Aqua Vita Benjamin - Aqua Vita

The circle of life continues. My old brewhouse has just rolled past my office window while my new reverse osmosis machine is being brought to life in the new brewhouse. Reverse osmosis is a wonderous process by which more or less everything that is in water is stripped out. Water remains one of the areas of brewing where even the educated consumer tends to be misguided. I have heard so many times that the same beer can’t be brewed elsewhere because of the water. You also get brewers who claim that their wells were blessed by ancient water fairies and hence have magical properties.

Water is H2O. There cannot be an argument about that. The same H2O flows out of the Grimsby sewage works as flows out of the filling machine on the Evian bottling line. What makes water different for brewing is what is dissolved in it. Being the 21st century brewers can adjust what it dissolved in the H¬2O without the need for water fairies. The first step is to remove what shouldn’t be in there. This is where reverse osmosis comes in. There are thousands of barriers to making the same beer in two breweries but the water supply is never one of them. Having an ancient well below your brewery is of no consequence to the quality of the beer you make today unless it is poisoned. When I am feeling particularly boorish and someone asks me where the water I use comes from I say the oxidation of hydrogen!

I hope someone is still reading. Today I received a bottle of the banoffee imperial stout that I brewed with Sam from Sipsmiths. I was there for the brewing and left Sam and the film crew to look after the fermentation and packaging. I was impressed with how it came out. Here’s the objective feedback I provided:

“Plenty(!!) of carbonation due to incomplete primary fermentation. The banana flavour from the yeast hasn’t come through greatly. This is probably because the temperature of fermentation wasn’t high enough. Beer smells inviting with good roast and a nice edge of hop resin. Flavour; very rich with good bitter, sweet and roast balance. Finish is big with long bitter and roast notes. Very much in the mold of a new world (US) imperial stout. Doesn’t taste oversweet which would be a concern at the high gravity at bottling. This because very high rate of the hops and roast barley. A sound example and a very good beer considering the constraints of production, just a shame about the lack of iso amyl acetate on the nose. I did an ABV on it and it’s surprisingly up to 7.8%.”

My flavour panel were very impressed by the beer which was surprising as they tend to favour lighter coloured drinks.

I did a parallel brew on my pilot equipment a couple of weeks ago and will bottle that next week to send up for their opinion.

I have just been evaluating my progress towards the 12 brews in 12 breweries and have had to call on a little poetic license to get to 5. Here’s where I am at so far.

1. Otter at home

2. 69 Hops with Brew Warf

3. Blend with Camden

4. White Shield with Steve Wellington

5. Banoffee Stout in a Sam from Sipsmiths’ kitchen

The next two are likely to be although yet to be definitively confirmed a collaborative brew with Alistair Hook at Meantime and something exciting with Adrian Redgrove at Castlerock.

In Bed with William Bass

I now know that I use the words honour and privilege too flippantly. I feel like my time at Burton didn’t happen, like it was a dream.

Suffering a journey on a Cross Country train did at least take the edge off the excitement. Whoever designed a train on which the carriages smell like a gastrointestinal ailments ward and there is so little room between the seats that you have to lean your laptop at an angle should be strung up in my opinion. I was met by Steve at Burton station, very much the man about town in his convertible Merc with private plates. He was as affable as I remembered and he told me that he had reserved me a room in the Town House. The Town House doesn’t sound especially impressive until you learn that it is a grade 1 listed building in which William Bass lived and died.

The evening with Steve was very civilised, incorporating a good Thai meal before we retired to the Town House to sample some of Steve’s creations. I also got to meet Steve’s assistant brewer Jo. Steve openly admitted that his beer would not be half as good without the talent and dedication of Jo. Behind every great man, there is a great woman. On their departure I did not take the option of overindulging and finishing the courtesy fridge full of beer. I’m officially grown up.

At 2am I awoke with a start. A strange ghostly noise emanated from the table in the corner. It wasn’t William Bass calling to me it was broken chain by Crucifier announcing the arrival of a text message joke about Bin Laden. Joking aside, sleeping in the house where one of history’s greatest brewers lived is an experience which is as spiritual as they come.

At 7:30 Steve collected me and we drove to the brewery for the 8am mash. The brewery is housed in the National Brewing Museum. You pass a massive steam engine and the White Shield bottle van to get to the bijou but beautifully engineered brewhouse. Steve stood at the helm while Jo busily fluttered in and out making things happen. Steve brews by eye and by feel. A talent which I am afraid I would never have the balls to master. I couldn’t live without my flow meters and digital readouts. Steve told me later that he had a pilot’s licence. I’m sure he flies like he brews, calmly, accurately and authoritatively. Aside from gawping and listening intently I was occasionally of assistance and helped with mashing in, cleaning out the copper and adding the late hops.

As I left Burton I remember thinking that I am a very lucky brewer. I sat grinning like an idiot all the way home on the train. Got a few stares but then that’s not unusual.

I'm too much in love

My Atlantic brew in March remains a target for next week.

