I now found concrete data about how much Steinbier was brewed in the last few years of this style’s existence. Fairly detailed data from 1904 to 1917 (with the exception of 1907-1908) about the production volumes of Carinthian breweries were published in trade journals at the time.
The last three remaining breweries were Ure and Kaschitz, both located in Waidmannsdorf, nowadays part of the Carinthian capital Klagenfurt, and Schorn, from Untergoritschitzen near Klagenfurt.
Production volumes of breweries Ure, Kaschitz and Schorn, 1903-1906, 1906-1917
As you can clearly see in the numbers, before Steinbier brewing ended, it was on an almost steady decline over the course of 13 years. For 1917, the records say that production at Ure and Schorn was shut down, while Kaschitz had produced a mere 52 hectoliters.
Of these breweries, all brewed Steinbier with an original gravity of 6°, with the exception of Wedenig, who brewed a 4° Steinbier.
This low original gravity of Steinbier also seems to show (although not explicitly stated, so this is slight speculation) in the 1889/1890 brewing season beer volume statistics of Austria-Hungary by original gravity: 6° beer was the lowest OG listed, with a production volume of 2,587 hl (which is roughly in the ball park what all the Steinbier breweries together used to brew in a year), and that number is significantly higher than the next stronger beers: of 7° beer, just 49 hl, and of 8° beer, just 102 hl.
In any case, the production volumes are tiny, the numbers are going down, all clear signs of a declining “industry” that was really closer to homebrewing, serving what was probably a tiny market of aging consumers. Despite the fact that brewing stopped because of a lack of ingredients during World War 1, the tiny volumes were probably a big contributor to not resuming brewing after the war.
I’ve been doing fine for the last 7 weeks. My company decided to implement a work-from-home policy (I’m privileged to work in IT as a software developer) on March 12, so it’s been pretty much exactly 7 weeks since this has started for me. In some ways, it was perfectly timed, as my wife had to undergo a knee operation around the same time, so it was actually good that I could work from home and be able to care for her as well.
The first time leaving the house has actually been stressful. One thing that I’m annoyed about are people who don’t care about keeping their distance or blocking a whole lot of space by needlessly hanging around outside in larger-than-legal groups. This didn’t just use to be annoyance, but rather anxiety. Mind you, this was at a time when I didn’t have a a home-made face mask (thanks, mum!). With a face mask on, I’m now feeling perfectly happy and content walking outside, even with people not keeping their distance. Even if they might not be effective, they sure do work for me at least on a psychological level.
As for beer, we were shopping wisely and bought two crates of beer from a local specialty beer shop before any lock-down measures were even announced. These two crates kept us going for quite a while. I did a quick count of how much other booze we had in the house, easily more than 40 bottles of all kinds of whisk(e)y, more than 10 types of gin, several rums, and even absinthe, vodka and fancy calvados. I put together a list in my mind of small beer businesses I wanted to still have around when this is all over, and supported them by either buying their beer, or buying vouchers from them if they offered such a thing.
My drinking has actually gone down. I don’t drink for the most of the week, and only a bit during the weekend. If I have 3 beers on one of these days, it’s already unusually much. Yesterday was such a day, as my Stammtisch has a Zoom session full of beer drinking and pub quizzing and discussing craft malts and their importance for historic beer styles, so I had three beers (Wicküler Pils, Neder Schwarze Anna, Schönramer Pils) and two small whiskeys (Koval Rye).
Stammtisch. I used to meet friends once a month for a few beers in one of the best German beer bars of Berlin, Foersters. We had a Stammtisch scheduled for March 12, but decided to move it to a Zoom call instead. We’ve kept this up, and actually met more often that we do normally, once every one to two weeks. It certainly helped me keep sane, and due to the decentralized nature of it, we’ve been able to include former regulars and friends that now live in other parts of Germany or the world.
Most of my beer writing energy has actually been going towards my upcoming book about Vienna Lager. I’m now in the final stages: I have only a few small gaps to fill, I have the printing layout set up, and a solid idea for a book cover, less beery per se but rather a nice homage to the city of Vienna itself. I’m so absolutely excited about the whole topic, as I found out so many things that have never been discussed in the context of the history of Vienna Lager, so many things that are just misrepresented and have even been forgotten. At the moment it seems quite realistic for me to publish the book in June or early July. It’s going to be kick-ass if I may say so myself.
