Lucky Ed

Amongst the language I learnt as a kid was the phrase 'scabby git' which, if directed at you, meant only one thing, that you'd been lucky. Perhaps you'd pulled off that tabletop without getting hurt, passed a French test or been given some tickets for the Pleasure Beach. Either way, you were a 'scabby git' in our book and we'd let you know, just in case you thought personal skill or charm played any part in your good fortune.

Well, in 1994, 6 months after starting my brewing apprenticeship, I was one scabby git. A great, big, fat, hairy one with nobs on: I won a bronze medal at the International Brewing Industry Awards. A cask of 'Firkin Dogbolter' I brewed at the Ferret in Lotts Road, Chelsea, was judged to be the third best strong cask ale in the World. Well, not including the many that didn't enter, but including the 62 that did.

Obviously I was pretty pleased with myself, and thankfully there were no Blackpudlians to point out that it was luck, not skill, what won it. But a couple of years later the senior brewer, Nick the Hat, confessed that he'd doctored my beer - he'd opened up the cask, didn't think much of the contents so put a handful of Styrian Goldings (hops) in for good measure. So afraid was he that I'd blame him for only getting a bronze (silver and gold were both taken by Shepherd Neame with Bishop's Finger and Spitfire respectively, incidentally) that he kept quiet about his genius little tinkering for two years, until, twisted by a guilty conscience and 8 pints of Dogbolter, he 'fessed up one night, spewing his adulterous little tale to me between sobs.

Now I know only too well that it was his intervention that stunned the judges and forced them, for the first time in the competition's then 109 year history, to award an award to a micro-brewery. And that forced our director to put his hand in his pocket and pay for a table of us to attend the awards ceremony, where beer and food were free and Firkin brewers made the most of them. I duly presented myself on stage at the appointed moment to rapturous applause and cheering from an audience that really, really loved seeing a little guy win.

Now I've lost the medal they gave me, and the certificate, but I'll never ever forget being one scabby git.

The IBIA is back this year and we're entering West Coast IPA. Fingers crossed for a gold this time.

Taste of Kent Awards 2010

Forget X Factor, that's over, now it's the Taste of Kent Awards voting time. Click here to vote for your favourite producers and retailers of Kentish food and drink.

You'll remember back in 2007 when we won Best Kent Brewery? And you'll also remember 2008 when, after the organisers changed the category title, we won Best Kentish Beer with GADDS' Number 3 Premium Kent Pale Ale? We won it in 2009 too, for the same beer.

Well, this year the organisers appear to have reverted to the "Best Kentish Brewery" category. Perhaps, kind reader, if I shut up you'll have time to follow the link and vote for your favourite Kentish Brewery (please, pick one that uses predominately Kent grown hops). The top three, according t0 public opinion, go forward to a judging panel where the real battle commences.

There's a lot of new breweries in Kent these days so I imagine the battle could be bloody, and fierce.

Le Voyageur

Canadian brewer Iain Shuell is leaving for his homeland next week after a 7 year spell here in Blighty. To me he has been, variously: a colleague, an employee and a close friend for around 15 years now, here and abroad. And I'm going to miss him, so we're brewing a farewell beer together.

On Iain's insistence we're keeping the styling English on a brown ale, but with a distinctly Canadian twist: maple syrup. So it's all about crystal malt for sweetness, with roasted barley and chocolate malt to lend some toffee notes and colour, oats to smooth it out and a twist of wheat for the head. Kent grown fuggles in the boil for a very light bitterness and, late on, for an earthy touch. We ferment with a gentle ale yeast, adding a flagon of maple syrup early on, and another just before casking. Mature for 3 weeks and send it out for New Year.

Oh, and there will be tears in there too.

The story of the voyageurs is pretty cool and very Canadian - look.

Bare faced cheek!

You may not know that every brewery in the country receives dozens of requests for paraphernalia every week, but they do. People collect not only beer mats but bottle tops, labels, badges, towels, umbrellas and anything else with the company logo on it. Such is the volume of these pleas that, were we to accede to them all, we'd have no time left for brewing and no money left to run the business.

