you cannot take the beer from the beer geek.

Tonight we've come back to the pub to use their WiFi as neither our brewery building nor our house have broadband yet. For that reason blogging is likely to remain intermittent for a while. I don't find the bar of a busy pub conducive to the best writing environment. But I'll be back, all in good time, I feel I still have lots to write about concerning beer and pubs, some of which I felt uncomfortable writing when I was a Landlord.

Last week, with the assistance of Jeff Pickthall, we attended a trade show for local hospitality businesses. It was the pre-launch of our new venture. In addition to our own brewing activities we are hoping to wholesale esoteric bottled beers. Early days for sure but the response from potential customers was positive. I enjoyed talking about beer to people and although very tiring, I enjoyed the interaction with enthusiastic property operators who like the idea of offering something other than ubiquity.

I'm really pleased to be taking away a whole load of skills and experiences of my time in the pub. I'm sure I'm going to have many sad reflections about the loss of a way of life to me, but I'm taking forward a new business with which I can continue to promote good beer.

Market research and brainstorming

This is an odd post, I'm not going to give you any opinion at all. It is possible you know, occasionally I like to listen to what other people have to say.

Imagine you have just inherited a large amount of money, enough to set up a brewery to your own exacting specifications, enough so that for the first few years you don't need to make a profit. Imagine you have the ability and financial resources to make any beer you want, any style, any quantity and using whatever dispense method you like.

What would be the beers you would make? What would you call them and how would you package them? What style of label design would you have, closures and bottle shapes and sizes?

Would you try to recreate something somebody has done before but has ceased production? Would you try and develop new styles? Strong beers, weak beers or standard session beers? What would you do?

You can say anything you like, providing it doesn't mention the war. Golly, you can even suggest making beers with drinkability if you really want.

Big(ish) brewery that thinks craft.

Right, I need to get back to some proper writing. It's all very well being pleased about recent event's, but that's done now. I have to get to what this blog is about; beer, pubs, perhaps food and anything else to do with the crazy industry I seem to be part of.

In my remote place tucked away in a distant and occasionally wet part of the British Isles I can become detached from the reality that most people experience. I'm glad of that detachment most of the time and today, with the weather fine it was nice to continue my outdoor maintenance on the roof. Nevertheless, I have more reporting to do on the trip to London last week. I very much enjoy these trips to the big city. I couldn't live there - too many people all crammed into too little space - but I enjoy the cultural things we don't have here. You know, things like street lamps and buses, cinemas, theatres and best of all beer that is different to the beer I get at home. Sometimes I even find beer that is better than at home.

I had an invite from John Keeling of Fullers Brewery to visit him in his big "industrial₁" plant. I had previously met him at the barley wine seminar and had been more than just a little bit impressed by his enthusiasm. I did wonder what brewers of big breweries actually do. I guessed they didn't dig out the mash tun very often or clean the copper for that matter. I'll apologise now for any inaccuracies here. I didn't use my note book as I felt I needed to just soak up the feelings and attitudes in the brewery; to see if I could get what the core differences, and more importantly, similarities between the really little breweries like mine and these regional breweries. I think peoples attitude to beer is far more important than brewery capacity. Facts and figures don't a good beer make, good brewers are what make good beer. Fine and enthusiastic ones, I normally find.

Although I was keen to see the brewery it was more getting to understand the ethos behind the place that interested me. So when John had invited me to visit I made it a key part of my trip to London. I heard various comments about Fullers; Some think they produce ubiquitous beers like London Pride, it gets everywhere in London for goodness sake. Other people think they produce fantastically interesting beers like London Pride, and it's great that you can get it all over London and it's one of the things that makes it worth going there for. When you get differences of view like this it makes life interesting. I seem to think the views on other very young breweries follow similar themes.

In the eyes of some it cannot be possible to make good beer in a large brewery. Furthermore, there is some debate about what makes a good beer. For some the ability to drink a gallon is important. For others maximum flavour is the key. Some would say that there are beers out there which have been made without any consideration to their drinkability. Other people would say that the vast majority of beer in this country is boring and only the stuff brewed with masses of American hops is worth drinking at all. I'll confess to being one of the latter types of people and upon mentioning this to John he threatened me, that next time I'm in London, he would take me out and show me just how drinkable London Pride is. It would be churlish to refuse I feel. My principles will only stretch so far you know.