That said, work itself has been hard-going at times. Not everything is great when you’re just sat at home for most of the time, trying to avoid distraction is hard, days just blend into each other, and you barely realize what day of the week it actually is. Weekends just pass super quickly and don’t really provide as much rest and recuperation as I would like them to do.
After publishing my book about historic German and Austrian beer styles (including a print version produced on a very short notice!), I went on holidays and decided not to write so much about beer for a few weeks. Instead, I just enjoyed the local New Zealand beer scene, which was absolutely lovely and totally unique. Not so much outrageous stuff, but all just really good, sessionable, local beers of various styles.
Of course, I couldn’t go without my beer history for more than a few weeks. I’m not working on my next book (yet!), simply because I don’t have a good next topic that I want to research. Instead, I decided to do some homework and bring some order into the historic sources that I’ve been working with to put together my latest book. For that, I decided to compile a literature list of historic brewing books, not necessarily limited to only Austria or Germany. For the last week or so, I’ve been gradually going over all the digital archives of public libraries that I knew of and that I could access, and searched for all and any literature related to beer and brewing.
The outcome so far is a list of 144 books, ranging from 1710 to 1947, but mostly from the 19th century and early 20th century, from Germany, Austria-Hungary, the UK and the US. Since I absolutely hate knowledge being kept secret and eventually getting lost (just think of a late relative’s “secret recipe” for some dish you loved that was lost and that you’ve tried to recreate so many times but could never get it quite right), I decided to make this list public under a Creative Commons license. You can access the list directly on GitHub: https://github.com/akrennmair/historic-beer-literature-list/blob/master/historic-beer-literature-list.md
If you want to contribute additional records, just send me an email or – if you know how to use GitHub – submit a pull request with your changes.
The format in which I keep it is quite primitive for the moment, but I’m trying to come up with a better technical solution to make it better viewable, searchable and usable in bibliographic software. I really want to make this a hub and starting point for explorations of publicly available historic brewing literature. I will certainly use it as my starting point for my next big project.
This is my contribution to Session 132 (aka Beer Blogging Friday).
My homebrewing “career” started in December 2012, when my girlfriend (now wife) and I decided to just try out brewing with an electric preserving cooker and a mash bag. The first beer was not great. I got a terrible recipe from a German homebrewing website which was described as a Bass clone. In retrospect, now that I know more about beer, it was completely misguided, as it used Vienna malt as base malt and German caramel malt, didn’t prescribe a specific hop variety nor a specific yeast. Luckily, I bought East Kent Goldings, not that I had heard about the variety before, but because the name sounded good to me, and Wyeast 1318 “London Ale III” yeast because hey, it was advertised as an English strain. We bottled the beer way too early, so it turned out way overcarbonated. I may have also overdone it with the hops, so it was very bitter, but in a pleasant way. In total, there was something about it that reminded of a typical German brewpub beer. My wife usually mentions this early period as the time when all our beers had “this homebrew taste”.
Despite these issues, we didn’t give up brewing, but continued with a stout (bought as an all-grain kit) and a Hefeweizen (also an all-grain kit), both of which turned out okay. The fourth beer was a special one, though. I was confident enough to somehow come up with a recipe myself, and I wanted to brew an IPA: not for us, but as a wedding present for a friend of mine who had spent three months in San Diego just a few months earlier. I read up on which hop varieties and which malts would be alright for an IPA, and the end result was actually pretty tasty. I even documented the recipe a few years ago in this blog, and looking back, I didn’t do too bad of a job.
Putting together my own recipes actually got me even more interested in homebrewing, because I suddenly realized how much of a potential for creative freedom there was in brewing: so many different techniques, ingredients, and beer styles, you could brew anything you wanted. Also around that time, I got a copy of Graham Wheeler’s Brew Your Own British Real Ale, a collection of over 100 clone recipes of more or less well-known British ales. Reading through it and comparing the recipes gave me a feeling for how recipes could be designed. From there on, with very few exceptions, practically every recipe was something I had put together myself (I think the only exceptions were a Black Sheep Best Bitter clone from said book with a weird diacetyl note, and a Heidenpeters Thirsty Lady clone), not all of them were great, but most of them taught me something new about brewing.