Thus, it is only in rare circumstance that I reply, I'm afraid. However, I'm tempted by the sheer over the top audacity of the below application:

Good afternoon. I am the director of the company "Beer na ves' mir" in Russia. My name is Arthur ******. At on 11/10/2010 in Moscow there was a beer festival. One man allowed to all to try your drink. I and my assistant have been very surprised, at your beer very unusual and pleasant taste. I would like to have your beer in the menu of my restaurants. Accept to me please your advertising materials, a price sheet for 2010-2011. And there are some souvenirs for our visitors.... Ball pens, supports under glasses, samples of covers from bottles, keychains, notebooks with your symbolics. We have a tradition to give to their good clients. Big to you thanks. I hope that we will co- operate with you. Our legal address: Russia, ******, Moscow, st. Volgogradskiy prospect ***-*-** Always with you: Arthur ******

Name and address supplied, but not revealed (for my own personal health).

Chilled

Our new glycol chiller just arrived, several weeks early.

When we installed the new (old) brewery in February I didn't have the budget to upgrade the cooling required for the fermentations, relying instead on pub lager coolers sitting in a wooden shed. It worked though and, surprisingly, we sailed through the summer without a hitch.

Now we've got some smart cellar tanks ready to install and I want the holding temperature down to -1° C for the bottled beer: cold storage (or lagering) improves flavour and flavour stability; the colder the quicker. So it's the right time to invest in cooling.

When I get back off a week's holiday Gray will have installed most of the new pipework and we'll be ready to shut the shed down, ship it out and install the new.

This kind of thing makes me very happy - everyone feels like this about cooling, don't they?

My friend Stewart

Stewart is a M. Brew, it says so after his name. If I were to aspire to any post-nominal it would be to this one, for it identifies the holder as a Master Brewer, the highest academic brewing qualification available in our industry. He must have worked very hard indeed to get that; I, on the other hand, dropped out of brew-school long before I achieved anything. And it isn't just a scholastic gulf that divides us: Stewart's career followed the classic route through national and regional breweries whilst I fell into a Firkin pub one night and wasn't thrown out until I'd learnt how to brew, how to manage a brewery and how to manage a pub. And while Stewart is now Senior Brewer at Britain's oldest brewery, I'm Head Brewer at a pip-squeak upstart rival down the road. But this is the UK brewing industry and, as such, we get on like a house on fire. That's the way it has always been in our trade: collaboration and cooperation, altruism and benevolence. They tell me it doesn't happen in other industries, how sad.

Stewart and I brewed a special yesterday on his 4 barrel pilot plant, in preparation for the harvest lunch at Coldred, the village he lives in. Between us we're presenting 4 different beers, matched to each of the four courses, to the entire village in a barn made over for the purpose. 'Delta', the beer we brewed yesterday, is a simple pale ale flavoured with a new variety of American grown hop called 'Delta' (see what we did there?) whose parentage is Fuggles and Casade. We're expecting an earthy, fresh aroma with a strong, well balanced, juicy and hoppy flavour, though, to be honest, we've no real evidence upon which to base this; our joint brewer's intuition has filled in the knowledge gaps and come up with a fruitless speculation, again.

It's my turn next time and I'm looking forward to knocking out a somewhat larger collaboration brew with this Master Brewer sometime next year. Any suggestions?

To be sure, this doesn't mean I've gone soft - the PBD defence operation continues apace.

Brewery Update

It's 'hanging on by our fingertips' season and beer appears to be pouring itself, in great volume, out the door as fast as Clive, Skinny and I can possibly brew it. It wasn't supposed to be like this; once we expanded and could brew 2500 litres in a shift, we mapped out an easy summer for ourselves, looking forward to lazing around whilst the sales and delivery crew grafted (for a change) to keep up.

And that's as much of an update as I can muster in the time allocated. Thanks.

Kent Hop Update

It has remained seriously dry in Kent throughout July and whilst yields might be expected to be low as a consequence, pests and disease have been thin on the ground too, suggesting decent quality. Humphrey the hop grower is even more bullish about quality than last year, when he was even more bullish than the year before, when he was even more bullish than the year before that - in fact, he can't possibly get any more bullish next year or he'll be attracting unwanted attentions from his herds. "An inch [rain] would do it" he tells me, bullishly. We're in negotiations over the 40kg of freshly picked, undried East Kent Goldings I want to collect from him during harvest, in early September. They're to go in a fresh 'green' hop ale of, as yet, undecided recipe. Naturally it isn't him that brings up the weight subject, you see, undried hops weigh eight times more than dried.

"I'm not after buying water" I say.

"Why not?" says Humphrey "what you sell is mainly water, isn't it?"

Touché.

