I love it when a plan comes together

I wrote a little about GADDS' Thoroughly Modern Mild a couple of weeks ago, after brewing it. The basic challenge we faced was to brew a mild ale (for it *is* Mild Month) that would sell very well. We've tried the traditional dark, sweet and weak route over the years but, despite a core of enlightened followers, it simply lacks a wide enough appeal to move quickly; beer that hangs around in a pub for a few days, especially beer fortified with little hop goodness, starts to taste poor pretty quickly.
So we hatched a plan to modernise the style, drag it into the 21st century, give it a right kick in the pants. A wide variety of tasty malts were employed alongside a more modern American grown hop variety, used only for flavour. We brewed it pretty strong, strong enough that two pints satisfies. And we didn't want it to be overly fruity, since we had no bitterness to balance that, so we fermented the ale under 1.5 bars of pressure. The beer was produced pretty quickly, to retain freshness and vitality.

Pomegranate, the designer, has a thing about irony, and duck tails.

Steve brought a cellar sample up to the office this morning and he bore a grin that said only one thing - we'd f^^&&&g nailed it. And he's right, it's a damn tasty brew and I can't wait to nip out for lasties, one night next week, and get a pint in some East Kent hostelry of (ill) repute.

Curses! That jpeg above is from the draft version; the real one says 'deep, golden mild' which is both far more accurate and grammatically fun.

Judgement Day

I'm on a train heading South West to the Tuckers Malting Beer Festival with the excuse of 'judging' at the Society of Independent Brewers SW regional beer competition. Around 100 breweries will have entered over 350 beers between them, each hoping to be judged 'best in class' or, better still, 'best in competition'. There'll be around 40 judges drawn mainly from the biz with a sprinkling of the worthy added in; we'll be divided into groups, each with its own guiding chair and a category to assess. Blind tasting will ensue with much sniffing, swirling and swilling and marks given for such attributes as clarity, aroma, and flavour. All the entered beers will be subjected to this scrutiny, the lucky few going forward to a national final competition next year and the winners of *that* will gain bragging rights over the entire craft beer movement of England, Scotland and Wales (I imagine it's only the pesky Irish sea that precludes Northern Ireland from our association, though it may be a lack of breweries). In this highly competitive industry such awards are generally considered to help out the sales department enormously and, to an extent, this is true: the process of selecting the winners is extremely vigorous, spanning over a year, and the assessment of as many as 20 independent scrutineers - you don't get lucky in this competition - the badge of merit is just that, a mark of true quality. All this helps the cream rise to the top where you, who just seeks a tasty beer, will be able to spot it and select it. The beer award world is, like most such influential awards, flawed. Of course it is, but it isn't damaged to such an extent that it ceases to work, no, no it works very well in fact.

But I feel uncomfortable about it all, I always have done. Beer 'competition'? Beer can't compete; nothing so profound is completely measurable. I can argue that the appreciation of a beer is subjective, that we have differing preferences, and I'd be partly right. You could counter by arguing that it's objective, that the vast majority of us can tell a rotten beer from a decent one. And you'd be partly right too. We could get bogged down in this (Pirsig stuff) for some time and not actually reach a conclusion, but we needn't, because it's superfluous to my point and that is this: beer is not a simple, stand alone object in the same way that, say, an eraser is. An erasure looks and works like one pretty much wherever it is and whoever is using it. There are no discernible outside influences altering the users perception and performance of the erasure, it's the same as it was, albeit possibly a little more worn, in a previous time and place. Not so beer though - beer is beer, and mood, and place, and company. Context is everything in beer - what's right one day, in one place and with certain people is not necessarily as good the next day, in a different place, all alone. I need only one example, a single anecdote, to illustrate my point: the best beer I ever had? I usually shy away, mumbling something about the one in my hand but that's a cover-up: truly, the very best beer I ever had (well, it's up there) was a bottle of Amstel, the Amsterdam brewed pilsner. I can't tell you about the malt profile, or the blend of hops used to create this masterpiece, mainly because the experience was over 20 years ago, but I can give you an idea of the circumstance: the beer was ice cold, fresh from a large catering fridge in the kitchen of a quayside taverna on the rocky Ithaca in the Ionian Sea. There were perhaps ten of us, girls and boys on our summer break from University, prime of our lives and having the time of our lives. There was more than one bottle too - enough to quench the thirst and lubricate social interaction for a number of weeks. Yes, Amstel lager certainly did it for me that summer. Back home, and before the season completely finished, I chose a warm West London day to treat my mate to a couple of chilled down Amstels I'd secreted in the union bar ice machine. And though it tasted good, it wasn't the same, not at all the same. It never could be the same.

