The Birth of a Brewery Part Two
The long awaited sequel to my debut film. That’s right, the oh-so-imaginatively named Birth of a Brewery Part One. This time, I got inventive and changed the name from Part One to Part Two. The reason for this is so people could differentiate between the movies and also so I could write an introduction that included a bit of sarcasm.
In reality though, we all know that Back to the Future II was loads better than Back to the Future I, mostly due to the inclusion of a hover skateboard… I do remember thinking that they would be invented by the new millenium… how wrong I was. Of course, Aliens and Terminator 2, with it’s cool liquid-metal-melty guy were also sequels that improved on the originals.
I hope this vid-blog follows the same path!
I am worried about part three though… when was the third movie in a trilogy the best???
Anyway. Lot’s of shiny stainless steel awaits!
Epic Halcyon goes on a journey
As you’ve probably read in my earlier blog, Epic Halcyon at Thornbridge, along with Luke Nicholas, one of New Zealand’s top craft brewers, we brewed a full-on version of our Halcyon Imperial India Pale Ale when Luke was over here brewing his Epic Pale Ale for the JD Wetherspoons International Beer Festival.
Luke unfortunately had to head back to New Zealand before this beer was ready to go, so we are sending him a couple of mini-casks that he is going to use for a tasting. You can attend this event here.
Here we have Thornbridgers Matt Clark and James Kemp getting the goods ready for it’s Epic journey! Hope it arrives safe and sound!!
Hops, Glory and Beers of the World
With all of the challenges that come with being a brewer, there’s also the fun stuff! Last Wednesday saw myself, Simon, Alex and Stuart Ross (Head Brewer of Crown Brewery at the Hillsborough Hotel) head down to Burton upon Trent to meet up with everyone’s favourite beer writer, Pete Brown at the launch of his new book.
As it’s summer and Sheffield is just a stone’s throw away, it is inevitable that it was going to rain. And rain it did, not being one to dodge the odd cliché, the heavens did open! In fact, I found later that we got a month’s worth of rain in 12 hours!
We made it to the fabulous Coopers Tavern, one of the coolest pubs I have ever been in. A stone’s throw from Coors Brewery, this unassuming pub opened up into a couple of front rooms and right at the very back, through a narrow door, was the tiny bar. Sitting behind it were a row of casks, all on gravity and jacketed up, making it as authentic an ale boozer that an innocent Kiwi like myself has been.
The reason for the visit was to go and see Pete Brown unveil his cool new book, Hops and Glory which I think you should all buy here. Pete was in fine form as always, and we also got to try the fascinating Calcutta IPA that had been his constant companion throughout the journey. Okay, so it wasn’t the actual beer that had crossed the equator a couple of times, but it was from the same brew that Pete and highly awarded Worthington’s White Shield brewer, Steve Wellington had brewed. We also got to try a cask version of Worthington’s White Shield, which was great. Nice and fruity with a solid malt base and a great amount of body.
Pete and Si share a laugh... or was it just for the camera...
I guess the Coopers being the pub that it is, I got chatting to the ladies behind the bar about Thornbridge beers, which they said sold really well. Always great news for a brewer to hear! Later in the evening, she came up to me and said I meet like to meet a group of home brewers that come in bimonthly to compare their beers. The crazy thing was that they were all comparing their clone brews of Thornbridge Jaipur! They’d based their recipes on the Bombay IPA clone recipe that Sara Carter had won the UK Craft Brewing Association Overall Champion Award with! I tasted a few of their attempts and was really impressed. I was stoked that people liked our beer enough to want to have a go at brewing it.
We finished up and hit the trains, only to be delayed as it had been raining. One thing I’ll never understand is that in the country that most people associate rain with, that when it rains, everything stops working! The tracks looked like rivers, but we eventually made it back to the Coach and Horses, had a couple of pints of Thornbridge beer and finished the evening with some Lost Abbey Inferno and Judgment Day and a Port Brewing Green Hop IPA… the latter a fitting finish to the evening, even if reading Hops and Glory at that stage was a little out of the question.
Friday saw myself and fellow Thornbridgers, Dave and JK head down to Birmingham NEC to the Beers of the World Live which coincided with the BBC Summer Good Food Show. We arrived a bit early and I parted ways with the guys as I was judging at the World Beer Awards. This is the third year in a row that I’ve judged in this and I absolutely love it. It’s fantastic to be able to sit around with your peers and analyse a few brews with like-minded people. It’s also great to test out your palate against other trained brewers and 99% of the time we all seem to come to the same conclusion. We tried a few interesting beers, a few great beers and a few that weren’t so good and were potentially infected, which was a shame.
Afterwards we walked around the stalls, all offering samples of the beers that had been entered into the awards, as well as a large selection of local and imported brews from breweries as diverse as Rogue, Samuel Adams and Redoak. Beers of the day were Rogue XS: Imperial Porter and Thornbridge Bracia (yeah, okay I’m biased).