We arrived at the brewery on a wet December day, luckily whilst walking down Chiswick Lane from the tube the rain actually stopped. Signed in and badged up at reception we waited for John to meet us. The lovely smell of brewing hung in the air like an enticement of a good perfume. In his office we had a chat about the relative sizes of his brewery compared to Coors₂. We looked at some old brewing logs that Ron Pattinson had been nosing at earlier and John refreshed my memory about how the Fullers parti-gyle system worked. I'll come onto that shortly. As I suspected, it turns out that John doesn't actually brew, the name on the door says "Brewing Director". There is a real brewer who looks after the day to day brewing, but just to confuse me, apparently he doesn't dig out the mash tun either.

John had to go and have a meeting with more important people than himself. It's difficult to imagine who might be more important than the Brewing Director in a brewery. I suspect it's those bean counting type people who have far more control than they deserve. Thankfully, John seems to have them under control, but even so he felt that much as he'd prefer to stay with us and talk about beer and his brewery, he really must go and kowtow. Derek Prentice, who is now the real head brewer has not been with the brewery long, was to take us around the brewery. That was fine seeing as Derek is just as nice a chap as John and equally as enthusiastic and knowledgeable about beer. It's a good job really seeing as he has an awful lot of beer to look after.

We were taken to see the Victorian part of the brewery. Now unused since 1984 its a marvel of engineering from that time. One of the two original mash tuns is retained in the building. The remaining copper really is made out of an orangy brown metal and is encased in a thick layer of brick. It looks great to the romantic traditionalist, and apparently it was even quite energy efficient. The bricks act as a combined insulator and heat store, which must have made it a right bugger to clean as it would have remained hot for hours in there. The wort for the next brew is held in a tank above and so kept hot by the heat from the boiling of the previous brew. Back when it was build in 1823 it was fired by coal. In the 20th century a steam calandria₃ was installed in the copper. That must have made it even more of a bugger to clean. To this sentimental brewer it is a piece of engineering beauty, but by modern standards completely wrong for making beer; As well as being troublesome to clean it has now been found that in most cases brewing beer in copper vessels causes WHO limits on copper in food stuff to be exceeded.

We then moved on to look at the new brewery. This was installed as part of a major refurbishment in 1984, which was when the old copper was last used. The main brewhouse is surprisingly compact and modern looking and as it is only 25 years or so since it was built I guess it should be. Considering the old brew house was in use for 161 years this one has a way to go yet. When we were there they were just in the middle of a boil and the mash tun was being cleaned out. It turns out that nobody gets into the mash tun to dig it out. It's all done by a mash rake and CIP₄ equipment. The coppers now use external colandrias which also make cleaning easier. In fact CIP is used in nearly every vessel in the brewery. I think that's cheating. Still, at least it means everybody can walk around looking smart rather than my usual brew day look.

Parti-gyling, I said I'd get to it. The brewery has two mash tuns and two coppers. There are two streams of wort, often the same grist mix in both mash tuns, although I'm assuming they could be different. The first runnings at perhaps an OG as high as 1090 from the sparge is run into one copper with one hop recipe. The second, much weaker runnings at perhaps 1020 is run into the second copper with a different hop loading. After the boil the two streams are blended to make different beers. The resultant wort is at production OG. This is not high gravity brewing, which is a different thing altogether. The great thing about party gyling is that Fullers get to make the occasional barley wine like Fullers Vintage and at the same time make a low ABV beer resulting in very efficient use of barley.

I love fermenter rooms. The smell of the yeast getting going on the malt sugars and some of the hop aromas wafting around reminds me of the fact that there are billions of little microorganisms working hard in the name of beer. I wonder how often they get thanked for the brilliant job they do. I know that the yeast is incredibly important to Fullers. They have about 10 people in their lab looking after it. Isolating and nurturing the correct strain has been a key part of quality control for them for a long time. Every crop of yeast from a previous fermentation is carefully checked for viability before being pitched on. If any problems develop a new batch is cultured up from yeast that has been carefully preserved on agar slopes.

