The Frog Is Fired - a gooseberry pale ale

One fresh gooseberry off the tree in the garden, that's all we asked for. Just one bloody gooseberry to go into the boil! The frog had one job but just couldn't stop the robin eating it. We had no choice, we had to let him go.

Last year we were approached by the guys at Independent Manchester Beer Festival to brew a collaboration beer with them for the festival. Now this is a festival we all love here at Weird Beard, so jumped at the chance. The beer we produced was a black Saison with orange zest called Hacienda. The beer was a great success, with the barrel aged version going down just as well. When we were approached approached to brew with them for their 2015 festival, we were more than happy to say yes. Then when they mentioned the guys from the mighty Lervig from Norway would be involved, there was no turning it down.

 

The theme for the year was fruit in beer and between us, over the power of the interweb, we decided on a Gooseberry Pale Ale. On brewday, the Weird Beard team were in and ready to go nice and early as both the Lervig guys and I had events going on that night for London Beer City. James from IndyMan was a little late, but this is understandable as we are based in the outer reaches of London. We decided to wait a little longer for the Lervig guys, as that is the polite thing to do and we are very English. James and Matt rocked up about 2 hours late, looking a little partied out exclaiming 'you shouldn't have waited for us'. But they did arrive clutching a 5Kg bag of Nelson Sauvin hop pellets, which we can't get our hands on, so all was forgiven. We got the brew under way, talked beer, drank beer and had a really good day. 

The beer we created is easy-drinking, straw coloured with slight tartness from the gooseberry, complimented with loads of Citra and Nelson Sauvin hops that play perfectly with the fruit. We then added Centennial, because who doesn't like Centennial? This is a perfect beer for enjoying in the sun; shame IMBC is in October.

But where did the name come from? Well, when one of our team heard we were brewing a gooseberry beer he got all excited exclaiming he had a gooseberry tree in his garden and we should use some of the fruit from that. A few days later we were informed that that there was just a single gooseberry on the tree, but we thought "what the hell, we'll throw it in the boil anyway". The night before the brew, I sent a reminder to bring our sacred gooseberry in, but got the below email entitled 'The Frog Is Fired'.

'Gutted, the gooseberry is gone.. The robin, who thinks he owns my garden, must have eaten it for breakfast. The frog was put there as a lame attempt to scare him off.'

I could not stop laughing for about an hour, and when talk of a name came up, we couldn't think of a better one. Chris our label guy could not have translated all this into a better label.

We had a blast planning, brewing and naming this beer, and we also love drinking it. We hope you guys at IndyMan enjoy it too. For those not going to IndyMan this year, the beer will be released in bottle, keg and cask the week following the festival.

Recipes Evolve ... Some Evolve More Quickly Than Others ... Your Feedback is Welcome.

We at Weird Beard are striving all the time to make the best beer possible. We think we have some pretty nailed down recipes but we are not ones to rest on our laurels, so make small tweaks all the time to many of our brews.

Some of the major changes we have made include:
Hit the lights lost its crystal malt after about a year and it became in my eyes a much better beer.
Decadence changed 4 or 5 times early on as we were perfecting the recipe.
Saison 14 changed yeasts from wet French saison yeast to dried Belle Saison.

All of these changes have been fairly seamless. Most of the time when we make a change it has only a small impact on the final beer, but we have made a change that has had a big impact on the flavour of a beer and it has divided opinion in the brewery....

We added some Green Bullet into the dryhop schedule for Mariana Trench. This does fit in with our transpacific hopping schedule for Mariana Trench but the resultant beer tastes noticably different to the Mariana that we know. We would be very interested to hear what you guys think about it. Look out for Batch 216 in bottles and kegs and casks around and about for the next few weeks and let us know what you think of this change.

The Duke of Dank

Earlier this year, we had Matt Curtis come pay us a visit at the brewery. He was on a mission to relaunch his blog with a new look and did so with by putting out a very transparent piece on us. He then approached us a short while after with an awesome proposal for London Beer City. Here he's announced the event details. What this entailed from us was a collab brew with The Duke's Head Highgate pub-team and Matt himself, for something that'll work particularly well on cask. Even though we don't put out many firkins, we do think cask is important and doing this collab was a no-brainer decision.

