Windsor and Eton brewery tour

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mmmmm BIG bag of simcoe hops!

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.

Spent grain, salt free pizza base

I often feel quite guilty about how much spent grain is left over after a brew. I don't throw the grain away, I compost it, but even so I'm often left thinking I could have done much more with the grain.

So, I had a go at adding some spent grain to pizza, and it worked really well. In fact I could hardly tell the grain was there except when the odd husk got stuck in my teeth. Over all it added nicely to the whole meal crust. Here's the recipe, it makes 3 thin pizzas. Caution, as I don't like to add salt the dough wont keep unless you freeze it quickly.


272g White flour
204g Wholemeal flour (I prefer spelt, but any wholemeal will do)
1 tablespoon sugar
2 tablespoons oil
355g Warm water
12g (1 packet) dried bakers yeast
100g spent grains (maris otter in the picture)

Set to the dough setting in a bread maker (or kneed yourself) - allow to rise and then roll out as preferred. Blind bake for 5-10 mins until starts to rise, then add toppings and finish.

Serve with some homebrew :)

Berliner weisse the quick way (to make your house smell of vomit)

All of a sudden the weather is getting warmer and summer is just around the corner. I'm now brewing for the summer. Crowd pleasing pale ales for camping trips and  thirst quenching wheat beers for baking hot summer days.

This year I also wanted to have a try making a low abv wheat beer called "berliner wiesse." Its a sour wheat beer which can be tart and refreshing, perfect on a hot day.

The traditional beer is soured with the main fermentation - a lactic acid producing bacteria (lacto-bacillus) is added in with the brewers yeast and the beer slowly sours. A faster way of making the beer is to sour the mash first, then to boil the wort and ferment as normal. This has the added benefit of not adding lacto-bacillus into fermenters and tubing etc. where it can stay around and get into other beers (souring these unintentionally). Another benefit is that it means the beer can be hopped and dry hopped more than the traditional version, hops stop lacto-bacillus from acting.

The method is pretty simple. Make a 1030-1035ish wort - i used 1.7kg of wheat malt in a BIAB mash. The mash went really well, it eventually came out at 1032 after the boil, colour was fantastic.

The next part was new to me. Basically I got two handfuls of pale malt grain and popped these into a hopping bag, and throw them in. The raw grains house lacto-bacillus on them, and quickly a thin krausen formed on top (i did this in the stainless brew kettle so i could boil clean everything easily afterwards.) I left this to do its thing and get even smellier hoping that this would do the job souring.

So far so good. Everything to plan as I had read. But one thing i wasn't prepared for, which was the awful smell. The wort smelled of vomit. Like a street outside a pub early in the morning on Saturday after payday. But it was in my house, and horrified I knew the next step was to boil it. I couldn't quite get the boiler outside, I opened every window I could. The result was that my kitchen stank of vomit for 2 days. This got me in a lot of trouble with my wife, and so its probably the last time i can make this for a while without a different method.

I boiled the wort for 15 mins with 25g of English Archer hops, which have an Apricot fruity tinge. The plan is to dry hop with Amarillo for a nice fruity Aroma.

So far, a week into fermentation the vomit smell has dies back a lot, but its still there in the background - I hope this will go by the time this gets out of the bottle in a few weeks!

Wychwood brewery tour

In February I took a tour around the Wychwood brewery in the Cotswolds. It's where both the Wychwood and Brakespear named beers are brewed. 

The brewery itself is nestled in behind the small Cotswold town of Witney, Oxfordshire. The tour takes around 20 people around the whole brewery, giving an idea of how the beers are made and telling  some of the history of the site. 

Outside the brewery, waiting for the tour to begin

Once inside, and after an introduction over a half pint in the tap-room, the tour quickly moves into the main building, but first you get a sneak peak at the Brakspear fermenters. What also strikes you is a big hit of fresh yeast - wow, that smell is amazing. From this point on you know you are no longer in a pub and you are very much unmistakably in a brewery.

Brakspear fermenting vats - the ones in the foreground are the secondary fermenters

The history is all around, in particular the front door is a nice piece. Our guide had lots of anecdotes about the buildings, their history and the way the business has evolved over time.

Lovely old door on the brewery

Our knowledgeable guide

The main Wychwood fermenting vats are very different to the Brakspear ones, very modern stainless steel tanks - there were about twenty in all and each one utilised with a brew.

The main fermenting vats

The brewing vessels themselves were massive. The copper "kettle" rose all the way from the floor to the ceiling. This brings a huge amount of liquid to the boil. Likewise the other brewing vessels are also much larger, the hop back and the whirlpool.