Some discussion was had with Derek regarding the behaviour of my dried yeast. Most pitched on yeasts form a crust on top of the beer at the end of fermentation. In all my experience and that of several other brewers who use dry yeast, it tends to drop out very easily leaving nearly no crust. Derek's concern is that the lack of a crust might allow in bacteria. Good point perhaps, although thinking about it I don't use open fermenters anyway. An advantage of 90 gallon Grundy tanks is that I can stick a lid on any time I like.

Fullers now use cylindrical fermentation vessels for all their beer. Back in the 80's some were installed with a view to making lager. Their lager brewing didn't last long and so they started to make their standard beers in the newer vessels. It made better beer and they won more CAMRA awards with it. So, to cut a long story short all the square fermenters were replaced with cylindrical ones. Cylindrical stainless steel fermenters are much easier to clean than square copper lined ones. Even so, Derek still reminisces about old square slate fermenters in a previous brewery he worked in. You can't take the romanticism out of a good brewer.

On route we spied some old oak casks lying around looking like they had been abandoned. I didn't find out why they were not in the nice old undercroft where casks used to be stored. I'm guessing there is a duty reason for that. Breweries do not have to pay any duty on beer until it is shipped out but some HMRC officers can be touchy about beer in duty suspense being stored in the same place as beer is consumed. Anyway, it turns out these casks contain brewers reserve. As this is being typed John tweeted that he's going to organise a tasting sometime of all his experimental beers. It's been noted John. I learnt some interesting stuff about whisky cask aging and from John. Subject of another post probably.

Finally we look at the expansive casking and kegging hall. An automated keg facility packages some of the Fullers beers for export. Anybody who reads this blog will understand that I wonder about the possibility of putting quality beer into keg for markets in this country. I'm unlikely to ever sell London Pride here but if I could get a 30 litre keg of Golden Pride, well, that might be a different matter. It would be fun for the beer festival. The kegging line is almost fully automated including a very intelligent robot that handles kegs to and from pallets. The robot is called Les, apparently after the chief engineer. Not, it would seem, because the chief engineer is also intelligent - although I'm sure he must be as you don't get to make a place like this work if you are not - but it's because Les stands in the middle of the room waving his arms around.

Interestingly, the kegging line is justified on the throughput of beers from larger breweries. Fullers can keg tanker supplied beers for less than the difference between the cost of tanker supplied and keg supplied beer. Nice way to increase the revenue for the brewery and I guess it must help transport problems in and around London. Bulk supplied beer can be brought into the area in less vehicles.

Casking takes a little more manpower. It is not easy to automate putting beer into cask. There was obvious signs of people doing real hard graft. Somebody hitting the keystones into the casks and somebody else manually controlling the cask filling. That's nice to know that not everybody in the brewery swans about in suits all day.

Before leaving we retired to the aforementioned undercroft. A traditional vaulted cellar where up until sometime in the second half of the last century beer was conditioned in casks. It is now a nice tasting room come function hall. We tried some beers, well you have to when you're in the brewery, don't you? I tried London Pride and yes John, you are right, it is drinkable. But don't let that honesty from me prevent us testing the limits of that theory at some later date. I particularly like Chiswick Bitter as a session beer. I think I remember it having Northdown and Challenger hops in it. Anyway, I like that one. As we moved up in strength my beer geek side kicked in and I started to get nice esters and stuff, I love the fruity notes you get in these beers, but you wouldn't want to drink a gallon. Vintage and Gales Old Ale were also tried. I'm starting to wonder why I buy Belgian beer when there are some equally as good beers this side of the Channel.

Gales Old Ale used to be made in wooden lined fermenters. It gives the beer it's distinctive sour edge that some people find difficulty liking. Gales was bought out by Fullers and the beer production moved to Chiswick. There are no wooden fermenters at the Griffin brewery so how is it still made? John explained that they brought the last batch to be made at Gales and put it into a conditioning tank. Each time some is bottled an amount is left in the tank and a new batch of fresh beer added. The micro-fauna in the tank grow and flavour the beer to create something very authentic. Whatever, I like this beer too.

