Fade To Black

Is it a hoppy porter, or an export stout or even a dark cascadian ale? There has been some considerable debate about the validity of the name Black IPA. How can an India "pale" ale be black? Well I have a view on this argument ... I don't give a shit about it, it is just a label get over it.

This beer is influenced by the Kernel black IPA brewed with Glyn Roberts that I first tried a couple of years ago. When I tried to do something similar at home I totally misjudged the amount of dark grains I would need to get the colour right... To my mind it had faded from black and it was a short jump while, listening to a certain band, to change the name to Fade to Black.


Another awesome Lup'in and label from Josh and Chris.

The beer has a complex grain bill with loads of crystal and crystal rye, a touch of chocolate and some carafa III special. This creates a black colour and full body to which layers of hop character are painted. The hops in this beer are Citra, Summit and Sorachi Ace. This gives a strong citrus character and interestingly a touch of toasted coconut that comes from the combination of the Sorachi and the dark malt.

If anything this version of the beer is a little too chewy and full bodied, especially in cask form, and a little low ABV so expect subtle changes for the next version, but I certainly won't be changing this too much.

This beer is available in cask, keg and bottle - look out for it in the usual places.

Week 28


Does this count as gorilla marketing? Taking a picture of one of our beers in someone else's brewery, where they happen to have a very fitting neon sign? Don't worry, we're not going to start playing that game, we haven't got time for that right now. This is just a picture I quite liked that someone posted on twitter. It's also a good way to show that Holy Hoppin' Hell has now left the brewery, along with Five o'Clock Shadow and Fade to black, and are all available to buy in bottles, along with some casks and key kegs.

Not sure how it happened, but things timed themselves to produce a very busy week, with 2 beers bottled and 2 beers brewed. The plan was to just bottle once a week and then brew straight away to get fresh beer into the FV. But this week we found ourselves with 2 beers ready. I blame that over-active saison yeast.


First off was finishing off the packaging of Hit The Lights. This was casked and kegged over the weekend, leaving us with around 1800 500ml bottles worth. We are pretty happy with it this time round, it has a great aroma, great colour and tastes fantastic. So this beer will be leaving the brewery as Hit The Light this time, in around 2 weeks hopefully.


This left FV3 empty, so we decided to fill it with one of our most popular beers to date. This week we brewed our first re-brew, not counting Miss/Hit the lights. We have re-brewed our 'Transpacific Pal Ale' Mariana Trench. This will be a real test for us, as consistency in a new brewery is very difficult, but key for our future. The day went very well, with no real issues, so we look forward to seeing how this one turns out.

As previously mentioned, we have some very excitable saison yeast in the brewery right now. And this yeast has managed to finish off our Saison 14 in record time. I'm not really a saison man myself, but Gregg assures me it is tasting great. So we filled 18 key kegs, no casks, and 2400 500ml bottles, which again should be available in a few weeks.


The saison yeasts work was not finished yet though. Saturday we brewed the second of our Single Hop series, which just happened to also be the second collaboration in the brewery. Saturday we invited Andy Parker of new gypsy brewery Elusive Brewing to the brewery to brew our take of their Nelson Saison. I left Andy in Gregg's safe hands, and the reports of a fantastic nelson aroma filling the brewery made me regret not pulling a sickie from my day job. I love Nelson Sauvin, so really looking forward to see how this one turns out. Also curious how quickly the yeast can get through this one too.

And as if that wasn't enough, in other news: We shipped off our first international pallet on Friday. Look out for bottles of Single Hop Chinook, Mariana Trench, Five O'clock Shadow & Holy Hoppin' Hell hitting the shelves and the same again in keg form, minus the Chinook, hitting the bars of Italy very soon. We also had a visit from a nice couple of Swedish importers who made the most of the brewery bar and put in a rather sizeable order, that will be leaving the brewery by the end of the month. Not enough international action for you? Well, we are also in the final stage of talks with a Finish importer too, so hopefully we can get that deal closed very soon also.

It hasn't all been plain sailing though. We are very lucky to be sharing the actual brewery location with another brewery, Ellenburg's Brewery. They have had a few more label issues than we have had, and have yet to receive theirs. This means they have a few bottles of beer waiting around. We are also brewing as often as we possibly can, and sometime more. This means there is a lot of beer around on site at the moment, so space is becoming a real premium. Unfortunately just selling beer is not always the answer to this problem. Once a beer has been brewed it takes 2 weeks to condition, at the very least. Some beers can benefit from standing for over a month before being sold. We had not really planned for this fully, so had been just sticking pallets of beer where ever we could. But we had got to the point where we just couldn't fit any more beer in. So on Friday I, Bryan, armed with a forklift spent several hours playing a rather large game of tetris. I removed some of the pallet racking, as it was causing more problems than it was solving, and just piled the beer in an orderly fashion. Now it is much easier to function in the brewery. I feel there should be a time lapse video with the tetris theme here, I may have to the at the CCTV footage.

