Some Closing Thoughts

On Friday afternoon, with work concerns disappearing into the rear view mirror, and a little time to go until I had to pick up the twins from school, I was having a very fine pint of lager (but which one?? It was Vested Interest, a Franconian-style kellerbier) at the bar in the Selvedge Brewing taproom. As I reveled in the magnificence of that beer, which is a stunner in an already superb lineup, I heard news that instantly yucked my yum.

Virginia's only craft malting company, my good friends Murphy & Rude, are closing their doors at the end of May.

To be honest, I don't know the ins and outs of why Jeff has decided to shut up shop, so I am not going to speculate on that. From what Murphy & Rude have told customers though, they were looking to scale and it became clear that the challenges of scaling made it unfeasible. What I do want talk about though is the ramifications of their coming demise.

From a very personal, and entirely self-centred, perspective, I am bummed that I am going to have to re-formulate all my homebrew recipes. For several years now, I have committed myself to brewing as much as possible with only their malt. My reasons are pretty simple, they are local, they malted, for the most part, Virginia grown grain, oh and their malt made my beer a lot better. While my best bitter was perfectly good with Maris Otter or Golden Promise, when I switched to using Murphy & Rude English Pale malt, the ante was upped quite significantly. Fresh malt makes a massive difference in terms of flavour. I also have recipes that I have designed specifically for Jeff's malt, my Haus Lagerbier is built on his Virginia Pils malt, which uses the Violetta strain of barley, as has the most recent versions of LimeLight, my lime witbier. As such, I will have to drop some dollars on stocking up on my preferred malts, and some containers to keep rodenty bastards at bay, so I can carry on brewing my favourite recipes for as long as possible.

Taking a broader perspective, there are several local breweries who are now in a similar position, though obviously with far more at stake as they make their living from Murphy & Rude malt. If I remember rightly there were about 12 breweries in Virginia that only used Jeff's malt, but something like 50 outfits using it at some level, including in some wonderful award winning beers. All of these will have to be re-factored for different grains, and in some cases find new suppliers, set-up accounts, contracts, etc, etc.

Taking it slight broader yet, there are farmers with grain in the ground right now who will have to find a new customer for their harvests. Most of those farmers, as I mentioned earlier are in Virginia, with some in Maryland and Pennsylvania, according to the M&R website. Hopefully the malting companies in those states will be able to pick up those harvests.

I don't think it is overstating the case to say that the loss of Murphy & Rude is a tragedy for the craft brewing and allied industries in Virginia. As Josh Chapman commented in my article about Murphy & Rude in Pellicle:

"When you close the distance between supplier and producer, things can only get better".

With that distance inevitably widening again, we are all the poorer for it.

Note: all the pictures here are beers I made exclusively with Murphy & Rude malt.

Making Bolt

I am going to the UK in about five weeks time, mostly for work, but also taking the opportunity of being over there to go an visit my parents in the north of Scotland - basically get to Inverness and keep going north, yeah, that north. 

The primary purpose for the trip is a work conference in London though. I haven't been to London in absolutely ages, I think the last time I was there was on one of my trips home to Scotland from Prague, when I would take the bus from Czechia to London and from thence up to Glasgow, and on to the Isle of Skye for the ferry to Uist. I honestly have no idea when I last spent a few days in London, it might be way back in the dim and distant past when we would go and visit my nan when my little brother and I were proper nippers - I have a core memory of watching "It's A Knockout" safely tucked up in her sofa bed.

In amongst all my looking at pubs in and around Westminster, I'll be staying just round the corner from the Abbey, I have been keeping an eye out for places that stock Timothy Taylor Boltmaker. Now, I realise that it is available in bottles, and I intend to get a couple to bring back to Virginia with me, but you really can't beat traditional British beers as Odin intended, from a beer engine, preferably with a sparkler attached...

But why Boltmaker specifically? Well, it all began when I watched a video from a YouTube channel called The Barnyard Brewhouse where he brewed a recipe inspired by Boltmaker. Every time I have got back to the UK in the last 20ish years, getting some Timothy Taylor Landlord has been high on my list of priorities, but I have overlooked their other beers, to my shame I am sure. Also, though, I have brewed a few times with Wyeast 1469 West Yorkshire yeast, which is reputed to be the Timothy Taylor strain, but I've never really been happy with any of the beers I have either brewed or drunk over here using that strain.

