Good News!

A quick break in the scheduled postings - trust me, I carried on my bitter and pub adventures in the UK after flying to and from Inverness - but this is good news that needs sharing.

On Wednesday an email was sent out that I have actually been expecting for a few weeks now, but I didn't want to let the cat out of the bag. Simply put, Murphy & Rude are not going out of business.

But first, a tale of how I learnt that news. When it became public that Jeff and co were going to be closing down, I said to Mrs V that I needed to make a big order of malt to see me through the rest of my brewing year. To that end I bought a 50lb/22.7kg of Virginia Pils, and one of English Pale - they are, after all the base of pretty much all of my beers. Also as part of that order I got 25lb/11.4kg bags of Vienna and Biscuit malts; 10lb/4.5kg bags of white wheat and brown malts; and 5lb/2.3kg bags of Munich 9, Munich 15, and Americano (basically pale chocolate) malts; oh and a packet of Greenmont Mother hops for good measure. A total then of 185lbs/84.1kg of malt.

When I swung by their old location to collect my order, Jeff was there and the very first thing he said to me was "Murphy and Rude will abide my man, Murphy and Rude will abide". He then proceeded to tell me the story behind the demise and resurrection of Murphy & Rude. The demise was basically a perfect storm of increased rents, heat affected green barley, and climate change impacted agricultural loss, resulting in a lack of product to tide the company over a planned move to a new location about 35 miles from Charlottesville.

The resurrection, which is the important part of this story, is the result of an agreement with Carolina Malt House, based in Cleveland, North Carolina, just north of Charlotte. As a result of their partnership, production of Murphy & Rude malt is moving to North Carolina, but importantly (at least in my opinion) Carolina Malt House will continue to purchase barley from M&R's Virginia farmers specifically for Murphy & Rude products, which will be malted to M&R's product specifications. So, Virginia Pils will still be Virginia Pils, made with Virginia grown Violetta barley.

While production is moving to North Carolina, Jeff will still be leading the sales, product development, and order fulfillment for the Murphy & Rude brands throughout Virginia. For homebrewers, like myself, Jeff is working on a solution to keeping the Grain Store going, which is fantastic as I really want to continue using Murphy & Rude malt in my beer.

In a time when we are seeing brewery, and allied industries, closings regularly, it is great that a solution has been found that keeps alive Virginia malt, made from Virginia grain, turned into Virginia beer. Here's to years more of brewing with Murphy & Rude malt!

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.

Hop to Murphy & Rude Mother

I don't really post all that often on here about my homebrew, or at least not as often as I actually brew beer in my garage. I am more likely to post pictures of grains, hops, and packets of yeast on my main Instagram account, I have a separate one for my book, "Virginia Cider: A Scrumptious History", if cider is more your thing...

Since the twins have reached an age where they don't need constant oversight, I have been able to find the necessary time to myself to brew. Kid related side, I popped into Selvedge last Friday and the bar staff made a point of thanking me for the fact that when my kids are in the taproom they are impeccably well behaved. We had been in for lunch and a pint the previous weekend and there were kids roaming the taproom unsupervised, which I know is a pet annoyance for many, and I fully understand that. In my world it is one thing to be a "family friendly pub/taproom/whatever you want to call it" but it is incumbent on families to likewise be pub/taproom/whatever you call it friendly as well. I like having the option to take my kids with me to the pub, and would be mortified if they abused that privilege so that fewer places would welcome families - after all, how else do you teach people to be good pub goers if not through teaching them when they are young?

Anyway, back to homebrew. I probably brew twice a month or so these days, having the chest freezer fermentation/lagering chamber means I can have a pretty regular supply of beer in my kegerator, and best yet I don't ever have to look at the menu and wonder if there will anything I want to drink. Currently carbonating, and hopefully ready to tap on Friday, is my first all grain version of LimeLight, my Belgian style witbier that uses lime peel in place of Curaçao orange, and batch 2 of my Haus Lagerbier project is in primary.

As with all my beers in the last couple of years, all of the grain has come from Murphy & Rude, our local craft malting company that I did a profile of a while back for Pellicle. I am not ashamed to admit it, and I realise here I am insanely privileged, but being able to support a local malting company, who in turn buy all their grain from local farmers, and also get involved in projects to make sure that historic Virginian corn varieties remain available to the like of Josh Chapman for making their gorgeous malted corn lagers, is deeply, deeply satisfying. It definitely helps that M&R malts are right up there in terms of quality and freshness. My house best bitter has been brewed for more than 2 years now with just Murphy & Rude malt, and it is the best it has ever been.

