New Seasonal - Cornish Winter Stout

This write up is a bit late. Our last seasonal, Abbey Christmas was phenomenally popular and sold out before early December. This beer was then used to stem the flood of disappointment from the trade. Cornish Winter Stout is my first foray into stouts in terms of recipe writing on a commercial scale. I am very pleased with the second batch. The first batch I will not mention and you will never see. Cask stouts can be awesome but often are just awful. I remember tasting stouts at a beer cask ale competition once. After 4 beers my palate was a mess, after 8 I wanted to stop sampling and after 12 I wanted to stop breathing. I felt sorry for the brewers of the last 3 that I judged because what had gone on before had reduced my taste buds to what felt like a full ashtray covered in treacle and the best beer in the world would have tasted like sewage. A lot of the entries subscribed to the more flavour = better beer philosophy and used so much roasted barley and black malt that I find it hard to believe that there was any room for pale. Others obviously weren’t happy merely using too much special malt and threw in enough hops to keep drinkers with no bitterness perception happy for a century. The result was olfactory Armageddon. Please don't get me wrong, there are some excellent stouts out there and everyone's palate is different.

Cornish Winter Stout is packed with flavour and tastes stronger than the badged ABV but there is still the inexorable tug back to the bar of a beer brewed for drinking rather than ticking off or discussing. Malt is pale ale, 140 crystal, roasted barley and crystal rye for tartness in the midst of all these heavy sweet/roast sensations. Hop notes come from the ever-versatile Hallertauer Northern Brewer and late hopping with the American monolith Apollo. The Apollo is there not for its earth shattering bitterness but for the pungency of its oils. A less strident hop just won’t compete with noise of the malts. To add a rich tiramisu roast note I have had some (120kg) of Peruvian, Cecovasa coffee specially roasted for me by the clever people at Origin Coffee. It has been roasted beyond the level felt acceptable in coffee made for drinking directly so that it stands out against the backdrop created by the roasted barley. From the amount that has disappeared from the stock room since we took delivery I think that my brewing team feel that it still makes a very good espresso!

Cornish Winter Stout is available from now until Spring. I hope it takes your palate to roast-accented heaven rather than olfactory Armageddon.

The Highlight of 2010

52. Imperial Black Golden Mild Pilsner

And so the end is near, and so I face the final curtain. No it’s not a funeral in Essex, it’s the last brew in the 52 brews in a year. The 52 brews has been a fantastic journey. You could say it’s a bit like rowing across the Atlantic; exhaustion, naked swimming, endless blue ocean, huge beards, violent storms, imminent danger, visits from friendly whales and dolphins, a camaraderie which will last a lifetime. You could but you’d be mad.

But as I approach Lands End I feel that I will be losing a friend. My pilot brewing equipment is looking tired, burned-out, heating elements litter the malt store, casualties of the war against the boundaries of brewing. My tattered hop strainer looks back at me forlornly as for one last time I ask it to brave the dark boiling depths. But at the same time there is trust in its sorrowful expression, a bond between master and servant which binds us tightly and drives us towards new horizons. (it’s all getting a bit stupid now) And so it is with heavy heart that I describe to you, my beautiful-souled blog followers, brew 52, Imperial Black Golden Mild Pilsner.

Is it possible to make a beer black without having the flavour associated with roasted or caramelised malt? The reactions which produce coloured compounds in malt also produce those which are flavour-active. Some of the compounds formed through the malting process are both coloured and flavour-active. So the answer in a sane world is no, we cannot brew a black blonde beer. Well this isn’t a sane world. This is the world of 52 brews in year, this is the world of a beer coloured with squid ink!

There are two risks in this brew. One is that the pigment in squid ink will make a blue beer rather than a black one. The other is that the brain will superimpose dark flavours on the beer despite the absence of dark beer aroma compounds. Flavour is sensed in the nose but processed by the brain. You can only taste what your brain allows you to taste. For this reason in beer flavour profiling and difference testing, opaque glasses are used to prevent the eyes overriding the palate.

I want this beer to be as dry and “blonde” as possible so I am using pilsner malt, a very thin temperature programmed mash with plenty of sugar. To this I am adding loads of citrus hops to lift and sharpen the flavour.