Besides the brewing itself, we also started going regularly to a Berlin craft beer meetup organized by Rory, who had an extensive knowledge about the Berlin beer scene and beer itself, and regularly organized visits to various breweries, craft beer bars, as well as beer tastings of different sorts. Anybody who has been involved with beer in Berlin within the last few years knows Rory, that’s how tightly he held the Berlin craft beer scene together. At some point, he organized a meetup of people from that craft beer meetup that were brewing at home, and a spin-off homebrewing meetup was started. While there had been occasional homebrewer-organized events in Berlin before, they were very irregular, usually German-speaking only, and more focused on just visiting bars. Rory’s homebrew meetup was different: very international, mostly English-speaking but not excluding German speakers, very open-minded, and very beer-focused. Everybody could just bring their own beer, and we would just taste one after the other, discuss them, and give feedback. It was well-structured, and very enjoyable at the same time. From these tasting, both guided tastings of commercial beers, and relatively unguided tastings of homebrewed beers, opened up a horizon of flavours (and off-flavours) that I otherwise probably wouldn’t have been able to experience. For some time, we even had themed tastings, where we’d e.g. all brew a Belgian style beer, or a Porter, or the same base recipe but everybody used a different hop variety. These themes made the meetups something that you could look forward to and work towards.
I think only in retrospect I realized how much of a nucleus of the emerging Berlin craft beer scene this homebrew meetup was: Thomas Wiestner who later co-founded Braukunst Wiestner was a regular participant who brought a lot of great and creative beers to the meetups. The two founders of Pirate Brew were there quite a few times, giving us crazy stuff to sample. The founder of The Mash Pit, Christian, helped organize the homebrew meetup, and usually provided us with the space to meet. A few people who I met there did beer sommelier trainings, and are now running beer tastings and homebrewing courses. It was a forum that inspired and encouraged people to do creative things, and to brew more exciting beer.
All these impressions had an impact on me as well: not only did I understand beer and its nuances better (or so I’d think, at least), it made me appreciate the craft of beer brewing more, because the close contact with all the processes (even just on a small scale at home) made me realize the complexity behind brewing as such. Don’t get me wrong, I think homebrewing is a hobby that is easy to get into as long as you can make porridge, read a thermometer, follow general instructions, and prepare well enough in advance to have all the necessary equipment and ingredients ready to go. But beyond that simplicity lie so many details, and the phenomenal thing about homebrewing is that you can explore all these details: you can just work on perfecting your single favourite recipe, you can experiment with different hop varieties, you can brew all the beer styles you’d like, you can use the most outlandish ingredients beyond just hops, malt, hops and yeast (as long as it’s not beetroot; I’m serious). You can do lager brewing, or explore decoction mashing, or strife towards the perfectly juicy double-dry-hopped NEIPA. Or, what I’ve been doing, explore historic beers both in theory and practice.
For me, beer is an ongoing journey, and the hobby of homebrewing, for the last few years, has been a reliable companion. I think it improved my understanding of beer as a whole, and for sure it will for the next coming years, if not decades. There’s still so much more to explore, so much more to try out, so much more to document and write about. I met and learned to know people that I otherwise would have never ever met in my life, and I looked into subjects of which I would have never ever thought that I’d be even remotely interested in them. And because of my rather positive and pleasant experience that homebrewing has been to me, I can only recommend to everyone who tries to understand beer better or get a different view on it: do get into homebrewing. At least try it out once. It’s an interesting hobby, one that is incredibly satisfying and rewarding, where you can learn about all the ins and outs of a drink that at its core is incredibly simple and yet can be totally complex.
2017 was a bit of a slump for me in terms of homebrewing: my keezer broke (and was unfixable), I was generally too busy with work, and didn’t really have that much motivation. Due to a broken keezer, I had to dump beer, and I brewed some terrible beer afterwards which I also had to dump. I also dumped some aged beer, such as my Berliner Weisse Starkbier, because the vinegar note was just too strong on it (not an Acetobacter infection, but a contribution of Wyeast 5335 which can produce acetic acid). Also, I noticed that my beer taste has changed a bit over the last 2 years, so brewing overly hoppy stuff just isn’t for me anymore.
