Win a brewery

If it's happened before, I've not heard of it - a kindly engineering company has donated a complete 100-litre brewery (they call it a microbrewery, I'd call it a nanobrewery) to be raffled for charity.

The donor is Elite Stainless Fabrications of Swindon, which makes brewing kit of all shapes and sizes, and the charity is Swindon Women's Aid which despite the name says it provides support to all victims of domestic abuse, regardless of gender or orientation.

Tickets are £5 each and can be bought online or by phone - I've bought mine. I'm not sure where I'll put my brewery, but it looks like a nice piece of kit!

Tasting at Twickenham

Yesterday's visit to Twickenham Fine Ales was a very welcome chance to catch up with one of my four excellent local breweries (the others are Weird Beard, the new Kew Brewery and of course Fuller's). The weather was pretty chilly – both outside the brewery and inside! – but the welcome from head brewer Stuart Medcalf, managing director Steve Brown and their colleagues was as warm as ever.

They had prepared a couple of treats for our small group – a CAMRA delegation mostly from the London tasting panel, which helps write tasting notes for the Good Beer Guide and elsewhere. The first was the very last cask of their 2015 Small Batch Stout series, which proved such a hit last December. They produced 200 firkins of this beer in total, 50 in each of four different flavours, and Stuart said they were sold out before they'd even been brewed, with many pubs buying sets of all four.

The lone survivor is the Sour Cherry & Chocolate variant (left). It's delicious – almost a dry stout and full of roastiness, yet also with lots of dark cocoa notes and a faint underlying sweetness. None of us could detect more than a vague hint of sour cherries though! If you'd like to try it, it should still be on sale from the brewery this coming weekend, either for takeaways or when the bar's open on Sunday lunchtime ahead of the rugby.

The small batch series was in addition to Twickenham's four regular ales, four seasonals, twelve monthly cask specials – Stuart noted that the latter sell out every time, often on the day they're released – and its sole keg beer, Tusk IPA. Steve said they will brew the stouts again this year, probably keeping two of the flavours and asking their customers to suggest two new ones, just as they did last year. They're also looking at doing extra monthly specials to meet demand, and at brewing more strong beers, mainly for bottling and in 330ml bottles rather than the 500s they currently use.

This ties in with the team's desire to update Twickenham's profile within the beer market. The problem is that while it was in the microbrewery vanguard 10 years ago – if I remember rightly, there was a time in the Noughties when it was the second largest cask ale brewery in London – more recently it has “kind of got left behind,” as Steve put it. So now they are looking at what to do next. As Steve added, “Everything's up for discussion – products, packaging, the lot.”

Busy! The 50-barrel FV is at the back

In the meantime, we caught up on existing developments. There's new hardware, in the shape of an automated cask racking line, plus a 50-barrel fermenter alongside the 25s so they can double-brew the most popular beers. There's two new assistant brewers, and there's the main reason for our visit, which is a switch to using their own wet yeast instead of commercial dried yeast.

While wet yeast does require extra care and management, and must be renewed from the yeast bank every three months, the fact that the rest of the time they can harvest and re-use it means that it is much cheaper than dried. More importantly to the brewers though, it has improved the beer's clarity and brought out the flavours of the ingredients. “Our beers were clear before, but they shine now,” enthused Dave, Stuart's deputy. I think he's right.

Stuart also discussed several other ingredient changes. Interestingly, when it's just had its 50th anniversary, they've stopped using Maris Otter barley and switched to the increasingly popular Flagon variety which he says gives better extract levels (i.e. more fermentable sugars). Some of the beer recipes have been tweaked too, and they've changed some of the hop varieties. In particular, they're making quite a bit of use of Progress and Pioneer hops – I especially liked the subtle bitter-orange and peach notes they gave to our other special treat, which was a saved-up cask of Winter Warmer, their monthly special for December.