We got the ball rolling on this one pretty fast. We had 3 potential weekends in June to execute this brew and have enough time for the beer to be ready; only 1 of those weekends was actually doable. We really knuckled down in brainstorming, scheduling, recipe development and ordering stock with regards to this new exciting beer. The enthusiasm and all-rounded effort was impressive from the very start. Matt suggested a West-coast inspired Red I.P.A with real resinous hop character. "None of that juiciness" he requested as admittedly, we'd all been having a lot of juicy, fruity I.P.As. We wanted something different and our boy Jonny, having spent a lot of time in the USA, sunk his teeth into the recipe and came up trumps.

So how did this Pacific Northwest Style Red IPA actually come into fruition?! The brewday itself was a Saturday and we were a team of 4: Bryan, Natasha, Matt and the pub GM, Tom Harrison. Between us, we were dab hands at digging out the mash tun, weighing out a hell of a lot of hops, ploughing through the cleaning and having the beer transferred into the FV by lunchtime. You can see Tom rocking a Weird Beard overall in the odd photos we managed to take of each other hard at work before settling down with a tasty beer in hand, courtesy of Curtis.

For this beer to be true to style, we've mashed in speciality malts, like caraRed, for the desired colour and graham cracker sweetness. Tasting this beer, you won't feel disappointed by the delicious malt character and we're pretty stoked we've hit the nail on the head here. We've also armed the brew with a big addition of clean bittering hop, Magnum so you really have the bitterness lingering in the after-taste. As well as Magnum, we've chucked in hearty doses of some of the United States' finest hops: Chinook, Nugget, Columbus and Simcoe to give the beer the dankness we had sought after.

You may enjoy The Duke of Dank, launching on keg and cask at The Duke's Head Highgate from Wednesday 12th August and on keg over the weekend at London Craft Beer Festival.

The Spreadsheet Ninja side of Brewing: Hop Contracts and Ninjaing the Ninja

So onto the 2nd installment of this little blog series. I even have a logo now!

Hop contracts are by and large a very good thing.  

A hop contract is a piece of paper that you sign that commits you to taking a certain volume of hops over the course of the year. There are a number of hop merchants that you can contract with and we frequently use Charles Faram as they tend to have the best range of available hops. It is vital for most breweries to guarantee the supply of interesting American/New Zealand/Australian hops that are so prevalent in current beer. It is also very useful if you contract at least 500kg for the year... At that point Faram's will store the hops for you allowing you to draw down from the contract without having to either store the hops yourself or pay for all the contracted hops upfront. To put this into perspective, our hop contract for this coming year is in excess of £40,000 and is over two tonnes of hops, not something we have the money or space to deal with all at once.

However, the availability of hops is always a hot and stressful topic at the brewery. Andy Parker sums up some of my thoughts nicely in his blog here. We in the UK only get the stuff that is left when the growing US craft scene has had its fill of the best of them.

Back before we started the brewery we knew that some hops would be very difficult to get hold of. Certain hops like Sorachi Ace and Nelson Sauvin are hoovered up in such large quantities by the bigger, more established breweries that they are almost impossible to get hold of unless you have a record of using them. If you are a start up you can't have such a record so you are left feeling that there is no way in. It took a lot of begging and buttering up the guys at Faram’s to get the small amount of Sorachi we did manage to get in the first year. We still can't get hold of any Nelson for love nor money.

Even when you have a contract, this is no guarantee of supply.  Hops are regularly shorted (a situation where the hop merchant gets only a percentage of their order and they pass this shortfall onto the brewers). Even when the hops arrive into the country can be a bit of an issue. Currently we are being told that there are no Simcoe pellets available, even though we have them on contract, that they have not arrived as yet. Not arrived! Hell, they were harvested 9 or 10 months ago... how long does the boat take to get across the Atlantic?