Before leaving we visited the shop. That was dangerous. We'd taken a large suitcase and a rucksack so as to maximize beer carrying capability. We had the rucksack with us at the brewery and filled that with several different years of Vintage, plus some Gales Old Ale. Pleased with that we headed off. Later, when we packed up during a move of hotels my suitcase lost a wheel on a curb. Beer is heavy when it's added to your luggage. I so wish Sapient Pear Wood was real. Anyway, the London hotel/luggage/tube disasters needs a whole new post. Fullers came to the rescue in part - look out for the sad story of a country bumpkin adrift in London.

So, my main thoughts behind visiting the brewery was to get into the ethos of the place. There is no doubt that London Pride and the other session beers are the core business of the place. Although they have a tied estate it's not big compared to some and a large proportion of the volume is sold to the free trade. You can't argue with that. Moreover the estate concentrates on quality premium establishments, which my luggage story shall confirm. I like Fullers and that's not just because they were very hospitable to us during our visit. I like the enthusiasm of John and Derek. It's not just about barrelage and money, although without making a profit no brewery can exist, but it's also about making good beer, and that they do too.

That was a long post. Amazingly, I could write more, perhaps it's a good job I didn't use a notebook. I can't really imagine anybody will read it all, except perhaps John Keeling himself. I do hope he's got a sense of humor. I did feel that perhaps I was digging a big hole for myself and insulting this great brewer with my little jokes. I hope not, it's all in fun. It's also interesting treading the line as a beer writer who wants to be honest about what he sees but also not upsetting companies that extend hospitality to amateur beer writers like myself. I hope I managed to get the balance right. My conclusion, as expressed in the title of this piece, is that so long as John and Derek are in charge of brewing, there will always be a firm foot in the craft beer market at Fullers.

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₁Hey, I'm kidding, but if you read all this post carefully you'll know that. "Industrial" is a matter of perspective.

₂Fullers make about 150,00 brewery barrels of London Pride a year. Coors make about 6 million barrels of Carling per year. 40 times as much and irrespective of anything else I might say I know which I'd prefer to drink and that ain't the Carling. John likes to think his brewery is closer to the size of mine. I'd disagree as I only make about 50 barrels of beer a year total. John and his team sell 300 times as much London Pride as I sell of my own beer total. Perhaps I need to start making drinkable beer.

₃A calandria is a set of cylindrical tubes used to heat one fluid by passing another fluid through. A heat exchanger effectively.

₄CIP = Cleaning In Position. It's dead good. Yes, even I use it for my fermentation vessels.

Various bits of news

It's quiet here now. The pub is in winter mode which means we don't open during the week. Hardknott pass is closed for repairs and in any case traffic along the road averages about one car per hour outside the summer season.

But still, there seems to be lots to do. I'm brewing today, a beer with an O.G. of around 1100, I hope. Needs many hours of boiling which will no doubt result in small but inevitable increased shrinking of the polar ice caps. Sorry penguins and polar bears.

I'm also starting to look at the options for selling beers in bottles mail order. Don't get too excited, it's very early stages just yet, I've got a bit of work to do before that happens. Quite apart from actually brewing the beer and the time it takes to bottle, I also have to explore various commercial difficulties such as economic and reliable ways of shipping from this far flung corner of the globe.

Last weekend we had another very successful wedding. I'm going to have to explore further how we promote that little addition to our repertoire. It's just something else to work into a long overdue revamp of our marketing and branding. If I get bored and we get a spell of fine weather, and yes it does happen even in Cumbria, we've got lots of outside painting to do. When it's raining we've got stuff to fix up inside too. So there, that's my excuses for reduced blog posting.

Hopefully I'll get a little bit of time to write next week; I hope so as I miss it. Meanwhile you can have a look at my second post as guest blogger for the BitterSweet partnership. I'd be interested in knowing what the reader thinks of what I've said or maybe more generally about the BitterSweet project.

That's all for now. Better go back and see if my copper has exploded yet.

What is a Microbrewery?