Sadly the Hill 60 and Oud Bruin are long gone

I was surprised though to see that the Winter Warmer – which originally had the very appropriate name of Strong & Dark – is now amber coloured rather than dark brown. Dave explained that, in part to cut confusion with their December-February seasonal Winter Cheer, which is both dark and very lightly spiced, Winter Warmer has been reformulated as an Extra Special Bitter. The result is still 5.2% but now balances a very firm bitterness with a smooth dry-sweet and lightly orange-caramel body.

It was really good to see the brewery busy and taste the beers again, and I do hope they can boost their market image – not least so that I get the chance to buy their beers more often, especially the monthlies and one-offs. (Yes, given the nature of the visit yesterday's tastings were complimentary, but most of the time I do buy my own beer!)

My Golden Pints for 2015

Just the first half of these for now, I'm afraid - I will try to catch up with the rest soon, although I know I'm already a little late! What with family visiting over the winterval, plus quite a few work deadlines impending, I've not had a lot of time for blogging, I'm afraid.

    Best UK Cask Beer
Oakham Hawse Buckler – it's been around a few years but I only caught up with it in 2015, when I had it a couple of times in different places, and it was excellent both times. It's a very hoppy (as you'd expect from Oakham), roasty-winey dark ale, verging on a Black IPA or Export Stout.

    Best UK Keg Beer
The Kernel India Pale Ale Amarillo – there's so many Kernel IPA variants, but this one was the best so far. The thing I like about these IPAs in general is they're pretty full-bodied, and in this one the hops added aromas of pineapple and orange, followed by more fruit on the palate along with hints of wintergreen and rosemary. Delicious.

My runner-up – and it was very close – was Brew By Numbers 100/4 Baltic Porter – Sherry. Again, this was part of a set, where the same beer was aged in five different barrels, and having tried all five this emerged as my favourite, perhaps because it was just barrelly enough without being like actually drinking sherry – just touches of dried fruit, dusty caramel and a light herbiness to enhance the lovely flavours of the base beer.

    Best UK Bottled Beer
Twickenham Hill 60 – blended in the best Belgian traditions by combining soured dark ale that had been so long in the barrel that it was very hard to drink straight with fresh strong Mild to lighten it and give it zing. The result was complex and refreshingly drinkable for a sour, with hints of sour cherry, burnt treacle and an earthy bitterness.

    Best UK Canned Beer
Beavertown Holy Cowbell India Stout – that rich piney hop nose with roasty black treacle and a touch of smoke just blew me away.

    Best Overseas Draught
Evil Twin I Love You With My Stout – another midnight-black beer, its heavy body, with notes of coffee, liquorice, pine and grapefruit, was almost too much but thankfully managed to stay on the “Wow, utterly amazing!” side of the border.

My runner-up was an Italian farmhouse ale – Toccalmatto's Tabula Rasa. It's a complex and multilayered brew, with aromas of lemon, white grapes and a little floral perfume and horsey funk.

    Best Overseas Bottled Beer
3 Fonteinen Oude Geuze – back in the summer, I toured the Lambic region immediately after the European Beer Bloggers Conference in Brussels, and amazing beer this was one of the real stand-outs of the trip. Lemon-sour and with faint strawberry notes, its initial sweetness immediately turns to a complex dry and lightly earthy bitter-sourness.

Runner-up was Ratsherrn's Wintertiet. Brewed on the Hamburg brewery's micro kit as one of last winter's specials, it masterfully showed how to create a complex and flavoursome winter ale without chucking the whole damn spice cabinet in there. Rich and drily soupy, it offered notes of treacle toffee, bitter orange, liquorice, christmas cake, dried figs and a light earthy bitterness. Delicious.

    Best Overseas Canned Beer
St Feuillien Saison – canned for the US market, I think, it combines the peppery hoppiness of many farmhouse ales with toast, bread, spice and fruit notes that almost remind one of an Ur-weisse. Well within the Saison boundaries, yet with a very tasty twist.

    Best collaboration brew
Adnams / Magic Rock The Herbalist – another Saison, again with those characteristic spicy, earthy and hoppy notes, but this time also with hints of tangerine and pineapple on a fruity, dry-sweet and herby-bitter body. Oh, and it was properly cask-conditioned, like the original Saisons would have been. 

