Weird Wired - a collaboration between us & 8 Wired Brewing Co

I remember back in the day when Weird Beard was just in the planning stage. Lots of talk and dreams, but no real decisions or substance; we hadn’t even agreed on a name. I was still at my previous job, on a night shift, filling the time reading blogs from other breweries as usual. To this day I remember one particular blog that really stood out. I had done some googling after I had enjoyed a stout, rare to these shores a few times, called iStout. I really liked the beer, but did not really know much about the brewery, 8 Wired Brewing Co, as there wasn't much of their stuff around at the time.

Here's that blog. It was really inspirational reading about a guy (Søren) working in a larger New Zealand brewery, who were letting him brew his own stuff on any spare capacity. The beers he made impressed people so much he went on to open his own brewery. 8 Wired beers are now a lot easier to find, thanks in part over the last year or so to Todd and the NZ beer collective.

Everyone at Weird Beard see Todd, and few other people working for the NZ cause, as friends. We've worked many festivals together, meeting a number of Kiwi brewers along the way. It really was only a matter of time before we managed to get together with one of these guys and brewed something special. So when we bumped in Todd exciting a great cask bar in central London where he mentioned that Søren from 8 Wired would be in town in a few weeks and was keen to brew with us while he had the chance, I have to admit to being just a little excited. The very next Monday, emails started flying around and it was official, Weird Beard and 8 Wired were going to be brewing a beer together at the end of February.

We are fans of hops - you may have figured this out by now - but it's always worth mentioning. And what is NZ known for? Could it be all those lovely New World hops? It was obvious, this beer had to be all about the hops. A super basic malt bill was required, with a single sack of Carapils, and then Lager malt, loads of Lager malt. In fact, this beer has a higher percentage of lager malt than our lager. Then, our standard yeast, a nice clean US style yeast that doesn’t add a lot of character, leaving a nice light, easy drinking but essentially blank canvas to paint our hoppy masterpiece. Anyway, back to the hops...we had a brewer from NZ brewing a beer with a UK brewery, so we had to run with this love in, and get some UK hops working in harmony with some NZ hops.

Left to Right: 8 Wired's Søren, Weird Beard's Gregg, Ryan and Bryan rubbing hops

Left to Right: 8 Wired's Søren, Weird Beard's Gregg, Ryan and Bryan rubbing hops

Unfortunately, there wasn't quite enough time to have Søren smuggling hops into the country and we were restricted by our hops contracts; anyone who follows our blogs will know how much fun they are. Out of what we had, Soren went with Kohatu, one we have used a few times in the past and we went with a UK hop that just oozes lovely, fruity blackcurrant, but one usually found in darker beers, Bramling Cross. Just to bridge the gap a little, we went for another NZ hop that we have been using since Gregg's first home brews, and a big part of our flagship pale ale, Mariana Trench. Pacific Gem, a hop that brings more blackcurrant to the party, in a very NZ way.

I had a great day working with Soren and think the resulting beer is something to be proud of.

Get stuck in while it is available. 

Weird Wired will be sold in keg, cask and bottle formats. It's launching on cask tonight (5th April) at our Meet the Brewer event at the Union Tavern.

February Open Day

The weekend is imminent and that means so is our open day. Head over to our brewery on: 

Sunday 7th February
12-7pm
Photo by Dom Hemy

Photo by Dom Hemy

As per usual we will have:

At least 5 Draft Beers
A range of our core, occassional and special bottles
Drink-in or Take-away
Growler fills, if you have a growler handy
Artisanal Scotch Eggs & Sausage Rolls to snack on from Pig & Hay
Tasty, home-made fruit sodas from Square Root
T-shirts & Branded Glassware Merch
Meet the Brewers
Informal Brewery Tours 


We've recently released some really amazing collaborations beers, which you can find more info on here. We will have these on sale as well as brewery exclusive or limited release bombers. How do you like the sound of Red Wine or Tequila Barrel Aged Sadako eh?



