Category Archives: Brewing

Advent Calendar Day 17 and it’s all a conundrum?

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I didn’t open yesterday’s beer, not because I didn’t fancy it, more like, I went out to collect a parcel at at two o’clock and didn’t get back in till gone half eight. I did however have a couple of stunning pints of Arbor Ales Smac My Brew Up (4.8%), on cask, in the excellent Mews, Wetherby, along with a few more on my travels – bus and walking, obviously. I didn’t realise three blokes could miss so many different buses in one afternoon?

Anyway, Day 17’s offering from Beer Hawk’s Advent Calendar is a Schneider Weisse Tap 7 Unser Original, from G. Schneider & son, brewers of Kelheim, Germany. A Bavarian Weizen, which appears on virtually everyone’s bucket list of beers to try before you die/best beers in the world. It’s easy to understand why, it’s a classic and a unique style.

You can by a 500ml bottle for £2.49 on the Beer Hawk web site, but the one I got is a 330ml bottle, so I feel a bit short changed if I’m honest. Mind you, a 500ml bottle would never have fitted in the Day 17 slot in the box. I had a quick look on YouTube and the Beer Hawk team had the same beer as well. I also had a look at Day 16’s video, which hadn’t been posted when I wrote yesterdays commentary. I was quite surprised to discover that the official Day 16 beer wasn’t the bottle of Damm Inedit I received at all. Daniel the Beer Hawk beer writer and friend, were trying a bottle of Brewdog Santa Paws? This sort of evidenced the claims in Day 15’s post that emanated from Boak & Bailey in so far as, 20% of the case will probably be available in your local corner shop. Santa Paws is indeed readily available in LS23, the home of both myself and Beer Hawk, at the local Morrisons store at 4 for £6. So if they had run out of Santa Paws why didn’t they send someone the two miles or so, to Wetherby Morrisons and buy a few more bottles? Or is Boak & Bailey’s notion that, the case will probably contain 50% of weird stuff that they couldn’t shift, also correct? But if that’s the case, why go to all the trouble of producing twenty four entertaining, and very professionally done, video tasting notes, and then send a different beer out? And why can’t Morrisons do Jackhammer at £1.50 a bottle? Surely the finest of Brewdog’s mainstream products?

Verdict – I eventually managed to squeeze the can out of the Day 18 slot and I’m really looking forward to drinking it whilst watching the Man City – Arsenal game this afternoon. There’s a clue or two in this post to indicate in which fine UK brewing city this real ale is made. In fact you should be able to work out the brewery from what I’ve said?

Advent Day 11 – Hop Devil!

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Today Beer Hawk have Nøgne in their Day 11 Advent Calendar, whereas, for the fifth day out of eleven I have something entirely different to the beer they taste in their video blog. Disappointed? Not really because I’ve got a bottle of Victory Beer  Hop Devil and I’ve liked the beers from this brewer that I’ve tried previously. In fact, I think I’ve had Hop Devil on draught in Leeds city centre before. Probably in North Bar.

What started out in 1995 in Pennsylvania is now quite a big brewer who produced close on 150,000 Barrels in 2015, including ten core beers and more than fifteen seasonal brews that cover virtually every style of beer you can imagine. Their strap line is European tradition – American ingenuity, which accords directly with my thoughts of what craft brewing actually is.

I’m loving the scary Green Man inspired Hop Devil on the label, it’s suggestive of what might be contained in the barrel, it also foregrounds Victory Beer’s ethos of only using hop flowers and not pellets. I think it’s also a nice link to the Old World that gave us this style of beer, along with the all powerful earthy connection that anything made from nature has.

Deep Amber in colour, a malty almost tobacco like aroma, along with hops, lots of them. It didn’t hold any head after the pour. The tastes were lemony citrus and ripe fruits and a nice balance of toffee malt flavours. I also got a (bitter) almond like flavour and a few spicy notes. It’s quite smooth in the mouth and leaves an after taste a bit like bitter cream soda. Overall, balanced flavours, but you could tell it was all of it’s 6.7% ABV. Victory Beer’s website tells me that the beer is hopped with Cascade, Centennial and Chinook –  powerful American hops in a powerful American style IPA, no surprise there then.

The acid test, would I drink it again? Yes, by the case load, it’s yummy.

Criticisms – the bottle was only in date by two months (BBE 02-17). Would I be buying something from a bottle shop that only had two months date left on it? Not unless it was in a reduced case I wouldn’t. Having said that, eleven days in, this is the first bottle from the Advent Calendar that hasn’t had a very long date on it. Despite the variations from the official Beer Hawk case showcased in their video, I’m still enjoying my selection.

