Don't look back

A monumental year at GADDS' Ramsgate Brewery draws to a close but reflection is a luxury only the secure can enjoy. Besides, the horizon is a thoughtful place to gaze at. And on it I see:

• in the very near distance a shed load of sleepless nights (they've already begun), long hours (starting Monday) and choice language as the big Project kicks in. It *should* be over by April, in time for Fools Day. Ha.
• a new web-site and redesigned labels. All nearly done. I must tell you about it soon.
• a re-organised shop in the middle distance - Hang 'Em, the visiting pro(con)fessor from Michigan, to take over. He does things his way, it ought to be fun.
• a new blog from me - 'Confessions of a small brewer'. Well, I never write about the bloody shop anymore anyway. Instead I'll carry on in the same vein adding more about local pubs, brewing and the industry in general (and there's a lot to add about that I can tell you). And you'll enjoy following the progress of a small brewer trying to build a bigger brewery armed with little more than deluded optimism, rusty engineering and a few small beads to trade.

In the meantime though, have a very good New Year. The future is ours.

Tradition for the sake of it.....

Five year's ago we made a Christmas morning arrangement to meet with a couple of friends and their kids on the main sands for a glass of cheap Cava and a toast. It was great, so we did it again the following year and a few more of our friends and their kids joined in. By last year there were around 50 adults sheltering under cover of the Pavilion, chatting, laughing, kissing and drinking and a hundred kids playing on the sand.

See you there at around 11.30am tomorrow morning. Merry Yule.

Sod tradition, and cheap Cava: it's beer every year for me from now on.

Supplier of the Year

It's a daily service he provides, throughout the year, come hell, highwater or a 2" snowfall. He's so reliable we rarely notice him. He's had a terrible year and, in the medium term, his prospects look bleak. In the short term, however, he's got a wopping great GADDS' faithful Dogbolter Yule Pudding to share with his family and friends.

He is, of course, our postman. A National Treasure.

Our Tony is a postie too. Loves his job but he's looking for a new one now.

Gadds' Seasonal Appeal

Hugh Shipman, co-founder of the specialist-beer import/export company, Bierlijn, is leading a campaign to save an historic WWI monument; the view from 'Hill 60' towards the West Flanders city of Ypres (Ieper) serves to remind the thousands of yearly visitors of the pointlessness of the War of the Western Front. It's a small piece in the jigsaw that helps us understand where we went so horribly wrong.

Peace and goodwill. Sign the petition.

GADDS' Dogbolter Yule Pudding Indoor Rugby Competition

Two of my favourite Ia(i)ns: Hayes on the left, proprietor of the legendary 'Grove Inn' smuggles a pass to Schuell on the right, ex GADDS' brewer now knocking up 'Newcastle' Brown Ale.

Mayhem

Yule has barely begun and we've cracked under the pressure: GADDS' Number 3, Seasider, Little Cracker and GADDS' Number 5 have sold out. We've got stocks of Dogbolter, Dark Conspiracy and GADDS' Number 7. They won't last though. (Pre-ordered polypins have been set aside so the organised need not fret).

We've also got some lovely GADDS' faithful Dogbolter Yule Puddings - they're big and gorgeous and on your Yule Feast table for £15.

Ok, I dropped the ball. I had a day off. But we're double brewing for the rest of the week in penance, though, to tell the truth, I'm largely unrepentant: where the hell were you all two weeks ago? The pub is not just for Christmas you know.

On the double!

Chelsea Clive and I are brewing double today. That isn't a new beer, we're brewing twice in a day. A lot of busy breweries do it but, on our scale, it's bloody hard work: the first mash went in at 06:30 and we'll not be in the pub much before eight this evening. Early in the New Year I'll be commissioning four new fermentation vessels (phase I) and double, and triple, brewing will be a feature of our lives for a while. It's going to hurt but it will be fun (well, fun if you're a weird, sad and obsessed brewer with a particular bent for engineering and hard graft).

The Schedule is coming under severe pressure from some Hungarian stainless steel fabricators who are linked to it through a long chain of sequential events. Like that butterfly that caused a hurricane. It's chaos, I'm telling you.

