Midsummer Murders

I’ve probably blogged about the Cornish summer tourist peak before. There is no more effective way of reminding you of the beauty of the peace and tranquillity of a rural existence than a visit to a supermarket that you didn’t want to visit in the first place, which takes 10 times longer and involves battling with families of tattoo-pocked greasy blobs squeezed in ill-fitting shorts as they meander pointlessly through the shop like a atoms in an excited gas. Given the evident attraction of entire afternoons spent in Tesco I am surprised it hasn’t got a brown sign. Fortunately I’m a very laid back and tolerant person so it doesn’t annoy me but I can appreciate how some people would be moved to devising schemes of mass murder involving health screening trucks advertising free donuts leading to a rendering plant in the car park. 

I received a bottle of the woodlice beer from Honest Brew on Thursday and it shows the potential to be a quite accomplished beer. There were no prawn, urine, ammoniacal notes although the late hop was obscured slightly by strong higher alcohols and esters. Dry hopping and bottle conditioning should redress the balance between the hop and products of yeast metabolism. Any contribution from the crustaceans should also be easier to decipher once the beer is cleaned up. Much credit must go to Andrew and Craig for staying until 2am after the live brewing session to finish the brew. I departed in desperate need of bed suffering from the effects of two-days-at-the-GBBF-based fatigue. Better or at least more sensible men than me!

The finished version of Project Crustacean should be available to sample in a couple of weeks. I’m 

 looking forward to it!

Enjoy your bank holiday weekend. Mine will be an abstemious one as I am judging the final round of the World Beer Awards next week so I need my tasting faculties to be à point . Which is nice.    

Watersports and the Woodlouse Hospice

I could answer the question “why brew with woodlice?” with another question. Why not? I could but that would be stupid. Most people could instantly think of several good reasons why not. Woodlice are ugly, creepy-crawly, little prehistoric throwbacks which live under rocks amidst detritus and decay.  If Wikipedia is to be believed they also taste of strong urine. If this is case the people who are seen enjoying potted woodlouse here must be urolagnic or have no sense of taste. They claim woodlice taste of prawns. I am yet to try a cooked woodlouse. Given what Wikipedia say about it, it seems strange that I’ve not yet found the time. 

Here's one watching TV with my kitten

The other aspect of using living things for brewing with is one of conscience. Although dirty-looking and not the kind of thing you would like curled up on your lap of an evening, the woodlouse does fulfil at role in the ecosystem. They are perhaps more worthy of a place in this world than the guests on an episode of Jeremy Kyle or indeed the host and counseling team. To that end I have, for the last few months set up and ran a woodlouse sanctuary (hospice) where all their needs are catered for until they shuffle of this mortal coil. Once expired they have been cryogenically-stored (put in my freezer) until their big day in the Honest Brew Brewery. 

Woodlice, like all animals are made of carbohydrate, protein and lipids. They will therefore enrich the wort with fermentables, free amino nitrogen and trace elements which could be used in yeast metabolism. I’m hoping that bearing in mind the strong urine reference above they may act like the fish sauce in Thai cooking. Fish sauce smells like something unmentionable suffering from something even more unmentionable on its own but adds real depth and breadth to Thai curries.

I will add the crustaceans to the boil as a powder so we get a good degree of dissolution. They should dissolve completely by the end of the boil. As well as the novelty of seeing woodlice beer being brewed those who come along to the event will get to try some of my short run beers, some beers from the brilliant Franciscan Well brewery in Cork and will get a full-on super involved rant/lecture about what we are actually doing on a scientific/technical level and why. You will get to ask me questions, argue with me, insult me and finally expose me as the fraud you know I am. I hope you can join us.  

  

I am transporting all of the water for the brew up from my sand, GAC, RO and salt-adjusting treatment system in Cornwall because the local mains water is a bit crap. More details about the recipe and desired outcome will almost certainly follow.

In all labour there is profit

My post today is a nice positive post about lovely people and good times. I like balance so I’ll start it with a rant. I was on line buying beer and came upon a brewery I had not heard of. I checked out their website to find more out about this new brewery. I am not going to name names because I’m sure the people in question mean well. When I got to the brewery web site I found they were not calling themselves brewers but Brewing Scientists. Images of white coated boffins in a state of the art lab pushing the envelope of brewing technology to delight and beguile the great drinking public instantly sprang to mind. Further perusing the web site which portrayed a Brewdog tribute band (so a tribute band to a Stone tribute band) revealed three plump young men brewing in what looks like their mum’s kitchen. 