Being the one who brews the beer, when sat around in the evening chatting to customers, I often get asked a lot of the same questions. The most common question is about volumes. Queries about how much I brew and how big my brewery is are common. I would get irritated answering the same questions all the time, but it's about beer which is a subject I like to talk about. Elaborating the answer helps to make it more interesting for me, but then that tends to encourage more stupid questions.

I can answer very easily questions about my own brewery. After all, if I don't know the answers then who does? Admittedly, the ever increasing risk of dementia might be an issue. The one question that does crop up time and again is that of the definition of a microbrewery. Just how small does a brewery have to be to be a microbrewery? I often get asked that question and because I'd really like to have the answer I'm going to explore the concept here.

To lay down a bench mark I'm going to start with the sub 60,000hl per year definition of a "small brewery"¹ as determined by HMRC². To put that into context I brew around 60hl per year. I could get up to around 300hl per year if all I did was brew beer, however, I have a pub to run. So the reader can clearly see, even if mathematically dyslexic, that I am nowhere near in danger of having to pay increased beer duty rates.

Just in case numbers do baffle you, I'll give some illustrations. I'd have to increase my brewery size by 200 times to reach the threshold. 5 fermenters of 240hl each should do it. A mash tun of around 5 tonnes grist capacity to feed them. I'd need around 9,000-12,000 firkins if I expected to sell most of it as draft, although bottling would help reduce this number. I don't know if the reader can imagine what all this might look like, but to me it is anything but micro.

I'll have a little stab at my own view of the volumes I think define a micro brewery. Please bear in mind this is only an opinion and I'm sure the reader will have their own view. If we think in orders of magnitude, if I'm saying that a brewery of 2 orders of magnitude bigger than mine is too big to be a microbrewery then something around one order of magnitude, or ten times the size of mine might be.

So, my definition of the maximum size might be a 30hl brew length and around 500kg of grist. You can just about mash that volume by hand, so that, in my view, is a good level to consider. At this size the production, sales and transport activities would justify perhaps 5-8 full time jobs and it's likely to have a sole trader or partnership model of business. A nice family owned company I'd suggest.

There is another level in the beer duty definition. Below 5,000hl per year a brewery gets a full 50% discount on all it's duty. My imaginary brewery above, if it had 3 fermenters, would be unable to brew more than this. This makes me confident about this definition.

The 60,000hl per year brewery by contrast will have mechanised mash rakes I'd guess, will probably fit the limited company model, will employ around 50 people or more and start to feel corporate. At this volume it will probably have sales of up to £10 million per annum. This is starting to sound familiar, but I promised not to mention that particular brewery for a while and a promise is a promise.

Lets take another brewery as an example, the White Shield brewery. At about 10hl brew length it easily fits my size criteria. Owned by Molson Coors however makes it part of a large multinational, but do we care? Of course, the head brewer cares, Steve Wellington cares very much about the beers he makes. When personification of the metalwork occurs, I believe Steve calls the brew house something like "The Old Lady", then you have a real life relationship that breathes character into the beer.

But then perhaps size doesn't really matter at all. If a big brewery can still think like a microbrewery then perhaps that is what really matters. In America they use the term craft brewery and craft beer to describe their quality beer scene. Of course some are very large, like Sierra Nevada for instance, and will be very corporate in their business outlook. But they all produce good beer and there is such a vast difference between that and the output from the vast mash filters of the huge multinationals as to render the definition clear and easy.

In the UK we seem to have a more difficult time defining what we think is good and worthy for the beer connoisseur. Are the outputs from the various Marston's breweries not good craft beers for example? Despite the White Shield brewery being part of a huge multinational it's beer is well revered and rightly so. Robinsons, Fuller's, and Green King have all produced at least something that has impressed me, even if just a little. Perhaps their main outputs are as dull as dishwater, but then perhaps that's what the masses want anyway. The key thing for me is how do we compare these breweries to the likes of Sierra Nevada or Stone for instance who produce some very interesting beers and probably are similar in size to our "regional" brewers.

I am of course asking rhetorical questions, which by their very nature have no clear answer. The reader will have their own views, which of course I'd be happy to know about. Indeed, that is the point of this post, to explore where we think the boundries lie between microbrewing, craft brewing and whatever else we would like to define.

