Week 28

Does this count as gorilla marketing? Taking a picture of one of our beers in someone else's brewery, where they happen to have a very fitting neon sign? Don't worry, we're not going to start playing that game, we haven't got time for that right now. This is just a picture I quite liked that someone posted on twitter. It's also a good way to show that Holy Hoppin' Hell has now left the brewery, along with Five o'Clock Shadow and Fade to black, and are all available to buy in bottles, along with some casks and key kegs.

Not sure how it happened, but things timed themselves to produce a very busy week, with 2 beers bottled and 2 beers brewed. The plan was to just bottle once a week and then brew straight away to get fresh beer into the FV. But this week we found ourselves with 2 beers ready. I blame that over-active saison yeast.

First off was finishing off the packaging of Hit The Lights. This was casked and kegged over the weekend, leaving us with around 1800 500ml bottles worth. We are pretty happy with it this time round, it has a great aroma, great colour and tastes fantastic. So this beer will be leaving the brewery as Hit The Light this time, in around 2 weeks hopefully.

This left FV3 empty, so we decided to fill it with one of our most popular beers to date. This week we brewed our first re-brew, not counting Miss/Hit the lights. We have re-brewed our 'Transpacific Pal Ale' Mariana Trench. This will be a real test for us, as consistency in a new brewery is very difficult, but key for our future. The day went very well, with no real issues, so we look forward to seeing how this one turns out.

As previously mentioned, we have some very excitable saison yeast in the brewery right now. And this yeast has managed to finish off our Saison 14 in record time. I'm not really a saison man myself, but Gregg assures me it is tasting great. So we filled 18 key kegs, no casks, and 2400 500ml bottles, which again should be available in a few weeks.

The saison yeasts work was not finished yet though. Saturday we brewed the second of our Single Hop series, which just happened to also be the second collaboration in the brewery. Saturday we invited Andy Parker of new gypsy brewery Elusive Brewing to the brewery to brew our take of their Nelson Saison. I left Andy in Gregg's safe hands, and the reports of a fantastic nelson aroma filling the brewery made me regret not pulling a sickie from my day job. I love Nelson Sauvin, so really looking forward to see how this one turns out. Also curious how quickly the yeast can get through this one too.

And as if that wasn't enough, in other news: We shipped off our first international pallet on Friday. Look out for bottles of Single Hop Chinook, Mariana Trench, Five O'clock Shadow & Holy Hoppin' Hell hitting the shelves and the same again in keg form, minus the Chinook, hitting the bars of Italy very soon. We also had a visit from a nice couple of Swedish importers who made the most of the brewery bar and put in a rather sizeable order, that will be leaving the brewery by the end of the month. Not enough international action for you? Well, we are also in the final stage of talks with a Finish importer too, so hopefully we can get that deal closed very soon also.

It hasn't all been plain sailing though. We are very lucky to be sharing the actual brewery location with another brewery, Ellenburg's Brewery. They have had a few more label issues than we have had, and have yet to receive theirs. This means they have a few bottles of beer waiting around. We are also brewing as often as we possibly can, and sometime more. This means there is a lot of beer around on site at the moment, so space is becoming a real premium. Unfortunately just selling beer is not always the answer to this problem. Once a beer has been brewed it takes 2 weeks to condition, at the very least. Some beers can benefit from standing for over a month before being sold. We had not really planned for this fully, so had been just sticking pallets of beer where ever we could. But we had got to the point where we just couldn't fit any more beer in. So on Friday I, Bryan, armed with a forklift spent several hours playing a rather large game of tetris. I removed some of the pallet racking, as it was causing more problems than it was solving, and just piled the beer in an orderly fashion. Now it is much easier to function in the brewery. I feel there should be a time lapse video with the tetris theme here, I may have to the at the CCTV footage.

We also sent the last of the bottles of Holy Hoppin' Hell through the labeller. Although we managed to come out around 50 labels short. So those bottles may make it into the luck dip, or the fridge.

As always, these are the rantings of WeirdBeardBryan, and not the weird beard collective.

Holy Hoppin' Hell pt1

Not exactly a core beer, or even a seasonal. This is our beer! A beer that does not take itself too seriously.

A beer we brew when the feeling takes us, and a beer we brew how ever we want. Same grain bill each time, and aiming for the same IBU, but that's where the similarities end. This is a canvas, an outlet for our creativity. We give ourselves free rain on the hops used, and the processes.