We also sent the last of the bottles of Holy Hoppin' Hell through the labeller. Although we managed to come out around 50 labels short. So those bottles may make it into the luck dip, or the fridge.

As always, these are the rantings of WeirdBeardBryan, and not the weird beard collective.

Holy Hoppin' Hell pt1

Not exactly a core beer, or even a seasonal. This is our beer! A beer that does not take itself too seriously.


A beer we brew when the feeling takes us, and a beer we brew how ever we want. Same grain bill each time, and aiming for the same IBU, but that's where the similarities end. This is a canvas, an outlet for our creativity. We give ourselves free rain on the hops used, and the processes.
This time round an 8.5% ABV Double IPA using some of the newer 'new world' hops. We have Dr Rudi (Super Alpha), Green Bullet, Pacific Gem and Columbus (not quite new world, but we never said there were rules here). Expect sweet fruits in the form of Papaya, mango, grapefruit pith, along with toffee and caramelised sugar. As a double IPA also expect huge bitterness lingering behind all those late hops.

Process wise we tried a few different things as well. Up until now we were getting far more bitterness from the late hop additions than we expected, and feared we would thus be loosing a lot of the volatile flavour and aroma oils as the hops sit in the kettle for up to an hour waiting to get cooled from 100 degrees C to 18. So we took a large portion of the flame out hops and threw them into the underback. The idea being the hot wort from the kettle would flow into the underback and be in contact with these hops for short time, then take the aroma and flavour with it straight through the heat exchange and into the FV. This time round the beer was brewed before we had calibrated the kettle, meaning it was diluted far more than it was meant to be. This gives us more beer, but dilutes the ABV, IBUs and general beating you get from the hops. Expect round 2 to be bigger, hoppier and all round more intense. We aim for 9.4% next time.


I personally love the branding for this one. Every time I say the name to myself I hear Robin the excitable sidekick exclaiming something to his friend and trainer. "Holy hoppin' hell batman, that's a hoppy beer!" I had images in my head of classic cartoon strips, and a masked Lup'in (is he a good guy or a bad guy?). That's all the information Josh & Chris, our amazing label guys, needed to some up with the label.

You will be able to find this in keg keg, 330ml bottles and a very limited number of casks.

We hope you like it, and want to share a few with us. But if not, that's just fine, we'll drink it all here at the brewery.

Week 27

So I have finally found the time to sit down and write a few words about the week just passed. And I think the word of the day is Saison.

The week started with a good old fashioned bottling session. With our collaboration Saison we brewed with Ingemar from Sad Robot. Unfortunately no sign of Ingemar on bottling day.  As mentioned in last weeks blog, there are 2 versions of this. The standard Saison 42, but then a version we call Saison 42e that has been primed with elderflower cordial. We bottled just 255 500ml bottles of this and 6 key kegs, half of which will be going to Sweden. So if you are lucky enough to spot any of this I would grab it while you have the chance. There's plenty of the original Saison 42 to go round though.


Saison 42 was the beginning of a bit of a Saison season for us. Normally we use a dry yeast as our house strain, but this time we splashed out on some freshly cultured saison yeast. This stuff wasn't cheap, so we are going to get our monies worth here. So the very next day, we brewed another saison, this time one of our core line up, Saison 14. There is a great story behind the naming of this beer, but I will leave that for the beers own blog. This beer took off like a rocket, coming down 14 points in just 24 hours, and is pretty much ready to bottle. So we just need to look at our schedule, crash cool it and get it into some bottles.

But our saisons wont be finishing with that. Hopefully in the coming week or so we will be inviting our friend from Elusive Brew to brew the next in our Single Hop Series, and our second collaboration on our own kit. Nelson Saison will be, as the name may suggest, a saison hoped with just Nelson Sauvin. And im sure any brewers out there will know how hard that hop is to get hold of, so we are extra excited about this one.


A lot of the week was spent sending bottles through our labelling machine. 5 o'Clock Shadow was all finished last week, with Fade To black all done and around 50% of Holy Hoppin' Hell all ready to go. So if any of our customers are interested in any of these new beers, please give us a shout.

The week drew to a close with a number of new beers making debut appearances at 2 beer festivals. Firstly we had 3 beers, 2 of which new, at the Reading Beer Festival. Here we had one of our favourites Black Perle, but also one of very few casks of Holy Hoppin' Hell, along with Fade To Black, our black IPA.
We also had 5 beers, and a brewer at the new LBA organised London's Brewing Festival at the London Fields event space. Here we had Black Perle on cask all weekend, Mariana Trench and 5 o'Clock Shadow in keg during the Saturday morning session. Unfortunately, Mariana Trench was not Mariana Trench for the majority of this session, and the trade session the day before. This was sorted out, but not until quite late into the session. So apologies to anyone who may have sampled this, and not got the hoppy pale they were expecting, but were greeted with a pilsner instead. Both of these keg beers sold out during the Saturday morning, so sorry if you did not get the chance to try them. Bryan was about for the morning session too, and got a chance to speak to a lot of interesting people. I was meant to be doing a meet the brewer session at 12:30, but as there were delays in opening this session, I was not inside in time.

