10 year overhang

I'm suffering from a 10 year hang-over, that is, it's the worst I've been for the drink for that period of time. (Probably longer but I lived in Holland back then and don't remember much.)

My regular reader (hi Owen!) will know that, apart from a weakness for decent Claret and a fine appreciation of Islay malt, I very rarely stray from beer. And real beer too, because not only does it taste damn good it never, ever haunts me the following day. Not so though cheap red wine and cheap Armagnac. Urg.

Please don't try it home and yes, I probably did exceed my daily allowance but so did the other 40 adults in the room - that's the problem with the allowance, it's so unrealistic it's laughable. That said, I rather wish I'd stuck to it now.

Pub of Month - December 2009

And the winner is.......

The Rose of England
Set just back off Ramsgate High Street, Harry's place is a treasure trove of the early 20th century and there's not a nook nor cranny without some great dusty curiosity sat therein.

So much for the customers.

Harry's a first rate, life-long landlord whose parents kept the Balloon Up The Creek in Chelsea many, many moons ago (a pub Steve, I and our brewery worked in many years later when it was called The Ferret & Firkin in the Balloon Up The Creek, now sadly long, long gone but at least it's still a hostelry of sorts). You'll find him quick and generous with his affection for the human race (that includes you), a trait borne of enormous empathy for the struggle we all individually face in life. He is a top bloke surrounded by a loving and lovely family.

And all this month he'll be serving GADDS' Little Cracker and Dark Conspiracy, though not necessarily at the same time but certainly at good value for money.

But do beware, many a visitor has fallen foul of Harry's curious opening hours. They are:

Sunday through Tuesday - 11am to 7pm (yes, he closes in the evening)
Wednesday through Saturday - 11am to 11pm (unless it's a very dreary night)

You'll also be able to buy your fresh greens and eggs there too for it's a service he extends to his more senior, less mobile customers at no margin to himself.

East Kent IPA

I'm first in, most days, and the moment I open the door I can't help but use both senses of smell and hearing, as well as sight, to check out and understand what's happened in my absence. The smell of the place changes depending on what, and how, we're brewing and pretty often, for instance, the aroma of fresh yeast gives away the fermenting of something big. This morning was a bit different: an unusual hoppiness pervaded the old place, subtly distinct from the daily hop-store greeting.

Last night I made a giant hop-bag out of muslin and stuffed it with Humphrey's East Kent Goldings - 2009 crop; fresh and aromatic - steeping it in the hot liquor tank for a few hours before brewing our annual pale ale (dedicated to Humphrey and his mates on Brooke Farm, who made it all possible, indeed, who make most of our ale possible). In an effort to extract all possible flavours, from what looks like the best season for a few years, I'm ramming as many hops in as many vessels as possible on this brew and it's going to get very messy.

I usually draw a jug of brewing liquor for morning tea but elected for fresh filtered water this morning - I don't think even my buds could deal with tannin from both tea and hops at the same time.

Hopscars 2009.

Last night I attended the Kent Hop Competition over on the other side of the County, in Marden, hosted by the local cricket club. It was a unique chance to rub and sniff my way through the best samples, from the keenest growers, in the hunt for a new addition to our battery.


Being a born and bred townie I was very much the alien in a room packed with wonderfully eccentric hop growers and mad farmers - even the other two brewers present were wise in the ways of the country. I felt like I was scubba diving, visiting another kind of world: crazily different, certainly irrational to my eyes and yet welcoming, friendly and jovial. But clearly not an environment I could hope to survive in for long. (As it was, the NUF branch Chairperson kept me in there until I was gasping for air.)

Anyway, big congratulations to our mate Humphrey who took the top prize in the 'Northdown' category with a stunning sample - we're very proud of him. (Not that he'd ever bother his a**e turning up - far too cool for that - I'm sure he's a townie really).

Tomorrow morning I'm taking a chunk of Humphrey's East Kent Goldings, harvested just a few weeks ago, and brewing a good old fashioned Pale Ale of decadent proportions, the better to assess this year's local lupuline qualities. I predict the brewhouse will smell like a Kent country oast by midday.

Seasonale.

Yule tide fast approaches and we're very much in the mood for a festive brew to help spread the good cheer (look, yeh, I know it's only November and all that but we have to plan ahead, OK?). A cunning combination of pale ale malt, malted rye, crystalised rye and organic chocolate rye was mashed this morning and the resulting wort boiled with a union of fruity, spicy hops including one of this house's regular favourites, Bramling Cross, grown by Tony Redsell in Canterbury. Used judiciously, crystalised rye can add a wonderfully festive and opulent temperament to a brew already invigorated with the spicy, dry, pale malted version of the cereal. As for the organic chocolate malted rye? Well, we'll see. Or smell. Or taste. I only used a teeny bit this year, not knowing much about it*.

Little Cracker, 5%, ruby, fruity and spicy. Available throughout East Kent on enlightened handpumps and also from our own shop, just here, in polypins, firkins, kilderkins, barrels and hogsheads. Until late December.

*See, sometimes we can just throw stuff in nonchalantly.

"Beer protects mens' hearts."

Well, it's protected mine a few times.

The story was headline news at 6am this morning but, by this afternoon, good old auntie had buried it below many other less 'off message' items.