But we've also decided to make some changes to how we run things on our open day, making it even better and in order to beat some of the busier periods! Firstly our warehouse, which you may or may not know about, at unit 9 will be the point of call for all take-out beer. If you want any beer for home, ensure you head there! Off-sales won't have you waiting at the brewery bar this time around. Secondly, we've got all-American BBQ and Smokehouse food trader, Redneck Smokehouse, to come on down and serve up delicious hot meals that you can enjoy hand-in-hand with our beers. Vegetarians and vegans, rest assured, we've taken care that there will be options for you too.
And if all that news is not sweet music to your ears, here's our fantastic draught line-up:

A collaboration with Bexar County Brewery that has flown out from the brewery. A treat of a low ABV beer with the right amount of lemon tartness and fruitiness, met with subtle sweet biscuit malt notes and creamy lactose.

This is a inspiring yet classic Pilsner style which strikes a balance between Czech hops and German Pislner malt and yeast. An easy-drinking yet satisfying kind of lager for an easy and satisfying kinda Sunday. 

A luxurious stout with plenty of cacao and freshly roasted coffee flavours. Robust in taste, as is expected from a stout but smooth and subtly creamy because of the addition oats to the grain-bill.


An interesting fruit IPA, originally made with the team from BrewDog Shepherds Bush but re-brewed because of its popularity. Made with chokeberries that give juicy but tart flavours, which we've complimented with tropical fruit notes of lovely Mosaic hops. 


A Heaven Hill barrel aged version of our latest Holy Hoppin' Hell DIPA. This beer is big, bold and beautiful when it comes to aroma, flavour and bitterness. The vanilla and marshmallow notes from the barrel complements the slightly chewier malt-bill of this style of beer. We've got it reigning our taps as the heavyweight for Sunday's line-up.

Check out the event page and see you then!

A Celebration of Collaborations 3


Now here's the sort of trivia that could feature in a 'craft beer pub quiz': Dave of Kew Brewery used to brew for us here at Weird Beard before setting up his own venture. It's been a long time since Dave left us. Looking back now, it's been a full 18 months that we have gone without Dave. In truth we have had his cheery self drop by for a friendly visit but we hadn't brewed together. As our world carried on without Davy, his world has gone from strength to strength with the opening and success of Kew. We always talked about doing a collab when Kew was up and running. Again, the holiday period offered some free-time and a free fermenter for doing just that. We set a date for the brewday, got a thread going and put our heads together to come up with a recipe. It didn't take long to come up with a no brainer, delicious idea. Kew have won awards for their Chocolate Porter, and us for our Milk Coffee Stout (Black Perle). What we went with was a Mint Chocolate Stout.


We collaborated on the recipe, selecting the grains based somewhere between our two dark beer malt-bills. We wanted both chocolate and robust flavours but nothing too overpowering either so we added lashings of lactose. This, to give a sweet and silky body to our beer. Hop-wise we went with Perle, which we are so fond of in Black and Double Perle. The reason it is a favourite of ours in dark beer styles is because of its slightly milky and herbal flavour. We wanted to emphasise that but also added some Willamette for its spicy character. 


Now for actual mint choc-chip constituents! We added a load of fresh mint, which we spent a considerable amount of time de-sprigging and chin wagging whilst doing so, and cacao nibs at every possible stage. We also made a mint tea-like wort infusion, which we added into the underback, to really amp up the sweeter mint flavours and help in layering them. During the conditioning phase of the beer, we did more of the same but also adding a cold brew of cacao. In doing so we aimed to get a deep mint-chocolate flavour that lingers.


If the recipe and collaboration wasn't fun in enough, we really got into the naming this beer. When Dave used to brew with us, we had some fantastic soundtracks to our working day. As most of you may know, we at Weird Beard have a history of naming beers with nods to some of our favourite bands/songs also. When it came to this beer, music was our first port of call for inspiration. Bryan discovered Carter USM's "A World Without Dave" on his iTunes and it made 100% sense that this was what we rolled with.

We whole-heartedly suggest you play the tune, grab the beer, drink & enjoy. A World Without Dave is so much easier to bear with this brew in your hand.

Debuting tonight at the harp in London if you fancy.