Sunday saw Holy Hoppin' Hell and Fade To Black on in the keg bar. These again sold out, so agian apologies to anyone who missed out. Neither Gregg or myself could be there for the Sunday session, as Gregg was delivering beers up in Manchester, and I was filling casks and Kegs with Hit The Lights.


We also got some really cool looking branding items, so you wont be able to miss us at future festivals and events.

All views and grammatical errors are those of @WeirdBeardBrew.

Week 26

This week started with a rebrew, or should that be a new brew? Let's start again shall we.


This week kicked off with a brewday. We started off by brewing one of our core beers, that we have actually tried to brew before. This will be brew 0009 and will go by the name Hit The Lights. Now, if you cast your mind back to early march, and the release of batch 0002 you will remember a beer called Miss The Lights. That was the first attempt at brewing Hit The Lights, but not all went to plan. But this time round all things have gone to plan. The brewday went without a hitch, with the beer happily in FV3 earlier than any brewday yet.

Hit The Lights will be getting a good dose of dry hops sometime in the coming week, and maybe bottled towards the end.



FV4 currently has Saison 42 in, our collaboration with Sad Robot from Sweden. This has been sat at around 25 Deg C for just over a week. The yeast have done their thing, and it is down from 1049 to 1006, making it a nice 5.7% abv. There will be a couple of versions of this out, and bottling will start early this coming week. I think you will agree that we got the label sorted.

Bottled beer continues to fly out of the brewery, and we have now sold out of Miss The Lights & Black Perle, with stocks of Single Hop Chinook and Mariana Trench getting very low. Cask and keg beer is also making its way out, but at a slightly slower pace. But we expect this to pick up dramatically with festival season now upon us. In fact, we have 4 casks going to the Reading CAMRA beer festival, 1 cask & 2 keg kegs going to the Hope in Charshalton and 1 cask & 4 key kegs going to the London's Brewing, all in the coming week.


We have bottles of 5 o'Clock Shadow, Fade to Black and Holly Hoppin' Hell waiting for labels, which have now arrived. We have made a start of the 5 o'Clock Shadow bottles, as these are ready to go. Fade to Black and Holly Hoppin Hell will be done when we have time over the coming week or so, as these could do with a little more time to condition, so no rush to get these out.

All opinions and grammatical errors are those of WeirdBeardBryan, and not to hairy ones as a collective.

Five O'Clock Shadow

So this is the third of our core beers. One of my personal favourite styles, the American IPA.

This beer had been through a number of iterations of prototypes, AC3 and AC4 were early names and some of you who have known us for a long time may have sampled one or both of these. One of the best prototypes had both Citra and Nelson Sauvin but the availability of hops caused yet another version to be tried. In the end we did find some Citra and added it to a load of the dankest, most pungent American hops (Summit, Apollo and Columbus).

The Lup'in for this beer is one of our favourites. Cowboy Lup'in has become our poster boy and has made it onto our bottle caps in a slightly different hat. I have even taken to wearing such a hat in homage.



The brewing of this beer, as you will have become accustomed to hearing, did not go without minor hitches. We reduced the bittering hops, on the basis of the previous batches being overly bitter at the time so this beer lacks a bit of the edge we were looking for (although this will probably make the beer more popular with the non beer geeks). The colour is also a bit too dark for my liking. So expect this bitterness to be increased and the colour to be toned down for the next release.

Still, what we have here is a very drinkable hop forward beer with a load of mango and grapefruit. It will be available in 330ml bottles and key kegs and will be released this week. There may be a key keg of it on at the Hope in Carshalton for their festival this weekend.

Week 25


 
This week started off on a real high. As mentioned in last weeks blog, we were very lucky to welcome our good friend Ingemar from cuckoo brewery Sad Robot over from Sweden. We decided to brew a saison, which we will be calling Saison 42, a mostly harmless farmhouse ale. Through this collaboration we have managed to score a distributor in Sweden, so very soon we will be sending a couple of pallets over to the fine beer loving swedes.


We also packaged our black IPA, Fade To Black, this week. And it is tasting great. It went into 2076 330ml bottles, 8 casks and 18 key kegs. We have labels on the way, along with 5 o'Clock Shadow and Holy Hoppin' Hell.


Beer continues to fly out of the brewery, and you can now find it in bottle shops all over the country. This week a pallet was sent up to Manchester. If you see it anywhere, please do tweet about it, so we can update our outlets page on the website.


Now the weather has finally sorted itself out, the air conditioning has been turned on in the cool room.  This means the beer for the bar has also moved into the cool room.


Remember Miss The Lights? This was our first attempt at Hit The Lights, and our 2nd ever brew on the kit. This beer has been a strange one for , getting a real mix of reviews. Our stock of the bottles have sold out, but the casks and kegs have not gone down too well. We apologies if you have sampled this on cask, or key keg and have not enjoyed it. We have stopped selling these and our considering putting the remainder into bottles, as it works really well in this format.