That isn't Humphrey's hand in the picture, his are gnarled and knotted like farmer's.

Kent Hop Update

Late July and the flowers are just starting to show.

Sam's Ram

If the owner of this spectacular piece of art would like to make themselves known, there's a polypin of ale here with their name on it.

Rewards

GADDS' Number 3 Pale Ale won another double gold at this year's Great Taste Awards - the judges reckoned that the hoppiness made it a 'stand out' beer. Well done them.

GADDS' faithful Dogbolter won gold at the South East SIBA Beer Competition this weekend and so goes forward to the national finals next year.

Hurrah.

Madman opens pub in Ramsgate

Rumour has it that despite the current economic situation a suspect has been spotted viewing properties, filling in planning applications and attending licensing courses. Police believe it is entirely possible that a man is involved and he intends to open a small pub.

Nutter.

Good luck mate.

Kent Hop Update

The bines have reached the top of the strings, 14 feet above the ground, (they'll continue to try to climb upwards for a few weeks yet, inevitably flopping over and growing back down a few feet). The ground is parched and we could do with a little rain to help nutrient uptake during this intensive growing phase (it's on the cards for next week). But this soil is clean, the ground managing to avoid the infections that decimated many Kent gardens in the 30's; verticillium wilt is unheard of round here and will remain so as long as visitors are few and respect the rules (never wear anything you've worn in another hop garden). Aspect is important and these East Kent Goldings are in hopheaven here - south-south-east facing in the south east of England; plenty of ripening sun and relatively long days. The cool on-shore winds have low humidity, keeping disease at bay, but on occasion can carry clouds of spider mite or aphid with them from lord knows where (the poor French often get the blame). It can be strong too, this wind, and that has a tendency to bash the flowers against each other, causing a little unsightly bruising. But all-in-all the terroir is, as ever, mixed: many good points, a few bad. We'll take it though, it's local and it's ours.

Flowers generally start to appear in the third week of July round here and in the first week of August lupulin production begins. Synthesis is almost complete by September but it's the final few days that really count - we need late summer sun shine and warmth to fully ripen the cones and keep 'em fit until harvest. There will be flowers next time I visit, and I'll show you them. And come September, on or about the 12th, we'll pop down early, bag ourselves 20 kilos straight off the picker and rush home to brew 'GADDS' Green Hop Ale'. I love the summer in East Kent.

We brew a lot of beer with the hops grown on this land and they lend a gently astringent bitterness and a humble but cultured floral, citrus aroma. It's unique to us and, for better or for worse, good times or bad, we're wedded to them.

It's nearly the weekend

Well it's the very height of summer down here at the seaside and only a cool onshore breeze is keeping profound madness at bay. I can't possibly imagine how the inlanders manage in this oppressive heat (perhaps they don't and they are loon) but I'm going to find out this weekend: I'll be leading (astray) a crack contingent of GADDS on a mission tens of miles into mainland England, to provide technical support to Vince Power and his Hop Farm Festival. We're sending several tonnes of cool Kentish ale to service the three beer tents and it is wholly necessary for me, and my friends and family, to be on hand to dispense advice to the bar staff. In order to be in a position to carry out our duties effectively we clearly need the right equipment, such as a crew bus, back stage camping and access all areas passes.

Should madness strike any one of us the emergency drill is only too well practiced: cease working, sit (or lie) down, get something cool to drink and try to focus on some music.

Blag? Yup.

UPDATE

I've got some 10 litre polypins of Festiv'Ale on special offer at £20 each (while stocks last). So if you didn't get a ticket, get a polypin, don't wash for three days and listen to the radio from your neighbours garden for that authentic stay-at-home festival experience.

Festiv'Ale

In a couple of weeks' time Van, Bob, Debbie and many of their friends are having a bit of a knees up down at the hop farm and they've asked for a cask or two of the good (and local) stuff to help things go with a swing. We'll be taking some Seasider and GADDS' Number 5 Best Bitter but the main offering will be Festiv'Ale, our pale, hoppy, fruity thirst slaker brewed to be enjoyed while dancing on grass in the sunshine. Or moonshine.

Obviously technical support is all part of the deal and, in a rare show of leadership, I've decided to do it myself - well it *is* on a weekend. I'm taking the Coyote and his camper van; he's very excited because blue-grass style Mumford & Sons will be there.

