2013: A Year in Beer

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The Collection

Just a bit of beer…

Sometimes I look at my calendar and feel some concern about the amount of beer on it.

This year is turning out to be a bit heavy on the beer front, perhaps not the healthiest of hobbies? I swore I’d fit more cycling in this year but right now I’m not sure where I can fit it. An interesting thing is that there are a lot more non-CAMRA events in the schedule.

2013 kicked off with Craft Beer Rising, a beery day out that ended in BrewDog Shoreditch & too much beer. CBR wasn’t really up to the standards set by IMBC in 2012 alas, that’s my personal take on it. It was a broad shapshot of “craft” encompassing what I personally think of as true craft breweries through to the big twig-co’s (Greene King for example, meh) and some truly terrible shit pretenders (Point from the US, and some dodgy rum-flavoured crap for example).

Less beery was the Windsor & Eton Brewery weekend doing the MITIE London Revolution. Over 180 miles cycling – fun but painful! It took 3 weeks for my knees to fully recover. I’d do it again in the future though and can just hope I fit my beaut Windsor & Eton Republika jersey a bit less like a sack full of lard.

Cambridge Beer Festival happened at the end of May and as per usual I attended on several occasions. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings I believe. With over 200 different beers there are always more I want to try than I can possibly fit in.

Hitchin Beer Festival

Hitchin Beer Festival

We had our own Hitchin Beer Festival in early June. This chewed a week of leave! Up to Crewe on the Monday to pick up beer from off Beat, site set-up on Tuesday, and then Thu/Fri/Sat fest and Sun take-down. We bit off a bit more than we could chew with this this year! Bar managing and also taking over from security at 6AM every day. Thu, Fri, Sat nights: less than 4 hours sleep a night! We ended the festival utterly exhausted and I slept a lot the following week and was a tad laggy at work. It was an excellent & successful fest though.

Next event on my calendar is the North Herts Cambridge Pub Ramble that I’m running. It’ll be fun and I hope we get a good crowd along. I picked a set of pubs, all good, which form a nice loop through town and all have a bit of extra interest to them. I have put notes up on the map I’ve made for the route.

Off Beat Firkins

Off Beat Firkins

After that a quick one is Off Beat’s #FirstyFriday on July 5th. We have some of their firkins out the back, empties from Hitchin Beer Festival. So why not coincide dropping them off with their little monthly at-brewery beer event? Now there’s an excellent plan coming together!

We’re all booked in for the Birmingham Beer Bash at the end of July. Both Saturday sessions including the beer-matched dinner. We scoot up via train on Friday afternoon and will be staying in the Radisson Blu just a short stumble from BrewDog Birmingham. I expect Friday may involve the consumption of just a bit of beer. Train: £129, hotel: £113, Beer Bash: £120 – over £350 spent up front. Not bad for a 2-night weekend away though I suppose. We do take our beer rather seriously, too seriously? ;)

August brings the GBBF – for which I use another week of annual leave as I am there from start-to-finish participating in CAMRA’s intensive bar/beer management course. This ought to be a blast! I’m going to be on Buster’s bar.

Independent Manchester Beer Convention

October brings IndyManBeerCon 2013! Wow, memories of 2012 still glow for me. We were booked in for this “FULL FAT” the day the tickets were released, hotel booked too – the travelodge around the corner again at an insanely-low early rate. So far IMBC is just costing £66 for tickets plus £152.50 for five nights in the hotel. (We’ll be driving up for this one.) Oh, and another week of leave booked!

I’m sure there’ll be more added to this list as time goes by. A Brodie’s gig or something similar in London is always tempting. We’ve still not seen the (now not-so) new Kernel brewery – not to mention not visited many of London’s shiny new breweries, I’m very keen to catch up with where Weird Beard are at. And, heck, we still haven’t even visited the Craft Beer Co. I also would love to get up to Edinburgh again, I’ve fallen in love with the place – though we’ve only stayed there twice. The BrewDog AGM passed us by this weekend, I was on the edge of booking that trip for weeks but decided against it in the end. The inaugural AGM was so good… I doubt future AGMs, while bigger and slicker, will live up to the memory.

Anyway – so far three of my five weeks of anual leave are given over to beer. That’s just nuts, right? I think the other two will go to a December visit back home to the family in Western Australia… where beer will certainly happen. WA’s craft beer scene is an ever-growing beast, interesting to catch in small bites every couple of years.

How much leave, travel, and time to you give to beer? Not to mention money!

We still haven’t quite graduated to making international trips just for beer events. That, I guess, is the next step. One for 2014? Copenhagen, De Molen, GABF? I’d love to catch up with beer folk in New Zealand again too. *sigh*

Weisse Fish Pie

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Fish PieVideo, what a faff! A few weeks back I was inspired to try filming a recipe by a “Frozen Food Federation” competition to win an all-expenses paid trip to Noma *drool*. That’s why I did the Wild Garlic post – it was a “test run”. Alas I didn’t even make the finalists, but after I and Kat both spent some hours wrangling video editing software in Linux it would be a shame to let this rot on a harddrive… or, perhaps it would have been better left hidden away? I talk a lot… but when listening to this I think “argh, I hate the sound of my own voice!”