As a side note, on Monday we will be brewing Hit The Lights. We have learnt from our mistakes, got a lot of the issues that plagued us in the beginning sorted, and calibrated the brew house. This time Lup'in will walk out onto the stage, but he will not fall on his arse. We are realy looking forward to brewing this, as it is a fantastic beer.

All opinions and grammatical errors are those of WeirdBeardBryan, and not the bearded collective.

Week 24


No real reason for the opening picture. Except it made us chuckle when we saw it, although not sure how the people of Hanwell would have felt seeing 'Destination weird Hanwell' pass through on the back of a truck. And maybe to pad out a blog about a moderately uneventful week.


One of the main reasons the brewery has been a little quiet over the last couple of weeks, besides me being busy with my 'day job', is our naughty little creation Holly Hoppin' Hell. Not sure we can blame the beer itself for everything, I think the weather has played it's part, but this brew has not gone as smoothly as we would have liked.  But it's finally been package, the label design is finished, Labels ordered and we hope to get bottles out the door in a couple of weeks. I love the label for this beer, a sneak peak can be seen above, but we will unveil the full label and full details of the beer and brewing process in the beers blog in a week or so.


The worst part of packaging days is the cleaning. Sticking beer into 4 casks, 18 key kegs and 2300 bottles doesn't happen quickly, even with the tireless assistance of Andy Parker. After standing for around 9 hours straight, the last thing you want to do is attack and clean an empty fermentation vessel. Holly Hoppin' Hell was a particularly messy son of a.... Coming in at 8.5% and with 15.5Kg of dry hops, there was a lot of crap in the cone of that vessel.Usually we would open the valve at the base of the cone and let the waste run out, but this time it was so thick and abundant, we had to get in with our new industrial size wet n' dry vacuum.


Now we could leave the cleaning of the FV until the next day, and we often leave part of the clean up for the following day, but you need to get the bulk of it done, otherwise it is all just going to dry up and be so much harder the next day. It was particulary important this time round for two reasons. Firstly, it was a Friday, and no one was really available on Saturday to come in and clean. But most importantly, and we are very excited to anounce this, with more information to follow, on Monday we will be doing our first collaborative brew in the brewery. This will not be just any old collaboration, this will be an international collaboration with our good friend Ingemar Jansson from Swedish cuckoo brewery Sad Robot coming over. I believe Ingemar has the obligatory facial hair, unless he has shave since last we saw him. This brew will be the first of hopefully 3 saisons over the coming months.


Beer continues to fly out the door, with bottles of Miss the Lights and Black Perle starting to run low. We are in a number of bottle shops around the country, and can be brought on-line now from Ales by mail, although they had pretty much run out of stock at time of writing. But they are picking up more next week.


This leads me on to a kind of apology. We are trying to keep the Outlets page on our website as up to date as possible, but this is proving difficult. There are several reasons for this. I would like to say the main reason is because we are selling to just too many people that we can't update quick enough. We are struggling to keep up, but this is not the main reason. We are now supplying a number of distributors, especially north of London, so we cant always know exactly who is buying from these distributors. As we hear about beer appearing, we try and update, but we need to keep our ear to the ground. We also supply a number of products to each bar we deal directly with, and it is impossible to know when each beer is going to be on. So if you guys see or hear of our beer anywhere, please do help us out by tweeting about it. Maybe we should come up with a hashtag.

All opinions and grammatical errors are those of @WeirdBeardBryan, and not always the grand circle of bearded brewers. 

Week 23 Blog

I don't know about you, but this bloody cold spell is starting to get a bit boring. Poor Holy Hoppin' Hell is still fermenting with all the will power it can muster, which is not a lot at 15.5 degrees C. Still dropping around a point a day, and with an expected terminal gravity of 1008, it should be ready by around Tuesday. That will be just shy of 4 weeks in the fermenter, meaning that's around another whole beer we have not been able to brew, making this a very expensive brew to produce. Luckily we currently have a bit of a stock pile of beer to send out from the brewery, do to label delays, so this hasnt hit us as hard as it could. Lessons have been learned from this beer, but it is tasting fantastic and i cant wait to get it out there.


Due to Holy Hoppin' Hell hogging FV4, and last weeks brew of Fade to Black, which is also tasting fan-frakking-tastic, we have not been able to brew this week. We haven't even had anything to bottle. So we just stood at the newly installed bar and got drunk all day, every day this week. Yeah right, as if. This week we passed around 4,500 bottles through our labelling machine. We would have passed close to 5,000 through, but the label company sent some rather random quantities of some of our labels, meaning we run out.


We brought the labelling machine 4 or 5 months ago, and it has sat quietly in the corner patiently waiting, until now. When we brought it, we spent some time with the previous owner learning how to calibrate and set it up. Like I say, this was around 4 or 5 months ago, and a lot has happened in that time. I am proud that we got as many bottles with labels out of it as we did, but i am not going to claim that they all came out perfectly. We tried to fish out all the dodgy ones, which will be used as samples, but apologies if you get a slightly skewiff label.