At the end of the day though, does it matter how big the brewery is, so long as the beer is good?

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¹Details for this can be found in HMRC Beer Duty Notice. hl=hectalitre or 100 litres or about 176 pints or 0.61 of a brewery barrel.

²Her Majesty's Robbing C***s

The Customer is Always Right

Today I casked beer, dodging heavy showers; you see my racking and cask cleaning is done outside as my brewery is very small. The wedding party is still here, most of them anyway. They keep insisting on eating my food and drinking my beer, so they are taking up a bit of my time. I'd like to post more but I've a living to make.

However, this article caught my eye.

"Someone once asked me for a pint of bitter with lime cordial in it. I refused. I am proud of the bitter I serve. I've won awards. I deliver what I think is a perfect pint of beer. I wouldn't allow someone to compromise it by sticking lime cordial in it. For some people the customer might be "always right" but I'd like to think I'd still got some integrity. The customer left but I felt proud."

Chris Maclean

Good man.

Does he also refuse to put lemonade in it I wonder? My beer may not be perfect all the time, but I'm sure if I'm going to stand in the pissing rain to put it in the casks I've a right to have an opinion about what is mixed with it.

Coming up for Air

I have very little in the way of formal qualifications in brewing. Up until 6 years ago I had very little work experience in the industry. Before that time my job was to count neutrons. Yes, really. That's right, those incredibly small sub-atomic particles that are impossible to see, and actually fairly difficult to detect owing to their lack of any electrostatic charge. You might wonder how I managed to count them. Well I could tell you, but I suspect I'd have to kill you afterwards.

Now neutrons are significantly smaller than yeast cells. Yeast cells can be seen under a microscope and are significantly easier to count. Also, once you counted the yeast cell it is still normally there. Neutrons, on the other hand, refuse to stay where you left them, and in fact, there is some question about their existence anyway. It is something to do with trees falling over in forests when nobody is there. Something to do with blind faith, although to be fair, there is a little more evidence to support the existence of neutrons over that of God.¹

I'm not going to brag about qualifications. I don't believe I need to. What I know is that I have learnt and forgotten more than I have managed to retain as a result of working previously in a highly technical environment. Much of this knowledge is highly transferable and my previous scientific and engineering background has primed me to be able to analyse all manor of diverse technical subjects. I believe brewing can be included as a technical subject and compared to some of the esoteric subjects I have dealt with in the past, something of a doddle.

What I know about brewing is that oxygen is good for getting primary fermentation going. Normally this oxygen is incorporated into the beer as a result of the wort falling through the air into the fermenter after flowing through a heat exchanger, where the previously boiled wort is cooled to pitching temperature. The yeast uses this oxygen as part of it's metabolism during the vigorous primary fermentation and hopefully all this oxygen is consumed, leaving an oxygen free beer. The spoilage bacteria don't stand a chance because the yeast has competed for oxygen and nutrients and by now won with style. It's really a numbers game; billions of yeast cells and only a few hundred other organisms.

The beer is often chilled towards the end of primary fermentation. This enables the CO₂ that is being produced by our friendly yeast cells to be dissolved and retained in the beer; the lower the temperature the more volumes CO₂ that will be retained. At a temperature of 11-12^oC the beer will have a carbonation of around 1.1-1.2 volumes at atmospheric pressure. The beer has to have live yeast in it for this to happen, but providing it is given some time, oxygen is not required for this process to occur. The yeast will settle to the bottom of the vessel, along with any remaining precipitated proteins and other particulates, which might include the vast majority of the unwanted micro-organisms. A small amount, around 5% of the original pitching rate of yeast, is allowed to remain in the beer. Some of this process might or might not be performed in a conditioning tank depending on the brewery.

From this point on, the best brewers will work very, very hard to prevent oxygen coming into contact with the beer. For that matter, eliminating air and therefore spoilage bacteria and wild yeasts is also key. Additionally, if the beer is in contact with oxygen for a significant length of time oxidization of the beer can occur, which most beer connoisseurs consider a bad thing to have happen to your beer. Together, spoilage bacteria and oxygen will react with the beer and create off flavours quickly, adding nothing to the quality of the beer; in any way, shape or form.