A reminder that hops don't equal bitterness

Many beer lovers know that hops and bitterness aren't the same thing – you can get bitterness from several other sources, including herbs and roasted grain, and hops are also important for flavour and aroma – but it seems others don't realise this.

Two things brought this to mind recently: first, the claim by US brewery Dogfish Head to have brewed “the hoppiest beer ever documented” when what they meant was the most bitter, and then quite unexpectedly a bottle of Guinness's pitch at the craft lager market, Hop House 13. The latter was developed by Guinness's pilot brewers at The Brewers Project, like the Dublin Porter, West Indies Porter and Golden Ale before it, and like them it has of course migrated to the main brewery for mass production.

Hop House 13 arrived as a freebie from Guinness's PR company, along with a suitably-branded glass and even an engraved wooden beermat – there is nothing subtle about the branding here! Named after a storeroom at the St James's Gate brewery in Dublin, Hop House 13 has been on limited release for a little while (I'd seen a few mentions from Irish beer bloggers, for instance) but apparently they're now preparing a big push for it.

So what's it like, and why the hops & bitterness references? Well, it's hoppy – the underlying beer is a typical malty-sweet Eurolager with notes of sweetcorn, but there's a rich hoppy-herbal layer of flavour over the top, with hints of peach, lemon and hay, and that resinous quality you get from a sack of dried hops. What there isn't is anything much in the way of bitterness.

It's pretty good, and rather better than the average Eurolager, but to my palate it seems a bit two-dimensional, as if they've taken a regular beer and layered a swathe of flavour onto it. And after a bit of pondering, I reckon that it shows how the big brewers are targeting craft – in this case, with a flavoured-up beer that is clearly not your average macro lager, yet isn't going to frighten the horses.

So while I've had far better hoppy lagers – for example, Trainings Lager from Hannover's Mashsee Brewery, or India Pale Lager from Redwell in Norwich – I can still see Hop House 13 doing pretty well.

Two years of Fourpure

It's amazing how much can happen in two years. A helpless newborn baby can turn into a determined, highly mobile and stroppy toddler, and a vast-seeming industrial unit with a shiny new brewkit looking very small and slightly lost at the back can turn into something so chock-full of stuff that it needs almost triple the floorspace.

Image used with permission of totalales.co.uk"

So when we turned up for an open-Saturday that was also both a party to mark Fourpure's second anniversary – not of its set-up, but of its first brew – and a launch for two new beers, the available space for guests was a mite crowded. It was also raining outside, which on the one hand forced everyone indoors but on the other presumably persuaded some people to stay at home and avoid adding to the crush.

Fortunately, everyone was in a good mood, even the toddler. And there's no passing traffic because Fourpure's at the back of an industrial estate where everything else is shut on at the weekend, so our only worries when she escaped outside were the puddles.

The two new beers were Southern Latitude, a fruity and bitter 4.7% 'South Pacific pale ale' with Australian hops, and Northern Latitude, a gorgeous Scandinavian-inspired 6.4% Rye IPA, dry-bitter and warming, full of toasted toffee and pine resin notes – Fourpure has quite a decent export business to Scandinavia now, incidentally.

Sumac Wheat

Among the others on the bar that were new to me were Morning Star, which was an excellent full-bodied, roasty and chocolatey 7.1% Imperial Porter (historically that'd be a Stout, but never mind!), Red Rye Session IPA which was 4% and cloudy, but had lovely pine aromas and a crisp dry-sweet body, and a 5.2% wheat ale using the Middle Eastern spice Sumac. This Sumac Wheat was an unattractive murky tan colour with equally unappealing sour yeasty aromas, but thankfully it tasted much better that it looked and smelled, balancing a dry earthy bitterness with light fruity sweetness.

