How the West Was Won

Thursday 30^th October 2014 is unseasonably warm.  West London’s Shepherds Bush Common is bathed in sunshine and filled with children playing football in the early evening, defying the overdue changing of the seasons. Aside from a handful of scalpers touting for business outside the Empire ahead of the evening’s concert, it’s a largely tranquil scene – or as tranquil as the main transport artery of London’s west ever gets. However, on the south-west corner of the common, condensation is building on a plate-glass window. The tables outside are all full and inside, it is heaving. Every chair at every table is filled, while every route from door to bar is occupied with drinkers. The bar is three-deep but moving quickly – yet despite the bar being rammed full, I can see one of the staff patiently offering the booth next to me table service, explaining why their two samples of IPA are slightly different, and if it’s not to their taste, perhaps they’d like to try…

When Brewdog opened its Shepherds Bush bar in November 2013, it was a considerable risk. The venue itself was an unorthodox choice, huge by comparison with the Scottish brewery’s other bars, and a long way from the crucible for London’s beer boom in the East. Their other forays into London had been in small units (Camden), a takeover of an existing beer bar (Shoreditch) and in trendy areas noted for their nightlife (both of the above). Ahead of its launch, it seemed like an ambition too far, even for a company known for its audacity. On launch night, one guest privately told me that they would be surprised if it were operating in the same guise in 12 months’ time. They need not have worried. This weekend, as the bar celebrates its first birthday, it is not only still pouring beer, but is on course to turn over well in excess of a million pounds in its first year of trading.

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The steady decline of the pubs of Shepherds Bush was as constant as it was depressing. The construction of the giant Westfield shopping complex nearby had revitalised a sagging and unfashionable area of the city, but this was not being felt in the on trade. Outsiders flocked to W12 for retail therapy and Wahaca, but nearby pubs like the Goldhawk and Duke of Edinburgh were failing and closing (in both cases, earmarked for apartments). The nearby Stinging Nettle became a Costa Coffee. Shepherds Bush was somewhere that required a good reason to visit – a gig at the Empire, a film at the Westfield – rather than a casual leisure destination. Pubs and bars were for other areas.

In the context, it is easy to understand why The Melrose was failing. A boxy, uncomfortable corner site, lined with glass, it seemed an unusual place to hold open-mic sessions around an upright piano. For years, it had been the Vesbar, all frosted glass, tube lighting and extensive cocktail lists. However, as business dwindled, by 2012 it was refurbished as the Vandella, a somewhat confused ‘entertainment destination’ that introduced a stage and suggested ‘you might get comedy, you might get drama, you might get music’. By the summer of 2013, Fullers had run out of ideas and sought to dispose of it.

The unloved 'entertainment destination' The Vandella (picture c/o Ewan at London Pubology)

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Dean Pugh was woken by his mobile phone. A veteran of cult Leeds alehouse Mr Foley’s, he joined Brewdog to become General Manager of their new Manchester bar, where he had been working until closing the night before. On the other end of the phone was James Watt, Brewdog’s self-styled captain, with a proposition – the chance to run the biggest Brewdog bar yet. “At the time I was starting to think about what else I could do in the beer world outside of bar management”, Dean explains, “but the opportunity to run one of our biggest sites, with 40 taps and in London was too good to turn down.”

At the time, the Manchester bar, set in a double-height unit in the redeveloped Deansgate, was the biggest that Brewdog operated, but nowhere near as big as the Shepherds Bush site. “It was huge!” Dean says of his first visit, but he could shared the vision for the bar. “It seemed like a really great site with… massive potential if we got off to a good start.” Although almost suburban compared to the Manchester bar’s central location, he was pretty positive about the bar’s prospects. Although he freely admits that Shepherds Bush was “a bit lacking in good beer bars”, that was part of the attraction. “I think that was more appealing to BrewDog, to help kick start a change in the area.”

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By autumn of 2013, the fit-out of the bar had begun in earnest. The design of the bar saw a tweaking of the core Brewdog bar aesthetic – stripped back and industrial, with bare brick and exposed lighting, but the confrontational branding, with slogans and logos frosted onto the windows, was dispensed with. To start with, a lower-case ‘brewdog’ sign above the door was the only branding on show. Diner-style booths were installed alongside the reclaimed tables and stools. Pinball machines and vintage arcade machines were brought in, with a nod to New York’s Barcades.

Most striking of all, a cinema-style backlit beer menu was put in behind the bar, stretching the entire length of the wall – no logos or pump clips, just the names of the beers. And there were a lot of them. The promised ’40 taps of awesome’, in typically understated Brewdog parlance, were delivered. “It was quite a big step”, Dean explains. “I think before that maybe 24 or 26 was the biggest range we had in one site”.

With construction underway, attention was turned to putting together the rest of the team. Jen Macfarlane, the Cornish assistant manager of the Camden bar, was coaxed into moving west to assist with the opening. She remembers feeling enthusiastic about the opportunity. “It was really different and super exciting – it felt like the start of something new.” Walls were stripped back, tables were assembled into pillars, toilets were installed. Barbecue chefs were sought to realise the Texas Joes’ food menu. Most importantly of all, an advert went out on the Brewdog website for bar staff.