Day 10 – Japanese Rice Beer

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No apologies today, I’ve been on the razzle since 1100hrs yesterday, apart from a brief respite in bed!

A Japanese beer, had one before that my daughter bought me from M&S, and I didn’t like it! Think it was a wheat beer? I like the label and that’s maybe why my 22 year old daughter chose it?

As soon as you take the top off it starts to foam out of the bottle neck. The initial aroma? metallic. Initial taste? Metallic.

This beer is like a good wine, it needs to be allowed to breathe. Let it breathe and the stannic thwack disappears.

This beer is very very interesting. I can’t put my finger on it. I won’t be drinking it on a session, even in front of the fire at home. But, I’m glad I did drink this rice beer. Some authorities reckon putting rice in beer is a cheap option, sugar without taste? This is rice malt, I didn’t realise they did it? Sweet, toffee sweet, sour but not tart, interesting but not much else. Fermented rice? Maybe? Almost a sort of emptiness amongst some nice elements, but a nice emptiness.

Verdict – Interesting choice. Glad I had it, would I be buying it to drink at home? Errrr … maybe not.

Advent Calendar Day 5 – Elysian Immortal IPA and more thoughts on craft beer.

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Some of the feedback I’m getting tells me yesterdays post might have been a bit controversial! It’s certainly highlighted the fact that some people are really precious over the term Craft Beer?

Perhaps a little contextualisation needs to be made from my point of view; this series of posts have arisen purely because someone bought me a Beer Hawk Craft Beer Advent Calendar. I thought it would be a good idea to post every day about each beer revealed in the run up to Christmas. Nothing has been staged, but I knew that whatever I encountered would throw up interesting little points. I didn’t know I’d get a bottle of FUBAR yesterday, but it tied in nicely with something I saw with my own eyes as a member of the public, several weeks previously.

This time yesterday I had no idea what was behind window number 5 neither, nor what I was going to say about it? My first thoughts may prove controversial once again, because despite this being a craft beer Advent calendar, todays bottle just isn’t craft beer! Not if you take the Brewers Association (USA) definition of a craft brewer, anyway. They say an American craft brewer is small, independent and traditional. Independent is defined as, ‘Less than 25 percent of the craft brewery is owned or controlled (or equivalent economic interest) by an alcohol industry member that is not itself a craft brewer’.

That definition disqualifies Elysian Brewing Company from being a craft brewer as they were taken over by Anheuser Busch in January 2015. This deal precipitated the comment by Paul Gatza (then Brewers Association Director) in this article by Coral Garnick, “When a deal like this goes down, there is a sense of loss in the craft-brewing industry, as well as some of the customers,” he said. “Some people will certainly look at it as a sell out and a betrayal. But others don’t know, don’t care, or just care about what is in the bottle.”

So where do I stand? I’m open minded, if I’m honest. Elysian Brewing Company started out in Seattle in 1996. They’ve done over 350 craft brews since then and have four restaurants. Restaurants? Doesn’t sound like somewhere you go for a beer to me? In fact it’s almost the opposite of the food led managed pub called Vintage Ale House that Goose Island (AB – inbev) are opening in Balham (Morning Advertiser 05-12-16), which is probably a restaurant. Whereas the Elysian Brewing Company restaurants really do appear to be brew pubs with food, yet they call them restaurants. I’ve been in a few over the years and got put off Pumpkin ale for ever one Holloween (sic) in New York, Yuk! I can’t get over the full service concept neither, I don’t want to have to be shown to a table in a pub!

According to the Elysian Brewing Company web site, Immortal IPA (6.3%) is; a refreshing and hoppy, medium bodied IPA. A Northwest (USA) interpretation of a classic English style, golden copper in colour and loaded with New World hop flavour and aroma. It’s made with Pale, Munich, Crystal and Cara-hell malts. Bittered with Chinook, finished with Amarillo and Centennial hop to give an IBU of 62.

The aroma is toffee apples and really ripe melon. It’s pale amber in colour and there is a decent little head on it which laces onto the glass as you swirl it round. The toffee apple continues in the mouth and then goes to a juicy flavour before leaving a piney bitterness. It’s not a headbanger of an IPA, it’s far more subtle than that, and is actually a sensible, easy drinking beer. Although I like many of the extreme IPA’s, you’ve got to have some like this that you can drink whilst sat watching footy on TV.

Like it says on the bottle, it’s not an English style IPA, it’s an American take on an English style beer with lots of powerful malt and different hops. Like I often say, different isn’t wrong and this American interpretation of the style has given a lot to the beer world.

