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!

Windsor the Second

Having left behind the warm embrace of the Windsor & Eton Brewery, picking up a copy of the local branch of CAMRA's latest magazine on the way out, I walked back to Arthur Road, past the appropriately named, though not yet open, Duke of Connaught.

I had a short list in my mind of places to visit, an amalgam of places visited by Tweedy Pubs in this video, and a few suggestions from folks on Reddit. First up on that list was the Carpenter's Arms, just down a narrow lane from Windsor Castle itself. Now, I have to admit, being an abysmal beer tourist - nothing new there if you know me - I didn't take that many pictures of the outside of pubs, but for the Carpenter's I did take a picture of the building opposite as it was just so funky.

I had snagged a seat opposite the bar in a bay window that was just delightful, and just as thrilling was seeing the pump clip of heaven on the bar.

Ok, sure, it's not a local beer in the furthest western reaches of Berkshire, but when you see Landlord on a beer engine, you drink it. It really is that simple, and it was as simply wonderful as you would expect. At this point in the proceedings news started filtering through about the sacking of Arne Slot from his role as Liverpool manager (head coach, whatever). Also distinctly not local, but something I haven't seen on tap for many a year was Budvar, so naturally I had a pint, and I almost wish I hadn't bothered. It wasn't bad per se,  it just looked deeply sad with the merest schmeer of foam on top of the liquid. My final pint here was the Nicholson's Pale Ale, the Carpenter's Arms being a Nicholsons pub after all, and it turned out to be surprisingly nice, I wish I had taken a picture really. Apparently the beer has Galaxy hops as well as the traditional Fuggles and Goldings combination, and it works really well. As with Windsor & Eton, I'd have happily stayed until the bus came, but other places needed visiting, and next up was The Corner House, so off I toddled.

Again as I stepped in, I was the only person in the place, and thankfully I didn't have to struggle to make a decision as to what beer was next. The bright blue pump clip made that decision for me.

Harvey's Sussex Best is a beer that I had never seen in the wild before. I have never seen it in the US, and so it was high on my list of beers to hunt out. It really is a pretty looking beer.

Unfortunately that first pint was distinctly vinegary, and the barmaid told me that she hadn't got round to pulling the lines through yet, and so a fresh pint was duly poured and that vinegar thing was no longer there. Setting to one side for a moment the idea that the barmaid served me beer that had been sitting in the line overnight, once I had a fresher pint I could kind of see what the fuss is about. This is such a quintessentially Southern English bitter, with notes of toffee, dark fruits, and a subtle sweetness in the background, all balanced expertly by the hops. However, I felt a pang of almost guilt at not really enjoying it as readily as I had various other beers that day, though that may have been a touch of palate fatigue at this point. 

I had a second anyway, before heading off to the final stop of the day, all the while aware that I had to get through security at Heathrow in order to fly to Inverness. The last place on the visit list, and the only place from which I have literally no pictures, was The Two Brewers, back up the road towards the Castle from the Corner House. My main reason for choosing the Two Brewers was that they actually have a beer list on their website, shocking as that may seem. As I mentioned in a previous post, pubs in England seem adverse to listing what beers they have on. Wine? Sure. Cocktails? We have a page for that. Beer? Good god man are you trying to encourage ruffians to drink here or something? They also had Fuller's London Pride at a very reasonable price, and so I had a few pints of that, sat at one of their various bars, keeping an eye upon the clock...

Make it back to Heathrow I did, through security and baggage drop off with no drama, only to discover nowhere was showing the Champions League final, and then eventually on to Inverness I went...

Of Guards and Fathers

It was 7.30am when my plane landed at Heathrow, the beginning of my 9 days back in the United Kingdom. Given the fact there was only an hour or so between that flight and the earliest flight to Inverness, I decided not to do a connection on the one ticket, and instead just get a separate ticket for the evening flight to Inverness. Thus I had the best part of half a day between flights, and as I mentioned in my last post, I decided to go to eschew the Tube into London proper, and get the bus to Windsor.

I had been to Windsor all of once previously, but I may have been about 12 years shy of being able to drink legally, and as such I don't remember much about that visit. There is though a family legend/inside joke that at some point whilst wandering near the castle, I asked my parents why it wasn't finished yet given the scaffolding that surrounded many of the buildings. I was then somewhat keen to walk by the castle to check up on progress in the intervening 40 odd years - there was still scaffolding to be seen, still not finished then I guess. It was getting pretty bloody warm by this point of the day, even though it was only 9.30 by now, so I took myself off along the river to get to my first planned stop of my tour of the town's hostelries.

It felt great to really stretch my legs after planes and buses, and also getting caught behind bimbling tourists (yes, I know) on the streets of Windsor in the early, comparatively, morning. Eventually I had to abandon the delights of a Thames stroll to amble my merry way through the Alexandra Gardens, through some railway arches and on to the taproom location of the Windsor & Eton Brewery.

Given that it was just a couple of minutes past opening time, I was the only person in the place, already with half a mind as to what my first beer of the trip was going to be, indeed my first beer in the UK since pre-COVID days, it had been that long. Alas the original plan went out the window as there was a problem with the Guardsman best bitter from the beer engine, so I went for Father Thames, a strong bitter - I am reticent to use the term "ESB" for strong bitters in the UK out of respect for the Fullers branding.

