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| 12 delicious beers on tap! |
My third brewery visit this year was to the Windsor and Eton brewery - which unsurprisingly is in Windsor. 200 years ago Windsor was a major brewing center.
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| Our tour guide, Will |
There were five breweries in the town in its hey day. The last of these closed in 1931, and there was no more brewing in the town until the new Windsor and Eton craft brewery opened 6 years ago. In that short time the brewery has expanded rapidly to an output of nearly 1.5 million pints of beer per year.
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| Lovely krausen on this beer |
We were taken around the brewery by Will, a partner in the business and a lifelong brewer. In contrast to the wooden vats and ancient timbers of the Wychwood brewery I visited back in March, the Windsor brewery is a temple of glistening stainless steel. Nine large fermenting vats contain a huge amount of delicious beer.
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| 9 large fermenters |
While Will tells us about the brewery and how they got started, we get stuck into the beers. Eventually we will sample 8 of the beers, quaffing about a third of a pint of each brought freshly from the bar.
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| Big bags of malt on the left |
Time for another beer Will says, and we tuck into some Guardsman, its a beautifully caramelly beer, with a big hop hit. Its like London Pride with the hops turned up to 11. Will explains that they designed the beer to be like London bride. It is a great example of what Windsor do - clean bright beers where the hops take centre stage With guardsman the centre stage hop is Fuggles, others feature American hops (Citra, Simcoe). In fact there's a big open bag of Simcoe that I'm sure we can smell all the way around the tour of the fermenters.
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| Mmmmm BIG bag of simcoe hops! |
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| underneath the fermenters |
Take a look under fermenter No6 says Will. The bucket under No6 looks like it is boiling, there is so much air passing though. They finish the main part of the fermenting in 4 day. This pretty much finishes the tour, two and a half hours in. 7 beers in we retire to the bar for the last beer. We have been too slow says Will, not enough time to drink the last beer on the tour. Oh, but we had so much fun, 2 1/2 half hours flew by.
