Monthly Archives: June 2022

Pub Guide

Bakewell Pub Guide 2022

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June 11 to 16, 2022, my wife and I spent our holidays in Bakewell in the beautiful Peak District. We happened to try out quite a few local pubs, so this is my (obviously very subjective) guide to all the pubs in Bakewell we went to.

The Peacock Inn

Very focused on standard pub food. Three beers from cask, all from Peak Ales: Chatsworth Gold, Bakewell Best and Swift Nick. Well-kept but really just your average bitters and golden ales. When we were in Bakewell previously in 2016, they wouldn’t even let you sit down inside unless you wanted to order food. This has fortunately changed. Good for a quick refreshment in the sun.

Website, Google Maps

The Queen’s Arms

In a stark contrast to the previous pub, you’re being greeted by a “sorry no food” sign. With parts of the floor carpeted, the whole length of the wall is lined by benches accompanied by tables and chairs. The whole pub gave me a rather simple and slightly Spartan impression. Even though it was relatively busy when we were there, it seemed quiet and relaxing, with some people reading their newspaper and enjoying a few pints. It seems to be a Marston’s pub, and had Pedigree and Old Empire from cask (besides a few others I don’t remember). Good for a quiet day.

Facebook page, Google Maps

Wheatsheaf

Despite its slightly sterile and pub-chainy look, we were unable to determine who actually owns this pub. I wanted to try Young’s London Original, but had to return it after I was served a pint of vinegar (the beer wasn’t taken off though), and went for Wainwright instead, which was fine but less bitter and hop-aromatic than what I remember it to be. The couple on the table next to ours also had food, but weren’t happy with their Sunday roast.

Website, Google Maps

The Red Lion

Three cask beers on, with either Timothy Taylor’s Landlord or Boltmaker being on all the time. Boltmaker tasted great, though a bit on the sweet side. It was quiet when we went in, the overall atmosphere seemed fine, but it can apparently get very busy at times.

Timothy Taylor’s Boltmaker

Website, Google Maps

The Joiners Arms

This pub wasn’t around yet when we first spent time in Bakewell. With slightly hipsterish-looking panelling from reclaimed scaffolding boards on the bar and the walls, it had a micropub-like, very informal atmosphere. In total, they had 6 beers from cask, always rotating, but while we were there, at least 1 to 2 Thornbridge beers were on, accompanied by several keg taps (lager, craft beer, cider). No food other than the typical pub snacks like crisps and pork scratchings, but instead a good place to get to casually get to talk to people, both locals and tourists. The pub is also very dog-friendly, and lots of people walking their dogs seem to make a quick stop there for a pint.

A good place if you’re into trying new, local beers, or if you’re into craft beer.

Facebook page, Google Maps

The Rutland Arms Hotel

Essentially a hotel bar, it has 2 beers from cask, namely Jaipur and Lord Marples, as well as their Helles Lukas from keg. The whole hotel lobby/bar/restaurant has been completely redone since we were last there in 2016, apparently after a takeover from a hotel chain. All the beers were Peak Ales back then, and frankly, I’m glad they changed it because all casks beers this time were well kept, tasted great, and highlighted a local product to tourists (and there were several American tourists at the bar while were also there).

Thornbridge Lord Marples (left) and Lukas (right)

Website, Google Maps

Thornbridge Taproom

A bit further out from the town centre, this is Thornbridge’s brewery taproom, with a fairly large range of their own beers from cask, keg and bottle or can. Everything we tried was well kept. If you’re hungry, you can order pizza which is all made from scratch in-house, and even though we didn’t have any, it smelled fantastic. As I learned, they take their pizza pretty seriously, got a proper pizza oven (though not wood-fired) and even ensure to buy the right flour.

By far the best place to try Thornbridge beers straight from the source!

Jaipur X at the Home of Jaipur

Website, Google Maps

The Manners

This is a Robinson’s pub, and it shows in the cask offering: Robinson’s Unicorn, Wizard, Trooper and Dizzy Blonde (despite the name, the visual branding has improved since 2016). The beer is perfectly fine, just not the most exciting to me. Instead, this pub is best visited for its food. By far the best pub food I’ve had in England. Our food highlights there were the honey roast belly pork, the steak & ale suet crust pie, the super juicy venison cheese burger, and of course the local specialty, Bakewell pudding.