A Celebration of Collaborations 2


Next collaboration we’re pleased to announce is “A Lemon Tree My Dear Watson”. This, we brewed with Steve of Bexar County Brewing (pronounced “Bear County” with the “x” being silent).


Both Steve and our Bryan have been drinking at festivals for years and we have always found ourselves drinking Bexar County beers at events - even if it was a Squid Ink Gose. Nevertheless, a collab’s been on the cards as we’ve admired the whackiness of Steve’s beers and share the ethos of brewing whatever we want. It was only a matter of time and over the holiday period, we had just that.


Simply enough we got Steve down to West London to brew one of his trade mark ‘out there’ beers with us. In the lead-up to this event, loads of ideas were batted around. The most unusual included guano as an ingredient, but that was just bat sh*t crazy, quite literally. Eventually we settled on the idea of Lemon Meringue Pie; a quintessential American dessert and well, who doesn’t like a bit of Lemon Meringue Pie? The idea was we de-constructed the dessert and made a beer that featured a little bit of all the tasty components that make up the pie.




So, the grain bill has delicious biscuit malt and when we say delicious, we really mean it. We couldn't help but munch on this at the start of the brewday! We also added a little amber malt for some sweeter, Digestives base flavours. When it came to the lemons, we went all out to maximise their flavour and we sure did use a lot of lemons. In the boil alone, we added the zest of 30 fresh lemons, which were then quartered and threw in also. We wanted a balanced beer, so afterwards we loaded the kettle with lactose for more sweetness and to create a creamy body to subdue the tartness of all the lemons.


For the hops, there had to be Sorachi Ace. Firstly, we love that hop and really don’t need much of an excuse to brew with it and secondly, it gives huge lemon refresher flavour. This works with what we were going for, but we also added Citra, for more natural citrus-fruit notes. Then, a hefty amount of dried lemon peel was added as the beer made its way to the fermenter, which adds layers and complexity to the flavour profile of the beer. When fermentation was finished, we dry hopped with more Sorachi Ace, Citra and a little more dried lemon peel. Altogether, our efforts created an easy drinking, 3.7%, Lemon Meringue Pie in a glass. 


This treat of a beer is available in all formats: cask, keg and bottles.

A Celebration of Collaborations 1

2015 was a great year for us at Weird Beard, mostly because of the many developments we underwent as a brewery and as a team that brought loads of positive change. Another important feature of the past year and something fundamental in us bettering our beers and/or techniques is collaborating with others. Not only are collaborations constructive but they are fun, and we certainly had a fair bit of collaborative fun throughout 2015. Particularly in winter, when the year was drawing to a close, we decided that all those promised brewdays with our brewer friends and any other exciting collabs that had been proposed, would be achieved. Now we’re kicking off January with a hell of a lot of exciting new beer and so, let us tell you about them.





First up and you’ve probably seen it about already is “Pankot Palace”. This was a mad collaborative brew with the fine folk from La Débauche. Here's the video blog to prove it. A little about these guys and why we thought to work/brew together: they’re a French microbrewery that we’d tried and thought they excelled in dark beers. We hope you’d agree that we also do some pretty bangin’ dark beers. 



Another reason we liked them was because La Débauche's branding is beautiful. The artwork often feature illustrations by local tattoo or other artists with many labels featuring skulls or a female character. Our labels have Lup’in, and you can probably see where we’re going with this... We’re most definitely big on our branding so we felt excited we could do something quite special with these guys when it came to the label, besides making a great beer.


We had Eglantine, Aurelien and Manu from La Débauche to brew with us. Since they mentioned they would travel to India before coming over, we decided to use ingredients from there and set ourselves the challenge of brewing a masala chai milk stout. This meant we were brewing with spices and with tea, and although we’ve put a lot of fruit in our beers of late, this was new territory. We added a lot of spices, which we first had to hand mix into our own garam masala. We also added a lot of Assam tea, in keeping with using Indian inspired ingredients. Lastly, we chose to round off the spice of masala and bitterness of tea with lactose because everyone knows proper Indian chai is sweet! 