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Lyndsey Browe does not instantly come across as a punk, a libertine or especially uncompromising. However, when she moved across the Irish Sea in the middle of last year, she quickly became aware of Brewdog. “When I moved to London last year I really became aware of the craft beer scene here and just how many places were making and serving awesome beer”, she explains. “I'd had a few Brewdog beers before back in Ireland and when I saw they had their own bars I was keen to apply. As luck would have it, the newest bar at Shepherd's Bush was opening soon and I got to be part of the opening team.”

She may be softly spoken, but Lyndsey is typical of the servers that staff Brewdog’s bars. Although new to the beer scene in general – her experience was limited to “some local brewery open days”, she was enthusiastic about learning more and beer and brewing in general. Finding the right staff was absolutely crucial, Dean believes. “Myself and Martin must have done close to a hundred interviews to get a team of ten guys together and that paid off for us big time.”

Opening night pouring (Lyndsey not pictured) (pic c/o Brewdog)

With so much variety on the bar at any time, Lyndsey and the rest of the team were put through an intensive course in zythophilia. “Initially, we had a day long crash course in beer to get us all up to speed - learning the basics of the brewing process and styles and testing out the Brewdog beers we would be encountering in the first few weeks.” By the time the bar was ready to receive its first customers, each member of the serving staff was able to identify and describe different styles of beer, and to make recommendations from the tap list. Even the staff themselves were surprised by the level of training, as Browe remembers. “I remember just before we opened, us all sitting on kegs in the cellar doing some blind tasting and realising we had actually learned a load in the short time we'd been at it.”

The occasional hiccup aside – blank faces when asking for a new beer that has only just been tapped, or asking for a description of something especially avant garde (Wild Beer’s rainbow collaboration with Toccalmatto, Indigo Child, was memorably difficult for the servers to describe) – the training system seems to be working. “It's been an on-going thing. We have weekly meetings to cover styles, beer history and, of course, lots of tasting and that’s never really stopped.”

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The low-key Brewdog Shepherds Bush (picture c/o Brewdog)

The shutter went up for the first time on Wednesday 27^th November, and Brewdog Shepherds Bush was open, in a fashion. The official opening was planned for the 29^th, with an invite-only launch night on the 28^th, but in line with usual bar policy, the doors were opened early for a soft, trial run. There is an air of controlled chaos – there are not enough letters for the beer board, so Dean is laying out A4 beer menus on each table. Jen is rushing around checking every detail. The company’s social media expert Sarah is sat in a booth tapping away on a laptop, finishing off the details for the launch nights. Behind the bar, the team serve their first beers.

The bar has a slightly unfinished feel to it, which is perhaps the intention. It feels enormous – when empty, it feels every square centimetre of its near 240 square metres. It also doesn’t feel very Brewdog – Martin, the manager of the bars division, is still applying the Brewdog shield decals to the keg fonts, but apart from that, there are no logos on the premises aside from on the glasses and bottles. It is, in truth, slightly chilly and unwelcoming. The staff behind the bar are nervous to start with. I ask for a BA Dark Arts, the red-wine-barrel aged version of Magic Rock’s ‘surreal stout’. The server pauses, hesitates, checks with me again, then pours.

I ask about the beer, expecting to hear something vague about it being ‘a dark beer, like Guinness’. Instead, I hear about the original beer, the brewery, the type of barrels, Brettanomyces. I am both pleasantly surprised and slightly confused. The beer, by the way, was fantastic.

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The investment in staff goes some way to explaining why, for a London bar, the staff turnover at Shepherds Bush has been minimal – only three members of staff have left the business in the past year. Some have moved on to senior positions in other bars, including Macfarlane, who returned to Camden as General Manager. Dean points to the training – and Brewdog’s recent decision to offer the Living Wage to all employees – as the key to it. “They really do look after us well. 

It all helps us keep our team together and benefits the company overall in the long run.”

The impressive knowledge on show behind the bar goes some way to explaining the bar’s success. From the one-off customer’s point of view, a knowledgeable server who can describe every product on a packed bar inspires the confidence to try something new or to explore beyond what they would regard as their comfort zone. Lyndsey agrees. “More often than not people are willing to at least try something new, since we don't offer any commercial beers that might be their 'go to’. Give a quick rundown of Brewdog and offer some tasters and most people are intrigued enough to want to try something new.”

For the repeat visitor – and I regarded myself as one while I lived in the area – that confidence builds into a trust relationship that can define the best servers, where recommendations can be made based on experience of what people have enjoyed before. It is something that I have seen in action in beer bars in the US, where newly tapped beers are proferred to regulars with excitement, and I like it.

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In their book Brew Britannia, Boak and Bailey refer to the notion of the specialist beer as a permanent ‘beer festival’, and nowhere is this illustrated more clearly than a typical beer board at BDSB. What is most striking about the tap list on any given day is how well the balance is struck between different styles, Brewdog beers and interesting guests, old favourites and the unfamiliar. Dean clearly relishes being the curator of his own festival every day. “If there are some new and interesting things coming out, I'm free to go out and buy it for the bar.” As a result, the boards often feature interesting one-offs (Brodies’ Port-like 22% barley wine Elizabethan, for example) or the debut of fledgling breweries just starting out - I can recall trying a beer from Gloucester Brewery in Shepherd’s Bush long before I’d seen it on sale out in Gloucestershire itself. "I've always tried to have the UK beers I've sourced reflect that [variety]. We'll always have things like Gamma Ray or Cannonball show up every month or two because they are fantastic beers, but we also want to bring in new beers from breweries we've heard good things about, or special releases from brewers we already know make great beers."