Above picture stolen from Dave at the Bottle Shop Canterbury

But having labels on bottles means we can now sell the things, getting them out of the brewery and making room for more exciting new brews. And they have been flying out the door, reaching Harwich in Essex, Canterbury, Dorking, Birmingham and Leicestershire, and with orders for further North and even interest from Sweden. We have also been delivering to more great beer establishments around London. So hopefully soon, it shouldn't be too difficult to get your hands on our beers where ever you are. But if you cant, approach your favourite pub, bar or bottle shop and ask. It will hold more weight coming from you guys than us.

All opinions, grammatical errors, and general greatness is that of Weird Beard Bryan, and not always the Weird Beard collective.

Week 22 blog


Labels have finally arrived, and we are so glad they have. We currently have 4 fully conditioned batches or beer taking up valuable room in the brewery. We have distributors, shops a people requesting bottles, so hope to get them flying out the door by the end of next week. I hope you agree that these labels look awesome. That's all thanks to our friends Josh and Chris.


Another week, and more beer is leaving the brewery. We were lucky enough to get orders from some of our favourite bars around London, and are super excited that our beers will be on the bar along side some fantastic breweries in the next week or so. For a full list of what is going where, be sure to keep checking our OUTLETS page on our website.  We can't always tell you when things are going to be on, but we can tell you what we are sending out. The picture above shows Gregg's rather worrying delivery technique of leaving beer out side bars on the street.If you can't find our beer in your favourite pubs, ask the bar stuff to get it in.


Along with label deliveries, we received our pump clips, to send out with casks, and Keg optics. Again, we are super proud of these, and think they should have a good impact on the bar. Thanks again to Josh for sorting these out for us.


5 o'Clock Shadow was bottled this week, along with a whole load of key kegs. No casks this time round. This left us with an empty fermenter, and we don't like that. So the very next day we were brewing again. This time round we opted for Fade To Black, our 7% black IPA. This beer uses the 'Marmite' of hops, Sorachi Ace. We love this hop, but know a lot of people hate it. It is not an easy hop to get hold of either, but we were lucky enough to persuade our hop supplier to let us know as soon as they got some in. 

Holy Hoppin' Hell is still misbehaving. It's still fermenting, but has slowed to a snails pace. The quick fix would be to raise the temperature from the 18.5 degrees C it's sat at, to something more conducive to happy hard working yeast. Not so easy when we only have chilling for the fermenters and they are sat in a cold industrial unit. It's 88% of the way to it's desired final gravity, so we have gone and dry hopped with 15.5Kg of pellet hops. That's 10g per litre! This is going to be one to drink fresh. Josh is currently working on the branding for this beer, and it's looking pretty special. I dont know about you, but every time I say "Holy Hoppin' Hell", I think of some masked sidekick from a 70s super hero show.


We now have a working bar, although we still cant sell any beer from the brewery. But it is there for us and any guests to enjoy a few samples. It is not quite finished yet, as the cornie kegs are meant to be the other side of the wall the bar backs onto, in the cool room. They are under the bar as the cool room is still being used a warm room, meaning the main brewery is the coldest, and therefore best place for them.


I have included a random picture a the new yeast we have started using. I personall think it's great, especially the name.

All views and grammatical errors are those of @WeirdBeardBryan and not always the Weird Beard collective.

Week 21 Blog


Not much to report on the brewing front this week. Five O'clock Shadow has been dry hoped and almost ready to package. It will be going into key keg and 330ml bottles this week. Holy Hoppin' Hell has slowed down a bit, and is requiring a little TLC to get down to terminal gravity. We are getting there, by injecting CO2 into the bottom of the fermenter to rouse the yeast back into suspension, which is what Bryan is doing in the picture above. HHH does use some sugar, to give it a nice dry finish, so we have also added that, and the yeast has kicked off again. It will need dry hopping after that, so maybe another week in the fermenter. These beers are the highest ABVs we have brewed yet, at 7.3% and 9.4%. They were also the first batches we tried re-pitching yeast. 5 O'clock made it to terminal gravity with a little help


This week has been more about the selling of beer. Last week we reported that a cask of Black Perle had gone out to the Bull in Highgate for their Stout Festival. Well, this week a hole load more beer went out. Including key kegs of Miss The Lights and Mariana Trench going to the Over The Hop festival at the White Horse Parsons Green. A cask of Miss The lights going to George and Dragon in Dartford. A cask of Mariana Trench to our local, The Fox In Hanwell. The list goes on. The best way to keep up to date is to vist the OUTLETS section of our website. We try to give details of where, when and what Weird Beard beers you can get.


Unfortunately we are still waiting on bottle labels, meaning the labeller is sat in the corner feeling unloved. We have started calibrating it, and getting the rotary tables and fittings ready. This wait has not been such a bad thing though, as we have had a few carbonation issues with the bottles. They have taken a little longer than we would usually expect, as it has been pretty cold in the brewery. But in the time we have been waiting for the labels the beers have developed a good carbonation. So hopefully a good few days this week will be spent sending bottles along the conveyor belt and into the labeller. Then we can start shipping bottles for you guys to drink at home.