As well as my first sight of the reorganised brewery bar, which now has 16 taps, giving them 10 for regulars and six for experimental brews, the visit was my first chance to see one of those experimental brews in production. Alongside the main 35hl (20 barrels, stretched a little) brewkit, Fourpure has a 1hl (100litre) pilot kit, which by the look of it is made from steel kegs, and this is where those extra six beers come from.

The live brew

For the open day, brewers Nick and JT were at work in front of the crowd, live-brewing an IPA using the new Lemondrop hop variety. These experimental brews are their chance to try out new ideas and of course to test different hop and malt varieties. “Our core range is very much 'to style', so this is our chance to be a bit more exclusive,” explained JT – in between helping explain to the toddler's elder brother how beer is made and letting him investigate its ingredients and the spent malt...

JT added that the pilot kit had also produced Milky Mohican, an unusual Chai beer that I'd just tried from the bar. Essentially they'd brewed this with torrified wheat for a milky texture, then tried blending in varying amounts of cold-brewed Chai spiced tea, before settling on a 10% addition for public release. (Annoyingly, all the photos I took of the live-brew have totally vanished, so this one's nicked off Fourpure's Twitter feed!)

He also ran through the expansion plans. Fourpure's taking over another similarly-sized industrial unit nearby for processing and packaging, so the bright tanks and canning line will move there. A large railway arch will also be taken on, as both a distribution centre and a cold-store for lagering.

More interesting for aficionados is that a wall of wooden barrels will fill the brewery space freed up by moving out the packaging stores. Barrel-ageing of beer is immensely fashionable and is also key to producing certain styles such as Lambics and Bretted beers, but as JT noted, it is not a short-term thing – they expect it will take four years to work out which are the best barrels and for those to develop the right microflora inside.

Surfing the Zeitgeist
So what has enabled Fourpure to grow so fast? One thing seems to have been having investors with deep enough pockets. That allowed them to go straight for a decent-sized brewkit, then as sales ramped up all they needed to add was more fermenters and more packaging capacity. JT noted that most of the tanks are now 70hl and take two brews to fill, while the biggest – used for beers that need a decent lagering time – takes a stonking four brews.

I suspect another thing was the way they focused first on getting a few well-made beers in volume into the sort of venues that wanted “craft” but couldn't handle cask ale, such as bars and restaurants, then swiftly pivoted to a broader range of short-run beers once the market opened up. The ability to can without having to do 100,000 at a time – Fourpure was the very first UK brewery to buy its own microcanning line – also widened the distribution opportunities.

Two years ago I was predicting that Fourpure would become a straightforward supplier of crafty beer styles to a local mainstream market, as the craft-keg equivalent of a old-fashioned regional cask brewer perhaps. It has certainly achieved that – the other day I spotted several of its taps in an outdoor kiosk by London's South Bank Centre, for example.

Yet it has also evolved alongside the craft beer market, becoming something rather more innovative – just like some of those regionals have, I suppose. It's similar to the solid yet adaptive business plans that seem to have served other start-ups well, for example Windsor & Eton and Truman's. What shall we call it – surfing the zeitgeist?

Public omnibuses, in the land of the car? Yes – and A-very fine beer too!

Part 2 of my touring Boulder's breweries and brewpubs, back in October. Part 1 is here.

I think I must have visited Boulder's Avery Brewing Company 10 years ago on a pre-festival breweries tour ahead of the Great American Beer Festival. My memory's a bit vague, but I have a recollection of a typical “microbrewery in an large garage” type of set-up in a generic industrial unit. If I remember rightly, what made it different from the others we visited was it did sour and barrel-aged beers at a time when those were far from fashionable.

An hour or two before the hordes descend...

Anyway, somewhere along the line they got my email address and have been dutifully sending me their monthly newsletter for pretty much an entire decade. I almost unsubscribed a couple of times, but then a few weeks ago I was glad I hadn't done, because they invited me (and presumably a few hundred others) to a launch party and a free pint of this year's 8.3% Old Jubilation winter ale. And for the first time in a decade it was going to be while I was not only on the right continent, but in the right town!

