What's in a name?

"We've managed to change the lease to a free of tie" she said, with a mix of relief and enthusiasm. "It's been a bit of a fight, but we got there".

This particular community theatre had been developing quite nicely, but to make the whole thing work as well as it could financially, the lady in charge wanted to be able to have free choice on the drinks stocked in the bar.

"I'd like you to help me get some draught beer installed"

"Great, I'd love to," eager to help "Only, I wouldn't advise cask beers, you wouldn't sell enough and there would be a large amount of wastage. But we do put some of our beers into keg, that would be ideal".

She loved the idea. Draught beer, locally made, it'd be the best solution all round.

So, I duly set up a temporary installation for the time being. I lent them an under-counter chiller, font, gas cylinder etc and installed it for them.

The theatre is also good at social media, Twitter and the like, and tweeted "got a keg of real ale on tonight courtesy of @HardknottAnn and @HardKnottDave #properdrink"

A short twitter conversation ensued pointing out that technically, beer in a keg can't really be called Real Ale.

This is not the first, nor I doubt the last time I'll have this conversation.

It does make me wonder if we should really be getting het up about the differences anyway, after all, most of the general public don't understand and many don't care.

Propaganda or Maverick Opinion?

The Craft Keg verses CAMRA thing has kicked off this week. Poignant really, it's a bit like a certain struggle that occurred about 2000 years ago. I'm just wondering who is going to be crucified this time, and what will be the new replacement in the growing independent brewing empire.

Firstly, it seems there has been a CAMRA motion put forward to AGM proposing the banning the use of the term "Craft Keg" or similar in any CAMRA publication. I believe there is a good chance that this will be thrown out. If nothing else it would represent dangerous censorship, which I hope CAMRA would have nothing to do with.

Secondly, at Wandsworth Beer Festival, the program demonises keg in a generalised and un-knowlegable manor, and weaves into the rant various references to CAMRA.

This is all very unfortunate for all of us who care about the debate. Firstly, and a point I think that is extremely important, craft keg, micro-brewed keg beer, beer in-a-keg that has been less processed than the big brand pasteurised and filtered to death stuff, is different. The fact that it is more difficult to define than Real Ale¹ might be a problem. But to demonise this growing sector of the beer world is, in my view, helpful to neither CAMRA nor the brewing industry in general.

But, is it CAMRA's fault?

Well, "yes and no" is my answer.

The debate is important. CAMRA must allow the debate to occur, just the same as the rest of us should. There is no reason why the debate should not occur in CAMRA publications. It does from time to time, and that is healthy. For it to occur, there will naturally be opinions that differ from mine, and those of other people who believe there are a lot of good things about keg beer made by independent breweries.

CAMRA does not have to support Craft Keg if the organisation feels they shouldn't. I would like them to do so, but that's just my view.

It is not the fact that CAMRA allow the debate, and therefore the inevitable maverick opinion that is the problem. It seems to me to be that the debate is perhaps biased in favour of the mavericks. However, to censor would be just as bad as the proposed censorship being put to the CAMRA AGM.

By not condemning the examples here, it is seen by those of us who dislike Craft Keg bashing that CAMRA official line is to condemn all keg.

So, shall we continue the debate?

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¹A point that I have on many occasions disputed, but to go into that discussion detracts from my main point here.

Brit Hop

Craft beer is often associated with American, or perhaps New Zealand hops. There are some good reasons for this, mainly because the more exciting hop flavours do come from the varieties grown in these countries. Discussions continue between brewers and hop growers as to how much this is due to climate and soil and how much is just down to the varieties themselves.

It is generally agreed that both terroir and variety influence the favours and aromas to some extent. The more progressive flavours have been shunned by the British beer scene until recently and therefore the growers less inclined to grow them. Where British growers have dabbled, with cascade for instance, the result is certainly different, and described as more subtle.

Exploring how we can make a more distinctly progressive British craft beer flavour is something that interests me. Long gone, in my view, are the days when Made in Britain has to be reserved, staid and damn boring.

John Keeling, who is Brewing Director of Fuller's, and more importantly, a good friend, has been to my brewery when we made The English Experiment. Four experimental hop varieties were used in this instance. The beer was so successful that we went on to brew Azimuth, which has now become our core IPA beer, but it uses a combination of American and NZ hops, and as a result I call it a Pan-Pacific IPA.

I would use more British hops, really I would, if I was sure they can provide what I want in my beer. Perhaps with experimentation in breweries, expansion of the varieties that hop growers provide, and an increase of demand for more progressive flavours, we will in time see changes.

John asked me to return to help his team make lots of a new beer, hoppy and contemporary, just using British hops. A trip down to London, and a play around on a big automated plant and some great hospitality from the Fuller's people couldn't be sniffed at.



Brit Hop from Hardknott Brewery on Vimeo.

Brit Hop was the result.

Being heard above the din

You know you’ve made it when you’re in FHM.

