Beer Porn - Wherry with Elderflowers

Took me a while to get used to this one, a standard Woodforde's Wherry kit brewed top an OG of 1050 (temperature adjusted to 1051) and dry hopped with 40g of dried Elderflowers. Tastes completely different out of the bottle compared with the keg.

Obviously, because of the crap winter, Elderflowers will be a bit late this year but when they do grow, I think I'll try an All Grain beer with Elderflowers as well as hops. I'm looking for a summer beer so feel free to suggest some grains.

Who else has made beer with wild ingredients? I'd love to hear some suggestions.

My Road To Damascus

Or, how a brewing competition finally tipped me over the edge into All Grain brewing.

It's been a busy week it the world of beer and brewing for me. On Saturday I attended the 5th Planet Thanet Beer Festival where I drank many beers, some excellent like Gadds' Uberhop and Tiger Rut from Millstone, an all Chinook beer. I also met the Eddie Gadd and had an interesting discussion about cricket. Now most of my brewing friends and acquaintances fall asleep when I turn the talk to cricket (as do most of my cricketing colleagues when I talk about beer - or perhaps it's just that I am a boring git). Anyway the upshot of the conversation was that I will soon be off to the Ramsgate Brewery to watch/take part in/clean up after a brewday. I am quite excited about this and have bored my wife about it many times this week.

Then earlier this week I read about the brewing competition being run on Beermerchants blog and thought about how I would love to be a part of that. Then I read through the competition rules and realised that kits, however well tweaked, weren't going to be allowed and that pushed me over the edge.

My plan was always to attempt the conversion in about September this year by which time I would have built a second shed in which to put all non brewing related crap but the competition deadline is in June so I need to find a tarpaulin under which I can store a barbecue, lawnmower and two push bikes until I can afford the shed.

Thanks to those nice folk on the Brew it Yourself forum and other places on the Twitterverse I've got step by step instructions on how to make a 10 gallon boiler, false bottom mash tun and immersion chiller.

Hopefully I can get all these things made over the next couple of weeks and be ready to get a brew on in time for submission to the competition.

An Insight into the Life of a Dozy Brewer.

There are several sorts of brewer but I think I must be the dozy sort; I spent a good hour looking for the lid of my fermenting vessel yesterday so I could put on a second brew (well it is Easter you know) and failed miserably.

This was a bit of a shame really because, my good friend Jim has got hold of some out of date Youngs Brewbuddy beer kits which a number of home brewers on Jim's Beer Kit are coming up with experiments for.

I wanted to do two kits side by side so that, apart from hops, they would have the same ingredients, the same conditioning time, etc. but my own lack of organisation meant that the first experiment was an epic fail, as my teenaged sons would tell me. This experiment involves using rehydrated S04 yeast, 15g of East Kent Goldings in the cafetiere for a hopped tea, a kilo of medium spraymalt and 25g's of EKG's for dry hopping purposes. This one's already bubbling away in the Brewfridge.

Oh and by the way, the lid to the aforementioned fermenter was in the garden on one of the garden chairs. Doh!

Recognition for Blog and Brewer.

Bit of a highlight for little old me in the last couple of weeks was to have the blog mentioned on the sites of bloggers far more superior than I.

Many of you will have visited this blog via Melissa Cole's Taking The Beard out of Beer. Melissa reviewed (very favourably, I might add) my Amarillo IPA. I've got a modified tweak on the go with half the hops so it'll be interesting to see how they compare.

Last weekend I also had an interviewed on Drink with the Wench, which was tremendous fun. Mind you there are some "proper" brewers on there which made me and my kit tweaks seem very humble in comparison. It felt like going for a swim with Michael Phelps whilst wearing armbands.

Back to the beer, tonight I will mainly be bottling my Linthwaite Light. Forty brown (heeding your words regarding light strike, Melissa) beer bottles await and then I'll get round to bottling the lager at the weekend.

With our friend Mr Darling putting up duty on cider, the requests my wife and the teenagers in my household have come flooding (well, trickling) in. I'm currently experimenting with something called THC (to quote Chris Evans, it's not what you think) which is a cider kit made with apple juice instead of water because, now, cider kits will work out cheaper than cider.

Stepping Up Production, a Dilemma.

So, after a particularly heavy night at Beer Club, I am faced with the need to step up production due to the club's burgeoning membership. The problem, as usual, is the time taken from brew to drinking.

Assuming it will be bottled (which most beers for beer club will be), a typical kit will spend 14 days fermenting, 2-3 days in the bottling bucket, a week warm conditioning and then a minimum of four weeks cold conditioning before it even becomes drinkable. That's 7-8 weeks from brewing. Kit beers taste even better when allowed to condition for 6-12 weeks so that'as anything up to four months.

As I wibbled earlier this year, I've been making lager which requires a three week lagering (obviously) period between fermenting and bottling and it then requires the full 12 weeks conditioning. The Brewferm Gold I brewed first thing this year is unlikely to be ready until mid May at the earliest. Not only does it take an age to be ready but it ties up a fermenter for five weeks. These days I have four FV's (fermenting vessels); two standard fermenters, one bottling bucket (fermenting vessel with little bottler attached) and a wine fermenter which doubles as another bottling bucket and a cider fermenter.

I've released my inner nerd and knocked up a spreadsheet which enables me to schedule my brewing and maximise my productivity but it is still only going to give me drinking beer mid May. I seems my options are either to buy a fifth fermenter so that I can double production in the short term or to invest in a 10 gallon all grain set up which finances dictate will probably occur in September. I've just put a request on my local Freecycle/Freegle board and we'll see what happens but an extra fermenter looks like the only option in the short term. Running out of beer would be, frankly, disastrous.

Beer Porn - Coopers Dark Ale

Brewed with 500g Dark Muscovado Sugar, 500g extra dark spraymalt and 250g golden cane sugar. It's come out about 6.5% so it's no session beer.

Beer Porn - Brewferm Gallia

I found her hiding from me in the shed; tucked away in a long forgotten crate. As I stroked her elegant neck, I smiled and I remembered how she tasted during our last brief but exciting meeting.

It came back to me in a flash; her effervescence, her golden appearance, her sweet heavy scent. I swear I could taste the candi sugar she was surely made from as she slipped down my throat slaking my parched thirst.

And then she was gone, just a memory. And yet I felt sure it was not the last time I would see Gallia or her sweet Belgian sisters.