So though it is possible to 'judge' the merit of beer it feels entirely inappropriate to do so. An act of sacrilege would be putting it too strongly, perhaps, but it is wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. But since my trip is an excuse to enjoy a little travel, meeting old friends and making new ones whilst supping a couple of pints of the local, I'll forgive myself.

Brewing a decent cuppa

We run on tea here and gallons of the stuff are drunk each day. As you might expect, we're not bad at brewing it (except, of course Coyote, whose hot 'drink' offerings are met with such muted enthusiasm - it's very difficult to know whether the drink before you was supposed to be tea or coffee and mostly it utterly fails to satisfy in any way - that he's pretty much banned from brewing up). Anyway, you all know about boiling water and bringing the pot to the kettle but here's a top tip about chlorine:

Chlorine is put in the water supply by the water suppliers to keep the water potable, free from contamination. It works very well but it can make the water taste pretty bad when levels of this additive are high - tea in particular will taste more than faintly of TCP and it can do serious damage to pasta. Install a carbon filter to your drinking and cooking water supply and you'll no longer have a problem. Or, and this is the top tip, keep an open jug of water in the fridge over night: the chlorine evaporates, the water tastes better and the tea is always spot on!

Extensive trials have been carried out here in the Brewery in order to come to the above conclusions. We present the results here for free.

Year in Beer 2010 - Thoroughly Modern Mild

Where I grew up the men drank bitter: proper Boddington's for the Dad's and Wilson's Fizzy Keg Chaz and Dave Bitter for us lads. Mild was enjoyed too but not in the legendary volumes of folklore, rather as an occasional alternative. The style is typified by low alcohol, low hop flavour and low bitterness. The only highs being roasted, coloured malts and sweetness. If it doesn't sound exciting that's because it isn't, well not in the volumes we drink today. To properly enjoy mild of olde one needs to sample far more of the stuff in a single sitting than is currently acceptable simply because, in order to really *get* it, one needs to tune into its very raison d'etre, that is, to slake the thirsts of parched miners and mill workers as they return home from a hard days graft. The stuff is brewed to be enjoyed by the gallon and so a few sips here and there isn't going to cut it.

So it follows that since the reason for drinking mild has disappeared, so too have the sales and thus the brewing of it. Anything going out of fashion like that is red rag to a bull where our friends, CAMRA, are concerned and so, yearly, May becomes 'Mild Month' and we're all cajoled into brewing and drinking the stuff completely out of context. We spend a less than physically gruelling day at our desks, returning first to home to play our parental roles and have dinner, then to the pub for lasties, a satisfying couple at most, and you want us to drink a 3% beer that hasn't got any hops in it? No way.

We did try and join in. For several years GADDS' Dark Mild was wheeled out during May, and pretty good it was too: Best Mild in the SE and finalist in the Champion Winter Beer of Britain. But it failed to excite the modern beer drinker in East Kent and just got harder to sell as the years went by. So I dropped it and, realising 'tradition' was not going to keep my brewery busy, I dropped any further pretence of *being* traditional. Besides, what's the point when Britain's Oldest Beer is brewed nearby?

Back in the olde days, to before the days of heavy industry, to when my Lancashire was still green, mild and bitter were brewed to varying strengths. Essentially, 'mild' meant young and lowly hopped, not bitter. There was 'mild' and 'bitter' of varying strengths and styles to suit most pockets and occasions. And so, the term 'mild' has never, necessarily, meant dark, weak and fairly bland. It meant, and means, *not bitter*.

So, with that in mind, we now brew a Thoroughly Modern Mild, a beer to speak for every East Kent office worker in need of satisfying sustenance during May, on a school night, with limited time available. It's brimming with delicious malt flavours: sweet crystal rye, toasty amber, aromatic melanoidin and juicy caragold, all smothered with a grassy, slightly resinous and earthy Willamette hop. There's no bitterness to this beer, but it is stacked with full flavour and a massive 2 pint satisfaction rating absolutely guaranteed.