Correction fluid.

Thanks to Pete Brissenden for alerting me to the Taste of Kent Awards current top ten nominations. You may notice that Dark Conspiracy is (as of this day) in there. You may also note that competition rules state that Kent's best beer should be "beer made from hops predominantly grown in Kent at a brewery based in Kent". Whilst I'm extremely grateful for all votes received for GADDS' beers, I feel that I must point out that DC is brewed with hops grown beyond these shores and that these transatlantic lupulin badboys are responsible for a significant portion of the beer's flavour and character. From that perspective it is certain that this beer is totally unqualified to be nominated as 'Kent's Best Beer'. To that end I've alerted the organisers and asked them to remove Dark Conspiracy from the list. But many thanks for those votes regardless, hope you don't feel you've wasted yours.

As regular readers will appreciate, hops are used for flavour and bitterness in beer. Now it is perfectly possible to use hops predominantly grown in Kent and produce a beer whose flavour is essentially, and fundamentally, non-Kentish, by timing the hop additions cleverly. For example - brew an IPA, bitter it with East Kent Goldings (say 60% of the total hops) and flavour with an American citrus variety. This way you end up with a beer that would qualify under the present rules yet the flavour is Stateside, rather than Garden of England. Perhaps the rules ought to state 'brewed with hops grown exclusively in Kent'.

However, you know by now that all of GADDS' regular beers are brewed exclusively with Kent grown hops so vote in confidence for either #3, #5, #7, Seasider or Dogbolter. Better still, rather than split the vote, simply choose GADDS' Number 3 Premium Kent Pale Ale - the true taste of East Kent.

Thanks.

Tea with the Competition.

James Sandy, proprietor of the new Wantsum Brewery, dropped in to say hello today. It didn't take us long to agree on the basics:


Yeh, I know the GADDS' apostrophy is in the wrong place: the mug is a 'second', one of only a few dozen and hopefully a collector's item now.

Basic brewing - 1.1

Before we go any further let's revise.

We consider a brewery to be made up of three parts:

1. Brewhouse - the place we mix malted barley with hot water, steep, strain and boil the resultant extract with hops prior to cooling and sending to the fermentation vessels (see below). This is a batch process and we're able to 'put a brew through' in 8 hours.

2. Fermentation Room - where we keep the fermenting vessels. These we fill with sweet boiled wort from the brewhouse (see above), adding yeast to convert the cereal sugars into alcohol over a period of 7 days or so. They (the fermenters) may match the batch size ('brew length') of the brewhouse, be smaller (allowing two or more to be filled from one brew), or indeed be larger (taking up to three consecutive brews to fill). Once done in here we send the 'green' beer to casks or tanks for maturation (see below).

3. Maturation and cold storage - a cold room we call a cellar, though it isn't. It's on the ground floor. Beer arrives here in casks or tanks from primary fermentation (see above) and stays here from anywhere from 2 days to 2 years depending on its nature. Then Gray the Dray loads and delivers it, mostly.

We've got to the stage where:

• capacity at stage 2 is inadequate.
• capacity at stage 3 will be inadequate once the Kent spring springs in. And
  
• it also makes a lot of sense to increase capacity at stage 1 too (thanks Hang 'Em).

A further, and perhaps far important requirement, is that we achieve this increase in capacity whilst retaining a continuity of supply.

Phew, enough for now class. Next time we'll talk about phasing and I might get some photos out.

All change!

So, to recap: we've been here at Hornet Close with our little brewery for 3 years, slowly but surely building up our customer base, increasing sales and adding capacity. There's now three of us full time and four part. We all get paid and no one has to work like a horse (anymore). Even the numbers add up properly, at the end of the month.

Easy street here we come? No way. I'm ripping the whole thing out and starting again, bigger (three times) and better (immeasurably). Why? It's not as if we did a poor job in the fist place, quite the opposite, by luck more than judgement. But, and inexplicably I'm afraid, I know there's no plateau upon which to rest, it's just a straight incline. Or a decline. I'm scared of the former but not half as frightened as I am of the latter.

So look forward to a blow by blow account over the coming months of how to decommision two breweries and recommision them both armed with only a wing (secularity precludes the usual prayer), an extremely tight budget and total failure-phobia. Ought to be interesting.

Local secrets - Castres-Gironde

Neighbours gave us a plastic litre bottle of fresh wine, advising that it drank particularly well with roast chestnuts. Following a forage in the forest and a little work in the kitchen we duly cracked the unlabelled bottle and poured out glasses of faintly fizzy, cloudy white wine. Slightly sweet, though clean as a whistle, this stuff had been bottled from the primary fermenters (before full attenuation and clarification) and sold by word of mouth at the chateaux for a couple of euros a litre, strictly to the locals, in an under-the-counter style. And cracking stuff it was too, the whole experience thoroughly local and singular.

We sell our beer fresh from the cellar here in a similar fashion and we've a growing bunch of regulars turning up with containers various as suits their needs. This kind of sensible 'producer direct to customer' business is growing again, thanks to a widening realisation that it's more rewarding than buying soulless ale from a faceless middleman. It doesn't suit everyone, and it won't work on a massive scale, but for the few that care this service will always be valued.