I was starting to doubt their credentials as true scientists until I found that these brilliant men have found a way of brewing a beer containing no chemicals. “There are no chemicals in our beer……. None at all!” is the proud boast of these Albert Einstein’s of the beverage world. Now this really is an achievement. Making a beer without carbon, nitrogen, sulphur etc. which malt, hops and yeast are made of is an immense feat of scientific ground breaking. Making beer without the hydrogen and oxygen in water is, I have to say, worthy of a Nobel Prize. I predict great things for these guys and their world-changing beers.

And now back to the main thread of my post.

The brewing industry is lovely thing if you’re a brewer. You get paid for doing something you love and you get to socialise with other brewers who the best people on the planet. As with all groups of people you do meet the occasional bad apple (or cock as I like to call them) but they are few and far between. August is the time that brewers converge on London to attend the GBBF.

I have always got excited about the GBBF. The first few years because it was only place in the UK where you could sample all week and still not try all the beers available you intended to. Then because it was a big day out with team Brakspear. These days it’s because 100s of the people I love are assembled and in the mood for some beverages and craic. Another highlight of GBBF time which makes it even more wonderful is the brewer’s technical dinner. Hosted by Simpsons Malt the night before the GBBF trade day, the technical dinner has masonic feel to it. Head Brewers from the larger regional craft breweries down to more significant micro craft breweries assemble in the upstairs room of a Mayfair watering hole to gain insider knowledge of the progress of this year’s barley crop. The oak-clad room with huge Edwardian boardroom-style table and décor is filled with more brewing knowledge than any text book, virtually no ego and a real sense of gentile inclusiveness. The evening helps guide malt buying policy, recipe formulation and improves bread roll throwing accuracy.

I am extending my GBBF trip this year to take part in the Urban Sessions and will be brewing live in front of an audience with Honest Brew on 14th August. Brewing a normal beer live didn’t feel enough. So I am going to do something which I think (everything has been done before in brewing so I’m probably wrong) has never been done before. I am brewing a beer with woodlice (as an ingredient not a collaborator). More details to follow.    

Happy 5th Birthday Brewhouse

On 5^th July 2008 I did the first mash in my DME brewhouse. Since then it has done just under 6000 brews, with around 150 thousand kg of hops, 19.2 million kg of malt and 504 million litres of water and using them to win 41 brewing awards. How she has changed! Ah the memories......

2008

2013

Thursday Vitriol

After years (well probably only months) of resistance I’ve joined Linkedin. 

Without ever really going on Faceache I’ve been victim to how the psychotic can use it on a couple of occasions so I avoid social media wherever possible. I’ve only been at it for three weeks and I am excited to report that I have nearly 300 business connections. Some I don’t know, some keep trying to sell me things I don’t want but most are great people with whom I can’t wait to share a beer or two. 

After looking through some of the people recommended as suitable connections I am thinking of calling myself a consultant nuclear physicist on the basis that I microwave egg whites every morning and know what an SP orbital is. I have seen the role “brewing consultant” listed by at least 20 people. Some of them are real brewers and scientists who have all the tickets and experience of working in a good-sized commercial brewery (Bill Simpson, David Smith, Chris Giles) but a significant minority are failures, bull-shitters and snake oil salesmen.

I’ve had a couple of occasions where I’ve been faced with a seemingly unfathomable problem, have exhausted the phone a brewer friend option and turned to a consultant. Only to have a children’s party entertainer without their costume turn up and the only benefit derived from their visit was to make me feel very good about my capability as a brewer. 

One bloke calling himself a brewing consultant on Linkedin is probably the worst brewer in the world. If you put the stuff he says about brewing which is true on one end of a seesaw and the stuff he makes up, has misconstrued or he has learned from a someone speculating on US homebrew forum on the other, the latter end would be sunk 300miles into the earth. His ability to talk with confidence in a mid-Atlantic drone about “cudding edge brewing science” while demonstrating a complete lack of understanding would be funny if he didn’t believe everything he says. Phrases like “retro nasal humulone sting”, “oxidized Pro-ceramide R leading to butyric notes in brett-aged bottled ales” flow from his beard-lined mouth like very stupid vomit.

 

I hope that the subtlety of English used in the last paragraph did not detract from its ability to convey my contempt for the pseudo-expert. 

I interviewed another “consultant” for a job in the not too distant past and they weren’t able to answer any of the very simple technical questions I posed. Other professions must have them but these days brewing seems to be becoming increasingly crowded with Walter Mittys.   

If you are an inexperienced brewer the best approach to avoiding the unsolvable problem is always to study brewing to degree level, to learn the practicalities at a range of breweries of different scales and then do your first mash in charge. If the call of the craft beer fame and fortune is too strong and you simply must start sooner and need advice, make sure your adviser is at least degree level-qualified, has at least 10 years of brewing experience at a good scale and has made some consistently good beers in his/her time. Often those most willing to advise are the least able.