The copper - a huge vat!

The silver vat I think is the hop back...

Lovely period malt miller, they don't make them like this any more etc

The whirlpool

Having had a good look around the brewery, and getting a hang of how everything works we finally got led back to the taproom for a tasting session.

Here we got to try a wee bit of almost all the main range of Wychwood beers. Not much more than a pint per person but a good way to try a big range of beers. In particular I enjoyed the Arrowayne (3.6%) which is an excellent session-able mild.

Overall a great way to spend an afternoon. It's a well pitched tour, enough detail to satisfy, not so much beer nerdery that it's not accessible.

The tasting! YUM!

Yeast washing

Fresh liquid yeast is great. I think it makes for better beer and certainly the beers i have made with liquid yeast have been better on the whole than those with dried yeasts. But there are some drawbacks. 

1) liquid yeast is much more expensive than dried - at nearly £8 for a phial or smack pack. 

2) the yeasts are imported from California - which means that they rack up a lot of air miles. This seems really disproportionate seeing as many of the yeasts I use are English, Belgian and Scottish - from about 250 miles of where I live. Brewlabs at Sunderland University has a limited number of UK yeasts available - but there is nothing in the EU that is anything like Whitelabs or Wyeast. 

So for both cost and environmental reasons it makes sense to re-culture yeast. It's also a useful back up to have a store of dormant yeast in the fridge ready to go if your planned yeast fails. 

I harvest yeast from the previous fermenter. there's always a layer at the end, a yeast "cake" that is left after the beer is racked off. I add some cooled boiled water to this and then pour off the sludge to some sanitised jam jars. Then once this has settled I pour the liquid from these into a smaller jar, leaving the solid trub. 

I seal the jars tight and keep these in the fridge. These can be woken up before using to make the next beer by adding them to a sugar solution, or a wort. 

In general I add 100g of sugar to 1000ml of water - then add the saved yeast. See the results below which are the two yeasts for my next brew. They were ready to go after 48hrs! 

  

Crabapple sour beer

Not pink as i had been led to believe it would be

Every autumn my neighbor has a crop of lovely orangey pink crab apples. They look beautiful on the tree. The blossom in the spring is a wondrous flood of pink.

But there are only a limited number of things you can do with them. You can't eat them - they are too sour. You can make them into a nice tart jam (it goes really well with roast chicken), i've made muffins with little chunks of apples in. Theses were ok. This year the harvest was amazing. Even after making a huge amount of jam.

This year there was a bumper harvest. I wondered if  you could make a crabapple beer - and turns out you can!  Even better it is supposed to come out a crazy pink colour! Mine didn't. The fermentation went fine, the secondary was as planned. But the colour wasn't pink.

The taste. Well, it's a bit sour. I used a fruity brett mix so it isn't too lambicky or challenging. It's a bit sour from the crab apples. But essentially it tastes like a mild cider. Crisp, refreshing, dry - but still very cidery!

11L BIAB
Yeast - Yeast Bay Dry Belgian Yeast
OG 1044 - est 3.8 abv before adding brettanomyces, 4% at finish of fermentation. 

Grain
2.26kg Wheat Malt

Hops
20 mins - 10g East Kent Goldings

Additional
1.4 kg frozen crab apples added to secondary for 2 months (quartered).
Added 1 vial of "amalgamation " Yeast Bay Brett yeast

Cherry sour

My first stab at cherry sour happened by accident. I was planning to a crabapple beer. I had made a 4% Belgian golden ale as the base which I was going to add the fruit and souring yeasts to.

But when i took the crabapples out of the freezer they had kept very badly, browned all over looking very unpleasant. I couldn't commit to using these, so i composted them and instead bought some frozen cherries from the supermarket.

I split the beer into two batches. One would be exposed to a Brett mix which would mature in 2 months. The other I'd expose to a lambic bacteria mix (with pediococcus and lacto bacillus as well as Brett) which would be ready in .... 12 months.

I let the cherries defrost. I liquidized these in the food blender and then poured the cherry mixture into the containers. An elementary mistake, but cherries contain a lot more sugar than crab apples, so very soon both containers had begun to froth and then overflow.

Ooops. I scooped off the excess cherries and poured away some of the work (wah!) to prevent any further blow over. At least when adding your own wild yeast you don't need to worry any more about your beer getting infected. It's already infected!

First cherry beer will be ready about easter time, i'll get the first look at it at the end of February!- the lambic one will have to wait for Christmas.