I'm brewing it tomorrow (if I can fire the boiler up) and you'll be drinking it in May.

No use for good advice

"Don't run out of diesel son: apart from fuelling the burners, it lubricates the pump bearings", the departing words of Jim the Boil fell on largely deaf ears, my capacity to absorb instructions diminished not only by fatigue and excitement but by minutiae-overkill too. I'd heard far too many menial little dos and don'ts over the previous 3 days, I just wanted the keys and to be left alone to put the boiler through it's paces, so go on, see ya later. But I had recognised this advice as wisdom, I had filtered it from the general white noise and labelled it 'important', yet all along I knew I'd ignore it.

Four weeks graft and the new (second hand) brewery is bedding in very nicely, a total dream to run. And it's a fair bit busier than forecast, which is the second contributory factor to my downfall this weekend: the boiler won't fire. The boiler won't fire and so it won't boil water. And since it won't boil water it won't produce steam, so I can't heat my brewing liquor for tomorrow and I can't boil my wort tomorrow. Which means I can't brew tomorrow.

Clive checked the diesel: it's low, but not empty.

My hope is that the low level has caused a disruption to the feed and once I've filled the tank up (they send a tanker out, I'm not kidding, a real tanker) head pressure will be restored and the old boiler will be firing on all (one) cylinders by lunchtime.

My fear is that I've seized the pump bearings and it'll take a couple of days or more to fix.

Grrr, wisdomfail. Still, it distracts me from an imminent and pesky HM Revenue and Customs visit this week.

Lobbying, a reply.

Dear Mr Gadd,

I had not actually seen the Telegraph article that prompted you to send me a bottle of Dogbolter. I have to confess that I usually drink draft bitter, but I greatly enjoyed a bottle of your porter. I will continue to look out for Dogbolter when I get a chance.

I shall certainly resist all the efforts of latter-day prohibitionists to impose ever more restrictions and cost on beer lovers like ourselves and the many other members of the public who enjoy relaxing over a pint.

Yours sincerely,



The Rt. Hon. Kenneth Clarke, QC, MP

See, beer creates consensus across the political divide - here here.

Nice one Ken, much appreciated. I knew you were a decent type.

Dragon's Blood ESB

ESB - eh? what's that all about?

Well........

Easy really: Extra Special Bitter, that's what it's all about. A bitter for special occasions, though brewed with the usual extra high quality ingredients and with the usual extra special attention to detail, this one is Special, and Bitter, in an Extra sort of way. It's for people who like their bitter trad': brown, balanced malt sweetness with tangy hoppy bitterness. Only, because this is ESB, it's a bit maltier, a bit tangier, a bit hoppier and far more bitter. It's Special alright.

This is Great Great Grandfather George's Special Recipe (he was an early advocate of the metric system):

(serves 3,400)

Crushed Pale Malt - 290kg
Crushed Crystal Malt - 28kg
Crushed Malted Wheat - 8kg
Twists of Roast Barley and Chocolate Malts
East Kent Golding Hops - 3.5kg
Kent Fuggles Hops - 3kg
Kent Northdown Hops - 2.5kg
3000 litres hot liquor (75 degrees Celsius)
1 kg Brewer's Yeast

Method:
Splash 150 litres of the liquor into a large pan with a false bottom and leave to warm for 5 minutes, splashing a further 1000 litres in along with all the malts. Mix well, but don't over do it. Leave to stand for 90 minutes, then drain the 'sweet wort' from the base of the pan and collect it in another large pan. Sprinkle the remaining hot liquor over the malt grains, collecting sweet wort from the base as you go along. Once the second large pan has 1900 litres of wort in it add half the hops and bring to a rolling boil for an hour. Add the remainder of hops, holding back the Fuggles, and switch off the heat. Cool through a heat exchanger and collect in a large bath. Add the Brewer's Yeast and leave for a week. Add those Fuggles, put a lid on and cool for another week.

Then ask your mates round for the evening and drink the lot. If that's too much effort, simply nip down to your local East Kent Hostelry and order up a flaggon of GADDS' "Dragon's Blood, ESB".

It's Bloody Special.