Speaking of my best bitter, a few recent batches have been brewed using Virginia grown Challenger hops from Mountain View Hops down the road in Floyd County, and now thanks to Murphy & Rude I will have more options for making near completely Virginia versions of that beer. Over the weekend, they announced that they are now stocking Virginia grown hops, in particular those of Greenmont Hopworks in Albemarle County. At present they have three varieties available, Cascade, Crystal, and their own unique hop called Mother, a wild hop that was discovered on their farm and has proven excellent for brewing - a recent version of Selvedge's landbier, Local Fabric, used them to great effect.

As a result of Murphy & Rude selling hops as well as grains now, my next batch of best will likely use Mother for the 40 odd IBUs that go into it. Now if only they sold Virginian yeast strains, such as that isolated by Jasper Yeast from an oyster plopped in some wort by Josh Chapman, my dream of a purely, and genuinely, local homebrew will become a reality.

A Little Self Evaluation

So far this year I have brewed almost as many times as I managed in the entirety of 2022. It turns out that having children that understand instructions and get quickly bored of watching daddy watch a boil kettle and disappear to play in the yard makes getting back to all-grain brewing far more feasible, and even enjoyable once again. It might also help that I have replaced the crappy little push button faucet on my mash tun for a ball valve and draining the first runnings now takes 5 minutes where it used to take 20.

In getting back to brewing more regularly this year, I also made a commitment to use malt from our local maltster, Murphy & Rude Malting Company, as much as possible. I have been developing new recipes based purely on their malts, and updating some of my existing recipes as well.

The very first brewday of 2023 was to brew a long standing favourite style of mine, dry stout. The grist was made up of pale, biscuit, roast barley, and milk chocolate malts - milk chocolate is Murphy & Rude's name for pale chocolate malt. For hops I used the locally grown Challenger hops, and of course the water came from my well. The only non-local ingredient was the yeast, which is Safale S-04, basically my go-to yeast. Coming in at 4% abv, and with 40 IBUs, it looked like this:

Basically what you expect a pint of stout to look like, and those looks are not deceiving, it smells and tastes as you would expect a low gravity dry stout to taste, especially if your reference point is Murphy's rather than Guinness. While it is true I do like a pint of Guinness, if Murphy's is also on tap in the same establishment, I'd be on the Murphy's instead. One thing that struck me though with this being my first all Murphy and Rude malt homebrew was the freshness and clarity of the malt flavours, especially the biscuit and milk chocolate which lacked the fusty character that can sometimes be present in malts that have enduring long journeys from Europe to the US.

As Virginia's rather lame, mild, and snowless winter dragged on, thoughts began to turn to spring, and in particular my wife's fiddle teacher's kind of annual St Patrick's Day concert/gathering, for which I brew a couple of kegs of beer. Mrs V's teacher is Alex Caton, who in 2015 released an album of songs and poems from the mining communities of England and Appalachia called "Never Take A Daisy Down the Mine". For the album release party I brewed a dark mild called Pit Pony, and Alex asked for a re-brew for the gathering.

Pit Pony was a beer that I re-factored to use Murphy & Ride malts, though as they don't do a honey malt the grist wasn't 100% Virginian. However, I did use a blend of their Crystal 40, 60, 80, and 150, as well as the biscuit malt, all on top of their pale malt. Sure at 4.3% it is a wee bit stronger than some of the guidelines would say a dark mild should be, so let's just call it a best mild shall we? The hops were a remnant of East Kent Goldings I had knocking about, and so that the malt could shine through, I took advantage of Safale's US-05 for it's clean character. The crystal malts really are the star here, with lots of toffee, caramel, and a touch of singed sugar in the mix. My only regret was that I didn't put it in a cubitainer to serve as an ersatz real ale.

The third of my recent brews, there is technically a fourth but that is a re-brew of the stout, was a blonde ale so there would be something paler for those who equate dark colour with heavy beers.