In five days I have had five really nice beers, good beers well made. In terms of whether they are craft beers then you have to make your own mind up. Before you do that you have to know what craft beer means, or maybe what it means to you, as clearly it means different things to different people. Despite the Brewers Association (USA) definition of a craft brewer if I hadn’t known that Elysian Brewing Company were no longer independent I would have instantly said US craft brewer, US style IPA, nice. Does a definition change that? If you’re reading this then please let me know your thoughts. Lots of you have done already in various forums, and I appreciate everyone’s views in my quest to define what craft beer is in the UK. The quote from Paul Gatza in the fourth paragraph is probably so, so true, in terms of the whole ethos around craft beer.

Verdict – Looking forward to my next beer and any dialogue it throws up. There hasn’t been a dark one yet? Will I be lucky tomorrow?

FUBAR by Tiny Rebel made in North Yorkshire Brewery? Advent Calendar Day 4.

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Many people will disagree with this, but I don’t think Tiny Rebel  are a craft brewer. Definitely a very, very good brewer, whose products I very much enjoy, but not craft beer. More a British (Welsh, to be specific) brewer with a host of accolades, brewing in a post modernist style. Okay, they may have been inspired by American IPA’s, it says so on their web site, beyond that the only reference to ‘craft’ I could see was in relation to their Urban Tap House (Mk I). I mean, if they are a craft brewer how come their Welsh red ale Cwtch won the Champion Beer of Britain 2015, in the Best Bitter category? Best Bitter isn’t craft beer is it? Cwtch is however a lovely drink that I could drink all day and everyday.

Opening my calendar today revealed a bottle of FUBAR. I like FUBAR. I like the name. I like the cheeky way they have just spun it round to ‘Funked Up By A Rebel’. I like the label art, I like the little bear, I love the bottle cap. I love it that you usually see it on cask, in fact we’ve had it on twice at our little local beer festival, by popular request! I like the fact that Tiny Rebel continue to produce all their core beers in cask and I’d love to see them follow  up FUBAR with a family of similarly named beers; SNAFU, SUSFU, TARFU and maybe even BOHICA for something with a bit of a chipotle kick?

I did get a little confused the other week when I saw FUBAR chalked on a fermenter/conditioning tank in a brewery at Cropton, near Pickering, North Yorkshire. Surely The Great Yorkshire Brewery haven’t nicked Tiny Rebel’s idea?

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I rang Tiny Rebel to find out. They explained they are going to be opening their new brewery in January 2017 and are currently working flat to get everything right. The new brewhouse is exactly the same as the The Great Yorkshire Brewery one at Cropton, so they went up and did a trial brew on it to see how things worked out. The new brewery will increase Tiny Rebel‘s capacity from 12  to 30 Barrels.

Getting back to FUBAR, a 4.4% Pale ale, Unfiltered and Vegan friendly, so the very pale amber beer is a little hazy in the glass. The foamy head you get on pouring soon disappears. I don’t know if it’s the bottles/cans or my glasses, but none of the beers I’ve had so far have retained their head? Aroma; hops and a hint of citrus flavours. Taste; dry, citrussy, flowery, bitter, a touch of biscuity maltiness that leaves a nice honey, lemon and straw after taste. I could drink lots of this. I wish they had it on draught in my local.

Still no more tasting notes on the Beer Hawk web site (1100 – 051216), since Day 2. I was enjoying those little videos too, a bit of added interest to the experience.

Verdict – I’m enjoying the beers I’m getting. Very well curated so far. And Tiny Rebel aren’t a Craft Brewer, they’re just excellent modern British brewers. I can feel a weekend trip to Cardiff coming on in the new year!

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A Maltese brewer

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farsons-neptuneOne of the highlights of the week was meeting John Pullicino, brewer at Farson’s Cisk, and a lovely man. As we walked out of the brew house our guide, Isabelle, pointed out this important looking bloke, saying we might want to speak with him as he was one of the brewers. Too right we did, and what a bloke he was. You could instantly tell that he was comfortable with himself, in all things, a clever man, contented.

He told us they used British hops for the darker beers and German ones for Cisk – Hallertau for aroma and H. Magnum for bittering, and that all the malts came from various sources in Northern Europe. John explained that you can’t really grow Barley on any scale or quality in Malta, the island is too arid and too small at only 17 miles long by 9 miles wide.

It was the little things he told us I liked, and the more you were interested the more he told you. He explained that originally the brewers were mainly British, with some German and Spanish brewers along the way, and it wasn’t until 1970 when the first Maltese brewer, Joe Naudi, was appointed.