The recipe does, of course, involve beer – this may have counted against me? Who knows, but at the end of the day the Fish Pie was highly enjoyable and the beer worked perfectly in the recipe. The beer used is the Weisse Hefeweizen Hell from Brauerei Josef Greif – a fairly light hefeweizen with all the expected spice notes, it seemed right. I know I make a mess of describing the beer in the video… *sigh* I’m not much of a writer, but I’m even less of a talker when “on the spot” it seems. Well, if you have 12 minutes 42 seconds to waste here’s my “Weisse Fish Pie”:

The ingredients were:

  • 300g Frozen Smoked Salmon Fillets
  • 400g Frozen Smoked Haddock Fillets
  • 350g Frozen Mixed Seafood
  • 120g Frozen Peas
  • 1 sheet Frozen “Jus Rol” Puff Pastry
  • 300ml Milk
  • 300ml Hefeweizen
  • 2 sticks Celery
  • half Medium Brown Onion
  • 2 Cloves of Garlic
  • 2 Cloves
  • 85g Salted Butter (60 for roux, 25 for sauté)
  • 60g Plain Flour
  • 1 medium Fennel Bulb
  • 1 medium Leek
  • 50g Fresh Tarragon
  • 50g Fresh Wild Garlic (or Chives, or Spring Onion)

The “method” is all in the video!

Fish Pie - Plated Up

Y-Brew 0x03 – Aussie Pale Ale – “Willy Hop” mod

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@RecentlyDrunk's excellent AG 04

@RecentlyDrunk’s excellent AG 04

Today I had a bottle of @RecentlyDrunk‘s lovely “Simcoe Amarillo” homebrew. I hope to be able to make a beer that good myself one day. For now, however, I’ll be sticking to what I can manage with “kit” brews. My Cooper’s kit has done good work producing two batches of ale so far. My Sorachi-hopped Cooper’s “Lager” worked rather well… not as good as proper Bristol Beer Factory Acer (no surprise), but well enough to be identifiably an attempt to mimic it. I had Acer at the Cambridge Beer Festival and my first thought was “this reminds me of my homebrew” ;)

Y-Brew 0x03 - Getting Ready

Getting Ready

Inspired by the weather, a bit of gardening including running a trellis for our “Willingham Hop”, and by Bob’s excellent “Simcoe Amarillo”… I did a quick “brew” today. I picked up a Cooper’s “Australian Pale Ale” can and some Brew Enhancer #2 earlier in the year and then promptly put it away and forgot about it. Today I dragged it out, cleaned up all the kit and got stuck in. It’s all very simple really, the beauty of kit brewing: I spent more time sanitising stuff than actually “brewing”. (In quotes because I won’t really consider it proper brewing until I go “all grain”, kits are just cheating really.)

Last autumn we harvested the hops from our hob bine, a hefty 200g (dry weight) in all. We have no idea what sort of hop this is as it was here before us, so we just call it the “Willy Hop” (we live in the village of Willingham). My mod to the APA recipe is to add some Willy Hop and up the BE#2 by 50% to get a higher ABV. Today’s recipe goes:

Y-Brew 0x03 - Rinsing Hops

Rinsing Hops

  1. Boil 4 litres of water
  2. Add 1.5kg of Cooper’s Brew Enhancer #2 and dissolve
  3. Add 15g whole-cone “Willy Hop” – boil for 5 minutes
  4. Add 15g whole-cone “Willy Hop” – boil for 5 minutes
  5. Turn off the gas… “flame out”
  6. Add the tin of Australian Pale Ale hopped-extract, stir in thoroughly, this is stirred/steeped for 5 more minutes
  7. Strain into fermentation vessel
  8. Pour 10 litres of tap water through strainer to thoroughly rinse hops, remove strainer
  9. Make up volume to 23 litres while checking temp – aiming for ~25C
  10. Stir very very thoroughly
  11. Take sample for measuring original gravity – was around 1046
  12. Sprinkle on yeast nutrient (not confident of my Cooper’s yeast sachets)
  13. Sprinkle in content of 3 Cooper’s yeast sachets – they’re not old, but just in case…
  14. DONE! Lid on, put somewhere warm and dark…

I’ll be adding a good charge of Willy Hop for “dry hopping” once this is fermented. Stay tuned! (and fingers crossed…)

Y-Brew 0x03 - OG 1047

OG 1046

Video! Wild Garlic & Walnut Pesto

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There’s no beer here I’m afraid. This is my first experiment with video… it is a bit cringe-worthy to watch for me, but hey, it took a lot of time to create so I may as well publish it to somehow make up for the time? Here it is:

Wild Garlic (Ransoms) Pesto, w/ Walnuts, Parmesan, & Rapeseed Oil

Ingredients:

  • 250g Wild Garlic (Ransoms)
  • 100g Toasted Walnut Halves
  • 70g Grated Parmesan
  • half a teaspoon of salt
  • “enough” oil to achieve the desired consistency

No need to be too precise, everything can be adjusted to suit your tastes! An addition of the zest & juice of half a lemon would “zing” it up nicely.