The bar is also starting to take shape, and will hopefully be sorted by the end of the week.

All views and grammatical errors are those of WeirdBeardBryan, and not always the Weird Beard collective.

Beer is now leaving the brewery

We have now started selling beer, so casks are leaving the brewery. We are trying to tweet about as many of these as we can, and give as much information, but we cannot always know when the beers will go on, so please do check with the free house yourself.

The best way to keep up to date, is to keep an eye on our Outlets tab on the main website, where we list all free-houses, bottle shops and beer festivals we are suppling.

If you do find our beers out there, please do let us know what you think, feedback is always helpful.

Mariana Trench

This beer started life as South Seas pale ale and was hopped with the NZ hops Pacific Gem and Nelson Sauvin. Unfortunately we are unable to get hold of Nelson Sauvin in anything more then home-brew quantities so in came Citra and out went the Nelson and Mariana Trench was born.



We aimed for 5.1% and overshot slightly thanks to more complete attenuation than we were expecting.

This beer will be available in bottle, cask and keykeg. The first cask is going to The Fox in Hanwell our closest good local pub and the first keykeg will be at the Over the Hop festival at the White Horse in Parson's Green from the 22nd - 24th March. Look out for Bryan at a Meet The Brewer on the Saturday afternoon.

Week 20 Blog

Another busy week at the brewery. But alas, not a lot of beer has gone out the doors.


As always, there was a lot of bottling to be done. We help Ellenberg's bottle 1000 litres of their stout, the rest will go into bottles next week. But perhaps more importantly, Mariana Trench went into 6 casks, 20 Key kegs and a whole bunch of 500ml bottles. You should be able to find this beer at The White Horse in Parsons Green this weekend, for their Over The Hop Festival, along with a key keg of Miss The Lights. In the picture above you can see part of our bottling line. Sanitised bottles draining in the background, with the bottle filler on the right. The skull in the foreground is the handle of our hand caper.


There were 2 Weird Beard core beers brewed. First of which was our American style IPA, Five O'clock Shadow, brewed with the dankest of U.S. hops in the form of Summit, Columbus and Apollo. The brewday went pretty smoothly for this one, and we experimented for the first time with re-pitching a batch of yeast cropped from the Mariana Trench brew last week. 5 O'clock is currently sat in FV3, a few days away from being dry hopped. The Lup'in for this beer is a favourite of ours, and you may recognise a slightly altered cowboy on all of our caps.


Next brew was our double IPA, Holy Hoppin Hell. Expect a blog in the coming weeks about this beer, but it weighs in at 9.4% with 100IBUs of bitterness. This is a beer we can have fun with, as the grist, ABV and IBUs will remain the same from brew to brew, but the late hops will change from batch to batch. This time round with got a bit of a NZ theme. We are still getting used to hop utilisation on the new brew kit and bitterness extraction from prolonged time the hops are in very hot wort. While the bitterness is being extracted from hops the delicate aroma and flavour oils are volatilized off, and these hop oils are an important part of Holy Hoppin' hell. So we went for something different with this batch, and stuck a proportion of the 5.2Kg of flame out hops in the underback. The cupcake picture above is a bucket we put on the floor to try and catch some of the foam coming from the top of the fermenter as it was filled, check out the short video at the end of the blog.


An exciting delivery came this week in the shape of our stainless steel bar. Don't get excited, we are not opening a tap house or sample room, as we are not licensed to sell at the brewery, yet. The idea of this is to have a few samples of core beers, and hopefully some prototypes for any guests, future customers and people who volunteer for a days bottling to sample. There will be a total of 10 taps. We also think it will ge a good place to just hang out and relax at the end of a hard day, or to persuade people to stock our product.

We have a quiet week ahead, as both beers we have fermenting will require dry hopping for around a week. So hopefully some time to get the bar up and running and complete some other outstanding jobs around the brewery. Don't forget to get over to the Bull in Highgate and the White Horse in Parsons Green for a chance to get you hands on some Weird Beard beers.


As promised, above is a short video of Holy Hoppin' Hell being transferred into FV4. It get very excited and started spilling foam out of the top from about 2/3rds full.

All views and grammatical errors are those of @weirdbeardbryan and not always the Weird Beard collective.

Black Perle

Black Perle is our milk coffee stout, and a cask of this escaped the brewery earlier this week, so we thought we better introduce it properly.


The idea for this beer came when I was drinking a Perle single hop IPA. My wife hates milk, and upon sampling the beer she starts screaming that it tastes like milk. Now the power of suggestion can be a strangely strong thing, and i could then taste the milk in this beer, but I found it less objectionable. Around this time we were working on our stout, so this all got me thinking about a milky coffee stout. Milk stouts or sweet stout are traditionally made with milk sugar, or lactose. So we combined all these to make a sweet, milk, coffee stout. I don't think this tastes like a milky sweet coffee, but it definitely works as a sweet coffee stout, AKA milk coffee stout.
I think this was one of the easiest beers to name so far. It is a stout, so black, and it is single hopped with Perle, although this isn't always pronounces as in pearl, but it is close enough (to not get sued). This is now sounding very much like a ship from a well known film, and I'm sure everyone out there likes the classic pirate, don't they? So Lup'in put on his pirate persona and Black Perle was born.


