Category Archives: homebrewing

Why We Brew

Why did we start brewing? Because we thought it would be diverting and entertaining. (It turned out to be frustrating and difficult.)

Why did we stick with it? Because, from day one, it helped us understand beer better. When we spoke about malt and hops, we were no longer thinking in abstract terms, but had handled the raw materials. We began to understand what effect they had, and could suddenly detect them in the beer we were drinking in the pub. We learned how hard it is to brew great beer and gained a new appreciation for the brewer’s art.

Why are we brewing more now than ever? Like the man says, it’s “a reaction… to what is otherwise available in the marketplace”. We simply can’t get the kind of beer we want to drink in Penzance for a price we can afford. We love cask ale in the pub but, sometimes, we want Belgian, American or German-style beers. Sure, we can order bottles online, with a hefty delivery charge, and do so as an occasional treat; but, now we’ve more-or-less got the hang of it, brewing at home is far, far cheaper, and has finally become as much fun as we’d hoped it would be.

No Room for It’ll Do

Be careful!

All the homebrewing and bottling we’ve been doing recently has reminded us that ‘it’ll be fine’, ‘ah, sod it’, ‘near enough’ and other slogans of corner-cutting have no place in the process.

Should we just check that tap is off one more time? Yes! Can we remember if we cleaned and sanitised that pipe? Pretty sure we did. It’ll probably be fine. No! Do it again. How much sugar did we use for priming with the last batch? Do we really have to turn a laptop on to check the calculation? Groan. (Stop moaning — it’ll only take two minutes and it’s absolutely worth it.)

Funnily enough, the more careful we are, the more consistent and drinkable our beers have become. Who knew?

Some bad experiences with commercial beer recently suggest that the same principle is not always applied even by the pros — dodgy quality assurance, careless recipe formulation and slapdash bottling practices evidently abound (often driven by cashflow pressures rather than laziness, to be fair).

Even the big boys who pride themselves on consistency and precision have their ‘sod it’ moments, such as deciding that clear glass bottles aren’t ideal but, meh, they’ll do, if that’s what marketing wants.

Variation and inspiration are fine; sloppiness never is.

Picture by Samout3 from Flickr Creative Commons.

On a Tripel Tip

The itch to brew a Belgian-style tripel has been with us for a while but, after a bad experience with Belgian yeast a few years ago, we’ve repeatedly chickened out.

Re-reading Brew Like a Monk and 100 Belgian Beers to Try Before You Die for the umpteenth time, however, we finally cracked and, on a whim, ordered the necessary ingredients from the Malt Miller. A liquid yeast derived from Westmalle’s and some Saaz hops arrived no more than 24 hours later.

With advice from Dominic Driscoll of Thornbridge (who has a red flashing light over his desk to alert him when homebrewers are about to attempt to make Belgian-style beers) we got a big yeast starter going several days ahead of the brew. (We’ve been surprised to learn that the amount of viable yeast you pitch into the cooled wort is a variable that makes a huge difference.)

The next important step in brewing a new beer style is to drink several, so we spent the second half of that week working our way through some in the stash. Achel Blonde, we decided, may be even better than Westmalle’s effort, as long as you have a high tolerance for banana aromas.

The brew itself was a messy, hectic few hours which left our kitchen floor coated in sugar (it’s still sticky, three mops later) and smelling of assorted secret ingredients. Within hours of hitting the bottom of the fermentor, it had spat out its airlock and was spewing the most delicious smelling yeast all over the place.

So far, a week on, there are no nasty lighter-fuel aromas — just a kind of spicy fruitiness we’d like someone to turn into a jellybean flavour. This might (fingers crossed) turn out to be drinkable. We’ll let you know.

As in this case, we increasingly find that saving money is part of the appeal of homebrewing — not so much on the beer itself, because Belgian beer remains good value, but on mail order shipping charges.

The Many Variables That Make a Beer

Packets of hops.

When we asked how Belgian beer could be so cheap, Matthew Curtis suggested on Twitter that their tendency towards relatively conservative hopping could be part of the answer.

This got us thinking. After all, though hop aroma is not something we especially associate with Belgian beer, it is certainly not the case that Belgian beer is bland or homogenous.

Hops are great — we love them — but their amount and variety are far from being the only variables a brewer has to play with.

In fact, two beers made with simple pale malt and ‘boring’ Fuggles could end up tasting and looking completely different, and equally mindblowing, if the following variables were carefully manipulated by a skilled brewer. (Or screwed up by a lazy one.)

Sugars
Dark or clear? Unrefined? Caramelised?
Long boils to darken/caramelise sugars in the wort.

Yeast
Strain selection.
Fermentation temperature.
Blending of multiple strains.
Refinement/customisation in the lab.

