Are You For Real?

On Friday afternoon I needed a pint. A proper pint that is, one that is 20 fluid ounces, or just over half a litre, as in 68ml over half a litre (for those outside the States, not everything here is bigger than elsewhere, their pint is a mere three quarters of the real thing). Thankfully the pub I frequent most often here in Charlottesville, and that not as often as I would like, now knows that when I ask for a pint, that's what I get, a  proper pint, in a nonic glass - my favourite shaped glass.

The pub in question is Beer Run, a bar, restaurant and bottle shop rolled into one, 2 minute drive from my house, delight. They also have a handpull, with a sparkler! Friday's firkin of fun was a barleywine from Cricket Hill, and it was delicious, far too easy to drink for an 8%abv beer. I needed a pint, the second one I wanted. So all seemed right with the world, a sparkled pint of barleywine, not cold, not warm, just right, pulled nicely and served by a smiling young lady - seriously, what more could you want in life? Perhaps being sat by a roaring peat fire, with my new Cairn Terrier puppy stretched out at my feet would round the scene out perfectly.

I love seeing handpulls in pubs, there are at least two such treasures here in Charlottesville that I know of, the other being in South Street Brewery. I am not a fan in the slightest of cold and fizzy beer - and people that try to give me a frosted glass are politely asked to return with a normal glass, thank you very much. If I want cold and fizzy, I'll drink Pepsi. Even when I am in the Starr Hill tasting room, I pour the Dark Starr Stout just after giving a group the penultimate beer for the day, so it can warm up and the lovely chocolate and coffee aromas and flavours can unlock and come to the fore.

Perhaps I am alone in this, but I often sit in the pub gazing at the beer engine and thinking about the stillage. I assume as most beers I have had on cask at both Beer Run and South Street are properly stillaged. Then my mind wanders back further in the process, to the filling and priming of the cask itself, and whether or not it is possible to use a regular Sanke keg as a cask? I am then filled with dread, am I being duped? Is this really cask conditioned ale, or is it just unfiltered beer, pulled through a beer engine?

At the end of the day though, it is the beer in the glass that is important, and every pint I have had in Beer Run from the beer engine has been a delight - especially the Joker IPA they had from Williams Brothers a while back, oh and the Two Hearted Ale from Bell's in Michigan, oh yes, mustn't forget Cricket Hill either - a brewery I will have to winkle out more beer from.

Brewer of the Week

I like to keep an eye on my Google Analytics account for Fuggled as it tells me all manner of interesting information - interesting if, like me, you are something of a stato with a taste for useless trivia. Seriously guys, if I may have a moment of hubris, you want me on your pub quiz team! One stat that has been consistent over the lifetime of this blog is the third most common country from which I get visitors. Norway. I have never visited Norway, though I would love to. I have only once met someone from Norway, as in actually meet rather than chat online, and that was in PK. When there were a few beers from a Norwegian brewery at a Christmas beer event in Prague a couple of years back, I got Evan Rail to pick me up a few bottles of stuff as I was in France at the time. Those beers were simply superb, and today, it is my privilege to have as Brewer of the Week, the maker of those beers.....

Name: Kjetil Jikiun
Brewery: Nøgne Ø, Det Kompromissløse Bryggeri AS

How did you get into brewing as a career?

I do not really know if I can call it a career. I am still an unpaid owner of Nøgne Ø, and there has been no dividend paid to the shareholders to this point. It all started with my homebrewing. At one point I realized that I just had to get out there and make my brews available to the public. I guess I felt like an artist, unable to get out with my message.

As such, Nøgne Ø was started. As we had no money, it was done on a shoestring budget, and the brew system was made with scrap metal and old milk tanks.


What is the most important characteristic of a brewer?

A brewer needs to be dedicated to make his/her products better every time he/she brews. He/she needs to be meticulous in paying attention to detail, and to document what took place in each individual brew.

Before being a professional brewer, did you homebrew? If so, how many of your homebrew recipes have you converted to full scale production?

Yes, I was a homebrewer. Only three of my homebrew recipes were brought into commercial brewing. It is interesting to observe though that two of these are today Nøgne Ø’s best selling beers.

If you did homebrew, do you still?

No, I do not have time. Absolutely all time off (time off from my other (and paid) job) is spent at the brewery. I do not have time to meet friends, maintain cars and house or having hobbies (like homebrewing).

What is your favourite beer that you brew?

That has got to be our lemongrass ale. It is very straight forward and simple to brew. Single mash, low original gravity, not too many hops in the whirlpool, though lots of nice aroma in the brewery, because of all the lemongrass!