The Best Pint in Town - week 49

It was the firm's Yule Do last night and though we all thoroughly enjoyed a very late Critical Mass in the Artillery, the beer of the night, and the week, was GADDS' Number 5 at the Sir Stanley Grey. For the last year now Alan has been turning over an impressive volume of the stuff and boy he keeps a cracking pint. Cool, clear and really fresh, its sheer drinkability consigned the wine list to the bin.

And, it has to be said, the food, the service and the ambiance was delightful. In these troubled times for the pub industry it's a real tonic to spend the evening in a business run by truly talented professional - well done Sue. (Alan ain't bad at his job either).

Delay #1

Jim the Boil barely surpressed a snigger as I showed him our gas meter. "Well, you'll need one a sight bigger than that'n" he said. Up until now we've run the brewing tuns on electricity - a clean yet enormously expensive heating fuel - but, as we scale up, it becomes far more practical and cost efficient to change over to a boiler delivering high pressure steam to heating coils within the brewing vessels.

A quick call to our gas 'provider': "I'm sorry sir but the meter 'provider' says your meter is registered as 'disconnected'".

A quick call to the meter 'provider': "I'm sorry sir but you'll have to speak to your gas provider".

Gas 'provider': "It's the meter 'provider' who is responsible for updating the database'

Meter 'provider': "Your gas 'provider' registered it as 'disconnected'"

Gas 'provider': "There isn't anything we can do sir, until your meter is registered as 'connected'".

Meter 'provider': "There isn't anything we can do sir, until your meter is registered as 'connected'".

Registering a meter 'connected' that has incorrectly been registered as 'disconnected', a meter that has been providing gas since 1988, a meter that has been read and invoiced since 1988, takes 28 days. Someone, somewhere, in either gas provider company or meter providing company (they continue to blame each other) has slipped up and it will cost my Project 28 days. 28 sodding days waiting for these companies, that have happily taken my coin for four years, to get off their respective arses and tick a f%cking box just so an engineer can come round and confirm that yes, I do indeed need a bigger sodding meter. 28 days and I'm absolutely sodding powerless (pun not intended) to do anything about it. Can I change either gas or meter 'providers' and excercise my consumer power? Not a sodding chance, not until my meter is registered as 'connected'.

Such is the 'efficiency' of privately owned utility companies, the age of communication and of customer satisfaction.

I think I can run the boiler on oil and it'll be tomorrow's job to find out for sure. Tonight's involves a calming Dogbolter.

Project 15 begins

The lull before the storm; I've done the planning and the expansion project proper starts (slowly, at first, manic for a while, steady and manic once again) in a week's time. Here's my tool set:

Engineering plan: a big drawing using Google Sketchup, the free on-line CAD package used mainly for modelling in Google Earth. Look what I can do:

Squeezing the most out of what we have.

Schedule: a spreadsheet itemising the various necessary works and installations, linked to both Production (we don't want to run out of beer) and Budget (we don't want to run out of money). The coming 'holiday' period is inked in with my initials - well, it's better than lounging around relaxing with fine food and beer, or so I tell myself.

Budget: a tight affair. Nothing more than a list of expected expenditure, organised in a fashion that makes sense to me, the primary user. It's timelined so I can forecast cash flow implications (look, I haven't got a very large capital pot OK?). I update it regularly as prices are confirmed, the bottom line fluctuating little, either way. It's like a vital signs, real time readout.

The Cast: a small group of highly trusted trades persons, experts in their respective fields - R the Brick, Cool S and B the Spark, all local, augmented by Lofty A and J the Boil, proven specialists picked up from friends in the Biz.

The vessels we're buying are second hand and still in use as I write, the owner testing his new, 21st century stuff with a first brew tomorrow (good luck M, make it so). If all goes well we're set fair for a decommissioning party hours before the Yule break, and a few long shifts whilst you lot engorge yourselves on Little Cracker.

I've woken in the middle of the night for the last three, thinking and worrying about the minutiae of the job - I've been here before, it's a perfectly healthy reaction and means I'm fully engaged in the task. And it'll go on for another three months so forgive me if I look a little frazzled from time to time.