I had it in mind that as much as possible I would be drinking real ale while back in Blighty, and Father Thames set a pretty high bar, though I wasn't taking notes. According to the Windsor & Eton website this is actually a "winter bitter" brewed with local malt and Admiral hops. According to me, it was freaking delish, goodness me I love the marmalade thing that you get from Admiral, it is just a bit punchier than East Kent Goldings in this regard. The scrape of bitterness in the finish was enough to leaving me wanting more, and that first pint may have vanished in about four mouthfuls. Four mouthfuls of glorious real ale, all of those classic toffee sweet malt flavours, conditioned perfectly and at cellar temperature, the proper temperature if you are at all confused. If my fellow Brits cannot recognise that real ale is indeed intangible cultural heritage then they are lost beyond measure. So I had another while the magnificent bar staff sorted out Guardsman.

Once ready to be on parade, a pint was duly ordered, and being an army brat, I kind of geeked out on the pump clip, most likely for details a lot of folks would miss. For example, the central guard is a member of the Scots Guards, how can I tell? The tunic has buttons in sets of three, and the bearskin doesn't have a plume. Likewise the buttons and plumes are correct for the regiments being depicted, it's little things like this that I notice, yes I am weird. Fun fact, my great uncle was a guardsman during World War 2, Coldstream if I recall correctly (correction: it was the Grenadier Guards), back when regiments in the British Army had their own mechanical and electrical engineers. In the aftermath of the war, the plan to create the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, aka REME, was concluded, and my great uncle was transferred over to the new regiment. Anyway, the beer looked like this...

Another classic southern English bitter, this time of the best variety, and perhaps more "classic" than Father Thames, as it is hopped with Fuggles, Styrian Goldings, as well as Pilgrim. I love that this is a properly bitter, bitter beer, clocking in with 40 IBUs, about the same as my own house best bitter, and funnily enough the same ABV of 4.2%. There is something about the aroma of Fuggles, and Styrian Goldings does it too for obvious reasons though it is less noticeable, that always reminds me of pipe tobacco. That note was present, floating around with the usual earthy suspects that Fuggles brings to the table. Something about the word "earthy" makes me think of hearty peasants bringing in the hay, and maybe there is a whiff of grass and summer in the mix too. Maybe I was getting carried away, but I seriously started entertaining the idea of re-formulating my house bitter to have a darker variant in the roster...what heresy was Windsor making me entertain?

I spent a good few hours in the Windsor & Eton taproom before heading out into the wilds of Windsor to hunt down a few more of the pubs that I had put on my list to visit before I had to get the bus back to Heathrow and a plane to the Highlands. In those few hours I tried halves of some of their other beers, including Knight of the Garter, a 3.8% golden ale that was very much like a session American Pale Ale, bursting with the pine and citrus character of Amarillo, and Eton Boatman, a slightly stronger golden ale, that has more of a Southern Hemisphere hop character. Eventually though, head out I had to, there were other pubs to see, other breweries beers to try, and that will have to wait until another post.

A Little Help Goes A Long Way

As I mentioned in a previous post, I am heading to the UK in a few weeks, mainly for work, but with a little personal time chucked in as well. While I own the fact that I am a terrible beer tourist, I really don't plan my trips around breweries or beer cultures I want to visit - rather I go places and just see what is around. A key part of my planning process then, and maybe I a sad bandit for this, is to use Google Maps to find places in the locations that I will be, and then check out their websites to see if it is likely to be the kind of place I want to visit.

It is almost exactly 15 years that I wrote a post called "Do Pubs Help Themselves?" in which I lamented the standard of many a boozer website. My biggest beef was that many pub websites go to great lengths to tell you about their wine list, their cocktail list, their food options, but almost nothing about what beers are actually on draft, which is just as true for a tied house as it would be for a free house. So you would like to think that in our increasingly online world, pubs would have upped their game then, right?

Errr.....wrong. Sadly.

Maybe it is a product of the parts of the UK that I will be visiting, the north of Scotland, and London, with a minor detour to Windsor when I first arrive. Let's start with the positives though, the Windsor & Eton Brewery website is really useful, and as a result of reading that, and watching the Tweedy Pubs video on Windsor and Eton, I made the decision to spend my several hours between flights in and out of Heathrow by going west instead of east. I really like that they have their draft list in the taproom readily available, and so they will definitely be on the list of places to hit. Admittedly I'll probably go to their tied house, The George, as well, but they don't keep an up to date list of beers on their own website.

Also on the good side is the site for The Two Brewers, again for actually having a beer list on their website, but extra kudos for having the price of a pint on the list as well. I imagine I will be popping in for a pint of London Pride at some point in my day then.

My biggest challenge though, and I am sure there are reasons for this, but with so many tied houses in the English part of my trip, it does get really frustrating when there is a shared platform with generic information, and almost universally no list of what is on cask in a given pub - this goes for chains like Wetherspoons as well. Yes, the many Fullers pubs in the city have elegant, beautifully designed websites, but again I can't find out which beers of the Fullers Brewery range are available, making it pot luck to stumble across less regularly seen beers (at least from what I have been told) such as London Porter. I don't want to single out Fullers, as I have seen the same with Shepherd Neame, Greene King, and Nicholsons, though several Young's pubs tend to have at least a list, and occasionally pricing as well.

In the spirit of sharing around the opprobrium, places in Inverness and further north don't fare much better when it comes to an absence of useful information for the drinkers among us.

So, in the fifteen years since I first broached this issue, we seem to have gone from generally crap to being something of a curate's egg, which is progress I guess. Surely I am not alone in wanting to get a sense of what is on tap before I visit a boozer, whether this side or that side of the Pond?

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...