English IPA #1

Why don't you see more IPAs that use English hops? Is it because the taste of the hops is different to American hops? Is it that they don't really suit the style? Certainly you do see more old fashioned English pale ales and traditional IPAs with English hops, but not so often in the American style IPAs. 

I love hoppy beers, so I was inspired by BrewDog's recipe book DIY dog to have a go at an American style IPA using English hops just like they had done.  

I went for a simple recipe with the focus intended to be on hop flavor and aroma. I used the most traditional English hops, Fuggles for flavour, and East Kent Goldings for aroma. My friend made a lovely fruity pale using East Kent Goldings, 

Recipe (19 litres) 

6kgs Maris Otter 

45g Fuggles - 60mins

55g Fuggles - Whirlpool (80C) 

180g East Kent Goldings - dry hop for 4 days

OG 1065

FG 1010 (7%) 

Yeast: White Labs London Ale Yeast WLP013

Quite a nice beer - but not an IPA

So how did this work out? It's a decent beer. Without prompting my friends and family have liked the beer and thought it was a belgian beer. It has a nice Fuggles flavour, but its not got much aroma to speak of despite the huge dose of hops. 

I took the beer to my local beer club for tasting - and they gave me some really useful feedback on the beer: 

The good points

* decent beer - drinkable

* good colour and body

* good fuggles flavour

The bad 

* Some off flavours (fermented too high temperature? Some yeast autolysis?) 

* Very little aroma

* Not bitter enough

How could I have improved this beer? 

So the main message is that some english hops are just not very suited to hoppy styles. One suggestion was to use Bramling Cross hops as these a much more American flavour. 

The yeast off flavours were due to the temperature i fermented at. This is because i have no  way to keep my fermenter cold, and at the time (early July 2016) it was regularly 30C during the day and pretty high 20s during the night. So i could have used a more temperature tolerant yeast like Danstar Nottingham, or a Belgian Saison yeast.

Some of the brewers thought that the yeast flavours may have masked the hop aroma - although i'm pretty sure this was down to the East Kent Goldings, as they didn't have much aroma when they were opened in the packet. 

Holiday beers

 This year I holidayed in South West France and I though I'd try out some local (well - French) beers whilst i was there. Actually where i was my selection was pretty limited (I was pretty much limited to  the supermarket E Le Clerc). I could buy countless Belgian beers, cidre and of course the wine was plentiful and very good.

However I picked out 3 beers that were made in France that I sampled over the holiday.

1. De Goudale - grand cru with Fantasia hop.

This is a strong Belgian style beer, made in France. As a Belgian beer it's lovely Smooth, blonde, great yeast taste. Unfortunately i couldn't really taste much from the hops. Fantasia hops are supposed to have a unique flavour, turns out this is cream soda and caramel which would have been hard to tell apart from the flavours already in the beer.

2. Abbey du mont Saint Eloi - Bier du Garde

Bier du garde is a genuinely French style of beer, so i was interested in how this would taste. Really disappointed in this. It basically tasted like a poor high alcohol lager. Maybe it was a bad example but i didn't like it.

3. Pietra - Biera Corsa.

This is made with Chestnuts! It had a lovely robust malty taste and rusty colour. In fact colour taste and aroma were similar to a British extra special bitter. I could taste a similar slight metallic taste which was similar to the chestnut beer I made myself last year.. Very drinkable.

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!