So over the course of 2017, I developed the idea that I wanted to refocus my homebrewing efforts, develop my skills and improve my knowledge. A pinnacle in homebrewing is certainly lager brewing, and since this is actually the kind of beer we drink most in our household (there’s always a crate of Augustiner Helles or Edelstoff in), I decided to exclusively brew lager beers for the whole year of 2018.
Thankfully, my father got us a commercial refrigerator as an (early) Christmas present, which now not only functions as a beer fridge, but also controls fermentation temperatures quite well. I already have one batch of Helles currently lagering in there, so I actually kind of already started with this new year’s resolution, but in any case, I plan to stick to it at least until December 31, 2018. I also have the ingredients for two more beers ready to go: one of them will be the historic Vienna Lager I kept blogging about in the past, with the right ingredients, OG, FG, attenuation, hopping rate, and mashing regime. The other one is the Helles recipe which I crowd-sourced for fun through Twitter polls back in October.
My other new year’s resolution for 2018 is a matter of procrastination. In late 2016, I published a German-language e-book about historic beer styles. After that, I started working on an English-language e-book about historic German and Austrian beer styles. It’s been a lot of work, I went through an incredible amount of sources just to find out all possible details about classic German beer styles, some of which are practically extinct. Unfortunately, I also hit a bit of a rough spot where I wasn’t really happy with the detailedness of some of the styles that I had researched, and where I generally wasn’t motivated enough to continue working on it. But hey, that’s why I decided to self-publish, right? No advance money, no deadlines, no pressure from publishers.
Therefore, my plan for 2018 is to finalize the book and publish it within the first 3 months of 2018. I think I’m actually pretty close, it may require a few finishing touches here and there, and maybe a less robotic writing style (that’s what you get when most of the writing you’ve done in your professional career is technical documentation), and it should be presentable enough. Should I not keep this new year’s resolution, you’re free to call me out on it!
For a few years now, we’ve spent a week or two somewhere in the UK to enjoy the local beer. This year, we first went to London to visit the Great British Beer Festival and Fuller’s Brewery, and then moved on to Whitstable for a week in Kent.
We had initially chosen Kent and Whitstable simply because we had never been to Kent before, and because Whitstable looked nice enough to stay there. Kent is often called the garden of England, and it is nowadays not only a place with a significant fruit and vegetable producing industry, it is also the largest hop growing area in the UK. When driving through Kent, it became noticeable for us that there were a lot more oast houses to see than hop gardens. Oast houses are very distinct buildings with a round tower with a conical roof, often tipped with a distinct white cover. These were used to dry freshly picked hops, and the large amounts of them bear witness to a much larger hop industry than there is nowadays in England.
A few weeks before we left for our holidays, fellow Stammtisch goer Joe told me about how Thanet in Kent, in particular Margate, Ramsgate and Broadstairs, is micropub central, and so we started looking closer into that, only to discover an aspect of British beer culture we’ve never witnessed before.
So what are micropubs? Essentially, they’re tiny, independent pubs that focus on their main product, beer, and often cider as well. It’s often just one room for customers, a back room with casks of beer and boxes of cider, and a customer toilet, though some may be a bit larger. The beer is often served straight from the cask, so most micropubs don’t even bother with handpumps.
And from what I could see, that straight up attracts the beer nerds: during our visit of different micropubs, I’ve heard many people discuss the specific beers being served, or other general beer-related topics. Whenever people learned that we live in Germany, the topic of German beer often came up, and people are genuinely interested in hearing about and discussing the finer details of German beer culture, and just love talking about the local beer and their preferences.
Publicans of micropubs also very much put an emphasis on good quality ale, often focussing on local breweries, and therefore are very much behind the idea of serving just great beer. In one instance, we’ve overheard two micropub employees and a regular discuss a particular firkin that had been delivered three days ago and hasn’t dropped bright yet, but instead developed a slight vinegar note, and whether they should return that firkin. So quality is a hot topic, and it’s openly being discussed to a certain extent. This is a refreshing difference to some other pubs that may serve you a slightly off pint with hints of vinegar, either due to economic pressure of having to sell the whole cask, or because they simply don’t care.
