Beer update edition

 

East Kent Pilsner

This beer is moving from the ‘lagering’ to the ‘coming soon’ phase. At this stage we brewers begin to get anxious and insecure, and we attempt to take our minds off all the things that can still go wrong by looking at pretty labels and pretending they’re important. If all goes to plan, everyone around us is totally focused on different shades and textures and forgets to ask us how the actual beer is doing. That’s the way we operate, it’s a protection mechanism. (As it happens, my lager brewing guru visited yesterday and gave us the thumbs up – so far so good).

East Kent Krausened Draft Keller Pilsner

A Keller Pils is, broadly speaking, an unfiltered lager, and krausening (adding fermenting beer to a finished beer to carbonate it) is one of the sexiest things that you can do in a brewery (without contravening good food safety practice). The beer is coming to the end of the lagering phase and we’re allowing the temperature to rise from below zero to 7°C (pretty much ambient at the moment). Once it’s there we’ll begin brewing the next batch and, a day after that, we’ll pump a couple of hundred litres of fully fermenting beer into the finished beer before kegging it and allowing a secondary fermentation in the cellar (keller). By July we should have something pretty special, fingers crossed.

Booster – I Love This Pub (Blonde Ale)

Huge thanks to all of you who donned the thinking caps and came up with a huge list of extremely funny beer name suggestions. I understand that not all of them were supposed to be funny, so I’ll spare blushes and not list those that had us rolling on the floor. Thanks go to Gill Keay from Canterbury for ‘Booster’ which sums up nicely what we all need to give to our local pubs (and apologies too for the addition of ‘I Love This Pub’ – I couldn’t stop myself). I’ll be inviting Gill (and her plus 1) to the brewery to help us craft a delicious Blonde Ale using sweet biscuity malts and perfumed, lemony EKG hops. It’ll be an easy like a Sunday morning kind of beer, mellow and refreshing and should be in pubs from early June.

Dates for your diary

Monday 17^th May – the Montefiore Arms opens its doors! Matt and Harry will be there to welcome you back from midday.