Bakewell pudding at the Manners

Website, Google Maps

A few remarks

If you’ve been to Bakewell before, you may have noticed that we have not covered all the pubs. This is because we didn’t go there specifically to put together a complete pub guide, and also there was one particular pub that we thoroughly did not enjoy last time, and thus didn’t return. As for drinks, I mostly mentioned cask beer because that’s what I’m interested in. If you want to drink keg beer or cider instead, the typical offerings are stuff like Carling, Coors, Fosters, Peroni, John Smith’s, Guinness, Strongbow (& Strongbow Dark Fruits), etc. You get the idea. Some places (like the Manners or the Joiners Arms) also have craft beer on keg.

When comparing the state of Bakewell pubs in 2016 with 2022, I have to commend those who have expanded their offerings: back then, we couldn’t find a single pub that served Thornbridge beers (it’s literally brewed a few hundred metres down the road!), save for the Thornbridge taproom itself, which was just a bit of a lounge and a small bar underneath some of the brewery offices. Nowadays, you will find multiple local places happily serving a fairly wide range of Thornbridge beers in excellent condition, and Thornbridge brewery itself now has a massive and very popular taproom, all of which are great improvements. And there’s even a micropub-ish free house in the town centre that brings rotating taps to the town that have clearly been missing before.

History

How did Whitbread’s fermentation cellar work?

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While looking for a picture of a Burton Union in old German brewing literature as part of another beer history discussion on Twitter, I came across a source that described Whitbread’s fermentation cellar and its setup. So that’s what it looks like:

(source)

But how did it work? Fortunately, the drawing is accompanied by an explanation.

In the center, you see a large vessel marked M. This is the main fermenting vessel. From the left, a pipe leads into it, marked r on the very left. It is actually enveloped by another pipe x, through which cold water can flow at a regulated speed. Pipe r comes from various cooling tubs, and the chilling pipe was meant to allow temperature control at which the wort is filled into fermenter M.

In M, fermentation is then started, and what the description calls the first fermentation is conducted. I think this is a slight misunderstanding in the process or just a poor description of it, because the beer is then filled into the smaller vessels N where it will expel more yeast that collects in the troughs in the middle. As some beer is lost in this process, all the N vessels are automatically topped up from O with more beer. This is done through a float valve that automatically tops up N if the level is too low. This very much sounds like a cleansing apparatus. And since O is also producing yeast, it has an iron swimmer connected with a leather hose so that any yeast on the top of the beer can fall into this swimmer and down the leather hose, ensuring that also the beer in O is cleansed.

And finally, the arched cellars P underneath, built from stone and made watertight, are used to store and mature finished beer. According to Martyn Cornell, these were vaults used for maturing porter that were opened in 1784.

And, of course, he wrote about this all in great detail quite a few years ago on his own blog.

Brewing, Recipes

My Summer Beer 2022

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Like last year, I decided for 2022 to brew a light and refreshing beer for the the summer. I was really really happy with my 2021 beer, and so for this year, I again brewed an 8° Czech-style beer, this time even more traditional than last year.

And that was my exact approach: be as simple as possible, but stick to the ingredients that would constitute a Czech beer according to PGI (if I brewed commercially in the Czech Republic and wanted to sell my beer with a Czech Beer PGI label): the sugar from the wort needs to be at least 80% from Czech barley varieties, at least 30% of the alpha acid needs to come from Czech hops varieties, decoction mashing needs to be used, and the beer needs to be bottom-fermented. So I went all in:

The brewing and fermentation process itself was rather uneventful: I hit 8.4°P OG, chilled the wort to 10°C, pitched a yeast pack, fermentation took off in less than 36 hours, and after about 3 weeks, it was finished, with a FG of 2°P. I then ramped down the temperature to 2°C, let it sit at that low temperature for just 2 weeks, and then bottled it, bottle-conditioning it with 1 liter of wort that I kept back.

I’m absolutely impatient when it comes to waiting for beer to be finished maturing and bottle-conditioning, so I had to crack one bottle open after just 1 week. I pre-chilled it for a few hours, and then poured it into a Pilsner Urquell glass I had at home. While carbonation wasn’t 100% there yet, it was definitely enough to drink it. The foam was fluffy but with rather big and open bubbles (I hopes this improves when carbonation is higher), the beer still looked slightly hazy with a very pale colour). It smelled absolutely amazing, and just after the first sip I could definitely say that this was exactly like a Czech beer (it’s not a Czech beer because I brewed it here in Berlin, hence why I call it Czech-style). It has that exact bitterness and the kind of hop flavour and aroma that I would expect from any Czech beer, it has a unique edge to its malt character that I would attribute to the intense decoction mash (hard to describe, but once you’ve had plenty of Czech beers, you just notice it, from your easy-drinking 10° beers to modern Czech-brewed IPAs e.g. from Matuška), and it’s got a very good body for such a low-strength beer.