However, managing such a huge range of taps brings with it its own challenges. Kegs of barley wine don’t tend to kick as regularly as, say, Punk IPA. “I've got a plan for the cellar that is our ideal line up, which should ensure that we have a varied range to cover all tastes”, Pugh explains. 31 of the taps are divided up into styles – nine for IPA, six for stouts, three for sour beers, and so on, with at least one of each of those dedicated to a Brewdog beer. The remaining nine taps are then free for the staff to balance the list up at their own discretion, either to offer a limited edition from Brewdog or something interesting from outside.

Dean's 'ideal' tap plan for the Shepherds Bush bar

With such a wide range available, concepts that seemed like gimmicks in other Brewdog bars come into their own. For example, the idea of buying a ‘flight’ – four one-third glasses of draught beer – from the dozen or so taps in the Camden bar meant that they were aimed more at the beer novice who had yet to try any of Brewdog’s core beers, and could tick off Punk, 5am and Libertine all in one go. In Shepherds Bush, however, one can now pit two or three top examples of the same style against each other at the same time – the aforementioned Cannonball and Gamma Ray can be contrasted with, say, Jackhammer and Punk IPA. For hardened craft geeks, this is utopia.

The lack of cask is, of course, taken as given in a Brewdog bar. It seems clear that the company’s keg-only policy is unlikely to change in the near future, based on James Watt’s consistency on the subject. At least with 40 keg taps pouring away and so much variety of style across the bar, the absence of cask-conditioned beer is less keenly felt than it might otherwise have been.

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Her face caked in greasepaint, the mime makes her way from table to table. We watch as she approaches a group that have just arrived. Saying nothing, she mimes taking a slug of beer from a pint glass, and points at the board. Once their initial confusion subsides, between them and their silent server, they decide on four pints of Punk IPA. The mime disappears and returns with their drinks, wordlessly charges their debit card, and moves on.

It is the 31^st of May, and Magic Rock have been invited to take over the Shepherds Bush taps. Dean was here into the early hours of the morning decking the bar out with bunting and balloons to look like a big top, and it looks like a particularly spoiled child’s vision of a circus party. On the bar, no fewer than 25 beers from the Yorkshire brewery are being served, and brewer Stuart Ross is on hand to introduce them. There is the sought-after edition of their Bearded Lady imperial stout that has spent time in Pedro Ximenez barrels, luscious and thick with molasses flavour. Core favourites High Wire and Cannonball are on fine form. However, what catches the eye are the staff – like the aforementioned mime, they have all taken the circus theme and run with it.

Behind the bar, Jen marches up and down in a head-to-toe lion costume. Dean patrols the floor dressed, inevitably, as the ringmaster. A strongman in leopard-print toga prepares a beer cocktail; a pint of Rapture is being poured by a bearded ‘lady’ in an evening gown. The uninitiated, the tourists and the casual drinkers approach the bar with a mixture of bafflement and amusement; they leave clutching glasses of Magic Rock’s brews.

The Brewdog Circus (picture c/o @lambicqueen)

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On that unseasonably warm Thursday evening in October, it seems hard to believe that anyone could have doubted the success of the bar when it was first opened. Whereas on that opening night, it had seemed cavernous, an echo chamber in waiting, it had in fact simply been an empty stage waiting for the thirsty cast to arrive. During the summer months, when the World Cup enticed drinkers to more sports-oriented bars (Brewdog does not screen sport, or anything else, in its bars), there were some nervous, empty weekdays, but as the nights draw in, business is booming again in the West. Jen is clear on why the bar has been so successful: “It’s the team. They're such a great bunch, and Dean is awesome at bringing out the best in them.” Word of mouth has played a part too – I can recall several occasions where a returning customer has brought a friend and wants to recommend the beer that they were themselves recommended by someone on their last visit. Lyndsey agrees: “I think word spread pretty quickly that we're a good place to visit… lots of people tell me they were in the area for a gig or a play nearby and we were recommended by friends.”

  

Dean is confident about building on the success of the first year. “At the moment we are really pushing the overall customer experience and looking at how it can be improved, particularly with table service.” One of his high points of the year was during the city’s beer week, London Beer City, in August, when he and James Watt held a sold-out tasting session, running through a selection of British beers, including many from guest breweries, not just Brewdog. “I really enjoyed getting him out of his comfort zone slightly and doing a beer tasting a different way.”

That outlook seems to sum up the BDSB approach – doing things in a slightly different way. Brewdog will, in many people’s eyes, always be the confrontational, explicit beer company, easily characterised as self-interested, inward-looking, protectionist… The bar in Shepherds Bush has gone a long way towards putting those characterisations to bed – a gentler kind of Brewdog. It is one that West London has lapped up. As Dean puts it, “Our aim is to… ensure that everyone that walks through the door has a positive experience, and hopefully learns something new about beer.”