But even outside the topic of beer, I found all micropubs to be more communicative than any other pubs I’ve been to before. In the majority of places, we just casually struck up conversations (well, my wife did, I’m too socially awkward) with either the publican or other customers, and people were much more open to just having a casual chat. For me, that was noticeable as the biggest difference compared to most other pubs.
The biggest contrast in Whitstable for me was the local ‘spoons versus a micropub close to it, the Black Dog. For those who don’t know, J.D. Wetherspoons (often abbreviated to just ‘spoons) is a British pub chains with well over 1000 pubs all over the UK with attractive prices for both their beer (which is usually reasonably well kept but mostly consists of big, national brands) and their food (which is often pinged in the microwave or deep-fried). People we met in a micropub in Ramsgate recommended to us to visit the Peter Cushing (the ‘spoons in Whitstable, named after the actor which some of you may know as Grand Moff Tarkin) for its grand interior. It’s in a former theatre and is decorated in a art deco style which I found looked very good and much better than most other ‘spoons which are usually a bit trashy and scruffy. Even the pattern of the carpet, which is unique for every Wetherspoons pub, matched the whole art deco theme. But while the pub itself looks beautiful and serves cheap drinks (I paid GBP 2.09 for a pint of bitter from a local brewery near Maidstone), it’s not where I would go to relax or meet people.
Now contrast that with the Black Dog. It’s a micropub in Whitstable probably a minute away from the Peter Cushing. It’s quirky-looking on the inside, the bar features faux handpumps which are just there to hold the pump clips of what beers are on, but it’s so much more inviting than the ‘spoons. The beers were mostly local, and with pints of GBP 3.00 to 3.50, the prices were higher but still okay and seemed to reflect a fairer pricing towards the brewer (Wetherspoons is known for not paying a whole lot to brewers for their casks). The raised benches and tables on both sides of the room may not be quite as comfortable, but provided an environment that just allowed you to chat to the people next to you.
And I think that’s exactly what attracts people so much to micropubs: the conversation, the social aspect, the – as you would say in Ireland – good craic, paired with usually a good selection of beer and cider curated by people who are deeply passionate about the pub and the beer they serve in it. The “micro” in micropub in my opinion not only refers to the size of the pub itself, but also to the minimalism of the whole concept: minimal infrastructure for people to buy pints of cask ale, hang out and have a good time, accompanied by a few bar snacks and maybe games, but that’s it. No free WiFi, no (or only very quiet) background music, no annoying slot machines. And that’s all you need to provide people with an experience they can enjoy.
Since the first micropub, the Butchers Arms in Herne, opened in 2005, about 300 micropubs have spawned in most parts of England, and a few in Scotland and Wales. I would like to see even more places like these, not just in the UK, but also in Germany. In Berlin, the place that I know that comes closest to a micropub is probably Försters Feine Biere: it’s very small inside (though you can sit outside during the summer), has no noticeable disturbance through background music, the food is limited in choice, simple and well-suited for a beer pub, and the owner is deeply passionate about the quality and selection of beer he serves. Due to the focus on German beer and in particular quality German lagers and regional beer styles, the choice of beer is different from your English cask-ale-serving micropub, but the quality beer is still central to the place.
But back to Kent: we didn’t just go there so that I could analyze and disect the concept of micropubs, we actually went there to enjoy the beer. And to do that, we went to plenty of places. Since that holiday house we rented was located in Whitstable, we first checked out the local pubs.
The instantly liked the Black Dog on Whitstable’s High Street. As I said earlier, it’s quirky on the inside, and the beer selection has been great all the time we were there, so definitely a place I can recommend. The Tankerton Arms in Whitstable was a bit further away, a good walk along the beach side, but equally nice.
In order to get a good overview over the triangle of Margate, Ramsgate and Broadstairs that Joe had recommended, we decided to split our visit up over two days: the first day we visited Margate, while on the second day, we went to Ramsgate and Broadstairs.
Our initial impression of Margate was not great: it looked like your typical tacky English sea-side town. Only on second impression, it turned out to be better, but I guess that’s just a resonation of our particularly bad experience in Scarborough last year.