If you have worked in other breweries, which other beer did you enjoy brewing, and why?

I have never worked for other breweries. Only my own. I have been involved with some collaboration brews though. I think brewing Special Holiday Ale (with Stone and Jolly Pumpkin) in Jolly Pumpkin’s brewery in Dexter, Michigan, was a thrill! Ron Jeffries’ set up and techniques are extremely interesting, and the beer is of course wonderful too!

Of the beers you brew, which is your favourite to drink?

The beer I always get back to, and which I never get bored of, is IPA. I like it fresh, with lots of things going on, like undisciplined flavours and aromas. Actually I prefer it straight out of the fermenter, before it is ready for bottling.

How important is authenticity when making a new beer, in terms of flavour, ingredients and method?

I think authenticity is only important when brewing to style. We allow ourselves to fairly creative though with regards to ingredients and methods. Of course, we would never allow ourselves to omit using unmalted wheat in a witbier, as this is so significant for that style, but we use peated malt in our tripel, and rye malt in our imperial stout. The final result though must clearly convey to the customer which beer style he/she is drinking.
Some of our beers are not to style, as Peculiar Yule, Winter Ale, Sunturnbrew and #100. It is quite liberating to think out of the box when creating things like those. Focusing on flavours and aromas only and not paying attention to authenticity.


If you were to do a collaborative beer, which brewery would you most like to work with and why?

This probably sounds insane, but I would like to do a collaborative brew with Heineken, Budweiser, Carlsberg or one of the big industrial brewers. It would be fantastic to make something interesting and at the same time something which the big masses would have access to. That would be a great way to reach out to a larger audience.

Which beer, other than your own, do you wish you had invented?

The world is full of wonderful beers. I love a lot of them. I guess what makes them so interesting to me is the fact that they were invented by others, and the fact that I do not know the whole story behind. Small secrets can be good for love affairs.

Some beers I totally admire, would be Fullers ESB, Anchor Liberty, Westmalle Tripel, Oscar Blues Ten Fidy, Avery Maharaja, Three Floyds Dreadnaught, ……………………………

My Dominion Cup Results

Patiently I waited, patiently that is once I had given the Dominion Cup organisers my address again because I couldn't remember filling it out when I registered. 2 weeks went by and still no sign of the score sheets for the 3 beers I entered in the Domion Cup, Virginia's largest home brew competition, then yesterday they arrived.

I had already been tipped off that my dunkelweizen/weizenporter had scored 30 out of 50, putting it in the "Very Good" category - defined as "may have a minor flaw (technical or stylistic) or may be lacking in balance or complexity". The thing though with the score sheets is that they give feedback which I can use to improve my beers.

Continuing with the dunkelweizen, which came 10th from 20 entries, the theme from both judges was that it was more roasty than malty. The dark grains in this beer were caramel 60 and chocolate, so perhaps in future versions I will tone back the chocolate and add an extra caramel malt, perhaps a 10 or 20, especially if it is being entered in competition as a dunkelweizen.

The peat smoked mild scored 33 out of 50, and placed 7th out of 15. In my eagerness not to allow the smoke to overpower the other elements of the beer I only used a very small amount, which seems to have caused the biggest criticism of this beer. I entered the beer in the Smoke Beer category rather than the mild or porter categories, and am now convinced that it needs more oomph to really make it as a smoke beer. Next time it will be a mild, or I'll just add more of the peat malt that I still have vacuum packed away.

The last of the three beers was Samoset 2009, my barleywine. Averaging 32 out of 50 from the 2 judges (the higher score coming not just from a Master BJCP judge but also a professional brewer), Samoset came in 6th out of 25. Both judges really only had two criticisms, both said it was a touch thin and that it would have ranked higher as an American Barleywine rather than the English that I put it down as.

Overall, I am very happy with the score sheets, especially as I have been brewing for little more than 18 months and am using the extract with grains approach. This weekend I will be dropping off more beers for another Virginia home brew competition and hope to score as well there as in the Dominion Cup.

Inspiration

Almost every homebrewer I know gives the beer he, or she, makes a name, and I was thinking the other day about the things that inspire the names we give our beer and brewing operations. For example, I refer to my brewing as "Green Dragon Brewing", going back to the original name after a brief flirtation with Pivovar Brewing, which is almost a tautology when translated from Czech. Brewery Brewing? Nah, sounds a bit naff really. The name Green Dragon Brewing was chosen because in the film version of Lord of the Rings, Pippin and Merri sing a song about beer, which contains the line "the only brew for the brave and true, comes from the Green Dragon".