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It is Monday evening, and it is a quiet autumn night at Brewdog Shepherds Bush. There is no gig tonight at the Empire, and no football at nearby Loftus Road. There are a few groups of friends and drinkers in tonight, but it’s largely peaceful. Around one table, though, there are dozens of glasses and bottles waiting to be opened. Lyndsey is sat amongst them, out of uniform for the evening. She and the rest of the table are not working tonight, but in a way, they are. At the head of the table, the first bottle, from Bermondsey’s Brew by Numbers, is opened. “So,” he says, “tonight we are tasting saisons…” as a ripple of enthusiasm reverberates around the table.

It Happened

It happened. It might not have occurred in exactly the way I'm about to describe, and certainly not all at the same time or in the same place, but it happened. Of that, I am positive. It happened on a weekday evening, in one of any number of pubs, but let's say it was up on White Lion Street, for the sake of argument.

There will have been a row of handpumps, each offering something slightly different, including one, none or fewer from the most reliable names in British brewing. Perhaps there was a Jaipur or a Wild Swan from Thornbridge; a Hophead or American Pale from Dark Star. Alongside, I have no doubt that there will have been something from a newer name - perhaps something interesting from Liverpool Organic, or maybe even one of the earlier sightings of Siren's core beers. On a weekday evening, I will have had to wait to be served. The condition of the beers being pulled will have been observed and, in all likelihood, been found to be excellent, at least to the eye.

My gaze wanders, though, to the keg fonts. To the promise of something new. To the rarity that probably shouldn't be on a bar in central London. To the exciting new beer from Wild Beer in Somerset. To the unfamiliar import from Scandinavia. To the novelty from the US. To the hop bombs from SE21. To the styles that I know for certain weren't being served here 5 years ago, and who knows when they'll be gone again?

There is an anxiety in the choice that I face at the bar on that weekday evening. I may never see some of those beers on the keg fonts again. This might be the only keg of that beer that ever sees this bar. I may never have another opportunity to taste that beer. I can order that pint of Hophead or Jaipur from hundreds of bars up and down the country, albeit perhaps without certainty about the perfection of the condition, so...

I will have been served at that point, with all my avenues still open to me in my mind. I will have only intended to come for two, perhaps three beers. The decision will have been made based on a simple calculation - what would I rather forego? The pint of Jaipur or Hophead? Or the promise of the undiscovered countries in a glass? 

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The memory of what certainly happened, but which may not have occurred exactly as described, comes to me as I watch the sun set, a long way away from London. There is no cask beer, waiting to be ordered. There are no familiar names on the bar nearby, and their condition is irrelevant. There are only the same names of the same beers, above identikit bars and restaurants, in the same colours. The beers aren't bad, as such, but...

Part of me wants to dismiss it as a touch of homesickness. However, the truth is that the fraction of a portion of a memory tells me what I already knew - that I perhaps didn't realise quite what it was to have that choice in front of me; that today's drinker in London is privileged in a way that, due to the pace of change in the past few years, they may not fully realise until part of that choice is gone.

The Post-Craft Revolution

Boak and Bailey's thoughts on where beer is heading in a 'post-craft' world spurred me to put down some disjointed ideas on the subject.

Jaipur - Ten years young in 2014

Considering a brief history of UK craft over the past decade, there have been a number of bold steps along the march of the 'craft beer revolution'. Thornbridge can't have been sure that a 5.6% IPA would have worked on a grand scale in 2004. Brewdog were probably flying a kite when they tried selling Punk IPA to Tesco. Kernel's offering of 7% dry-hopped IPAs and export stout was probably not the safest bet when they opened. Those breweries weren't necessarily innovating - in Kernel's case, the exact opposite - but they were slowly stretching out the drinker's tolerance of styles, flavours and ABVs.

The creation of that tolerance is what has led us to 2014's 'Year of Craft' - Sixpoint cans in Wetherspoons, big breweries running campaigns with the word 'craft' shoe-horned uncomfortably into the copy, and a brewery under every railway arch in the SE postcode. So what now?

Clarity - overrated or essential?

The boldness of those breweries back in the last decade was in pushing the envelope of IBU count and ABV, which is an inherently limited exercise. (Despite often being characterised as juvenile, Brewdog had the sense to abandoning the facile eisbocking). They moved in the direction that they did because they wanted to create beers that they wanted to drink, and in doing so have popularised those beers with a wider audience.

If the 'craft revolution' was about prioritising flavour and aroma at the expense of appearance and, well, expense, perhaps the most successful brewers of the post-craft revolution will be those that can address the latter without sacrificing the former, and do it consistently. Some breweries are heading that way anyway.

I was intrigued to hear from Andy Parker that Fourpure, one of the newest breweries in London, have set beer clarity as one of their most important principles. (I have yet to try any of their beer, but although their Pils is reportedly excellent, what I have heard of the rest of the range has not been great - so perhaps some work needed there.)

The Armoury - seen here before it went down the drain

Further up the food chain, when Brewdog's lavish new brewery initially struggled to turn out two batches of Punk that were alike, they lost a lot of credibility. However, by the end of last year, the consistency was back - Jackhammer, in particular, is recognisable (and superb) from batch to batch. They even stunned everyone and dumped a batch of beer that had been trailed extensively on their blog (The Armoury, a dry-hopped black lager) when it failed a QA test - something that they perhaps should have done with all that dodgy Punk in 2012... I think it's a sign that standards are important to the brewery now in a way that they clearly weren't a couple of years ago.