Our first stop in Margate was the Harbour Arms out on the stone pier. From there, you had a great look over the town. It was nice to sit outside and enjoy the sun, though we were put off a bit by a woman who turned out to be a Ukiper that talked about indigenous people in England (her mother was Irish, she didn’t get the irony), alleged riots in Ramsgate the day before, her claiming that the movie Whisky Galore was filmed on the Irish-Northern Irish border (it was not, we double-checked), and finally a bizarre monologue about subterranean worlds underneath Israel and Sinai and why there’s still hope for humanity because of them. And she wasn’t even drunk!
We then moved on to the Little Prince, which was hard to find in the first place and then turned out to have run out of real ale. Due to very limited space, they usually only had bag-in-box real ale and two keg beers on draught. We had a half pint of Leffe and a bottle of Peroni out of pure politeness.
The next stop was the Two Halves. Now that was a micropub with a view! Very bright, a great view towards the harbour, and of course, good beer. The casks were prominently displayed behind a large glass window, so you could see everything that was going on.
After a quick stop at the Bottle Shop, a craft beer bar, where we had a To Øl Sur Mosaic and a Thornbridge Lukas to cleanse our palates, we went to the Fez, another quirky micropub full of old beer-related signage. The beer there was great, as was the atmosphere. We had a conversation with a group of older men who, after they learned we were from Berlin and here on holidays, wanted to know about all the good beer places in Berlin. I also asked them why they specifically went to this micropub, the Fez, and they said, “oh, we go to many pubs”.
One of them emphasized though that they enjoy micropubs because they are the quintessential pubs for them: good beer and a good place to hang out with friends. They also recommended to us two more pubs, one of them being a micropub we had on our list, but we eventually decided to return to Whitstable since we were hungry and time had passed a lot quicker than we had thought.
The next day, we took the train to Ramsgate, where we first visited the Hovelling Boat Inn, which was okay but not too exciting, from which we moved on to the Conqueror Alehouse. There we met a couple which we had seen in the Hovelling Boat Inn earlier, and together with the publican and another couple that came in shortly after us, we had a nice and fun conversation. It was pork pie day, so slices of pork pie were served, which went perfectly with the well-kept beers. We then decided to move on to Broadstairs, since it was already getting a bit late and we still wanted to visit two more places.
From Broadstairs train station it was a few minutes of walking to our next stop, the Four Candles. The Four Candles isn’t just a micropub, the owner brews his own beer on a 2.5 bbl (about 400 liter) kit, but also serves guest beers and sells some of his own beers in bottles. And the brewery logo are two fork handles. In the unlikely case you don’t get the reference:
The atmosphere in this place was different, very vibrant, a bit loud, very welcoming and friendly locals, lots of them coming to the pub with their dogs, so we decided to stay for a few more and skip the second micropub in Broadstairs. All the house beers were good, solid bitters, nothing too crazy, but refreshing, hoppy beers for average non-hophead beer drinkers. The place also served cheese: they had a huge box with shrink-wrapped local cheeses, you picked the one who wanted to have, you got a plate with the cheese, a good amount of crackers and a lovely home-made onion chutney, and were charged based on which cheese you had chosen. A great deal, and tasty!
We eventually had to get our train back to Whitstable. All in all, visiting all these micropubs was a good experience. None of them was outright bad, some of them were just okay, but a lot of them had a great atmosphere, and didn’t just serve good beer, but were also passionate about it. It gave me the feeling that what I had witnessed there represented how lots of people want pubs to be, a place to socialize and meet friends, a place to enjoy a few drinks, a place to relax and people-watch. I’m not qualified to say that this is how pubs were originally meant to be, but it’s certainly a type of pub I would love to see more often, and not just because of the great variety of local beers.
My wife and I are currently spending our holidays in Bakewell, Derbyshire, England. Even though I usually primarily blog about homebrewing, I’d like to share a few quick notes about good beer here in Bakewell.
The first impression was that the pubs are dominated by Peak Ales, a microbrewery near Chatsworth house. Unfortunately, I find all of their beers rather unremarkable, the stereotypical “boring brown bitter”. Which is unfortunate, because Bakewell is home to another brewery, Thornbridge, which has produced some fantastic and exciting beer over the last 11 years. It was surprisingly hard to find any pub that has Thornbridge from cask. Impossible, in fact. What the locals told us, most of the Thornbridge pubs are in Sheffield, and the only local Thornbridge pub we found, the Horsepack Inn in Little Longstone, had really odd opening hours. Don’t expect to be able to get a pint there on Thursday at 4pm.