John was very proud of the fact that he was the longest serving brewer at the company, where he’d worked for 32 years in the old brewhouse. He didn’t say anything, but I got the feeling he thought the old brewhouse was superior to the shiny, soulless modern one? A bit more hands on, an art more than a science.

All the companies brewers go to Heriot Watt to complete the four year degree in Brewing and Distilling, unless like him you are a double honours degree holder in Chemistry and Biology, when you only have to complete a one year course. John reckoned it was pretty tough to get into Farsons as a brewer these days. His son was currently studying for the same degree he took at The University of Malta, and having seen how much work was involved, John didn’t think he would be able to complete it himself. I think he was modestly underestimating his capabilities there!

He did say though, and this was the mark of the man, that when recruiting a new brewer he would rather see someone with enthusiasm, passion and dedication whom he could coach and mentor and allow to develop into their own style, as opposed to taking on an out and out academic performer.

One anecdote he related was about Joe Naudi’s son, Pierre, who followed his father and went up to Edinburgh to study at the companies expense, never to return, going to work at Tolly Cobbold instead! Looking back at past brewers, he said there was a newspaper advert in the company archives regarding a British brewer who was returning to the UK and selling his household effects, lock, stock and barrel including chickens!

John’s current role is principally developing specific projects these days. One of these included the management of the brewery water treatment plant. We all know how important water quality is in brewing, something even more critical in Malta as the islands scarce water is all obtained by reverse osmosis from sea water. If you’ve never drank Maltese tap water the best way I can describe it is just to say, you don’t really need to add much salt when boiling your veggies!

Because the public supply is the only source of water, this givers the brewer a big problem. Farsons operate their own reverse osmosis plant to turn tap water into a suitable brewing liquor. This isn’t exactly cheap, hence they operate on a 95% recovery of all waste water on the site, as well as  generating 7% of their own power from solar panels on the roof, and producing their own CO2.

Looking forward, John was hoping this season’s hop prices were going to improve. Farsons buy on the ‘spot market’ and have no growing contracts. He thought the outlook and potential prices looked a bit gloomy. So much so, he and some of his colleagues were experimenting by growing their own hops at home. They hadn’t had any rain for over twelve months, and so far only the plants in John’s garden had survived the hot summer. He didn’t ever think it could be a commercial option but he was hopeful he could eventually get enough to do a small scale brew with.

Chatting to John and seeing the immense pride that he, Isabelle, and everyone we spoke to had in the company, sort of restored my faith in big brewing companies. Well … Farson’s at least. They might not brew any real ale, but they brew something that’s pretty nice to drink and different styles of beer. They also seem to be a very good company to work for. The sort of company where neighbours comment in hushed tones that, ‘He works for Farson’s you know – ’ Enough said.

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Lord Chambray

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Lord Chambray definitely has to go down as the brewery with the nicest, most glamorous,  friendliest tour guide ever! Valentina was an absolute star, she really made us feel at home. She’s passionate about the brewery and her role in Administration and Marketing for the company. I guess she would be really, her boyfriend Samuelle is both owner, director, and assistant brewer.

When I first looked to see if there were any new brewers on Malta, I was pretty certain I wasn’t going to find anything, Farson’s have pretty much had things sewn up for a long time, so I was pleasantly surprised when Google enlightened me about this new craft brewery on Gozo.

Just to save all the cask ale diehards the trouble of reading further, they don’t do any cask ale, sorry. They do however produce excellent unpasteurised, bottle and key keg conditioned beers; sounds like real ale in my book.

When I visited there was only Valentina around, the rest of the team had gone to a beer festival in Genoa and had all their return flights cancelled, owing to tragic incident at Luqa airport. They offered to meet up later in the week when they got back, but my busy schedule meant I only had one window of opportunity to get over to Gozo.

To some visitors, the fact the brewery is on a small industrial estate, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, on the island of Gozo, may seem problematic. Don’t let it put you off, you can get a 7 day unlimited travel bus ticket for €21 and the ferry to Gozo is only €4.65 return. Make sure you are first off the ferry though, because the 301 bus which stops straight outside the brewery isn’t quite as big as the huge ferry, as soon as it’s full the doors shut, off it goes and you have to wait over 30 minutes for the next one! Me? We got Joe Baxi to take us to the brewery, €12 one way, and then continued on public transport. It’s only the buses at the ferry terminal that get rammed.

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Brewery tours are available Tuesday to Saturday, between 1000 and 1800hrs. They’re currently free, but you have to book, and any beer you drink in the modern tap room has to be paid for although I thought the prices were reasonable. They have four draught beers on at any one time, plus their full range of bottles, along with a natty range of Lord Chambray merchandise.