This one is a completely new recipe for me. Continuing my 100% Virginian malt when possible commitment, the grist is Murphy & Rude's Virginia Pils, Vienna, Crystal 15, and Soft Red Wheat malt which gave me an ABV of 4.5% and that absolutely banging colour. On the hops front, I decided to use up some Cascade I had in the freezer, with a calcuated 23 IBUs, though with a healthy addition at flameout just for aroma. I stuck with US-05 for the yeast, though this time more to let the hops do their thing. I realise I am biased, but damn this is one lovely beer, well, was as my neighbour and I kicked the keg last weekend. I will be brewing this several times this year I am sure, though likely swapping out the hops to get different characters, I definitely plan a version with Saaz, and likely one with Hallertauer Mittelfrüh,  perhaps even a 100% Fuggles one as well.

With regular brewing very much back on the table, and a kegerator in the kitchen to justify the expense of by having beer regularly on tap, I can see homebrew making up a greater portion of my drinking this year. 

Brewing with Murphy & Rude

Hopefully by now you have read my article about Charlottesville's Murphy & Rude Malting Company on Pellicle. One thing that I mentioned in the piece is that I have brewed several times with their malt in my own homebrewing shenanigans, usually as a specialty malt on top of a base of Golden Promise or Maris Otter. When Jeff suggested then that we brew a batch of my best bitter recipe using just his malt, I jumped at the chance. For the eagle eyed among you, you will have noticed us doing so in some of the pictures on the article.

It was actually Jeff who suggested brewing the best bitter, and I am never one to turn down the opportunity of a collaboration, though it is definitely the first time I have brewed with a malting company. I momentarily played with the idea of creating a new recipe specifically for this project, but when I mentioned it to Mrs V she suggested that we stick with my tried, trusted, and oft brewed best bitter that is the basis of Three Notch'd Bitter 42. Fun fact, the first time I met Jeff, at Kardinal Hall, to discuss the article his first words were "you're miss Ashley's husband, right?" - Mrs V is a Montessori teacher, and Jeff's kids went to her school, though were in a different teacher's class.

Anyway, I took a look at the Murphy & Rude website to decide what malts would take the place of my regular Golden Promise and Briess Victory combination. The base malt was pretty obvious, Jeff does an "English Pale" that he describes as:

"Well-modified pale ale malt kilned to slightly higher temps at the end of curing to release the slightest bit of nutty sweetness (Grape Nuts®, saltines, sunflower seed, honeysuckle) and unlock hints of pretzel and pizza crust."

With a Lovibond rating of 3-3.5° it is just in the same ballpark as both Golden Promise and Maris Otter from the UK.

The specialty malt to replace Briess Victory was more of a challenge as they do a Biscuit malt, which I had previously used as a substitute for Victory to good effect, and a Belgian Amber that sounded intriguing. The Biscuit is described as:

"A fantastic malt for adding body, smoothing out competing dark malt flavors, or delivering buttery or baked dough sensory attributes mid-palate. Biscuit malt is also a great selection when seeking additional body for sessionable beers without adding significant color"

while the Belgian Amber thus:

"Built upon a higher kilned base malt to deliver exponentially more depth than a traditional Amber. Flavors of biscuit bottom, roasted peanut shell, toasted Grape Nuts®, Bran Flakes®, and hard pretzel, with the slightest bite in the background. Great for big Belgians, Fall seasonals, spiced beers, Double IPA".

I took Mrs V's advice though and stuck with the Biscuit, which is a bit paler than the Briess product.

The only challenge in the brewing was the temperature, it was bloody hot that day. If memory serves it was the first 95°F day of the year in central Virginia, though it was much cooler a few weeks later when it came time to drink the beer and see how it had turned out. Throughout the fermentation process, Jeff kept me up to date on how things were progressing, and basically we hit every number and milestone as expected.

Other than a touch of chill haze, the beer was exactly as I had hoped it would be. We went classic with this version of the recipe, using East Kent Goldings for the 40 ish IBUs, and my house yeast strain Safale S-04 to get to the 4.2% abv. One thing that really took me by surprise was just how much additional flavour came out by virtue of using really fresh malt, rather than just freshly milled malt. In the Pellicle article, Josh Chapman at Black Narrows Brewing commented that closing the circle between supplier and producer really benefits the beer, and that freshness really shone through in the beer that we produced.

With the new brewing season almost upon us, I rarely brew during the summer, I have started to work out how I can get back to doing all grain brewing rather than extract brewing. I have nothing against extract brewing, indeed my kegerator currently houses a 100% extract ordinary bitter that is delicious and I plan to brew it again soon. However, with all grain back on the horizon as a viable option, I plan to use Murphy & Rude malt wherever possible.