On the nose, this beer smells of winter spice: rich in cinnamon, ginger and clove notes. Flavourwise, the spiciness remains and particularly the ginger lingers throughout the earthy, roasted tea flavours as well as maltiness from the grains. Before you think “woah this is all too much”, the lactose mellows the bold flavours and encourages you to take the next sip. 


And the only cask of this beer in London, is serving at the Harp tonight so see us there!

A Very Happy New Year


It's the very first day of 2016 and we can't help but be excited for what this year will bring nor can we hesitate to reflect on the year just gone. 2015 has been jam-packed, exciting, prosperous and important for us. 
Photo by Matt Curtis
We've grown in more ways than one. For starters, we installed 2 new 20 barrel fermenters, we then installed new Hot and Cold Liquor Tanks and we've massively upped our production. We've also built up our ever-growing team and are currently a happy, beery family of 8 going onto 9. We had welcomed Jonny as a new lead-brewer, who offered insight, some change, new recipes and also afforded time for headbrewer Bryan to make changes to the brewhouse and its management. Due to unfortunate circumstances concerning Jonny's family, we saw him go but we then welcomed another awesome guy, Ryan. It's only been a couple of months, but you can bet on seeing some cool new beers from him soon. 
Photo by Matt Curtis
 

With our growth, we've put more beer out. As a result we've battled with our hop contracts but even then we made a positive out of a tricky situation. Gregg has written a great blog about it all and you will get more of his musings about the "Spreadsheet Ninja side of Brewing" this year. Even though he's not often brewing, Gregg continues to develop some of our recipes. Both him and Bryan are carefully considering our beer range and have re-defined what is "core". We laid "Hit the Lights" to rest to make room for new and more "Weird Beard" brews over the year, which we felt we've definitely achieved.


 2015 saw us also develop our skills through the many collaborations we did. Collabs, when done well, are both fun and constructive for everyone involved and here's a list of the fine folk we've had the pleasure to work with last year:

Photo of The Frog Is Fired from IMBC

Aside from brewers, we've also worked with a few other great people, including:

Photo of Karkli Beer Pairing at IMBC
  • Hayley from Pig & Hay, who cooked with our beers to make super tasty speciality Scotch Eggs and Sausage Rolls for our AGM and Meet the Brewer event at BrewDog Camden. 
  • The team at BrewDog Shepherds Bush to make a beer for BrewDog's annuary Collabfest; we brewed "Safe Word". 
  • The Duke's Head Highgate and Matt Curtis for specifically developing and brewing "Duke of Dank" together for a "Cask Is Important" event they hosted.  
  • Chris Walker and Josh Smith are two guys we will never fail to appreciate as they are the maestros behind our branding. Of course we're biased but there is truth in the fact that our labels ROCK!


Over the past year we've held and partaken in some really awesome events in and outside London. We've also jetted about the globe to Copenhagen, Athens, Tuscany, Barcelona, Antwerp and Orlando. From tutored tastings, tap-takeovers, meet the brewers, live brews, beer festivals and open days, we really have satisfied our social calendars. We are pretty proud that our open days continue to be well attended and enjoyed, so we'll have more of the same this year for sure. To safeguard against missing out on what we will be getting up to, keep an eye on our blog and Facebook events. We've got plenty lined up already.
 
Photo by Dom Hemy

 Hopefully, we've been able to show and share that 2015 has been a great year for us in our beers and antics. Now we've kicked off 2016, we'd want to up the ante and make it a better year than the last. So here's to doing just that.
Cheers and Happy New Year from all of us at Weird Beard!

Winter Open Day Draft List Announced!

So here are the final announcements of the weekend's Open Day:


 Sunday 13th December
12-7pm
Weird Beard Brewery

Our smashing, know no bounds, 6 draft beers line up will consist of the following:

Our super-fast-selling, deliciously juicy Cranberry Christmas Stout that boasts roasted and spicy notes from dark malts and rye. Perfect for our festive-themed brewery antics.


The latest batch of our award-winning session I.P.A, this time it's all-American hops Simcoe, Cascade and Chinook for pine and citrus hoppy goodness.