This time round an 8.5% ABV Double IPA using some of the newer 'new world' hops. We have Dr Rudi (Super Alpha), Green Bullet, Pacific Gem and Columbus (not quite new world, but we never said there were rules here). Expect sweet fruits in the form of Papaya, mango, grapefruit pith, along with toffee and caramelised sugar. As a double IPA also expect huge bitterness lingering behind all those late hops.

Process wise we tried a few different things as well. Up until now we were getting far more bitterness from the late hop additions than we expected, and feared we would thus be loosing a lot of the volatile flavour and aroma oils as the hops sit in the kettle for up to an hour waiting to get cooled from 100 degrees C to 18. So we took a large portion of the flame out hops and threw them into the underback. The idea being the hot wort from the kettle would flow into the underback and be in contact with these hops for short time, then take the aroma and flavour with it straight through the heat exchange and into the FV. This time round the beer was brewed before we had calibrated the kettle, meaning it was diluted far more than it was meant to be. This gives us more beer, but dilutes the ABV, IBUs and general beating you get from the hops. Expect round 2 to be bigger, hoppier and all round more intense. We aim for 9.4% next time.

I personally love the branding for this one. Every time I say the name to myself I hear Robin the excitable sidekick exclaiming something to his friend and trainer. "Holy hoppin' hell batman, that's a hoppy beer!" I had images in my head of classic cartoon strips, and a masked Lup'in (is he a good guy or a bad guy?). That's all the information Josh & Chris, our amazing label guys, needed to some up with the label.

You will be able to find this in keg keg, 330ml bottles and a very limited number of casks.

We hope you like it, and want to share a few with us. But if not, that's just fine, we'll drink it all here at the brewery.

Week 27

So I have finally found the time to sit down and write a few words about the week just passed. And I think the word of the day is Saison.

The week started with a good old fashioned bottling session. With our collaboration Saison we brewed with Ingemar from Sad Robot. Unfortunately no sign of Ingemar on bottling day.  As mentioned in last weeks blog, there are 2 versions of this. The standard Saison 42, but then a version we call Saison 42e that has been primed with elderflower cordial. We bottled just 255 500ml bottles of this and 6 key kegs, half of which will be going to Sweden. So if you are lucky enough to spot any of this I would grab it while you have the chance. There's plenty of the original Saison 42 to go round though.

Saison 42 was the beginning of a bit of a Saison season for us. Normally we use a dry yeast as our house strain, but this time we splashed out on some freshly cultured saison yeast. This stuff wasn't cheap, so we are going to get our monies worth here. So the very next day, we brewed another saison, this time one of our core line up, Saison 14. There is a great story behind the naming of this beer, but I will leave that for the beers own blog. This beer took off like a rocket, coming down 14 points in just 24 hours, and is pretty much ready to bottle. So we just need to look at our schedule, crash cool it and get it into some bottles.

But our saisons wont be finishing with that. Hopefully in the coming week or so we will be inviting our friend from Elusive Brew to brew the next in our Single Hop Series, and our second collaboration on our own kit. Nelson Saison will be, as the name may suggest, a saison hoped with just Nelson Sauvin. And im sure any brewers out there will know how hard that hop is to get hold of, so we are extra excited about this one.

A lot of the week was spent sending bottles through our labelling machine. 5 o'Clock Shadow was all finished last week, with Fade To black all done and around 50% of Holy Hoppin' Hell all ready to go. So if any of our customers are interested in any of these new beers, please give us a shout.

The week drew to a close with a number of new beers making debut appearances at 2 beer festivals. Firstly we had 3 beers, 2 of which new, at the Reading Beer Festival. Here we had one of our favourites Black Perle, but also one of very few casks of Holy Hoppin' Hell, along with Fade To Black, our black IPA.

We also had 5 beers, and a brewer at the new LBA organised London's Brewing Festival at the London Fields event space. Here we had Black Perle on cask all weekend, Mariana Trench and 5 o'Clock Shadow in keg during the Saturday morning session. Unfortunately, Mariana Trench was not Mariana Trench for the majority of this session, and the trade session the day before. This was sorted out, but not until quite late into the session. So apologies to anyone who may have sampled this, and not got the hoppy pale they were expecting, but were greeted with a pilsner instead. Both of these keg beers sold out during the Saturday morning, so sorry if you did not get the chance to try them. Bryan was about for the morning session too, and got a chance to speak to a lot of interesting people. I was meant to be doing a meet the brewer session at 12:30, but as there were delays in opening this session, I was not inside in time.