The Urkel Lager strain, despite (allegedly) having a Pilsner Urquell provenance, does not seem to produce diacetyl at any detectable levels. What it does though is produce lots and lots of sulphur. This was particularly noticeable during fermentation and at the beginning of the very short lagering period, but at packaging, all of that was gone.

In the end, choosing the right ingredients and processes for the kind of beer you want to brew matters, and I’ve only ever gotten all the details of a Czech-style beer right when I applied all the techniques that I knew, with all the right ingredients.

What follows is a quick recipe. In terms of ingredients, it’s incredibly simple and one of those beers that can be formulated as a SMaSH beer – single malt and single hops. In this case:

  • 3.1 kg floor-malted Bohemian Pilsner malt from Weyermann
  • 24 g 2021 harvest Saaz hops (4.2% ABV) @ 60 min
  • 24 g 2021 harvest Saaz hops (4.2% ABV) @ 30 min
  • 24 g 2021 harvest Saaz hops (4.2% ABV) @ 5 min
  • 1 pack Imperial Yeast L28 Urkel Lager yeast

Use enhanced double decoction mashing scheme. Lauter, sparge, chill to 10°C, pitch yeast. Ferment fully, lager at low temperature for 1 week (I went down to 2°C), bottle or keg and carbonate. This should get you about 20 liters of a beer with 8.4°P OG, 2°P FG, 3.4% ABV, about 25 IBU in bitterness, and a very pale colour.

Beer Styles, Brewing, Recipes

Experience in Brewing a Belgian-Style Tripel

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I’m not really an expert on Belgian beer styles. I do like my gueuzes and lambics, and there are some Belgian beers that enjoy occasionally (my wife and I keep a collection of various vintages of Orval), but my personal interest is not exactly focused on Belgian beer, and therefore I don’t seek them out regularly or brew them at home.

My Dutch neighbour Rick though, he’s very much into Belgian beer styles. When he learned that I knew how to brew beer at home, it was clear that we had to brew something together. I asked him what his favourite beer style was (it’s Tripel, with his favourite beer being Tripel Karmeliet), and so we decided to brew a Tripel. Prior to that, I had only brewed one Tripel that was loosely inspired by Brooklyn Brewery’s Local 1. So off I went to do a bit of research.

My first decision was to make the base mostly Pilsner malt, and use some sort of sugar so as to make the beer “thinner”. With a high original gravity, you’d expect the final gravity to be fairly high and the beer to be full-bodied, so adding sugar to amp up the original gravity but keep the final gravity at a fairly low level is the way to go.

With the hope of adding a bit more complexity to the malt profile of the beer, I decided to also add 500g of flaked spelt. Not only is it a fairly cheap and easy to get ingredient, it could potentially also impart its own flavour to the beer, and (as a relative of wheat) also help with head retention.

When it came to the choice of sugar, I first looked at what my options are with pale candi sugar. Turns out, candi sugar syrup from home-brew stores is really expensive, and so I decided to look into other types of sugar. I found a slide deck “The Sugars of Tripel” by Ted Hausotter which discusses several option in great detail and also involved some experimentation. If you plan to brew a Tripel yourself and are thinking your sugar options as well, don’t miss this presentation. Looking at the slides of tasting results and rankings of the type of sugar used, I opted to go for cane sugar, as it seemed an okay option that also didn’t deteriorate flavour-wise over time. There was some warning that sucrose could add a slight cidery note to the finished beer, but I was willing to risk that.

As for the yeast, I took a closer look at what my options were with dry yeast. Fermentis has two options that could roughly fit the phenolic and estery profile of Tripel, namely SafAle BE-256 and SafAle T-58. Lallemand also has two options, one is their LalBrew Abbaye, the other one a more recent offering that might seem a bit unusual at first: LalBrew Farmhouse, which they describe as a hybrid-style saison yeast. Unlike most other saison strains, this one is non-diastatic, meaning the yeast is missing a gene that would otherwise help it enzymes to break unfermentable sugars down to help ferment a beer to absolute dryness.