The pace of change at Sharp’s at the moment is greater than ever. Numbers like £4m for expansion, 280k hectolitres per year are no longer pub fantasies but enthralling commitments and milestones. If you had told me when I did my first mash in the 50 barrel brewhouse in 2002 that within a decade the brewery would be twenty times the size and I would be part of the team driving that change I would have phoned Bodmin mental hospital to alert them to their latest escapee. There was an ugly old-looking bloke on the BBC South West breakfast news, he reminded me of me. The cost to me of all this is less time in the gym, less time for brewing experimentation and less time on the blog. For this, my faithful friends I apologise.

12 Brew four: Camden Brewery

You don’t need me to tell you that Camden Brewery is new, shiny and sexual. I should however be able to give you an insight into the team and their ethos as brew 4 progresses. I am most of the way to sorting the details of April’s brew. This one is going to be a bit different (aren’t they all?). I am taking 400 litres of a 3 year old cask-aged barley wine (10.1% ABV) up to the guys at Camden Brewery, then we are going to select (brew?) some beer(s) to blend it with to make a two-brewery-brewed blend collaboration. Ahead of my visit, I have sent up a couple of bottles of the beer so they can get a shortlist of beers and then we are going to get together, select the beer and produce the blend. The beauty of this is that it will involve the need to sample the prospective beers, then the various blends of these beers until we hit the winning combination or the floor in a heap of alcoholic dysfunction. This beer will then be packaged and sold by Camden. I would claim that this is a novel approach to collaborative brewing but I’m sure that a load of brewers in America will be yawning at the idea.

A lot remains to be finalised on this one and a few logistical questions need to be addressed before it can go ahead. Not least how I am going to get 400 litres of beer in the boot of my Z4.

Citra is dead, long live the King Singers.

Radical and hardcore are just words

The date: 25th February

The place: Brew Warf

The Hops:

1 Sovereign

2 Challenger

3 Northdown

4 Goldings

5 Pilgrim

6 Fuggles

7 Boadicea

8 Progress

9 Pilot

10 Pioneer

11 Phoenix

12 Target

13 Bramling Cross

14 Admiral

15 Beata

16 First Gold

17 Saaz

18 Bobek

19 Atlas

20 Aurora

21 Lubelski

22 Marynka

23 Celeia

24 Savinjski Golding

25 Saphir

26 Tradition

27 Mittlefruh

28 Magnum

29 Spalt

30 Tettnang

31 Northern Brewer

32 Hersbrucker

33 Perle

34 Herkules

35 Brewers Gold

36 Mount Hood

37 Cascade

38 Amarillo

39 Willamette

40 Centennial

41 Galena

42 Santiam

43 Sterling

44 Ahtanum

45 Simcoe

46 Citra

47 Warrior

48 Cluster

49 Palisade

50 Crystal

51 Vanguard

52 Apollo

53 Chinook

54 Sorachi

55 Nugget

56 US Northern Brewer

57 Summit

58 Bravo

59 El Dorado

60 Sonnet

61 Columbus

62 Delta



12 Brew one Sharp's and Otter Imperial Pilgrim Barley Wine

Otter Brewery

In my 12 brew posts I want to steer clear of history, the colour the pump clips, what flowers are growing around brewery gates and other such irrelevancies. Beer is as always the important thing. Otter is such an exceptionally beautiful brewery, in a stunning location, making beer in a gentille English way that you can’t discuss its beers without mentioning these things. The brewery is in glorious isolation in a green and tranquil valley. The few times I have visited there I have felt like I was on holiday. Otter make some excellent cask ales but if beer tasted of where it was made they would be among the very best in the world. Otter brewery sell more beer than Thornbridge and Brewedog combined but you probably can’t remember the last time you read about them on a blog. You get the impression that they don’t much mind this low profile (sorry Patrick!).

Otter beers are all-malt, whole-hop ales fermented using the dropping system. The dropping system involves carrying out the first day of fermentation in one tank before using gravity to transfer (drop) the beer to a second vessel to complete the job. The thinking behind this is to get the beer off of the trub and provide a second charge of oxygen for the yeast. The result is a clean yet complex beer.

Keith Bennett

Keith went to a Rudolf Steiner school where the kids make their own rules. He has never really recovered from this. Keith is Keith, you can take it or leave it but you won’t change it. After he graduated with a degree in pure mathematics he took the logical career step of getting a job as a Postman. It was only a matter of time before his love for beer drew him to the mash tun via Heriot-Watt University. At university Keith was known for his love of the student union and ability to survive on a liquid diet. He was also quite proficient at getting me kicked out of lectures by throwing his voice (that’s my story anyway). Perhaps Keith’s proudest boast is that he is the most fertile man in the universe. He has successfully sired three children despite his partner taking the contraceptive pill, although even Keith’s monster sperm have yet to find a way through his sutured vas deferens. Keith’s other special talent is doing a spectacularly accurate impersonation of Dr Evil without even trying.

Brew Number 1

Our one avowed intent will be to brew an Imperial Pilgrim barley wine brewed from English ingredients using the dropping system (can you see what I have done there?). The recipe is well modified Concerto pale ale malt, Optic crystal and roasted barley hopped with Pilgrim hops in the kettle, hop back, Fermentation and Conditioning. Pilgrim is quite a new hop and is an excellent all rounder providing a rounded bitterness and hoppy aroma (yes sometimes hops do smell of hops!), perfect therefore for a classic barley wine. The only unknown is how well the Sharp’s yeast responds to being “dropped”.