Sunday saw Holy Hoppin' Hell and Fade To Black on in the keg bar. These again sold out, so agian apologies to anyone who missed out. Neither Gregg or myself could be there for the Sunday session, as Gregg was delivering beers up in Manchester, and I was filling casks and Kegs with Hit The Lights.

We also got some really cool looking branding items, so you wont be able to miss us at future festivals and events.

All views and grammatical errors are those of @WeirdBeardBrew.

Week 26

This week started with a rebrew, or should that be a new brew? Let's start again shall we.

This week kicked off with a brewday. We started off by brewing one of our core beers, that we have actually tried to brew before. This will be brew 0009 and will go by the name Hit The Lights. Now, if you cast your mind back to early march, and the release of batch 0002 you will remember a beer called Miss The Lights. That was the first attempt at brewing Hit The Lights, but not all went to plan. But this time round all things have gone to plan. The brewday went without a hitch, with the beer happily in FV3 earlier than any brewday yet.

Hit The Lights will be getting a good dose of dry hops sometime in the coming week, and maybe bottled towards the end.

FV4 currently has Saison 42 in, our collaboration with Sad Robot from Sweden. This has been sat at around 25 Deg C for just over a week. The yeast have done their thing, and it is down from 1049 to 1006, making it a nice 5.7% abv. There will be a couple of versions of this out, and bottling will start early this coming week. I think you will agree that we got the label sorted.

Bottled beer continues to fly out of the brewery, and we have now sold out of Miss The Lights & Black Perle, with stocks of Single Hop Chinook and Mariana Trench getting very low. Cask and keg beer is also making its way out, but at a slightly slower pace. But we expect this to pick up dramatically with festival season now upon us. In fact, we have 4 casks going to the Reading CAMRA beer festival, 1 cask & 2 keg kegs going to the Hope in Charshalton and 1 cask & 4 key kegs going to the London's Brewing, all in the coming week.

We have bottles of 5 o'Clock Shadow, Fade to Black and Holly Hoppin' Hell waiting for labels, which have now arrived. We have made a start of the 5 o'Clock Shadow bottles, as these are ready to go. Fade to Black and Holly Hoppin Hell will be done when we have time over the coming week or so, as these could do with a little more time to condition, so no rush to get these out.

All opinions and grammatical errors are those of WeirdBeardBryan, and not to hairy ones as a collective.

Five O'Clock Shadow

So this is the third of our core beers. One of my personal favourite styles, the American IPA.

This beer had been through a number of iterations of prototypes, AC3 and AC4 were early names and some of you who have known us for a long time may have sampled one or both of these. One of the best prototypes had both Citra and Nelson Sauvin but the availability of hops caused yet another version to be tried. In the end we did find some Citra and added it to a load of the dankest, most pungent American hops (Summit, Apollo and Columbus).

The Lup'in for this beer is one of our favourites. Cowboy Lup'in has become our poster boy and has made it onto our bottle caps in a slightly different hat. I have even taken to wearing such a hat in homage.

The brewing of this beer, as you will have become accustomed to hearing, did not go without minor hitches. We reduced the bittering hops, on the basis of the previous batches being overly bitter at the time so this beer lacks a bit of the edge we were looking for (although this will probably make the beer more popular with the non beer geeks). The colour is also a bit too dark for my liking. So expect this bitterness to be increased and the colour to be toned down for the next release.

Still, what we have here is a very drinkable hop forward beer with a load of mango and grapefruit. It will be available in 330ml bottles and key kegs and will be released this week. There may be a key keg of it on at the Hope in Carshalton for their festival this weekend.

Week 25

 
This week started off on a real high. As mentioned in last weeks blog, we were very lucky to welcome our good friend Ingemar from cuckoo brewery Sad Robot over from Sweden. We decided to brew a saison, which we will be calling Saison 42, a mostly harmless farmhouse ale. Through this collaboration we have managed to score a distributor in Sweden, so very soon we will be sending a couple of pallets over to the fine beer loving swedes.