Once in cask the remaining yeast will add to the carbonation of the beer. Remaining fermentables allow remaining yeast to progress slow secondary fermentation and a very good cask beer will improve in a sealed cask for weeks, months and sometimes even years. If the beer remains in contact with live yeast it will consume some compounds that result in off flavours.

When it is time to serve the beer it is time to vent the beer. The reason for venting is to release excess CO₂ and so prevents the beer from being too lively on serving. Failure to do this can result in overfobbing and too much head, if head is not your thing. There is no requirement at this point to allow air to come into contact with the beer in the cask other than something has to replace the beer that is removed. There is no purpose served in letting damaging oxygen and microorganisms coming into contact with the beer. The conditioning has already been done. If this venting can be done through a one way valve, such as a race spile, then things are wonderful.

If at this point in time a non-pressurized CO₂ blanket is allowed to rest over the beer, without any air entering, then the beer could actually last for many days or even weeks as this would be no different to it being in a sealed cask. There is no scientific argument that could be applied against this, in my view. Would it still be classed as cask beer? That's for the reader to decide. My view is that cask beer should be matured on live yeast in the vessel from which it is dispensed and have a relatively low carbonation level. That, for me, would be the end of the discussion, but it won't be, and probably shouldn't be.

I like the beer blogging world. I really like all the people who take time to post and comment in this international, largely constructive medium. I do make an effort to understand the things that are being discussed and it can be surprising to find where the best knowledge resides, although the techniques of getting that across might not always be helpful. I care about all who take part and you all mean a lot to me. Sometimes things get out of hand. Discussions develop that become destructive due to entrenched positions where the sides are obviously taking an "I'm not listening" stance. My mother might have said "If you lot don't stop fighting I'll have to bang your heads together"

What is this all about? Check out this post and this post and ensuing comments.

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¹Sorry, yes I'm taking the piss out of hardcore physicists a little here, who are similar to hard core beer fanatics and sometimes the same thing. Very few of them, physicists that is, can understand my assertion that nobody has actually proved the existence of the neutron. Beer fanatics probably don't care about neutrons despite the fact that neither them nor the beer would exist without such amazing little things. Rather than proof we just have a model for how sub-atomic particles work and so far nobody has been able to run an experiment that disproves the model. Sometimes the model needs to be adjusted a little as more sophisticated experiments are run. But guys, nobody has ever seen a neutron, we can only observe it's effects.

It's true that the robust model we have of the strange subatomic world is fairly indisputable and better than the "God must exist because you can't prove he doesn't" argument. But most physicists simply have blind faith in what previous physicists have learnt. Sometimes the same can occur in the beer world.

Some days though, I do wonder; is that a yeast cell I can see when looking down the microscope, or am I just plugged into a big matrix so I have no way of knowing what is real and what isn't anyway?

You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes. Remember -- all I am offering is the truth, nothing more.

Morpheus

A Zippy Little Number

One of the nice things about having my own brewery is that I can brew what I damn well like. Yes, I do have the problem that people might not like what I brew and I'll end up with 350 litres of product I can't sell. Despite what Ann thinks, I can't drink that much all by myself. I mention a beer here and here and here. It went on the bar for the beer festival and it's called Zippy Red IPA, an oxymoronic beer. It's hoppy but not particularly pale by today's standards. I don't care about the colour because it tastes great.

The second cask is sitting on the stillage waiting to go on once something else runs out. Tonight I braved the midges and sat in my beer garden, looking at the interesting cloud formations, and drank a 6.6% hoppy beer that I'd stolen direct from the cellar. What more could a man ask for?

The beer has a strong citrus nose reminiscent of orange zest. There is not as much orange flavour in the body of the beer as I'd like, but it's still bloody good beer. I'm very proud.

Many thanks to Dave for the recipe and Ted for the introduction to West Coast USA style beers. Ted talks about West Coast IPA in casks here.

Worts and all

I like brew day. It's my excuse for not being able to do anything else. There is the fact that it's hot, dirty and backbreaking at times, but there are other times when all you can do is wait. Like right now.