There are a lot of breweries in the UK now. Probably too many for them all to survive long term I’d suggest. The ones that do, who manage to keep their heads above water, are likely to be the ones that get noticed.

Making OK beer, in a shed, selling to local pubs is all very well, but that is no way to make a real viable business. Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of reasons to support the little guy in a world where the vast majority of beer has little intrinsic value and is just mass produced, mass marketed blandness with more money going into glitzy advertising than into the actual beer itself. Power to that shed brewer.

It is unlikely that the strategy employed by many a microbrewer has a long term future. They may be able to rumble along. Perhaps even make a half decent living. It’s unlikely to be great, and certainly insufficient profit will be made to plough back for successful growth. But of course, for many brewers the satisfaction of brewing and getting paid for it is sufficient reward by itself. Nothing wrong with that.

Making great beer is a start. Beer that is about flavour and difference; Beers that stand out from the crowd and not just another bland offering barely better than mass produced predictability. Making noise is about variety, new flavours, challenges to pre-conceived ideas of what beer is about.

Once a brewer has made that great beer he must make the world aware of it.  It would be nice to think you could make lots of great beer, then just sit back for the orders to flood in. It is essential to make some noise, of some sort, somewhere.

So, that’s what we’ve been doing.  Making beers that are different, challenging, with lots going on in them. Some would say far too much going on in them sometimes.

And then we make a fuss. It doesn’t really matter what the actual fuss is about, just a little bit of nonsense to wake people up. Yes, perhaps sometimes it might seem like a child throwing a tantrum, but it sure gets everyone’s attention.

When I was a young man I became aware of the publication called FHM. Important people and trendy brands are the ones that get mentioned in there. I never dreamt I’d be responsible for an image, and be quoted in this glossy posh lads magazine¹

But my beer, and some of my words are in April's edition.

Just because I didn’t get to be a rock star, silver screen actor or trendy business mogul doesn’t diminish my feeling of achievement for having made the grade along with the other craft brewers in the article². I'm convinced that this has happened partly due to us making a little bit of a fuss every so often.

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¹We can't ignore the fact that it is quite legitimate to level an accusation of chauvinistic soft porn at the publication. I am torn on the issue of porn, mainly because I am a heterosexual male and I would be dishonest to the reader if I pretended that I found images of scantily clad women repulsive.

However, I do wish the beer was less masculine. For this reason I do have some reservations about the way that beer is more likely to feature in publications where the readership is predominantly male.

²Yup, I know there was a brewery that filled six pages. We all know who they are, so I’ll not mention them. In fact, I shall avoid comment other than to say they are proof to me of the point I’m making.

People in brewing

People are needed to brew beer. Even the biggest automated breweries need people to make them work, maintain them, take readings, analyse samples and, of course, sell the beer. Big brewers also need bean-counters to add up all those huge profits.

Small breweries need fewer people. However, if you calculate the amount of beer produced per person employed in a small brewery you find that to make the same amount of beer, smaller breweries employ more people per volume brewed. I think this is important. A very good reason to support us little guys; we create employment, which s good for the economy.

Anyway, Alex Routledge has been very good for us. He has been our production brewer/production manager for about 18 months now. He's decided to move on.  New pastures, a new start and as far as I can understand an exciting new brewery opening up somewhere near here. It's not my job to say what or where or how or why. He should have the pleasure of that.

All I can do is wish him well and thank him very much for all his help in getting Hardknott to where it is now. We couldn't have done it without him. I hope he's got as much out of working for us as we've gained from him being with us. I certainly think he's improved his brewing skills and I'm sure he'll be part of the brewing community for a longtime to come.

Meanwhile, we need to replace him. Meet Graeme, on the left in the picture above with Alex. He comes with the advantage of being slightly smaller. He can get into the copper and doesn't bang his head on the celling above the malt mezzanine. Rumours about him having furry feet and getting fractious if he misses second breakfast are completely untrue. At least that's what he claims.

Container Snobbery

We've recently invested in some proper stainless kegs. We've been putting beer into KeyKeg for some time and we have a few plastic kegs too. Most of our kegged beer has been exported to Italy where it has been well received. Today we are sending a further 48 KeyKegs.

As we've been gaining experience putting un-filtered craft beer into keg we've found there to be some issues. Un-filtered means the beer will contain some live yeast. This can sometimes, if there are some fermentables left, result in over-conditioning of the beer. This is especially true if the beer is allowed to warm up¹ during transportation.

Cask of course can, and should be vented prior to being served. Any over-condition is allowed to be released until the carbonation is at an equilibrium with cellar temperature and atmospheric pressure. This means that fresh cask beer should have a minimum carbonation of about 1.1vols upon serving. Effectively this is an advantage of cask beer for micro-brewers as the exact carbonation level is determined by how the cellarman treats the beer rather than precise process at the brewery. Every good cask cellarman knows there will be some variability in the carbonation dependant on many factors including the timeline activities between racking in the brewery and the point of being tapped and vented.