I quite like the sense of being a pioneer and sussing new things out? That soon disappeared when the CAMRA branded leaflet display full of the latest ‘Swiggin in Wiggin’ magazines on the bar told me that Wigan CAMRA had beaten me to it! Valentina explained they get quite a lot of UK visitors and she was well versed on the CAMRA ethos. The Lord Chambray team had recently been at the GBBF and Valentina said she’d had a field day doing, first her own Cascade hop trail (mainly IPA’s), and then a separate dark beer trail.

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On the brewing front, they mill all the malt on site, most of which is sourced in Belgium and the UK, although I spotted sacks of German produced (Durst) Vienna malt lying around. All the hops are purchased on contract from Worcestershire based hop merchant Charles Faram and the liquor is corporation tap water that has been through their own reverse osmosis equipment and revitalised using the Grander technique. Currently they are using Belgian and Danish yeast strains, but they are looking to culture their own yeast in house. They already have a small, but state of the art laboratory, and biotechnician, which wouldn’t have looked out of place in a large modern beer factory. Very impressive, as was the shinier than shiny centrifuge which they use to recover as much water as possible from the spent grains, as well as for the filtration process, a feature in general of the Maltese islands. In fact if I hadn’t seen the beer store and some labels still in the bottling machine then I wouldn’t have believed they’d ever used any of the kit. They’ve been open and brewing since June 2014, and everything still looks all shiny bright and brand new.

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The head brewer is Andrea Bertola, an Italian master brewer, best known for his brewing exploits in a prison. He acts in a consultant role to Samuelle who is also Italian. In fact everyone’s Italian, even the Spadoni brewing kit, at Lord Chambray which the D’imperio family named after the iconic Fort Chambray where they made their Gozo home after having holidayed on the island for the last twenty seven years. Signor D’imperio must have some serious dough if he can afford to set his son Samuelle up in an enterprise like this. I’ve seen it described as a micro brewery, it’s not, it’s bigger than that and certainly as big as North Brewing, or the original Northern Monk set ups. I bet you wouldn’t have got much change out of £60K for the brand new bottling machine alone.

In terms of brewing, there didn’t appear to be any short cuts. The brewing process takes around 45 days with a 12 – 15 day fermentation, then conditioning and further bottle conditioning for 15 days before labelling and despatching.

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So, what’s their beer like? Pretty decent I thought. We started with the Sans Blas (5.7%), it’s billed as an English IPA, but it’s not, it’s much more hop forward, more a US craft style IPA. It was very nice though and was tasty, but well balanced. The second we tried was the Special Bitter (3.8%) which comes with a Union Jack styled label. Again, it was very nice, but it wasn’t really a typical bitter. Light in colour, clean, crisp, citrus and a little hazy because Valentina got carried away talking to Mrs C, and poured the bottle bottoms. Tell you what, I didn’t mind, I tasted a bit out of Mrs C’s glass, she got the top half, and there was no discernible difference. The brief notes in my book summed it up, ‘Not really a bitter, but stunning!’

There’s also; Wheat beer, Blonde ale, and a Dry Stout. I tried the stout (5.5%) in a trendy bar in Valetta a few days later. Like the others, it’s not a typical stout, it’s sort of a cross between a stout and a Black IPA, again it was very nice, apart from the price. At almost parity between Euro and Pound it worked out at about £5.40 for a 330 ml bottle. Nice but not that nice, I’m afraid. That’s the issue here for me. The brewery’s good, the people are good, the beers good, it’s just that the market isn’t there in Malta yet. It’s coming I reckon, and Farson’s have just released some stronger, dearer, premium beers. Even in the southern Mediterranean they realise that they can upscale the prices on the craft niche.

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At present they are turning out about 1500 bottles, and a small amount of kegs on four seperate brews per month, although they have the capacity to produce around 20,000 bottles a month. Most of the kegs go to Italy and more recently to Tallin, but the bulk of their production remains in the Maltese island. It seems to be proving a bit of a difficult nut to crack and they’ve had to appoint separate distributors for both Malta and Gozo. I asked the obvious, but it seems supplying to bars direct is a non starter. Most bars won’t take anything except through their established distributor and Farson’s own 99% of the dispense equipment, so, apart from one bar in Marsaxlokk, it’s bottles or nothing.

I really hope that Lord Chambray crack the market, and then maybe get the prices in the local bars down to something more reasonable, yet still reflecting the fact they are making a premium product. If you’re interested then I would recommend a trip to the brewery and if you’re really interested, they are currently looking to team up with UK based distributors.