As 'craft' infiltrates Wetherspoons and the High St, expectations surrounding quality will rise accordingly. Uncarbonated batches, oxygen-riddled IPAs and gushing saisons are a surefire way to send the curious drinker back to their comfortable macrobrew. Post-craft needs to be defined by an ability to match the consistency of big beer. Big regionals like Thornbridge and Adnams, with their impressive brewplants, can manage it - the challenge for the small start-up breweries will be how that can be achieved through good process rather than through investment in equipment.

Golden Pints 2013

So here are my Golden Pints 2013... so it turns out that I did a lot of drinking over the past 12 months, and these were the most memorable moments (and Birmingham Beer Bash):

Best UK Cask Beer - Start with the toughest category... memorable cask moments of 2013: Siren's Whiskey Sour in a Barrel at LCBF, served with ice, a slice and a cherry was as far from Boring Brown Beer as anything I've tasted from a cask and was incredible. Sticking with Siren, all their cask imperial stouts have been awesome Oakham's Green Devil was again superb, the Ashover Rauchbier at IMBC hit just the right spot, Weird Beard's Black Perle was stellar at Ealing Beer Festival, ... and speaking of WB, I loved our LAB\Weird Beard collaboration Hive Mind on cask too. I thought Siren's Oi! Zeus! was glorious in Copenhagen, even if the other guys I went with weren't quite so sure (was that a collab? It was good, anyway.) 

In the end, it comes down to the one pint of cask I remember above all others: Summer Wine Oregon at the Well and Bucket in Shoreditch. As I said, these awards are all about moments in time - and on a muggy, thundery day in a crowded bar, it was served at the perfect temperature,  in perfect condition, and was stunningly refreshing.

Best UK Keg Beer - Honourable mentions to Thornbridge Tzara for being consistently drinkably great, Beavertown Gamma Ray for similar reasons and Siren Broken Dream for being everything I want in a coffee stout... but the best for me was Weird Beard Little Things That Kill Batch 3 - it took them a few batches to nail it, but the 3.4% iteration of LTTK was knockout. 

Best UK Bottled or Canned Beer - Wild Beer Ninkasi, for being both way out there and incredibly accessible for non-geeks. I could easily have picked their Modus Operandi or Shnoodlepip too. Partizan's Christmas Stout was pretty special too, which had a perfectly judged blend of spice, cherry tartness, a hint of funk and lots of roast.

Best Overseas Draught Beer - To Øl Black Malts and Body Salts at LCBF and Indy Man was patently ridiculous (double black coffee IPA), proper craft wanker, but also proper tasty, as was their I've Seen Bigger Than Yours raspberry and orange barley wine (which I heard an American guy at Borefts describe as a 'real panty-dropper'... you can decide if that's a good thing or a bad thing).

Other top beers... Dieu du Ciel!'s Aphrodisiaque and Péché Mortel were both a real treat at their recent Brewdog tap takeover... Three Floyds Vanilla Bean Dark Lord was pretty good in Copenhagen (albeit probably not worth having to basically scrum down with a lot of big bearded Scandis to get at), and Pizza Port Bacon and Eggs at their Craft tap takeover was coffee overload in the best way possible.

Best Overseas Bottled or Canned Beer - Hill Farmstead Anna honey saison. There is no way that I can do justice to how good this was - just the right levels of everything, from acidity (sharp but soft, way short of a lambic) to funk (textural but short of a full-on plough into the barnyard) to sweetness (very slight but perceptible) to carbonation. Nearly perfect.

Best Collaboration Brew - Wild Beer\Burning Sky\Good George Shnoodlepip. Absolutely crazy beer - passion fruit, hibiscus and pink peppercorn saison with Brett sounds like something @TheCraftWanker would come up with, but it just works. So good that I drank four in quick succession at Birmingham Beer Bash, contributing to a 4pm 'bedtime'. 

Best Overall Beer - Any of the above, on any given day, could be the best overall beer.

Best Branding, Pumpclip or Label - Weird Beard - Josh has done a great job on their branding.

Best UK Brewery - Thornbridge - Despite producing some of the most dependable and available regular beers around, as well as fantastic one-offs and seasonals, Thornbridge don't seem to get the recognition that they deserve online. Perhaps it's their ubiquity that makes people overlook them - you can get find a pub with Jaipur on pretty much anywhere, from America to Estonia to... Stroud, but in all of those places, you know that it will be worth ordering. Their German series of beers have been a triumph, the Imperial Raspberry Stout at Borefts was a stand-out in a crowded, crazy festival, and even crazy craft shit like Baize worked. In short, they don't have any bad beers.

Best Overseas Brewery - To Øl - All their beers were just a load of fun to drink, and they were really nice guys at LCBF and IMBC.

Best New Brewery Opening 2013 - Split decision here between Siren and Weird Beard. They both started off a bit slowly - I wasn't wowed by Siren's core beers, Broken Dream aside, and it took Weird Beard a while to dial everything in, but by the back end of the summer they both really hit their stride.

Pub/Bar of the Year - A month ago, it would have been Craft Islington, the homeliest of the Craft bars and their events have been great this year. However, the new BrewDog Shepherds Bush has 40 taps, is closer to my house, has great staff, isn't full of Brewdog's usual wall-to-wall branding and it has pinball tables. So it wins.