When it came to sourcing coffee for this beer, we wanted to find a supplier local to us. We ended up being put in contact with Alchemy Coffee by a mutual friend. They invited us over one evening, and we arrived armed with a prototype bottle of Black Perle, and another non coffee milk stout as a tester. When we arrived they had thought about our proposal and select 3 different beans to sample. They talked us through and tasted all these with us, and we talked them through our plans for the beer, while sampling that. We then went through each bean, mixing it with the milk stout we had brought and trying to find the best match. We went with a Costa Rican Zamorana bean. This wasn't the most exciting coffee we tried, but the one that suited this beer best. The more exiting one will find it's way into another beer in the future. We really enjoyed our evening with Jamie and Joe, and hope they will visit us at the brewery some time soon.

Now, this was our 3rd brew on the new kit, coming just a week after the brew of Miss The Lights. I am not going to lie to you, we are still learning the kit, and this brew didn't go without it's issues. The main problems came from changing our process from lessons learnt, but going too far in the other direction. We backed off slightly on the grain bill, as we had been getting higher efficiency in the last couple. We are also having some issues with volumes, as sight glasses on some of the vessels had not been installed at this stage. This all resulted in this batch weighing in at 3.7% instead of the planned 4.5%, which also makes it a little thinner than we would like. We think the taste of the beer is pretty much spot on, so decided to release it as Black Perle, but we hope to bring future batches back up to the original 4.5%.



Black Perle will be available in 500ml bottles and on cask. There is a possibility it may appear on key keg some time in the future, but we dont feel that this first batch quite suited it.

I also mentioned that a cask of this escaped the brewery this week. That would make this the first commercially available Weird Beard beer to be in pubs. We did have Shark Biscuit a while ago, but this was a collaboration. Miss the lights was supposed to be the first beer released, but our good friends at The Bull in Highgate where having a stout and oyster festival. These guys offered us our very first collaboration brew a while back, and we owe them a lot for this, so we couldn't say no. So go and try Black Perle along with some other fantastic locally brewed stouts this week end (14 - 17th March 2013).

The Bull Stout and Oyster festival

We have sent our very first cask out of the brewery to our friends at The Bull in Highgate for their Stout and Oyster festival. This will be taking place over St Patrics day weekend, starting Thursday 14th March to the Sunday.

There will be a great selection of locally brewed stouts. And no double Gregg and Bryan will be around to sample these themselves, most likely Friday evening and Sunday if there is any left.

Week 19 Blog

It's been a bit of a quiet week after the craziness of the last. And it looks like it's going to be a busy week ahead. The idea is to brew once a week, and bottle once a week too. But due to past issues and not wanting to leave a fermenter empty for any period of time, we seem to be having one hugely busy week followed by slow ones. But we have some mega hoppy beers coming up, that will need dry hopping and hence more time in the fermenter, so hopefully things will level out soon.

 
We haven't been sat at the bar all week though. As you can see from the picture above, we finally have some beers to sell. This is meant to be our cool room, where we keep beer just before we ship it out to customers. It is kept cool to keep the beer nice and fresh. Right now though it has been converted to a warm room, as we have found that our beers just aren't conditioning properly in the current cold spell. So we have stuck a couple of the heaters in to keep the temp at around 20 degrees.


So what beers do we have in here? On the left of the room we have bottles of Boring Brown Beer, which we are aging for a while before we start selling. We have some bottles of Miss the Lights, which we hope to get out there pretty soon, just waiting on labels. There are also 15 key kegs of Miss the lights and around 800 freshly bottled 500ml bottles of Black Perle.



On the right hand side of the cool/warm room we have 60 full casks. 18 Boring Brown, 12 Miss the lights, and 30 Black Perle. You can sample Black Perle on Cask at the Bull in highgate next Sunday 17th, at their St Patrick's day stout festival.


Above is a picture of a half of Miss the lights. It is very hazy, but tasting great. We have a key keg of this destined for the Over the Hop festival at the White Horse later this month.

This coming week we will be bottling Mariana Trench, brewing 5 O'Clock Shadow and then Holy Hoppin' Hell. We are very excited about both of these ultra hoppy beers.

Single Hop Series No 1: Chinook

So you may have guessed that we plan to blog about each new beer release. This is the fourth beer to be blogged about and is the first beer that we brewed and the first of a series of single hop beers in assorted styles.

So what is the single hop series all about? Well, it is a chance for us to brew one-off beers in a variety of interesting styles or to miss out the style book altogether and brew stuff we think will work. This will allow us to play around with techniques that we may not normally get to use in our day to day beers. Step mashing, lagering and brewing with interesting yeasts are all things that we are considering, all with the constraint of using a single hop variety.