I've talked before about how to reduce the pressure² in KeyKegs - it works. I even managed to do it on-the-fly in Turin last year for various British brewers' beers to help get them served on the bar at Salone Del Gusto. My thumb acted as the release valve. It was a risky process. And yes, I did end up getting a beer shower.

We have improved significantly in our skills at getting carbonation right since we started putting beer into keg. From that respect the beer will be no better, or worse, in the stainless kegs than the beer we are now sending out in large quantities in KeyKeg. However, as is the case with most craft brewers who are exploring keg the early editions have been in KeyKeg and less well executed versions than the beer we now send out.

When we first started brewing all our beer went into plastic casks. It worked for us because way back then, in late 2005, we only sold it through the pub we then owned. Any problems we could manage and anyway, as the beer went straight from racking into the pub cellar there were rarely any issues. However, when we started selling a lot more to various outlets we found that the beer was less tolerant to variability especially in hot weather.

Again, we've improved. A lot. We rarely send out beer out in plastic cask, or plastic kegs. Mainly because in trade they just don't stand the knocks. Longterm, plastic just isn't a sensible investment. However, for startups it makes sense and as a result many new brewers use plastic. Low investment costs equals reduced risk. The result is that less experienced brewers, who have yet to perfect their processes, may have a greater degree of variability.

I've noticed a wide range of snobbery towards containers. There is of course the ongoing question of exactly what CAMRA should accept. I've noticed some distributors now refusing to accept KeyKeg because of a high rate of return of over-conditioned KeyKegs. The same distributors will accept stainless kegs. I've heard publicans snoot at plastic casks because the beer tends to be more variable. Either it is under-conditioned and flat or it has a much bigger tendency to blow keystones and shives.

I'd argue that none of this is the fault of the container, although I don't doubt that the correlation is real.

Our beer is getting better and better and better all the time. Over the next few months we will be putting out much more keg beer into the UK and it will mostly be in stainless kegs. It'll be very good indeed, trust me. It's not getting better because we are putting beer into stainless, we are putting it into stainless because we are better and way more confident in what we are doing.

Of course, I could now start to talk about bottles versus cans.........

If you are in Leeds next week you might find kegged Azimuth and/or Duality in North Bar. We're also sending keg Azimuth to BeerX in Sheffield. I believe there are also places in Newcastle that might have our keg either now or in the very near future. These include The Free Trade Inn, Bacchus and Lady Grey's.

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¹Beer will always keep better, irrespective of whether it is filtered, live or even pasteurised, if kept cool from the point it is packaged to the point it is served.

²Although I accept that beer ought to be as good as it can be for the establishment to handle, I do wonder why some don't at least make the effort to gas off kegs from those brewers who are experimenting. I'd love to still have my own bar so that I could iron out all the troubles within my own control. However, we do make mistakes and sometimes places get beer that fobs due to over condition. If it's not right then clearly a refund is in order, but it would be nice to still get the beer on the bar and showcased, especially if we've made the effort to ship it a long way.

Are CAMRA's Wetherspoons vouchers good for The Pub?

CAMRA like to champion the "Community Pub" I applaud that. When we ran The Woolpack Inn I was a little unsure about the term Community Pub, as ours served the Tourist Industry more than locals, but still, a minor point I feel. Even a pub that serves tourists is serving the tourist as a transitory local I guess.

Anyway, a problem I always had was the Wetherspoons voucher incentive is that the pub chain is as much, if not more of a problem for established pubs than supermarkets. If the reader thinks about it, there are only so many drinkers. Those drinkers only have so much money to spend on beer. Most Wetherspoons open in buildings that have never been pubs. One I know is a huge cavernous building that used to be part of a bus station garage. I reckon that every Wetherspoons that has opened has taken away the revenue from numerous smaller pubs.

Now, the commercial minded side of me says that competition is good. If the public want Wetherspoons over other forms of pub then that is fine. However, CAMRA on the one hand fights to keep pubs open but then instigates a commercial partnership that is contrary to that. If CAMRA want to support Wetherspoons then they just have to accept that other pubs will fall as casualties as a result.

Harry Berger bought The Woolpack off us. He and his wife are making a fine job of running it. They buy our beer and as far as I know have it on the bar most of the time. Harry phoned me up the other day, quite outraged really, because CAMRA had asked him to help recruit members, and display information¹ about the Wetherspoons vouchers.

He isn't pleased. It's not that he doesn't want to help increase CAMRAs membership, and would happily display the information if it didn't contain the reference to a competitor. But to ask a favour of publicans with this lack of sensitivity seems slightly ill thought out and so I agree with him. I feel this is one of the many issues that irritates a lot of publicans when it comes to CAMRA.

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¹The information is in the form of a tent card which is designed to be displayed on the tables in the pub. I expect it was a waste of money on CAMRA's part as Harry probably isn't going to display them, and to be honest I wouldn't either.