Was a great day out and good training for next year’s World Beer Cup that Stef and I are judging in. Can’t wait!
Birth of a Brewery Part 1
As promised, below is my first attempt at creating a video using our little Mino Flip. As you can instantly see, I’m no Spielberg, Eastwood, Kubrick or Hitchcock. In fact, I reckon I make Ed Wood and Joel Shumacher (you know, the guy that maimed Batman by making Batman Forever and Batman and Robin) look like Hall of Famers. Hell, even Uwe Boll with his abismal Alone in the Dark and BloodRayne movies is a veritable Orson Welles next to me.
Anyway, here is a taste of what we’re getting ourselves in for. Although my script and delivery are probably a bit droll, I can promise you we’re ridiculously excited about the coming months. It’s going to be a massive learning curve, but being involved in the startup of a new brewery from concept through to finished product has always been a dream of mine and now it’s happening! How cool is that!!!
A Bit of Beer Geekery and the New Brewery
A while between blogs I know, but has been all go here at Thornbridge! May was a mega-busy month with Stef and I heading to Italy to go finalise the process flow and associated bits and pieces for the new brewery. Everyone at the pub I live above (The Coach and Horses in Dronfield) pulled out the classic “Sure it’s a work trip” lines, but alas, it was. We spent a solid four days in a small boardroom perusing a giant process flow diagram and painstakingly went through each inch of potential pipework and each potential process, whether it be the CIP (Clean In Place) for the Mash Mixer right through to where gas lines would be placed. We then began going through all of the software and automation, which is going to make the brewery state-of-the-art and allow us to produce some fantastic beers. We did get to eat fantastic Italian food, visit a couple of awesome brewpubs (Birrificio Barchessa Di Villa Pola and La Gastaldia) and drink some great Italian craft beers (the future Mecca of craft brewing I reckon) and a few bottles of delicious Prosecco as well!
But back to the brewery… Stef has been doing a massive amount of research over the last 18 months to ensure that we get a brewery that allows us to continue brewing beers like we do now, but also to give us flexibility to branch out into other styles.
I always find it kind of strange that when people here we are upgrading, the first thing they say is that our beer won’t taste the same, or that when such-and-such a brewery upscaled their beer tasted rubbish. The other is usually related to the perception of real ale… will it still be traditional ale, etcetera, etcetera. We’re ridiculously passionate about what we do here. We don’t cut corners and we strive for perfection in every beer that we brew. So, for the record, this stance isn’t going to change. Just because we now have something with a few more buttons, a lot more stainless steel, some programmable logic control and valves that will automatically open instead of us running from one side of the brewery to the other to do it manually, it doesn’t mean our beer will become crap.
In fact, we’re convinced our beer will become even better! By brewing larger batches of 30 barrels/50 hectolitres, this will straight away reduce the potential for batch variation that is inevitable in a smaller plant. You have to remember there are four of us that brew here at Thornbridge and we all have tiny discrepancies in how we do things. These have the potential to change the character of the beer, though the changes are so slight that it is impossible for the consumer to pick these up in a pint at the pub. This is because there are so many other factors involved in the flavour and aroma of the pint when it gets into your glass. How long has the cask been in the cellar. What temperature is the cellar. Has the publican cleaned his lines recently. Is the glass clean. How long has the cask been opened for. Is the publican’s cellar clean. What type of glass are you drinking it out of. Has it been through a sparkler. What have you eaten prior to the pint. Do you drink coffee. Are you a smoker. You get my drift. All of these factors and more have a lot more of an impact on the beer than what occurs in the brewery.
Saying that though, we’re all about continuous improvement and quality control. From receipt of hops and malt, right through to our oxygenation rate and knowing the pitching rate for our yeast within 10 000 cells per mL of wort that’s what we do and the new brewery will enable us to be even more precise.
A key part of the new site will be our laboratory and in particular, sensory evaluation. The plan is to build a tasting room which will allow us to do blind tasting of all our products at various stages of their shelf life. In fact, our newest employee, James Kemp (JK) was chosen because of his experience setting up tastings at Fullers and working in their laboratory. He also won three of the five major awards at the New Zealand Homebrew Championship last year. Again, we’re all about passion and knowledge and hopefully he’ll add a bit of both to the mix! JK is also going to be a regular behind the bar at our pub, The Coach and Horses, in Dronfield, where his education will continue as he pulls some great Thornbridge pints!
We’re yet to decide what type of sensory evaluation we’ll do, but more than likely it will involve tasting fresh cask and bottled beers and then trying them at intervals to assess their shelf life. Another interesting approach is to do accelerated shelf life tests, where the bottled beers are incubated at elevated temperatures for a set amount of time and then tasted for any off characters. This then gives us the chance to verify that the bottled beer we send out will be okay up to its best before date and give us an excuse to taste lots of beer!
I’m currently putting together my first video of the Birth of a Brewery… as amateur as it is… so everyone can see what our new baby looks like. So watch this space… I promise the videos will get better as I get more organised!