Best New Pub/Bar Opening 2013 - Brewdog Shepherds Bush.

Beer Festival of the Year - Copenhagen Beer Celebration and associated days of drinking around it. If you've never been, go. Go for the beers at the festival. Go for the chance to go to the Mikkeller bars. Go for the seminars (Chad Yakobsen of Crooked Stave talking about brettanomyces was superb). Go for the chance to meet some brewing heroes. Go for the hot dogs, even. But make sure you go.

Of the UK fests, IMBC was superb again, Birmingham Beer Bash was great (or the hour or so of it that I can remember was great) and London Craft Beer Festival at Hackney Oval was a surprising success, despite the deafening music.

Supermarket of the Year - I don't really buy beer in supermarkets... but let's say Waitrose.

Independent Retailer of the Year - Favourite Beers, Cheltenham - friendly, wide selection, well priced, and it has a shop dog called Ruby. 

Online Retailer of the Year - Brewdog - despite the outrageous mark-up that they put on the Founders beers earlier in the year, they have had some amazing guest beers in lately, and their service is next to flawless.

Best Beer Book or Magazine - I thought Future's Homebrew bookazine was very creditable, if only for all those clone recipes.

Best Beer Blog or Website - The Evening Brews - cheery-beery or otherwise, they've been consistently interesting throughout the year, and their Brewmaster features in particular are excellent. Honourable mentions to the little-known Bertus Brewery blog and his quest to 'clone' famous IPAs; and to Boak and Bailey for striking just the right balance between dry history, tongue-in-cheek silliness and old-fashioned enthusiasm for quality beer.

Best Beer App - Untappd - especially now that you can turn off the auto-tweeting of badges.

Simon Johnson Award for Best Beer Twitterer - RIP Scoop. @cshallwriter in all his forms is excellent value for his 140 characters. Quick mention to @ThornbridgeDom for tweeting lots of great brewing advice and  to @NateDawg27 and his filthy fucking mouth.

Best Brewery Website/Social media - I like the new Wild Beer site.

Food and Beer Pairing of the Year - I can't really think of anything aside from Chris and Emma's pulled pork brioche buns with our Brett IPA at their Christmas bottle share... I think the eight of us managed to eat and drink enough of those two together to satisfy scores of people. Yum!

Garden Herb Saison

I've drunk some fantastic saisons in the last year - Ilkley/Melissa Cole's rhubarb-and-vanilla Siberia, Bristol Beer Factory's zingy Saison, Wild Beer's trifecta of Epic, Bliss and Ninkasi, homebrewer Andy Parker's Nelson Saison and its bastard son the Pomegranate Saison... It's a fashionable style at the moment, and lots of people are brewing great versions of it.

I had a largely unsuccessful attempt at a saison several months ago - my main problem was that I was worried about it drying out too much and put some cara-pils in the grain bill, completely missing the point of the style. The WLP565 yeast that I used took it down to 1.010, which is not too bad considering, and the final beer was still fairly drinkable - but it wasn't quite right. After trying yet another fantastic saison - Stone/Dogfish/Victory's sublime herb-flavoured Saison du BUFF - just before Christmas, I was inspired to have another go at brewing one, if only to stop me spending so much money on them outside the house.

First of all, I decided to use WLP566 instead of 565, which is a very similar strain but anecdotally is easier to attenuate without a lot of hassle. I made up a two-litre starter 48 hours ahead to make sure I had lots of nice, healthy yeast. Secondly, I wanted to keep the grain bill very simple - 5.5kg of grain, 90% pilsner malt, 10% wheat malt. In practice, I didn't have enough of either for that, so I topped up the pilsner with regular pale and subbed the wheat for 500g of spelt malt that I bought a while back on the grounds that it was a bit of a novelty. I've never used it before, but seeing as it's very similar to wheat, I thought I'd give it a try in this.

For hops, I went the all-Nelson approach that worked so well in Andy Parker's saison, but to give it a bit of a twist, I also wanted to steal the mixed garden herbs idea from Saison du BUFF, which uses parsley, white sage, rosemary and lemon thyme at the whirlpool stage for aroma. I took the proportions from Stone's blog (although as I don't have weighing scales that are accurate to fractions of a gram, there was a lot of guesswork involved), and replaced the white sage and lemon thyme with regular garden sage and thyme, as I didn't have those to hand.

Here was the recipe for my New Year's Eve Brew - Garden Herb Saison:

Mash
3kg Pilsner Malt
2kg Pale Malt (Crisp)
500g Spelt Malt

Single infusion mash at 67C for 90 mins

Boil - 90 minutes
12g Nelson Sauvin at 90 mins
10g Irish Moss at 15 mins
38g Nelson Sauvin at 0 mins
Herb bag containing 7g fresh parsley, 3g rosemary, 3g thyme and a few sage leaves at 0 mins

Yeast - WLP566 (2l starter, made 48 hours ahead)

Notes: I wasn't sure how to treat the spelt malt, so just used it as I would wheat malt in a simple single infusion mash, which I think had an impact on efficiency.  23 litres of very pale sweet wort collected - I've managed to lose the pre-boil gravity figure but I think it was 1.050.