This is not a recipe for anyone who fears “garlic breath”! :)

Thing’s I’ve used this pesto for this week: sizzled in olive oil for a simple pasta sauce; lined some puff pastry sausage rolls; simply spread on bread! Most of it went into ice-cube trays in the freezer for future use though.

I’m thinking of doing a bit more of this sort of thing, should I? It’d have more of a beery twist normally. I’ve filmed another cooking session which does involve some beer… now I just need to find the time to cut 25 minutes of video into something less tedious yet still useful.

It’d probably help if I wasn’t using my ultra-wide helmet-cam and its shitty built in mic!

Bon appetit!

The Session #73 — Beer Audit

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The SessionMy first session! Since local blogger Pints and Pubs was hosting it I figured it only polite to participate. I don’t have time for a detailed analysis of my small collection… instead I’ll reveal how I got into “cellaring” beer and that I am now recovering from this grave mental illness.

I almost went down a horrible deep and dark hole. I almost succumbed. However I’m glad to say I am now a recovering “early stage” beer hoarder. It all started with BrewDog. Sure, I already knew some beers had cellaring potential and had enjoyed “aged” beers in 1st class beer venues… but I didn’t really even drink much beer at home until BrewDog came along. I certainly didn’t “cellar” beer until their “Abstrakt” series came along.

I fell for BrewDog hook-line-and-sinker quite early on, even bought shares in the first release of Equity for Punks (I’m a proper EFP1er, not one of these EFP2er tagalongs! *grin* </trollololol>). The set-up was pretty good — make people pay a large chunk of cash for “shares” and give them a decent 20% discount on your beer. Watch as they do their best to make up for the cash spent on shares buying HUGE volumes of beer. I don’t want to add up the value of my BrewDog orders over time… it’s in the past! Now I don’t resent BrewDog at all for doing this to me as I have massively enjoyed the ride and they’ve given back a lot for our shareholder love. At the current time I do feel a bit BrewDogged Out per se but I still think they’ve done good for beer in the UK.

BrewDog Abstrakt Collection

BrewDog Abstrakt Collection

Anyway — this is NOT a BrewDog post. But it just so happens I’ve bought and drank more BrewDog at home than anything else and it is still the dominant brand in my little collection. There are two sides to the beer in this house:

  1. “cellar” — stuff I am deliberately short-term ageing (maybe up to 4 years)
  2. “drink it” — beer for drinking, when I get around to it

The “cellar” collection started with Abstrakt and then extended to Hardknott starting with Granites and Æther Blæcs, and has since included a bottle here and there from other breweries such as Moor Fusion & New Zealand’s Liberty Debilitated Defender. The AB series forms the core I suppose, and I still have one of every Abstrakt, and one or two more of some up to AB:12. It really isn’t a very large collection and I have started drinking it faster than I collect it. In fact I don’t think I’m likely to buy more Abstrakts. But I said that last time…

The “drink it” collection has three sources: online orders, trips to events/places, and Bacchanalia in Cambridge. That is in diminishing order of where it has come from. When you order beer online it tends to be in boxes of at least 12 beers, if you order too often you get a “drinking backlog”. Most of the beers in this house are backlog. When I travel I almost always come back with some beer. Maybe a couple, maybe a box. Then there is Bacchanalia, usually I pop in if I’m passing by on the bike and get a couple of beers or maybe six. These usually get drunk right away and I think maybe only one or two in the collection are from here.

Last year the collection started to get a bit out of hand. Too many online orders being the main problem as I never really went hardcore with the “cellar” concept. I don’t know where the count peaked but it was probably 250 to 300 bottles. Things like this made moving home last May that little bit more difficult! Late last year I made a vow to slow down and try not to buy more than I’d want to drink and since then the boxes are gradually thinning out.

As for the “cellar” — I expect I’ll keep doing this to a small extent. But limited to a couple of years ageing. Without proper cellaring facilities it isn’t really sensible to do. That said, if I had unlimited funds I’d buy a LOT of some beers and cellar them properly. The risk is high… but sometimes the rewards are too. Some of the aged Abstrakts and Hardknotts I have had have transcended their “fresh” form and become quite stunning. Some others have died horribly, become wraith-like shadows of their former selves or actually just plain foul.

As it stands now the collection is down to a paltry 115 bottles… most of them lovely. I’ve just taken them all out for a photo, which is a good excuse to re-box and re-order them tomorrow. But, oh, where to start?! Maybe down the pub… it is Friday after all.

The Collection

The Collection