This is a new Black Pilsner inspired by the Japanese drier versions of dark lagers. Chocolate, subtly malt-loaf sweetness and roasted flavours, lifted by coconut fruitiness from Sorachi Ace and herbal hop notes from Hersbrucker.

Our flagship pale ale with tropical fruit aroma and flavours from Pacific Gem that plays with citrussy Citra (errr duh!) hops. We've got this on keg for you to pair with our Karkli Snack collab flavour: Lemon and Ginger, that'll be on sale to chomp on.

Our third collab with our friends from Northern Monk, hence the name, this is a Belgian I.P.A inspired by Houblon Chouffe. Peppery and fruit salad bowl flavours make this is a satisfyingly complex beer that is a bastardized version of a hoppy Belgian I.P.A style.

A deliciously moreish milk stout and an amped up version of our Black Perle. It is more of everything: creamier, slightly sweeter, richer and more chocolate-y. It’s a decadent beer but we suitably add more Hasbean coffee to compliment the roasted flavours of the darker malts used.


We'll be serving pretty much all day so there's plenty of time to catch some (or all) of these tasty brews on draft. Expect thirds and halves of pints as well as larger measures of the lower ABV beers and tasters of anything as always. 

Catch you at the weekend!





Winter Open Day

It was around this time last year that we had our first ever Open Day. Come to think of it, time has really flown!? A year later, we’re just as excited to announce another. 


 Make sure you head on over to our West London brewery to join us in our holiday shenanigans. Here are the details:
Sunday 13th December
12-7pm


Since it's the last gathering at the brewery of 2015, we’re dead-set on making it a big one. With all the best things of previous events and plenty more offerings to add to the festive feel of Christmas, we have the following things lined up:

6 beers on Tap
Including specials like ‘Black Christmas’

Growler fill with 10% discount

A range of bottles for drinking-in & take-away


Brewery Exclusive Bombers on sale (Jim Beam B.A. Sadako & Jack’s Rye Smile)

Our collaboration snack recipe with Karkli


Christmas Specials of Pig&Hay wares


Christmas Specials of Square Root Sodas

Super cool, 'Black Christmas' t-shirts (£15)

New Branded Craft Master Glassware (£3)

See you next weekend!

Faithless Spreadsheet Ninja - our Black Pilsner at the Black Heart


It is well known that Gregg’s beer history started with lagers and that he is partial to a quality lager when he has that option. He too, successfully developed the recipe of our flagship lager “Faceless Spreadsheet Ninja” and slices his way through the spreadsheets as he battles with the nuances of hop contracts in order to keep a Weird Beard lager alive.
What isn’t well known is that Bryan does in fact enjoy lagers. A fan of Japanese culture, his exposure to black and dryer styles which are offered in Japanese restaurants had awakened his thirst for this type of beer. It was only a matter of time that his ideas of and his recipe for a Black Pilsner would creep its way into the brew schedule.

That moment came a lot quicker, thanks to Des de Moor. Reading through Des’ latest publication of CAMRA Guide to London's Best Beer earlier this year, we came across Weird Beard’s section and Des’ accidental reference to our best-selling pilsner, calling it “Faithless” instead of “Faceless”. As soon as he heard this, Bryan decided to coin the name for the lager he had anticipated to brew for so long. And so the beer was borne. Thank you Des!
Faithless Spreadsheet Ninja, like its brother Ninjas is a German Pilsner style. What makes it different is that its grain bill has a decent amount of carafa malt and a touch of roasted barley to give it those more robust and roasted flavours as well as it's black colour. Although Faithless is darker in taste and nature to our other pilsners, we've kept it light with adequate Munich and Pilsner malts. The chocolate finish is lifted by healthy additions of a mixture of hops. We’ve armed this Ninja with Summit and to keep it traditional, Hersbrucker in the kettle. Being inspired by Japanese dark lagers and because we love the hop, we’ve chucked in Sorachi Ace for coconut fruitiness to come to play as you savour this brew.
 