This was the third brew I've done on my relatively new Brupaks boiler, which I bought to replace the leaky Electrim mashing bin in my all-electric setup (although I still use the mashing bin as an HLT). It's a picky bugger though, and it kept switching itself off just short of boiling point. I think there's an issue with the thermostat but I need to investigate further. After a frustrating 10 mins of watching the thermometer hover around the 91C mark, I gave up and transferred the wort carefully into the old Electrim boiler and used that instead.

I put the finishing hops and the herbs into a hop bag so that I could fish them out as soon as the wort was almost at pitching temperature. The last few degrees of cooling and the dead-slow run off from the Electrim bin can take over an hour sometimes, and I didn't want to overdo the herbs - by the time it was down to about 25C, the herb aroma was pretty pungent, so out they came. SG was measured at 1.058 - below the 1.064 BeerTools predicted, but acceptable. Fermentation started at ambient temperature - a fairly constant 16C in the utility room - and when it began to slow down after 7 days, I ramped it up to 22C gradually using a combination of a heatpad and towels. It took a while but after 20 days, it was down to 1.008 and ready to rack to secondary.

It's currently sitting in secondary with some more Nelson Sauvin as dry hops to try and balance off the strong herb aroma, but I'm pretty happy with it so far. It should be ready for bottling in a few days, and I'll blog about how the finished beer turns out once they've conditioned.

Brewing the Megabeer Part 1

The 'megabeer' that I described in the last blog has been brewed and is fermenting away - I need to work on a better name for it than 'megabeer', but that can wait until later. As usual, there were a few hitches along the way that blew me off course on the day, so much so that I didn't actually pitch the yeast until nearly 5.30am on Christmas Eve.

The recipe was almost as described in the last blog - I cut the amber back a bit to less than 5% to make sure the final beer wouldn't be too dark:

8kg Pale Malt (Crisp)
400g Amber Malt
Mash at 64/65C for 90 mins with 24l Campden-treated water (I don't do water chemistry yet!)
This was quite a thick mash, but my mash tun couldn't take any more water.

Two very different amber malts

The first problem was that when we started to run the wort out of the tun, it was much darker than anticipated - much, much darker than expected, like strong tea, and not really what I was looking for, given that it was only going to get darker over the course of a two-hour boil. We'd put the wrong amber malt into the tun - instead of the EBC 48 bag, we picked the EBC 100 bag, hence the coffee-scented dark brown wort. (Incidentally, the EBC 100 Fawcett malt is what Dogfish Head use in their 60/90/120 Minute IPAs by many accounts, but although the beer is inspired in part by other people's clones of 120, I'm not trying to make an outright clone of that beer).

So, we made a snap decision to drain the tun without sparging, boil up anything we ran off along with some Fuggles hops that had been hanging around for ages, pitch the backup sachet of dried yeast I keep in case of emergencies, and start again. Using a Scotch Ale as a basic direction, we collected just over 20 litres of deep brown wort, gave it a short 45-minute boil with 50g Fuggles, then ran it off, took a gravity of 1.080 and pitched rehydrated Mauribrew 514 yeast. For an old sachet of dried yeast, it's done a good job - after 3 days, it was down to 1.028, and it's still going.

Hop soup - with the pellers now in sludgy suspension

While all that was boiling up, we reset the HLT and started mashing a second batch of malt. Mashing low for a highly fermentable wort, we collected as much as we could get into the boiler - 23.5 litres - knowing that we would lose a lot to the boil... and to the hops. I mixed together 250g of high-AA hop pellets (130g Amarillo, 60g Columbus, 60g Galaxy) and 75g whole-leaf Simcoe, and divided them into five equal portions, to be added at 120, 90, 60, 30 and 0 minutes. As expected, I lost a hell of a lot between the start of the boil and the FV - a shade over 15 litres. Runoff took a long, long, long time - about 2 hours - as the pellets broke down into a thick sludge that covered the hop filter and, together with the Simcoe flowers, slowed the runoff to little more than a drip at times. I need to work on a better hop filter for my boiler. I could have thrown in some more late hops, but I'm going to save them for a bigger dry hop.

300g Dextrose Monohydrate

Gravity was measured at 1.108, which was a few points up on where I thought I'd be. I allowed the WLP007 5 litre starter to settle down to a big cake at the bottom, siphoned off the top 4.5 litres of it, then swirled the cake into suspension and pitched it. After that, I made a 3-litre starter for the WLP099 high-gravity yeast, and left it to grow for three days. I left the FV in the utility room where the temperature stays at a good, constant 19C (I'll use a heatpad if I need to raise the temperature later in the ferment), and it was fermenting wildly within hours.


On the 26th, 60 hours after pitching, I took the first gravity reading at 1.030 - incredible work from the WLP007 to chew through that much so quickly - and pitched the slurry from the WLP099 starter, along with 400g dextrose monohydrate. I've measured the remaining 3.6kg of the dextrose into 300g and 150g freezer bags, and the plan is to add all of this to the FV over the next few days to give me an adjusted OG of somewhere around the 1.200 mark.


The routine goes like this - I keep a bucket of sanitiser next to the FV containing two jugs, a silicone whisk, my hydrometer and my baster. Twice a day, I take the two jugs out, drain them both back into the bucket, put the whisk and the drained baster in one jug so that they're handy. I then take a sample for the hydrometer and record the gravity, then pour this into the other jug and continue to draw beer from the FV until I have about half a litre in the jug. I add in 300g of dextrose from one of the freezer bags, whisk it into the beer until foamy and in solution, then pour it into the FV and seal it up again. I then clean all the equipment and put it back into the sanitiser.