We also packaged our black IPA, Fade To Black, this week. And it is tasting great. It went into 2076 330ml bottles, 8 casks and 18 key kegs. We have labels on the way, along with 5 o'Clock Shadow and Holy Hoppin' Hell.

Beer continues to fly out of the brewery, and you can now find it in bottle shops all over the country. This week a pallet was sent up to Manchester. If you see it anywhere, please do tweet about it, so we can update our outlets page on the website.

Now the weather has finally sorted itself out, the air conditioning has been turned on in the cool room.  This means the beer for the bar has also moved into the cool room.

Remember Miss The Lights? This was our first attempt at Hit The Lights, and our 2nd ever brew on the kit. This beer has been a strange one for , getting a real mix of reviews. Our stock of the bottles have sold out, but the casks and kegs have not gone down too well. We apologies if you have sampled this on cask, or key keg and have not enjoyed it. We have stopped selling these and our considering putting the remainder into bottles, as it works really well in this format.

As a side note, on Monday we will be brewing Hit The Lights. We have learnt from our mistakes, got a lot of the issues that plagued us in the beginning sorted, and calibrated the brew house. This time Lup'in will walk out onto the stage, but he will not fall on his arse. We are realy looking forward to brewing this, as it is a fantastic beer.

All opinions and grammatical errors are those of WeirdBeardBryan, and not the bearded collective.

Week 24

No real reason for the opening picture. Except it made us chuckle when we saw it, although not sure how the people of Hanwell would have felt seeing 'Destination weird Hanwell' pass through on the back of a truck. And maybe to pad out a blog about a moderately uneventful week.

One of the main reasons the brewery has been a little quiet over the last couple of weeks, besides me being busy with my 'day job', is our naughty little creation Holly Hoppin' Hell. Not sure we can blame the beer itself for everything, I think the weather has played it's part, but this brew has not gone as smoothly as we would have liked.  But it's finally been package, the label design is finished, Labels ordered and we hope to get bottles out the door in a couple of weeks. I love the label for this beer, a sneak peak can be seen above, but we will unveil the full label and full details of the beer and brewing process in the beers blog in a week or so.

The worst part of packaging days is the cleaning. Sticking beer into 4 casks, 18 key kegs and 2300 bottles doesn't happen quickly, even with the tireless assistance of Andy Parker. After standing for around 9 hours straight, the last thing you want to do is attack and clean an empty fermentation vessel. Holly Hoppin' Hell was a particularly messy son of a.... Coming in at 8.5% and with 15.5Kg of dry hops, there was a lot of crap in the cone of that vessel.Usually we would open the valve at the base of the cone and let the waste run out, but this time it was so thick and abundant, we had to get in with our new industrial size wet n' dry vacuum.

Now we could leave the cleaning of the FV until the next day, and we often leave part of the clean up for the following day, but you need to get the bulk of it done, otherwise it is all just going to dry up and be so much harder the next day. It was particulary important this time round for two reasons. Firstly, it was a Friday, and no one was really available on Saturday to come in and clean. But most importantly, and we are very excited to anounce this, with more information to follow, on Monday we will be doing our first collaborative brew in the brewery. This will not be just any old collaboration, this will be an international collaboration with our good friend Ingemar Jansson from Swedish cuckoo brewery Sad Robot coming over. I believe Ingemar has the obligatory facial hair, unless he has shave since last we saw him. This brew will be the first of hopefully 3 saisons over the coming months.

Beer continues to fly out the door, with bottles of Miss the Lights and Black Perle starting to run low. We are in a number of bottle shops around the country, and can be brought on-line now from Ales by mail, although they had pretty much run out of stock at time of writing. But they are picking up more next week.

This leads me on to a kind of apology. We are trying to keep the Outlets page on our website as up to date as possible, but this is proving difficult. There are several reasons for this. I would like to say the main reason is because we are selling to just too many people that we can't update quick enough. We are struggling to keep up, but this is not the main reason. We are now supplying a number of distributors, especially north of London, so we cant always know exactly who is buying from these distributors. As we hear about beer appearing, we try and update, but we need to keep our ear to the ground. We also supply a number of products to each bar we deal directly with, and it is impossible to know when each beer is going to be on. So if you guys see or hear of our beer anywhere, please do help us out by tweeting about it. Maybe we should come up with a hashtag.

All opinions and grammatical errors are those of @WeirdBeardBryan, and not always the grand circle of bearded brewers.