Imagine then my interest being piqued when The Craft Beer Channel, as part of their series on cask ale, went to Timothy Taylor and the head brewer, whilst showing them around said something to the effect that their yeast has evolved to need invert sugar to really get going. Hmmmm, I may have rewound that part of the video to make sure I had heard correctly. Indeed I had, they add about 5-7% of sugar to the wort, with this nugget in mind, and the very helpful ingredient list on the Timothy Taylor website, I set to coming up with a localised version of Boltmaker, using as I always do now, Murphy & Rude malt, and this is what I will be brewing in a couple of weeks:

• 69% English Pale
• 7% Biscuit
• 7% Crystal 40
• 7% Munich 9
• 5% Brown
• 5% Invert Sugar 1
• 17.5 IBUs of Fuggles at 60 minutes
• 9.5 IBUs of East Kent Goldings at 15 minutes
• 4.5 IBUs of Styrian Goldings at 5 minutes

For the invert sugar, I will use the very handy directions from Ron's book "A Homebrewer's Guide to Vintage Beer".

If everything goes to plan, when I get back from the UK, I will have a 3.9% abv Yorkshire style bitter on my kegerator, and hopefully a mini-keg cask or two in the cellar, with which to do a taste comparison with the bottles, and my memories of cask Boltmaker in London, which should still be fresh.

Aged Porter and Mild

In 2017 I designed and brewed a beer with Three Notch'd Brewing in Charlottesville, Blackwall London Porter. The recipe for Blackwall was based on copious amounts of research into porter brewing in the middle of the 19th century, and named for the docks in London which were so central to the history of the British Empire.

 

Featuring about 30% brown malt, the beer was only brewed a couple of times, but at the last brewing in 2018, I made sure to get myself a growler's worth for a little project. Beer hacking, to use Evan Rail's term. As well as my growler of Blackwall, I bought a bottle of Orval, which I promptly drank and pitched the dregs, containing all that brettanomyces goodness, into the growler, and soon enough the gasket on the swing top was thoroughly deformed as the additional CO2 created by our friend brett was expelled.

Yesterday, after nearly 8 years of the growler sitting on the shelf in my beer room, I took the opportunity of the head brewer from Selvedge helping me transport my new-to-me kegerator, to finally broach the growler.

I had two major concerns when I unclipped the lid...a geysir of foam, or being as lifeless as the grave. Thankfully neither happened and as you can see from the picture, there was carbonation in the beer, but not to excess, though the glass I poured for Josh did overflow, but that was more user error on my part than the beer itself.

So how did it turn out? Well, while it is true that I didn't take any notes, Josh and I had a pretty wide ranging conversation around what we were experiencing. In terms of the aroma, that classic barnyard character was present, not overwhelmingly so, however. Maybe it is because I grew up in a very rural area, but I have always found that character to be somewhat comforting. I was most relieved though there was no real vinegar aroma, and it was still identifiably a porter I was shuffling my nose about.

Tastewise I was getting some interesting nuttiness, I imagine from the brown malt - fun fact, when we first brewed the beer, the brewers at Three Notch'd were a little reticent about using 30% brown malt in the grist. I am glad I stuck to my guns on that one. Also in there was that thing which is often described as "vinous", which in this case reminded me of sour cherries, but lingering in the background was an umami character that I absolutely love in dark beers, just a merest wisp of soy sauce, but good quality soy sauce rather than industrially produced.

Clearly the presence of the brettanomyces had dried the beer out a little more than it had already been, but it wasn't like sucking lemons, just there was a tartness that I enjoyed. Nearly 8 years sitting around had meant that the hops were barely perceptible as anything more than bitterness in the finish. Overall I was really happy with how it turned out, and I enjoyed a couple of glasses, even persuading Mrs V to try a little as well.

I can't remember the exact quote, but I do recall seeing that well aged porters were described as being "racy and mellow", an epithet that now makes sense to me after this experiment. It's just kind of a shame that to repeat will mean brewing Blackwall at home again sometime...oh darn.

From one extreme, we went to the other, by broaching my final mini-keg "cask" of dark mild that I brewed earlier this year, and boy was that just flat out awesome. I think I need to get myself another couple of mini-kegs so that my mild brews can all be cask rather than in the keg. This one, Crystal Conjunction, was fine on keg, but with natural carbonation it absolutely shone. It's good to know that you can make very solid beer at home...