The biggest bugbear this year is the availability of Citra. Citra is our biggest usage hop accounting for about 25% of all the hops us we have on contract and the instrumental hop in Mariana Trench, our best selling beer, and Faceless Spreadsheet Ninja. Unfortunately it is a very popular hop with other breweries so the demand is large. This year for some reason, perhaps there was a lower yield on the citra crop, or one of the big US brewers decided they wanted a lot more but Charles Faram received only 70% of their expected ration. As such, they passed this shortfall onto the brewers so we only got 70% of the citra we were expecting. 

So how does a ninja deal with this kind of bump in the road? 

Be Prepared: 

As you may expect we were sensible enough to order more Citra than we needed, particularly the pellets we use for dry hopping. This got us through the start of the year.

Be Flexible: 

Faceless Spreadsheet Ninja in concept was a single hop Citra but as soon as we were shorted we changed to Magnum for bittering, which also allowed us to keep the price down slightly.

All was going well until we started to ramp up our production of Mariana Trench. We keep running out of Mariana so had to brew it more regularly - twice as often as planned in fact. A quick spreadsheet later and we realised that we had *just*  enough Citra to brew Mariana at this accelerated level for the rest of the year, so where did this leave this Ninja's dearest beer...

Plan B:

We had to make a sacrifice, we had to ninja the Ninja. We had to come up with the “Variations on a Ninja” series.

So what are the Variations on a Ninja series?

First up is MAC Spreadsheet Ninja, almost ready to release, perhaps a play on the Apple Mac where this Ninja first encountered spreadsheets. It uses Mosaic, Amarillo and Centennial and is less tropical than the Faceless version but its crisp hoppiness put a very big smile on my face.

The second variation is Traditional Spreadsheet Ninja, this is lagering away in the fermenter at the moment. It uses the Saaz hop, which you all will of course know is traditional in Czech Pilsners. Even if our brewery water treatment brews more German style pilsners, it is currently tasting great from the fermenter, so expect to see it in a month or so.

We have other ideas, Experimental Spreadsheet Ninja using Experimental 431 as the hop and Faceless Wordprocessor Ninja with Aurora, Bobec, Celia and Dana hops. Whether these get brewed, this ninja can't really say.

Defacer - the 200th brew

All the way back in February 2013 we brewed our very first beer, Single hop Chinook. This beer became Boring Brown Beer our Imperial Best Bitter which is brewed once a year at around the same time, but I digress. It took us a full 17 months to get to our 100^th brew. For this we decided to take one of our original core beers, and go big. We went with one of the original home brew recipes, Black Perle, back from when Weird Beard was just a twinkle in the eye. Double Perle was a huge success, and is now brewed around 3 times a year, with a small amount each time going into barrels.

It then took just under 11 months until our 200^th brew was upon us, and this time we thought of something different.

It has been well documented that we at the brewery love Sorachi Ace, that most divisive of hops. It may have started with beers like Fade to Black (Black IPA with Sorachi, Citra and Summit) and Saison 14 (Saison with Sorachi and Pacific Gem) that Gregg brewed as a home brewer, or it may have been the night that Bryan and Gregg met for the first time in the Euston Tap, where the Sorachi Ace version of IPA is Dead was the beer of the evening. Who cares which came first, either way we used Sorachi at every given opportunity, so where did you think we were going to go with this.

Our 200^th brew is inspired by a kind of unofficial beer range we have, that started out life as batch 8 of our Little Things That Kill. This was a low ABV beer hopped generously with Sorachi Ace, Summit and Apollo. The beer quickly got the nick name of Sorachi Face Punch because of the huge Sorachi Ace hit you got from it. We decided to use this hopping on a slightly tweaked version of our Holy Hoppin' Hell, a double IPA, which went by the name of Sorachi Face Plant, and again another brew of ours went down a storm. So for brew 200 we thought we would push ourselves as brewers and go bigger than we have ever before. Taking this hop profile a step further and brewing a triple IPA.