Manchester is only 2 hours away from Bakewell by bus, so if you have plenty of time, it’s worth visiting Cloudwater Brewery. They’ve recently created a large hype with their rather unusual one-off brews and fantastically juicy series of Double IPAs. You need to reserve a seat beforehand to be sure to get served on Saturdays when their tap room is open. We were lucky to reserve just for the weekend after they started releasing their v4/v5 DIPAs.
If you find the trip to Manchester too boring, a good time-waster is to count pubs and what breweries run them. It looks like Robinsons totally dominates around that area, but I managed to see a seemingly defunct-looking pub with an old Boddingtons sign just before Stockport.
Talking about the better beer in Bakewell itself, we enjoyed going to a particular pub, The Manners. It’s a Robinsons pub, their food was good, and the beer was well-kept. From cask, they had five different Robinsons ales (Trooper, Unicorn, Wizard, Bonjeuros, Dizzy Blonde), from keg, the usual lagers, Robinsons Smooth (nitro keg ale) and Robinsons Dark (keg mild). My personal favourite has been Bonjeuros, a dry, hoppy, citrusy, zesty golden ale, which was quite refreshing.
Our opportunity to drink more Thornbridge beer was Peakender beer festival. It’s Thornbridge’s very own festival, so of course, many of their core range beers were available, and a good selection of other breweries’s beers. What we didn’t know beforehand: the location was extremely muddy. It’s more of a 3-day camping&beer festival. But on the Sunday when we were there, the weather was rather sunny, and a rare opportunity to get a proper sunburn in England.
Another day, we also visited Thornbridge brewery itself. It was quite interesting to see the size of the operation, which was actually smaller than I had expected, given their vast core range, and the amount of beer they sell nationally and internationally. Unfortunately, they’re currently undergoing some extensions, and thus not all parts of the brewery can be visited. We had the chance to sample one of Thornbridge’s latest releases, Serpent: a Belgian-style Golden Ale, fermented with the lees from a local cider maker and barrel-aged in ex-Bourbon casks (Four Roses), was a collaboration with Brooklyn Brewery. A pretty good beer, with the qualities of a dry, fruity white wine. I also managed to get two bottles of their sour red ale oak-aged on cherries resp. raspberries, for which Thornbridge recently won gold and silver medal at the World Beer Cup. I have yet to try these, though.
Starting tomorrow, we’ll be in York for a week. I’ll write about it next week, and I’d be grateful if anybody has any good tips regarding beer there.
I was quite busy recently, so I didn’t have time to give you an update on the Hefeweizen that I brewed in August.
Fermentation went fine, but took a bit longer than expected to finish up. I then bottled the beer with Speise, and let it referment in the bottle. It carbonated properly.
I first tried the beer about 3 weeks ago. It pours fine. The yeast has formed a relatively hard sediment that took a while to swirl up. When poured, the beer forms a relatively dense foam that falls down at a moderate speed. Colour-wise, it looks a bit darker than your average Hefeweizen, in fact quite close to several commercial products branded as “Urweisse”. Definitely looks pleasant.
In the nose, you get a whiff of acidity, with hints of a phenolic character. It certainly smells like a Hefeweizen. When tasting it, you again get an acidity that almost gets too much over time. It is spritzy, and that acidic component makes it refreshing. The greatest disappointment are the other flavours, though: there is barely any banana coming through, maybe a hint of pear, even though I specifically optimized the wort for ester production. The phenolic side of things is… different. Yes, there are phenols, but it’s not the typical clove character that is so uniqie for the beer style. Not chlorophenolic, though, but still odd.
All in all, I’m a bit disappointed. It is an alright beer, but some of the flavour is just off for the style. I blame the yeast. 😉 I had had quite a few beers, even commercial ones, brewed with WB-06, which exhibited similar issues (high grade of acidity, very few esters and phenols), but I was a bit naive in thinking that I could do better. I wouldn’t mind brewing the beer again, but not with the same yeast. Wyeast 3068 it is next time.