When I came across that product, it actually got me thinking: normally, saison yeasts are a bit more phenolic in their flavour profile, but if that yeast is indeed non-diastatic, I could end up with a beer less dry and still with enough body to make it a convincing Tripel. What’s the worst that could happen? If the flavour profile does turn more towards a typical saison, I’d have something akin to Dupont Bons Voeux. So let’s be a bit experimental.

When it came to hopping, I wanted to have enough bitterness and hop aroma so as not to make this beer too sweet. It’s what I had noticed with some Tripels, and Joe Stange had also mentioned to me in the past that Tripels can work surprisingly well even with higher levels of bitterness. I think his prime example was Westmalle Tripel. When aging strong beers, my experience is that you could lose quite a bit of noticeable bitterness, so it’s better to aim too high than too low. In the end, I decided for go for 1g/L of Herkules (16.7% alpha acid) as bittering addition, 1g/L of 2021 harvest Saaz hops (4.2% alpha acid) as flavour addition (30 minutes before end of boil), and 2.5g/L of the same Saaz hops as late aroma addition (5 minutes). In terms of calculated IBU, this should end up at about 38 IBU.

The brew day itself was fairly relaxed: Rick and I mashed in 5.2 kg of Bohemian Pilsner malt and 500g of flaked spelt, did an initial protein rest for about 15 minutes at 54°C, then ramped up to 62°C for saccharification for about 40 minutes, and then 72°C for another 30 minutes, finished off with an increase to 78°C. Lautering and sparging went fine, and we mixed in and dissolved 1.2 kg of cane sugar (an organic own brand from a local health and beauty retailer that is ever so slightly darker than regular table sugar). After 60 minutes of boiling and adding all our hop additions according to schedule, we chilled the wort to 20°C, measured OG (19°P) and pitched two sachets of the Lallemand Farmhouse yeast.

I had originally planned the recipe for an OG of 18.5°P, but for whatever reason, we had slightly higher extraction and got 19°P. Surely not a bad thing.

After about 2 weeks, the beer was fully fermented. We then bottled it, using the same cane sugar for priming, and then let it sit for a few weeks for bottle-conditioning. The final beer came out at 2.7°P FG, which means that the final beer should have about 9.2% ABV.

We finally sampled the first bottle together this Friday. The resulting beer was actually less bitter than expected, and the hop aroma was more subtle than what I had expected, but nevertheless present in sufficient amounts. The beer itself looked slightly hazy, with a pale orange tone that made it look very inviting. The foam was very white, long-lasting and pretty dense, while the carbonation was exactly the right amount to make it pleasantly fizzy but not overly so (we went for about 2.5 volumes / 5g/L carbon dioxide). As for the flavour of the beer itself, I think the yeast expressed a very balanced amount of fruity ester and spicy phenols without either of them being too much in your face or overpowering anything. The body is just right, not too dry and not too full, which makes the beer dangerously easy to drink. The alcohol does not show at all, it is very smooth and slightly warming, and no cidery note from using cane sugar was noticeable. Rick (as a home-brewing newbie and Belgian beer aficionado) was very happy, and so was I, as I hadn’t brewed this style much beforehand, and therefore was really just guessing my way into a recipe based on some reading about the style that I had done.

(it glows more when held against the light)

The choice of yeast, although a bit risky because it was supposedly not an ideal match for the style, was a good call, and I can absolutely recommend Lallemand Farmhouse dry yeast for Belgian Tripels and similar styles. Keeping the grist simple with just Pilsner malt and spelt flakes also turned out to be a good choice, as was the use of cane sugar.

To summarize the recipe:

  • 5.2 kg Pilsner malt
  • 0.5 kg flaked spelt
  • 1.2 kg cane sugar
  • 20 g Herkules hops (16.7% alpha acid) @ 60 minutes
  • 20 g Saaz hops (4.2% alpha acid) @ 30 minutes
  • 50 g Saaz hops (4.2% alpha acid) @ 5 minutes
  • 2 sachets Lallemand Farmhouse hybrid saison yeast

Mash in and do multi-step infusion mash as described above (54°C, 62°C 40 min, 72°C 30 min, 78°C mash-out), lauter, sparge, add cane sugar to wort, boil 60 minutes with hop additions as describe above, chill to 20°C, pitch yeast, package with carbonation level of 2.5 volumes / 5g/L.