At Weird Beard, we have some strict rules with what goes into cask; lagers and saisons being 2 big fat “no’s”. Because of the flavours and subtle richness of the dark pilsner, Faithless Spreadsheet Ninja has had us thinking and we’ve allowed ourselves to package it in cask as well as in keg. With a limited 2 firkins in existence, we’re launching one of these casks of Faithless alongside a keg of it. Our Black Pilsner will be first had at the Black Heart pub on Wednesday 9th December. Come along, try the beer and Meet the Brewer Bryan from 7pm.

The Frog Is Fired - a gooseberry pale ale

One fresh gooseberry off the tree in the garden, that's all we asked for. Just one bloody gooseberry to go into the boil! The frog had one job but just couldn't stop the robin eating it. We had no choice, we had to let him go.


Last year we were approached by the guys at Independent Manchester Beer Festival to brew a collaboration beer with them for the festival. Now this is a festival we all love here at Weird Beard, so jumped at the chance. The beer we produced was a black Saison with orange zest called Hacienda. The beer was a great success, with the barrel aged version going down just as well. When we were approached approached to brew with them for their 2015 festival, we were more than happy to say yes. Then when they mentioned the guys from the mighty Lervig from Norway would be involved, there was no turning it down.

 

The theme for the year was fruit in beer and between us, over the power of the interweb, we decided on a Gooseberry Pale Ale. On brewday, the Weird Beard team were in and ready to go nice and early as both the Lervig guys and I had events going on that night for London Beer City. James from IndyMan was a little late, but this is understandable as we are based in the outer reaches of London. We decided to wait a little longer for the Lervig guys, as that is the polite thing to do and we are very English. James and Matt rocked up about 2 hours late, looking a little partied out exclaiming 'you shouldn't have waited for us'. But they did arrive clutching a 5Kg bag of Nelson Sauvin hop pellets, which we can't get our hands on, so all was forgiven. We got the brew under way, talked beer, drank beer and had a really good day. 




The beer we created is easy-drinking, straw coloured with slight tartness from the gooseberry, complimented with loads of Citra and Nelson Sauvin hops that play perfectly with the fruit. We then added Centennial, because who doesn't like Centennial? This is a perfect beer for enjoying in the sun; shame IMBC is in October.

But where did the name come from? Well, when one of our team heard we were brewing a gooseberry beer he got all excited exclaiming he had a gooseberry tree in his garden and we should use some of the fruit from that. A few days later we were informed that that there was just a single gooseberry on the tree, but we thought "what the hell, we'll throw it in the boil anyway". The night before the brew, I sent a reminder to bring our sacred gooseberry in, but got the below email entitled 'The Frog Is Fired'.


'Gutted, the gooseberry is gone.. The robin, who thinks he owns my garden, must have eaten it for breakfast. The frog was put there as a lame attempt to scare him off.'

I could not stop laughing for about an hour, and when talk of a name came up, we couldn't think of a better one. Chris our label guy could not have translated all this into a better label.

We had a blast planning, brewing and naming this beer, and we also love drinking it. We hope you guys at IndyMan enjoy it too. For those not going to IndyMan this year, the beer will be released in bottle, keg and cask the week following the festival.

September Tap Room Beer List

Head over this coming Sunday 12-7pm to our brewery where we will be happy to serve you some great beer along with great snacks, food offerings and music.


On tap we'll have:



Our bestseller, a transpacific pale ale with New Zealand Pacific Gem and American Citra hops that give tropical fruit flavours. Excitingly, we have teamed up with Karkli to create the ultimate beer-matched snack and we will be seeking feedback on our exclusive Mariana Trench pairing at this open day! 



A new variation of our Pilsner, with all-American hops: Mosaic, Amarillo and Centennial. It is a go-to beer: crisp, hoppy, quaffable and how lagers should taste.

To mark both of their birthdays, our Gregg and Pig&Porter's Sean collaborated and made this California Common. Boasting biscuit and subtle caramel sweetness, it's a darker lager style that has a fruitiness due to fermentation at ale temperatures. The American kettle-hops and Experimental 431 dry hops add more citrus notes to balance this beer.



A new release from the brewery this week! It is an India Brown Ale, brewed with Muscovado sugar and cacao nibs. Hoppy enough to bridge the chocolatey sweetness and subtle liquorice, it's a really tasty new brew.