Water/minerals
Mash liquor chemistry/softness.
Boil liquor chemistry/softness.

Malt
Custom/homemade malts.
Creative ‘misuse’ of specialty malts.
Belgian/German/British/US version of standard types, e.g. Pilsner malt.
Mash temperature and timing.
Extracts.

Additives
Heather (as in Williams Bros. Fraoch).
Salt (as in gose).
Spices (e.g. coriander).
Herbs.
Chocolate.
Coffee.
Lactose and other unfermentable sugars.
Soured/stale/aged beer.
M&Ms, otter spittle, Mr Kipling apple pies, and so on.

Conditioning
Temperature.
Carbonation levels.
Wood ageing.

And finally…
Hop freshness/age.
Timings of hop additions.
Extract, pellet or whole leaf?

In Our Dream World

Homebrew beer bottles with Pivovary PZ labels.

We’ve found it much easier to tell what’s what in our homebrew stash if we create distinctive labels. We’ve also decided that, if we have to design labels, we might as well use them to sell our beer to ourselves and to those we foist them upon, so, we try to make them look reasonably polished, but also let our imaginations run a little.

Epingwalder Bürgerbräu

This is the brand name for our German-inspired beers. We used to live on the edge of Epping Forest which, of course, is the Epingwald. If it were real, EB would be the kind of company where people knock-off early on Friday and head to the excellent beer garden across the road from the brewery; they’d probably use more-or-less the same label designs they’ve had since 1985; the head brewer would rarely smile and have an enormous moustache.

Pivovary PZ

Our Czech-style beers bear this brand. PZ, in case you haven’t guessed, is what locals call Penzance, and the code painted on the local fishing boats. We like it because it represents 20 per cent of the letters, including one that scores highly in Scrabble, in “Plzeň”. The picture above shows the state-of-the art bottling line that’s just been installed. (Our kitchen table.) We’re now wondering whether Penzaňsky Prazdroj might not be even better…

Boak & Bailey

Obvious, really, but the name of the blog does seem to fit old-fashioned English beers. If our grandfathers had been fusty Victorian brewers, this is what would have been painted on the brick wall of their imposing East London brewery before Whitbread took them over in the 1960s. We’ve got a B&B export stout maturing at the moment, with a label based on some from the 1940s.

For our next brew, we’re planning to make a big US-inspired IPA. Coming up with a suitably bold, in-your-face brand for that is going to be fun.

We print all of our labels on a standard inkjet printer; fix them with cheap hairspray; and attach them to the bottle with milk. The ink doesn’t run, the labels slip off in warm water, and we get to reuse our bottles time and time again.

Memorable Beers #9: First Decent Homebrew

The first beer we made that we were proud to give to other people was only ever intended as a test subject.

We were trying out our new all-grain brewing kit and were also trying to start from scratch designing recipes, and so brewed with only pale malt (Maris Otter) and Fuggles, fermenting with dried Nottingham yeast. (We think. This was years ago, and we weren’t keeping notes.)

We were staggered when the finished product was bright and aromatic and flavoursome. Our flatmate/landlord/friend, Ed, described it as “immense” and refused to believe we’d made it. Perhaps he was being polite, or perhaps he meant “compared to that shite you forced me to drink from the first kit”, but we didn’t care.

Of course, the next two brews failed, but the memory of this early success kept us going through the hard times, and convinced us it was possible — that the idea of drinkable homebrew wasn’t just a cruel lie promoted by the vast and sinister plastic bucket industry.

Inspired by a memory of a taste

Inside U Fleku, Prague.

As we neared the end of the lager brewing season (the point when our utility room stops being cold) we decided to make something dark, and the beer that came to mind — what we found ourselves craving — was the one at U Fleku in Prague.

We did some research online and found a few recipes, all wildly different, and cross-referenced them to come up with the following.

Malt: 4kgs Weyermann’s Premium Pilsner Malt (EBC 3-5); 0.5kg Munich Malt (EBC 20); 0.5kg Crystal; 0.3kg Chocolate (EBC 500).
Hops: 50g Pioneer 9.4% (90 mins); 50g Liberty 3.6% (20 mins); 50g Liberty 3.6% (5 mins).
Yeast: White Labs WLP800.
Notes: single decoction mash.

Without going into tons of detail, this all worked very nicely but, when we took it out of secondary fermentation ready to bottle, our hearts sank: it in no way resembled U Fleku. It had that homebrew smell and taste; it was too pale; it was like a crappy English bitter.

We put five litres into a polypin and dry-hopped it, hoping to rescue at least a portion. The rest we bottled, just in case a miracle might occur…

The first glimmer of hope came when we tapped the polypin and, despite a lingering ‘homebrewness’, found it kind of moreish. We drank the lot. Surely, though, this was just the dry-hopping at work, making the best of a bad lot?