Recipe Formulation Day

Next week we're brewing Festiv'Ale, a pale, fruity little 3.8er for those on a session at this year's Hop Farm Festival up in Paddock Wood. We've brewed it before; we find an excuse to slip it in most years but we don't necessarily use the same recipe every year. Proper beer drinkers think it sacrilegious alter a beer's formulation but the truth is it happens a great deal more than they suspect, to a great many more beers. I can't speak for others but there are a few reasons we change and alter things: a change of raw materials available necessitating a tweak, a change in drinker preference (or a change in drinker), to improve the flavour of a beer or simply to try something a little different. No one has drunk Festiv'Ale since sitting in a field last year and I doubt even those that took notes can recall the exact nuances involved so I feel free, to a certain extent, to revisit the brewsheets, check the malt store, check the hop store and work out a recipe. I call it 'freshening up'.



So, the malt was simply pale Marris Otter and some Caragold (body and mouthfeel) at 11%, the hops were Canterbury grown Cascades for a middling bitterness and juicy flavour with a twist of fruity Nelson Sauvin hops at the end. All fermented with a soft ale yeast to a sweeter-than-usual finish, (which will have balanced that gentle bitterness).

I don't think much needs changing there then. Up the hops, as always, but nothing else.

Well, that was an easier day than I thought it would be - as the Coyote says "some days you eat the bear, some days the bear eats you" (these Canadians are an odd lot).

Warminster Malting

I visited Chris Garrett at Warminster Maltings a couple of weeks ago - we've been using his malted barley to brew our beer for around 5 years now and have developed a close and beneficial working relationship. I like to know the materials I'm brewing with; malt and hops vary quite naturally from season to season, year to year, and it's a brewer's responsibility to take account of this irregularity and produce beer with acceptable consistency. Now, as a *small* brewer, with little purchasing clout, I'm not in a position to draw up demanding specifications for my supplies, and, even if I could, I'd be unable to verify them with the limited lab checks available to me. So ours' is a world slightly more intuitive than that of our bigger cousins and the better our understanding of the whole chain of supply, the better that intuition works. So I like to track back, through the chain, to the field, talking to the key (and not so key) people along the way in an attempt to pass understanding between us.

Chris and I, along with Piers from Nelson, Phil from Goachers, and James from Wantsum, have been discussing how we might get our barley grown locally, here in the Garden of England. There are many varieties of barley available to the farmer with new ones, bred for ever increasing growing efficiency, emerging all the time, but we smaller brewers tend to favour a rather old fashioned one, Marris Otter, for its superior flavour and brewhouse performance. 'Otter' was bred back in the 60s and its agronomic performance is way below today's standards, so it's no easy task to persuade Giles to struggle away with it when he could be growing something else, something with less risk and greater yields ('doesn't stand up' is farmers' vernacular for 'difficult to grow'). Brewers are fussy too about nitrogen levels in the grain - too little and our precious yeast is uncomfortable, too much and we get haze problems (in the beer). Generally, suitable soils for growing malting barley are the less fertile ones and, *very* generally, these are in East Anglia not in Kent. That said, Kent isn't completely devoid of fields of barley, there are isolated pockets but, at the moment, it is completely devoid of fields of Marris Otter barley.

So getting locally grown barley is by no means straightforward but, thanks to Warminster Malting, it is going to happen: the first acres are to be planted up later this year, the first grains harvested next spring and the malt on-line and in-beer next summer. And I'll be able to witness, first hand, the whole process from planting to drinking. It'll be a great year.

I must tell you more about Chris Garrett and his Warminster Maltings one day - it's one of those businesses that is sooo well run it makes you laugh out loud. I get most of my hops my Humphrey and most of my malt from Chris and that isn't going to change anytime soon.

Sorry

Yesterday's post was awful wasn't it? I *know* that nothing so becomes a man as modest stillness and humility and I *know* too that pride is a rather dangerous feeling, best avoided, or at least saved for the rarest occasions, such as watching your daughter come third in the first heat of the 60m dash on sports day. But I'm weak and susceptible to over-excitement, prone to forgetting the point of it all: to just brew it, as best I possibly can, and leave the rest to others.

I want to make it up to you - come up to the brewery today, before 1pm, and I'll stand you a pint (or two if your constitution is up to it). Then you won't need me to tell you whether or not you like the beer, you can decide for yourself.

Brewing is a great leveller - the better you think you're doing the more self critical you become in order to avoid as much dillusion as possible.

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.