2010 Year in Beer - 80 Shilling Ale

New look pump clips will be a feature of 2010

Next year's 'Year in Beer', to be published pretty soon, tells me we're featuring '80 Shilling Ale' throughout January and February and, since late December in the brewery is likely to be a little unsettled (I'm installing and commissioning a total of 140 hectolitres of fermentation space - phase I of GADDS' great expanding girth), I thought I'd best stay ahead of the curve and get the first batch brewed tomorrow.

So I'm sat thinking about Rannoch Moor and sweet, mellow, heady ale (a fairly one dimensional view of Scotland I'll grant you, but it does things for me). I delved through the malt store for a half kilo of the most peated malt on earth (180 ppm) and crushed it up, the resulting aroma one of sweet smokey malt and wild, weather beaten peat. Perfect for a little background atmosphere. I'm using some crystal malt for its colour and distinctive sweet flavour, oats for their general northerliness, aroma and enriching property, chocolate malt for colour and smoothness, melanoidin malt for aroma and some amber malt for a juxtaposing drying character and toastiness.

As for hops, well, not too many; 80 shilling isn't really about hops. They're there, and they're classic British (Fuggles and Goldings), but they're far from dominant, though the Fuggles will add some smooth grassiness to flavour and aroma.

Come January, expect the kind of ale capable of driving the dampness from your bones, warming you through with its very wholesomeness and leaving you happy and ruddy faced. A fireside ale, one to drink with haggis (quorn) and something to chase a little Islay malt with. The kind of ale winter was designed for.

Beery presents

Large gift pack: 3 bottles of Dogbolter, 3 bottles of Number 3 and a pint glass - £15
Small gift pack: a bottle of Dogbolter, a bottle of Number 3 and a pint glass - £7.50
Sipping beer gift pack: one bottle each of Ancestors, Black Pearl, India, Oooks!, Reserved and a tulip glass - £12.50

Each of these gifts comes ready wrapped in bag with a handle - it's a 'grab and go' Yuletide present solution for the way we live today.

Where the wild hops grow....

....outside my brewery door.

Humulus lupulus (gaddus)

This little lady (for it is a female of the species, as evidenced by a couple of very small, immature hop cones) forced her way through a narrow gap between the concrete foundations of our building and the concrete slab of the car park. I'd be delighted to afford her long term shelter but, I suspect, this isn't an ideal site for a hop to prosper (unless I dig up some of the concrete, which is a distinct possibility).

Chelsea Clive and I are going to take cuttings and, through a process of mist propagation, we hope to have healthy plants in suitable ground (our allotment) by next summer. A couple of years after that and who knows, we may be drinking Ramsgate Pale Ale indigenously hopped.

I love being a brewer in Kent.

Hanging up the old boots.

Nah, not like *that*. This pair of old faithfuls has done its last shift - heel worn and leaking, they're heading for a cabinet in the Hall of Fame. In my possession alone they've brewed around 4 million pints of beer at 9 breweries in 3 different countries.

"You can use these until you get a pair to fit" said Stevie, as he handed over the keys to the Ferret & Firkin Brewery in Chelsea back in '94. They've flopped around on the end of my legs most working days ever since and I'll miss them.

Retired with Full Brewing Honours

Yule have to order soon.

Around here we start thinking about our mid-winter celebrations early in December and though work tends to intensify, so does the expectation of fun and merriment later in the month. Buying presents for one another is a creative way of showing, and sharing our love. But we're no good at that and, we suspect, nor are many of our customers. To that end Lois has created a range of gifts, ready wrapped and ideal for the beer lover in your life, even if, or especially if, that happens to be you yourself. First up, draught beer in bulk to take home:

For the month of December we're offering our Yule Special 'on draught' in mini-pins (10 litres - 18 pints) and poly-pins (20 litres - 36 pints) for you to collect, to take home, and to savor.


This is a beer specifically designed to complement your Yule Feast(s), so there's no need, or excuse, to bother with that annual bottle of dodgy red stuff that gives you a hangover.

Mini-pins are £30, poly-pins are £50. Ring Steve or Lois on 01843 868453 to order one.

Next up will be 'gift-packs', priced to suit a range of budgets from skint to just-about-head-above-water.