Then, last night, with low expectations, we opened the first bottle and were delighted to find that a transformation had taken place. In an appropriately Mittel-European handled glass, it looked darker, clear as a bell and healthy red-brown. The head was like  meringue. Tasting it didn’t quite take us back to U Fleku, but it certainly made us feel that, if we were to go outside, a tram might be passing, on its way to a grand square somewhere nearby.

The moral of the story? Er… bottle it anyway and hope for the best?

We asked Velky Al of Fuggled fame for an appropriately Czech name and he suggested “Odštěpek” which he tells us means “a chip off the old block”. Thanks, Al!

Walk, Don't Run

Fermentation Tank

This week, we were asked (not for the first time) if we had any plans to open a brewery.

Who doesn’t have plans? Plans are exciting. When we’re wandering the clifftops, we spend hours talking about possible brewpubs, breweries and business models.

Will any of them ever be realised? Probably not.

We’ve tasted too many beers brewed by people running before they can walk — sour, chalky, nasty-smelling concoctions that we’d have poured down the drain if they’d come out of our plastic homebrew fermenting bucket, but which people have had the nerve to bottle and sell. For real money.

Either they know it’s crap and they’re selling it anyway (cynical) or, worse, they really can’t tell how bad it is. No-one who’s not fussy about beer ought to be brewing.

When we brew at home, although our beer is increasingly drinkable, it’s rarely the strength or colour we were expecting, and we’ve never successfully replicated a recipe. In the unlikely event that we suddenly find ourselves in possession of the kind of capital necessary to start even a modest-sized brewery, we wouldn’t want to. Not yet.

Two of our best idle dreams c.2007: getting the then disused brewery at the back of the William IV in Leyton going again, and buying the rights to the Truman name to take advantage of the free advertising all over London. Heh.

A Big Shout Out for Yeast

Beer labels with tasting notes rarely mention yeast. They usually say “malty with a hoppy finish” or “hoppy with a malty finish” or some variation thereon. Stella Artois is apparently made without it. Is that because “yeasty” just sounds nasty to most people?

In our experience, though, the impact of yeast on beer is too big to ignore. The extent to which it devours sugars affects the body and mouthfeel of the beer; and the compounds it produces while doing so contribute aroma and flavour. A lot of aroma and flavour. Sometimes most of it, in fact, as in the case of banana-bubblegum Bavarian wheat beer. (The standard learning tool for aspiring beer geeks who want an obvious example of the influence of yeast.)

For a recent homebrewing session, we made a yeast starter using a simple wort of dried malt extract. We couldn’t resist tasting it, even though we suspected that, without hops, it wouldn’t be pleasant. Surprisingly, it didn’t taste terrible, and we were astounded to discover just how many of the flavours and aromas we’d put down to the hops were apparently coming from the yeast. Boring malt extract, no hops and good yeast made something drinkable.

We’ve also found in home brewing that the single biggest factor in giving a beer a specific character is the yeast. British malt and British hops with Czech yeast tastes pretty Czech. German malt and German hops with British yeast tastes British. And so on.

We’re certain disagreeable yeast is behind our antipathy to the entire product range of some breweries who others seem to love.

Now we’re seeing single-hop ranges from big brewers, maybe now it’s time for smaller breweries to move on to something else: ranges which showcase characterful yeasts in the same controlled way, as the only variable in a range of otherwise identical beers.

If you want another example of a big beast of a yeast, check out the one used at Fuller’s: their beers brown/amber beers all taste and smell of orange marmalade, regardless of the hops or malt used, because of their assertive yeast.

UPDATE: oh, and we meant to link to this — New Briggate Beer Blog’s post in praise of malt. UPDATE 2: and here’s Alan on water, the forgotten ingredient. Now, who wants to take on ‘in praise of gypsum’?

Canned dark mild to the rescue

Either we’re very harsh critics of our own homebrew or, after years of practice, we’re still crap at it. Whichever is true, we found ourselves this week with a polypin of what seemed to us very dry, very Cascade-flavoured, under-conditioned pale ale, which we didn’t much want to drink.

Then, in the supermarket, a sudden impulse saw us chuck four cans of Thwaites Dark Mild (£2.98) into our basket.

Tasted on its own, this was nothing special — watery, sweet with a little sickly caramel. As a mixer for half-and-half, however, it not only hit the spot, but transformed our pale ale into something magnificent. There was chemistry. The two beers complemented each other perfectly and produced something very like a good cask-conditioned stronger mild. Not a compromise but a real pleasure to drink.

Our conclusion: it’s worth keeping something like this tucked away in the larder. You never know when it might help you snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.