Tech Spec:

Malt: Pilsner, sucrose

Hops: Cascade, Brewer’s Gold

Yeast: US Pilsner

Spices: Squid ink

OG: 1058

51. Imperial Noma Beer

This picture poses more questions than it answers

Foraging is great if you own a Danish restaurant. You get your team of foragers to pop down the local forest, pick a couple of kilos of grass and weeds and then arrange them tastefully on a plate. Idiots then come to your restaurant and pay you hundreds of pounds to go home hungry. Bigger idiots them come along and give you awards for excellence in cooking. Thank god that craft beer has not yet descended to this level of emperor’s new clothes.

If you are brewer in Cornwall and it’s December the proposition of foraging is a less attractive one. According to a very informative web site my trip into the wilds of North Cornwall should have yielded the delights of exciting herbs like sea beet, hairy bittercress, three cornered leak and moist mangina (I made the last one up). Even with this helpful guide I struggled. That was until my foraging expedition lead me to a clearing in the forest where, like a mirage, a range of potential brewing ingredients sat on a well-lit shelf under a sign saying fruit and veg.

The security guard didn’t seem to fully appreciate the concept of foraging for free food and after a short discussion I foraged via the self service till.

This brew would maybe be best undertaken in the summer when herbs are growing rather than rotting.

Tech spec

Malt: Low colour ale and crystal rye

Hops: Citra, Nelson Sauvin

Yeast: Unnamed Northern English brewery

Spices: Lime zest, pepper and tarragon

OG: 1081

50.Imperial Sage and Onion Saison

When I was in my late teens I went round my then girlfriend’s house for Christmas dinner. Her family lived in the better part of town, only ever shopped at Waitrose and had a hostess trolley for use at their evening soirees. My family were proudly working class and had never been to a soiree. I remember thinking that I was in for a taste sensation having a posh Christmas dinner. I was even permitted to forgo the rotten grape juice in favour of a selection of Belgian and British strong ales.

The homemade, slow-cooked, hand-reared, free-range organic squash and cream soup with herb croutons starter was good although my mum’s prawn cocktail urinated on it from a great height. I learned that one does not pronounce the s in croutons. The main course looked impressive with a huge, fresh rare-breed turkey and all the trimmings. All the trimmings is a singularly stupid phrase. Surely the trimmings are the crap you throw away? On my plate next to the slices of turkey breast, where the stuffing should have been, was a grey-brown lump of something. I politely enquired as to the identity of the grey-brown stuff and was told that it was homemade fig, walnut and honey stuffing from a recipe by Delia “sausage fingers” Smith. It was according to sausage fingers far superior to Paxo and kept the bird beautifully moist. I tasted some of the superior stuffing was horrified to discover that it tasted like something you would leave out for the birds in the depths of winter. I did not consider this stuff to be superior to anything apart from maybe leaving the guts in the turkey when roasting it. That day I learned something, well two things actually. One was that people’s taste is subject to influence beyond that of the biochemistry of the olfactory system and the other is calling your bird’s mum’s stuffing “rough” is not a viable social tactic.

Every year you see celebrity chef’s attempting to justify their existence by either telling you what you should already know about cooking Christmas dinner or subverting and bastardising classic combinations like turkey and sage and onion stuffing. I think, although you may not agree, that most of the time, the little extras and new twists just detract from a classic meal.

“All this from a bloke who makes beer out of pig’s insides!” I hear you say. It’s a good point and one with which I agree. Beer is best left as good quality water, malt, hops and yeast brought together by skilled processing to make a well-balanced, fresh and moreish drink. Playing around and pushing boundaries is fun but for me the art of brewing is subtlety, consistency and balance and what real brewers should excel at.

This brings me on nicely to today’s unsubtle and outlandish brew. Sage and onion saison is a saision spiced in the kettle with sage and dehydrated onion. For a complete explanation of what a saison is see Here or buy a book written by Zak Avery or Adrian Tierney-Jones.

Malt: Pilsner

Hops: Strisslespalt, Saaz

Yeast: Dupont yeast

OG: 1068