With the beers I brew, the names often reflect the ingredients, or what I am trying to achieve in making the beer - of course it is easy to say that I am just trying to achieve making a good beer, but there are often reasons that underpin the recipe creation process. Take for example my India Black Ale that I bottled last week, called Red Coat India Black Ale. The thinking behind the the beer is that India Black Ale, or Black IPA if you must, is nothing more than porter using different hops and too many of them. Replace the Cascade, Centennial, Simcoe et al with British hops to the same IBU rating and hey presto, you have over hoppy porter. Red Coat of course refers to the soldiers of the British Empire for whom beer was shipped out to both the American colonies and India.

A beer such as my spiced Christmas amber ale, called Biere d'épices, harks back to my growing up in Germany and loving the smell, and taste of course, of the gingerbread houses my mother made at Christmas. Why use French as the name though? Well, simply because my parents now live in France and given the Belgian yeast and French hops in the beer, it sounded more apt than "Lebkuchenbier" -  though of course a quick change of yeast and hops, and Lebkuchenbier could yet be this year's Christmas libation of choice.

Tomorrow I will be bottling the Best Bitter I brewed a couple of weeks back, single hopped with First Gold and fermented with Wyeast 1968 London ESB yeast. The name is Gunnersbury Gold, gold for the hops and Gunnersbury for the park in London where my brothers and I would play when we went to visit my nan in Southall.

The one thing I haven't done of yet is get seriously creative and create labels for my bottles. There is a very simple reason for this, I have, in the words of Blackadder, all the "artistic talent of a cluster of colour blind hedgehogs in a bag". I did though create this little thing for my recent weizenporter, Black Rose.

However, Rob from OptaDesign is supremely talented and created this label for LimeLight.

What then inspires your homebrew brands and label designs?

Anything But Brown and Boring

Growing up in the far north west of Scotland, there were two main beer choices when you finally hit your 18th birthday for your first legal beer. The cool kids at school almost uniformly went for mass produced lagers, your Carlings, Fosters and Tennants of this world. Those outside the secondary school jet set drank Guinness, or Murphy's depending on which pub you went to. When you ventured to the mainland, quarterly trips to Inverness being the highlight of life pretty much (even Skye was a thrill!), pubs with bigger selections beckoned, Caffrey's or John Smith's in a pub rather than from a widgeted can was the height of excitement.

Yet, sat on the bar, seemingly forlorn was Newcastle Brown Ale, the old man beer. As far as I knew nobody drank it other than the old men. Brown ale had an image problem, it was boring. Fast forward nearly 20 years and I still hear the same way of thinking, though usually about bitter as well as brown ale, the so-called "boring brown beers" that Britain seems to excel at producing. A minor aside, it really pisses me off when Brits bash their native products, being lured by the glamour of sexy foreign imports with odd names and sufficiently pretentious ingredients to get mentioned in the Guardian.

Last weekend Mrs Velkyal and I went out with some of my Starr Hill tasting room colleagues for some post work drinkies. I say post work, it was for them post work, it was for me post brewing at Devils Backbone. Just round the corner from the Starr Hill brewery is a pub called Fardowners, and it is a good pub, with nice food, a good buzz and a decent selection of beer. On reading the draught beer selection (sorry I rarely drink a bottle when I go to the pub, I just don't see the point of that unless it is something rare), I was almost aghast when the only beer that appealed was a brown ale from Williamsburg Alewerks just a couple of hours up the road. Aghast purely because I had always thought of brown ale as old man beer, and well, who wants to admit they may be getting old?

Three fabulous pints later and I knew I needed to explore more in the world of brown ale, in particular American Brown Ale, I will however admit to Samuel Smith's Nut Brown Ale being something of a go to beer in the absence of anything else that take's my fancy. After digging around in the cellar, I found a couple of bottled versions of the Williamsburg Tavern Ale that had so delighted my palate, and as luck would have it, our local supermarket just got in Sierra Nevada's autumnal seasonal, Tumbler, a brown ale.

First up was the Williamsburg Tavern Ale, which poured a deep crimson with a thin, ivory head and then out of the bottle came the evidence of bottle conditioning, a happy surprise! Can we have more bottle conditioned beers over here please? The nose was just as I remembered from Fardowners, lots of cocoa off set with the slightest hoppy citrus thing. Drinking it was a wonderful balance of the sweet chocolate maltiness and the bitter bite of the hops, which are Cascade and Amarillo I believe, to round out the beer there is a soft toffee touch that makes it such easy drinking. Really it was wonderfully smooth and tasty, a great beer for sitting on the balcony in the autumn chill and just watching the sun go down over the turning leaves.