I took some pictures while waiting for the sparge to finish. I set the camera on 1600ASA and forced the flash, just so I could see the wort frozen in time as it falls into the copper. It amused me, so I thought I'd share these pictures with you.

I'm waiting for the water to reheat so I can get another brew done before the day is done. I have to wait a while, so blogging time again.

I'm going to brew my ginger ale next, Woolly Fusion. Both of these beers should be ready for the beer festival in just over two weeks time. Hope to see you here.

A master brewer

The last post was about grain provenance. In some weird coincidence, which seems to happen to me a lot, one of the master brewers from one of the major breweries checked in to stay last night. He doesn't want to be named or have his brewery named, which is understandable. Irrespective of the fact that I could see his company as part of the homogenisation of the general public attitude to drinks products, he is, none the less, a brewer. As we were both enjoying a drink in the bar we naturally got talking about brewing and comparing the various brewing processes that are used.

We talked about mash filters and mash tuns and high gravity brewing before liquoring back to the finished products. We talked about the fact that with modern mash filters efficiencies of 110% can be achieved. Now how can that be the case? Well, theoretical maximum conversion is determined by laboratory mash process, where sparge is continued until a volume of liquid with a overall S.G. of 1.001 is achieved. This is still not as efficient as milling the grain very fine, using membranes instead of wedge wire strainers and then squeezing out the grain. Hence a practical extract that is better than the theoretical maximum. Magic eh?

We talked about that fact that most major brewers add sugar of some sort and also use hop extract liquids to fine adjust the hop profile. I could not argue that most technical developments in the brewing industry have come about as a result of cost driven research. For instance, trading off sparge time against the number of brews per day might cost £100,000 per year in sugar costs, but might result in 2 more brews per day, and hence more product throughput and more profit.

Lagering time has been reduced by careful experimentation with the yeast and how it behaves in various situations. Using a faster more efficient process to provide a product that the consumer cannot distinguish from a slower less efficient method begs the question; why less efficient methods should be used? If real hops are needed then they are used. Even using aroma hops in some cases because there is just no other way of getting the result. This is a similar argument to the Maris Otter conundrum I posed in the last post.

None of this was really a surprise to me, but was interesting none the less.

What got really interesting was when we started to discuss quality. Now you might think that macro brewed beer is generally nondescript. I would of course agree. But it's consistent. It's very, very consistent. This particular brewer was very keen to stress that his team took great pride in getting as close as possible to the target parameters. Tasting is done at the wort stage, during fermentation and during conditioning, at the point of packaging and then samples held back for further tasting and testing afterwards.

In fact he was quite insistent saying "It really annoys me when people say that the big brewers don't care about quality, we do care, very much". Certainly if this brewers attitude is anything to go by, the people on the brew lines really do care.

I still don't drink his products and would not stock them, but that's not really the point.

95% water

In wine making the Terroir is important to the characteristics of the wine. In beer there seems to be much less concern over exactly what might affect the end result from the location of the brewery. For most breweries there probably is little that will affect the outcome, except perhaps the skill of the brewer himself herself themselves. The brewery can source grain and hops from wherever they like and these are the things that affect the beer most. But there is one ingredient that is most important, the water.

We're on a private water supply. The acidity is just fantastic for making good beer, although the water is very soft and adding a few trace elements is handy. Because it comes from a peat bog the water is loaded with organics. I've often wondered what affect these organics have on the beer. Anyway, we've been brewing for three years now and the beer is good, so a change to the water supply would really mess things up.

The problem with the water is that the acidity corrodes copper leaving green stains down the baths. We decided to install a limestone filter bed this winter to stop the problem, but this upset the balance of the water for the brewery. A bypass route was installed with brand new 25mm blue pipe giving pure high flow water for the brewery. When used with the new cooler I bought last year it cools 2.5 brls of wort in around 30 minutes, much better than the 3 hours it used to take.

Trouble is the output is too close to the water treatment pump. The shock of the pump starting and stopping tends to blow apart fittings. 25mm pipe fed with 60psi water sure makes some dampness when unimpeded.

I brewed today. Light Cascade at 3.4%. Next week I cask it and then brew some more as part of my second brewery workshop. There are still places available if anyone is interested.