These beers will have a common branding theme. The name of the hop in bold in the middle and the style of beer underneath.

So what about this single hop Chinook beer? It was our first beer brewed, very simple, Pale and Special B malts, Chinook Hops and Nottingham ale yeast. Sounds a little bit like a best bitter? Well we aimed for 7.2% and hit 7.4%, figured about 100IBU would just about do it. So not quite a best bitter more an imperial best bitter! Or as we call it a Boring Brown Beer.

It was not all plain sailing however, as mentioned in the Miss The Lights blog we had temperature control issues with the fermenters. This one topped out at 29 degrees and at that point was leaking beer all over the floor, we were not sure for a long time if this was going to be a drain pour or not. We were planning packing into keykegs as well as bottles and casks but decided not to risk the expensive kegs on a beer we were not sure about.

So after a month where are we? There are no off flavours but the bitterness is a touch harsh maybe and the malt character seems to be a little lower than the prototypes. However the bottles are crystal clear and settled and it actually drinks rather well.

We hope to debut a cask of this beer at the Egham United Services Beer festival over Easter weekend and send some bottles out to bottle shops early next week. What we do with the other 17 casks is anyone's guess (late edit: some have gone to the Craft Beer Co and Cask Pub & Kitchen). The beer may be a candidate for throwing in an oak barrel at some point and I'm sure one or two casks may sneak out to a few more festivals.

As ever let us know what you think.



Miss the Lights

Here at Weird Beard Brew Co we believe in good beer, and being as honest and transparent as possible. In this vein, we would like to introduce you to the second beer we ever brewed on the new brew house, and most likely the first to be released. But first a bit of background.

We have essentially been home brewers for the last couple of years, and have got to know our little 21 or so litre brewery set ups at home very well. We know that adding water to the mash at a certain 'strike' temperature will cool down to a usable temperature to mash at. We know how much sugar we will extract from the grain, and hence how much alcohol. We know how long it takes to cool our boiling wort (unfermented beer) to the right temperature to pitch the yeast at, and therefore how long our hops are in the beer extracting bitterness. We know how our yeast is going to react with our temperature controlled fermentation.

Now translate this up to a 10 barrel (around 1640 litre) brew house you have never used. Things do not work the same at all. You can do all you can, read literature, listen to podcasts or use brewing software to try and scale up a recipe, but until you have actually used the kit, and learned the kit, you will struggle.

We opted to brew a non core beer first time round. A simple beer that used just 2 types of grain and one single hop variety. This went pretty well, but until it was fermented out and conditioned, we couldn't really know exactly how the new brew house performs. We were not willing to wait that long, so within a couple of days, we went for a core beer.

We decided we wanted Hit the Lights to be the first beer released into the wild. The name alone made it a prime suspect, but we thought the beer would be a good example. This is a 5.8% ABV, 53IBU hop burst IPA. Hop burst means there are no early kettle hops, just loads added at 20 minutes before the end of boil, and then another huge charge of dry hops. This was our first issue. Hop oils help tame the bubbly mass that is produced at the top of the boil, and stops it boiling over. Put no hops in at the start of the boil means no control, resulting in a good proportion of the wort boiling over and escaping the kettle.

The idea of adding the hops at 20 minutes before the end of the boil is to give a softer bitterness, along with a healthy amount of taste and aroma. But the longer the hops are in contact with the hot wort, the more bitterness is extracted and more aroma oils are boiled off. After the boil is done we cool the wort down to 18 degrees C, which takes a lot longer to do for this amount of liquid. Also, in all the excitement someone, (Bryan) forgot to add the protofloc, which is a natural additive used to clarify beer, resulting in a slightly hazy product.

Unfortunately the temperature control of the fermenters had not been installed to a working standard. So one night, when the fermentation really took hold, the temperature ramped up a little higher than we wanted. This can introduce some unwanted flavours if you are not careful. One way around this is to put a little pressure on the fermenter, so we sealed up the air outlet to allow the pressure to build. This helped alot, but created its own little problem when it came to dry hopping. By sealing the air outlet, the beer had carbonated a little, so adding the hop pellets just created loads of nucleation points for the CO2, think minto in a fizzy drink bottle. This resulted in Gregg, who was doing the dry hopping being attacked by a huge amount of foamy beer spraying out of a small opening at the top of the fermenter, and just missing the ceiling and the lights. Unfortunately no one was quick enough with a camera for this.

All of this resulted in a beer that was not what was intended. This is a much more bitter beer, with a slightly different character than what we were shooting for. We debated putting it down the drain, but decided we really quite enjoyed it. So we have packaged it, 12 casks, 15 key kegs, and around 750 500ml bottles, and will sell it as a one off special beer.

When it come to naming the beer there was no competition. This beer had tried to escape and hit the ceiling twice. It was meant to be called Hit the Lights, but missed the target. So we had no choice but to call it Miss the Lights. Look out for it over the coming months and let us know what you think.


This now means the Hit the Lights brew has been pushed back. But hopefully we can get this brewed in a few months time, just in time for the summer.