What can be said about Sierra Nevada that hasn't already been said? They nail classic styles so perfectly that it would be easy to drink nothing but Sierra Nevada and never get bored. Their Tumbler seasonal special, described as an "Autumn Brown Ale" rather than a "Fall Brown Ale" which I would have expected, pours a very dark copper, with a red tinge and a light tan head. Again the cocoa notes are there, but this time there is a tobacco smell - you know the kind of tobacco smell from people rolling their own, a smell I love by the way, even though I have never smoked in my life. Tastewise, again chocolate, but lighter than the Williamsburg brew, with caramel and biscuitiness thrown in for good measure, with a crisp hoppy bite in the background. Another beautifully balanced beer that you could drink all night.

Brown Ale in the hands of Sierra Nevada and Williamsburg Alewerks is anything but boring, it is well made, tasty and the kind of beer that makes you more than happy to have another, and then another. All round good stuff, if drinking this stuff makes me an old man, then the old men knew a thing or two.

Homebrewer of the Week

This week's Homebrewer of the Week interview is really a Homebrewers of the Week, as both Boak and Bailey of blogging fame weigh in on this particular interview. I had the pleasure of meeting them in Prague a while back and enjoyed boozing with a couple of people who so obviously enjoy their beer, so without further ado, here goes.....

Name: Boak and Bailey

How did you get into home brewing?

BOAK: We can't quite remember the exact motivation but, in about 2004, I bought Bailey an extract home brewing kit for his birthday.

BAILEY: And I made a couple of brews, both of which were terrible, and lost interest. They were terrible, by the way, because we did literally everything wrong.

BOAK: Then a year or so later, we picked up some better books, and had another go, and haven't stopped since.

Are you an all grain brewer or extract with grains?

All-grain, although we occasionally experiment with extract and sometimes use DME.

What is the best beer you have ever brewed and why?

Hard to say. Our first lager, maybe, or the IPA we made for our 10th anniversary party – lots of our guests loved it and still rave about it now.

What is the worst, and why?

Oh, there have been too many disasters. Probably the Belgian-style beer which got an infection and smelled of poo/vomit. The biggest disappointment was probably a Belgian-style blonde which looked great, smelled pretty good, but tasted like pure alcohol.

What is your favourite beer that you brew?

Probably our various lagers. It's so hard to get bottled lager in the UK which is anything like the stuff you get in Franconia, so we rely on this stuff to fill our stone krugs during the summer.

Do you have any plans or ambitions to turn your hobby into your career?

Doesn't everyone? We daydream, but we don't want to do anything professionally until we really know what we're doing. There are too many slightly amateurish microbreweries out there for us to go wading in to the market. Given how little time we have for brewing, it's going to be many years yet.

Of the beers you brew, which is your favourite to drink?

Think the answer is the same as for 5 above – the lagers we make consistently make us smile.

How do you decide on the kind of beer to brew and formulate the recipe?

BOAK: we tend to make sure we have a fairly broad range of ingredients in store and then see how we feel on brew day. I'll usually formulate a recipe using Qbrew (http://www.usermode.org/code.html), with a stack of brewing books and references for inspiration.

What is the most unusual beer you have brewed?

We've found that the more unusual beers are our least successful, generally speaking. We've experimented with raspberry and blackberry wheat beers; we've put star anise into strong ales; and added spice to stout. Our must successful experiment was probably the use of sherry-soaked oak chips in a couple of super-strong beers, which added a whole extra dimension without much hassle.

If you could do a pro-am brew, what would you brew and with which brewery?

Cantillon! We'd have to move to Brussels for several years, of course, and we'd make something like a framboise but with blackberries from Walthamstow Marshes.

Back to Bohemia

As I mentioned in Monday's general post about Devils Backbone, I spent Saturday with their brewing team. The project in hand was to brew a replica of the original 1842 recipe used by grumpy old Josef Groll to create what became Pilsner Urquell. I first heard about their plans for this beer back when I was browsing Jason's blog in the light of the magnificent 1904 Stout (please, please make more!), and patiently I waited. Each month Devils Backbone send out a newsletter to those who have signed up, and on receiving it earlier this month I replied, simply asking when the pilsner was coming? Following a few emails between Jason and I, he very graciously invited me to come out and help brew, so, of course, I jumped at the chance and cleared my schedule.