Naming this beer proved to be a bit of a challenge, almost as divisive as Sorachi Ace is as a hop. To some, there was a natural progression from Sorachi Face Punch, to Sorachi Face Plant to Sorachi Skull F*ck, but for better or worse this deemed unwise. We then bashed through a number of other names, such as Sorachi Face Explossion and Sorachi Face Hugger (which our Friends at Mad Hatter beat us to). But we came up with the equally good name of Defacer, which continues one of our other favourite things, music and name beers after songs. It also kind of follows the series name, as the sorachi is ripping your face off this time. And it has of course lead to some fantastic branding and a little twist to the workings of Lup'in, our ever changing skull.

The final beer is packaged today and specially bottled into 660ml bombers. Expect to see it in a few weeks after it has conditioned. Please do drink as fresh as you can, there are so much of our favourite hops in this beer, we wouldn't want you to waste them by sitting on a bottle. It weighs in at 11.1% so beware or it really will rip your face off!

The Spreadsheet Ninja Side of Brewing: Introduction: The Birth of the Spreadsheet Ninja

This is the first in what I hope is a series of blogs giving some insight into the business side of running a brewery.

When Bryan and  I started the brewery in 2013 neither of us were able to devote 100% of our time to the project. I was still running a photography business and Bryan still worked full time at the BBC. At the start we were both involved with every aspect of the brewery operation, brewing, packaging, sales, purchasing, marketing and social media, logistics and delivery and accounts. We were men with many many hats and when we were small this was not a problem. I could deal with sales e-mails in the middle of a brew day, or put together orders in the downtime on packaging days.

As we grew, things became a bit more difficult to juggle all the balls - even when we went fulltime at the brewery. Bryan automatically gravitated towards the brewing side and I to the business side. This led to some tensions as neither Bryan nor I appreciated how much time the other half of the business was taking. At one point Bryan called me a faceless accountant during one of our discussions.  It was time to get some more staff....

So this was the birth of the Faceless Spreadsheet Ninja, Faceless Accountant is the worst superhero name ever but change accountant for spreadsheet ninja and you have the basis for a beer and now a blog series.

Upside to A Down Day

Not many people would admit it, but things don't always go to plan in a brewery. Beer is a living thing and so many variables can effect it, and every so often a beer is brewed that just doesn't want to behave. I could name several very successful beers out there that were born out of error; I won't though.

Back in March our head brewer took the day off, leaving our very competent team to brew the next batch of Black Perle. This happens from time to time with no problem, but on this cold morning the wind must have been coming in from the wrong direction or the planets had aligned badly as we overshot our efficiency. This means we made way more sugar in the wort than usual, which in turn means the yeast is likely to produce more alcohol. 

Picture courtesy of Matt Curtis

Our problems did not end there though; the yeast seemed to really like this beer and did not want to stop consuming the sugars. Usually with a stout you would create lots of long chain sugars that yeast don't like. These sugars are left in the beer giving it a thicker body. This time round, the yeast wanted to eat almost everything and so the beer tasted a little thinner than we would like.

To recap, we had an over efficient brew, meaning more sugar, and yeast that just wanted to eat everything. So after fermentation we were left with a version of Black Perle that is over 1% higher ABV and with a little thinner mouthfeel than we would have liked. At this point, decisions have to be made: can the beer be fixed and released as normal? Is the beer releasable at all? Do we do something a little different with it? Well, we could have added some water to dilute the alcohol and bring it back to the right ABV, but this would thin the already lacking body even more and it just wouldn’t be Black Perle. The beer tasted great, as it always does, so we weren’t going to ditch it. This is where our creative juices start to flow and we get excited. What can we now do to turn this into an interesting new beer; make a positive out of a negative; find the up side of a down day? We tasted the beer and decided that with the addition of some choice dry hops this would be the perfect Breakfast Black IPA. So we chucked generous amounts of Bravo, Apollo and Cascade hops in the fermenter with all that lovely Has Bean Coffee, and gave it some time to take shape.

We think the end product is great. And hope you all enjoy it. But not too much, really don't fancy trying to brew this one again.