Whisking in the dextrose

I'm hoping to keep the OG somewhere around or just under the 1.030 mark - if I take a gravity reading and the yeast hasn't chewed up all 300g of the dextrose from the previous addition, I'll switch to adding the 150g bags.

So far, it seems to be turning out very nicely! I reckon the ABV is up around the 13% mark by now, and the aroma from the FV is wonderful. My main concern is that during one of the dextrose additions, I'll introduce an infection of some kind, hence the sanitising routine each time I open it up. It's been hard work having to nurture it for as long as I have so far, but I hope it'll be worth it. I'll be back with an update once I've finished the primary fermentation and the beer is ready to enjoy a nice, mellowing rest in secondary for a few weeks.

A Christmas Experiment

For several months I've been planning a brew for Christmas, the one time of year when I can have 10-14 days off work straight without using up lots of precious annual leave. I'd quite like to fit in a few brewdays between now and the new year (a classic English nut-brown ale and another saison are high on the list), but this is pretty much the only time of year when I can fit in something really labour-intensive.

What I have in mind is something like a really big barley wine, something that will keep for years and develop, but which is interesting to drink now. There were so many BWs at the festival in Toronado in February that were offered as verticals - 2009-2012 versions being poured alongside each other - and it was fun to see how they'd developed. Along the same lines, this year I've loved drinking Dogfish Head's 120 Minute IPA (not a barley wine per se, although the DFH site doesn't seem to know what it is) and Brewdog's Anarchist/Alchemist (which they claim is a 'triple IPA', although who knows what that even means apart from 'it's really strong'), which are both hugely hopped when fresh but which mellow out nicely to bring out sticky, candied fruits. If I can get in that territory I'll be very happy, although more than likely I'm going to end up with a big hot fusel mess.

Those two aforementioned beers have enormous ABVs - 20%-ish for the original 120 Minute, 14% for AA - which are way beyond anything I've brewed before, hence why I've been saving this 'experiment' for when I have some time on my hands. All of the yeast strains I've used so far only have a tolerance of up to 10%, so the plan here is to follow a trick Sean Paxton, The Homebrew Chef, used when trying to 'clone' 120 Minute for a Can You Brew It? - his blog on this is here. He pitched two yeasts - WLP001 to start with, then the super-tolerant WLP099 high gravity yeast a few days in - then fed the second yeast dextrose on a twice-daily basis to bump up the ABV. I'm not sure I want to take my beer up as high as 20%, but then I doubt I'm going to be able to look after my yeast well enough to get it close to that anyway.

Someone else who has done something similar to this is Scott of Bertus Brewery, except for extra authenticity he went with WLP007, the Dry English Ale strain, instead of WLP001. He has some great tips for brewing with the high gravity yeast in this blog - I'll definitely be referring to this over the next few days. He rightly points out that Sean's SG of 1.050 is ridiculously high and aimed for 1.020 - again, I doubt I'll be able to get my yeast to attenuate down to 1.020 but anything under 1.030 should be okay. I plan to measure the SG every day and control the dextrose additions to manage the sweetness.

So those were the starting points for pulling the recipe together. A simple malt bill with a few % amber malt, and using WLP099 part-way into the ferment to kick up the gravity. Sadly, the availability of hops in the UK isn't quite as good a over in California and Arizona where those guys are brewing, so I'm going to do my own thing on that score. By huge coincidence though, The Malt Miller just took stock of a load of fresh 2012 Amarillo hops. I'm going to partner it with some Columbus pellets that Mel brought me from San Francisco, and some terrific Galaxy hops from Australia. I'm not going to faff about with hop additions every 3 minutes either (I've done it once with a 60 minute boil and it was incredibly tiresome), so I may instead do 5, one every half hour through a two-hour boil.

So the broad outline for the ingredients for this 5 gallon batch of doom...

8kg Pale Malt (!)
500g Amber Malt
(Aiming to mash on the low side, mid 60s, to help with attentuation)
350g Amarillo, Columbus and Galaxy hops, mixed and split into five 70g batches and added every 30 mins from start to finish
Target post-boil gravity of 1.100 or thereabouts

The most important thing about this brew is going to be looking after the yeast. For the initial yeast, I'm going with WLP007 - two vials went into a huge 5l starter a few days ago and there's a nice big cake forming at the bottom (I don't have a stir plate, hence the size of starter and length of time I've given it for growth). Mr Malty recommends about 350 billion yeast cells for a 1.100 gravity beer, and I reckon I should have at least that in there now. I'm going to make a similar size starter for the WLP099 on brewday to give me the same number of cells again to start attacking the dextrose.

Finally, I've been worrying about how to get enough air into the wort before I pitch. I asked on Twitter for advice and the ever-awesome Broadford Brewer linked me to this video from Wyeast:

I don't have an aquarium pump (or any fish - the two are connected) or any pure O2, so I'm going to have to get shaking. My plan is to run off into the FV, seal it up, shake it well for a full minute (with help from my brother - this is going to be heavy) and then pitch the yeast cake from the starter. It probably won't be optimum aeration, but it's the best I'll be able to do.

Right. Time to go and put the HLT on!