At 8 o'clock on Saturday morning I rolled up to the brewery, or rather, was driven by Mrs Velkyal as she needed the car to go rowing, to be met by Jason, and bags of milled grain filling the brewhouse with that gorgeous malt aroma. Eventually we would be joined by Jason's assistant, Aaron, and coming in and out pretty much all day was Heidi, who was taking photos and making a video. Jason's brewhouse is German designed and built, although in a former life it was in Japan. Being German built, there are three vessels rather than two, the usual mash tun/brew kettle and lauter tun being joined by the decoction kettle. In keeping with the plan to be authentic as possible, we would be doing a triple decoction  mash, which takes about 3 hours rather than the more common 90 minute infusion mash.

Just briefly, though I imagine most of you know how decoction mashing works, essentially you bring the main mash to a predefined temperature, pull off a portion of the mash into the decoction kettle, bring that to the boil and then return the decoction to the main mash, which raises the mash temperature and creates Maillard reactions. Obviously for a triple decoction you do this three times, each at a higher temperature than the last. Entirely oversimplified I know, but there we go.

With regard to the recipe, Jason was using an article in The New Brewer magazine as his guide, which called for Bohemian Pilsner malt, in Jason's case floor malted from Weyermann, acidulated malt and a touch of light caramel malt (if I recall properly, I didn't take notes, I was too busy being awed at brewing with a champion brewer). The hops? Well to quote Connor McLeod, "there can be only one", Czech Saaz. One of the things I was really interested in was to see the water profile. Plzeň is famous for it's incredibly soft water, but to my surprise this wasn't to be an issue, because the well from which Devils Backbone draws its liquor is actually softer than Plzeň! For yeast, Jason stuck with the Augustiner lager yeast he uses, which really adds to the authenticity because it was a Bavarian yeast that first fermented the sugars in the wort that gave birth to the pilsner style lager. It was my pleasure then to get the process started by chucking in the first bag of milled Bohemian Pilsner malt.

The mash took about 3 and a half hours rather than the usual three, mainly because the decoction kettle wasn't heating the decoction quick enough, soon fixed though with a good whack of a hammer - recalling the comment of another brewer I know describing his job as "1 part artist, 1 part scientist, 1 part handyman". To celebrate the first decoction we popped open a bottle of Budvar, the second was marked with Devils Backbone's Vienna Lager, the third with one of Aaron's recipes Reilly's Rye, which was very nice. With the three decoctions done, the mash was pumped over to the lauter tun to be sparged. The picture below shows the first runnings of the wort back into the brewing kettle.

During the sparging process we popped into the bar for some lunch, some more samples - the highlight being for me the UK IPA and their Congo Pale Ale, a Belgian IPA which was distinctively champagne like. Eventually though we had 11.5 hectolitres of wort, measuring at that point 11.5° Plato, correctly predicted by Aaron. Once the boil was on, and it was a vigorous boil, in with the first round of hops - ah the smell of Saaz. I am sure I am entirely biased, but Saaz is one of my favourite hops, wonderful aroma, great flavour in the beer. To mark the first and second hop additions, I pulled out a bottle of the barley wine I brewed last November, of which only 13 bottles remain (from an original batch of 18 that is). Both Jason and Aaron were very complementary about the beer, and given it's marked hoppiness, I may have miscategorised it in the recent Dominion Cup. The third hop addition was heralded with their Scottish ale, Ale of Fergus, to which I alluded on Monday, along with the comment that they don't normally mark all the stages of the process with a toast - a practice I fear I would institute if I had my own brewery!

Obviously in between stages Jason and Aaron weren't just sitting around twiddling their thumbs, there being plenty of jobs to be done, such as sanitising the fermenting vessel, harvesting the yeast, preparing for the next days brewing by milling the grain. With everything done to prepare for the wort, it was pumped through the heat exchanger and into the waiting fermenter. I was intrigued to see how they would pitch the yeast, basically as the wort is being pumped into the fermenter, the yeast is pumped into the same hose through a valve, while aeration is achieved with a jet of filtered air rather than pure oxygen. When the final gravity measurement was taken, it read 12.5° Plato - just right for a Bohemian Pilsner.

And there it is, Devils Backbone's replica 1842 Pilsner. When the fermentation is about 1° Plato from the target, the airlocks will be closed and the remaining CO2 created will carbonate the beer, a process called "spunding". Under pressure, the beer will then be transferred to a lagering tank to sit for at least 30 days, before again being moved, under pressure, to one of the serving tanks.

I want to thank Jason and Aaron for having me along to take part in the brewing process. it was a fantastic day and we have discussed doing another brew day together. In the meantime I will wait patiently for what I hope will be a wonderful drop of lager that I will fill every growler I own with. Cheers!