So after a bit of breakfast, it was into town to find the bus station. Yes, pretty much every US city I've been to has a viable public transport system – if you're willing to put in the effort needed to figure out how it works in terms of fares, stops, etc. It helped a little that Boulder comes under the Denver Regional Transportation District (RTD), and I'd used Denver buses in the past, but really it wasn't that hard to scope out the routes on Google Maps, check the RTD website for timings, and so on.

So there I was just after lunch, waiting for bus 205 with coins in hand – the ticket machines don't give change. Sure, the bus carried a little age, but it was clean and comfortable, and like many other bus companies they've adopted the system of giving a recorded announcement ahead of each stop. (When London Transport did this, they found it greatly increased travellers' confidence, and no wonder!)

When I got off and headed into the industrial estate that Avery moved back in February this year, I was over an hour early though. That's because in the process of checking the route I'd found a second brewery resident there that I'd never heard of before, and where Avery didn't open until 3pm, this one opened at 2…

Asher Brewing Company's main claim to fame is that when it opened in 2009 it was the first all-organic brewery in Colorado – I presume there's been others since then. Tucked away among workshops and offices, the taproom was cool and bright, with at least half a dozen beers on draught. It was an unusual mix of a clean space with cheerful service and a sense of activist grunge. I liked it, but I can see it wouldn't be to everyone's taste.

The beers were certainly well made, the best being the Green Bullet IPA which had a nice balance of chewy dry-sweet malt and aromatic hoppy bitterness. The others I tried – I had a flight of six tasters, including a properly (but not overly) bitter Kölsch and a chewy Double IPA – were almost as good. The one exception was a slightly insipid and over-gassy brown ale.

From there it was a short walk back to Avery, where there was already a small crowd on the terrace outside the bar. As I walked up, I had to marvel a little at the purpose-built structure in front of me – it combines brewery, packaging plant, barrel ageing stores, restaurant, bar, shop and of course offices, and it's hard to imagine that it had only been in operation for eight months.

My pint of Old Jube

The bar was already getting busy, even though it was the middle of Monday afternoon, but I was able to get a seat at the bar. The gimmick for the Old Jube launch was you had to wear a sweater to claim your pint – it being sunny and pretty warm outside of course – and there were several on view besides mine. I wouldn't normally start an afternoon session with an eight percenter, but hey, needs must… I just had time to enjoy the rich and lightly toasty brew, with its hints of toffee, cola and apple, before heading upstairs to join one of the regular free brewery tours. More on that in the next post in this series….

More beer myths that just won't DIE!

Uh-oh, the refugees are coming!

This time it's the "sources of fresh water were untrustworthy—often reliably fatal—and scarce. Beer, on the other hand, was always boiled prior to fermentation, making it safe to drink" one, via a chirpy article on Vinepair. I assume the main story is simply lifted from somewhere else, by the way, as Lisa Grimm wrote a much better and significantly corrected version for Serious Eats back in 2012, but presumably checking for accuracy was above the Vinepair author's pay-grade. 

So in summary, there is no evidence the medieval mind considered or knew water to be unhealthy. Bad water was a concern, but people had their own guidelines on how to tell good from bad. If you want more evidence, look at how long it took Dr John Snow to persuade people that cholera was spread via water. That was in the 1800s -- more than two centuries after the Mayflower -- and it was also when they realised that drinking beer was safer than well-water.

Plus, boiling the wort for beer before fermentation seems to have come in some time after the introduction of hops (remembering here that in mediaeval times, ale was unhopped, beer was hopped). Boiling modifies the acids in the hops and is needed to fully activate their bitterness and preservative qualities. Before hops, there was no need to boil.

What you did need was hot water for the mash, as it's how you get the fermentable sugars out of the malted grain. This heating would have been enough to kill most bugs, but was not a boil. Apart from anything else, at a time when a fire meant collecting or buying firewood, unnecessary boiling would have been a waste of expensive and/or scarce fuel.

The truth seems to be that drinking water was not fashionable among the middle classes in 1620 -- it was something that only poor people did, and the religious fanatics aboard the Mayflower were not poor people.