Our 200th brew and a triple I.P.A/amped up version of Sorachi Faceplant with Apollo, Summit and Sorachi Ace hops. It's a monster of a beer and does as its name suggests, but remains juicy and deliciously drinkable.


If for any reason, those beers don't take your fancy, we'll have a fridge-full (and brewery full) of other beers for you to choose from to drink in or take away.



September 20th - our next Open Day

We're very pleased to announce it's nearly time for our next brewery taproom and open day.

Head on down for Sunday 20th September 12-7pm.

For the occasion of drinking and enjoying yourselves at our West London brewery, we've got:

4 taps of tasty beer
Limited edition, special & occasional Weird Beard brews
Drink-in or Take-away bottles
Brewery exclusive bottles on sale
Delicious, artisanal Scotch Eggs & Sausage Rolls from Pig&Hay
Tasty Snacks from Karkli
Handcrafted soft drinks by Square Root Soda
Branded T-shirts and glassware on sale
Informal brewery tours
Meet the brewers


Plus our fruit machine will be set up for playing!

We've got to add, that at this open day attendees will get a sneak preview to our beer-food  collaboration with Karkli. We're excitedly looking for feedback on our trials before the final product, so please let us know what you think!


On tap, we plan to have some exceedingly good beer, watch this space for announcements of the line-up. And let's not forget we have some stock of Jim Beam barrel-aged Sadako (imperial stout) 660ml bombers, which we sell exclusively from the brewery.

Don't miss out, see you then!

Recipes Evolve ... Some Evolve More Quickly Than Others ... Your Feedback is Welcome.

We at Weird Beard are striving all the time to make the best beer possible. We think we have some pretty nailed down recipes but we are not ones to rest on our laurels, so make small tweaks all the time to many of our brews.

Some of the major changes we have made include:
Hit the lights lost its crystal malt after about a year and it became in my eyes a much better beer.
Decadence changed 4 or 5 times early on as we were perfecting the recipe.
Saison 14 changed yeasts from wet French saison yeast to dried Belle Saison.

All of these changes have been fairly seamless. Most of the time when we make a change it has only a small impact on the final beer, but we have made a change that has had a big impact on the flavour of a beer and it has divided opinion in the brewery....

We added some Green Bullet into the dryhop schedule for Mariana Trench. This does fit in with our transpacific hopping schedule for Mariana Trench but the resultant beer tastes noticably different to the Mariana that we know. We would be very interested to hear what you guys think about it. Look out for Batch 216 in bottles and kegs and casks around and about for the next few weeks and let us know what you think of this change.






The Duke of Dank



Earlier this year, we had Matt Curtis come pay us a visit at the brewery. He was on a mission to relaunch his blog with a new look and did so with by putting out a very transparent piece on us. He then approached us a short while after with an awesome proposal for London Beer City. Here he's announced the event details. What this entailed from us was a collab brew with The Duke's Head Highgate pub-team and Matt himself, for something that'll work particularly well on cask. Even though we don't put out many firkins, we do think cask is important and doing this collab was a no-brainer decision.

We got the ball rolling on this one pretty fast. We had 3 potential weekends in June to execute this brew and have enough time for the beer to be ready; only 1 of those weekends was actually doable. We really knuckled down in brainstorming, scheduling, recipe development and ordering stock with regards to this new exciting beer. The enthusiasm and all-rounded effort was impressive from the very start. Matt suggested a West-coast inspired Red I.P.A with real resinous hop character. "None of that juiciness" he requested as admittedly, we'd all been having a lot of juicy, fruity I.P.As. We wanted something different and our boy Jonny, having spent a lot of time in the USA, sunk his teeth into the recipe and came up trumps.




So how did this Pacific Northwest Style Red IPA actually come into fruition?! The brewday itself was a Saturday and we were a team of 4: Bryan, Natasha, Matt and the pub GM, Tom Harrison. Between us, we were dab hands at digging out the mash tun, weighing out a hell of a lot of hops, ploughing through the cleaning and having the beer transferred into the FV by lunchtime. You can see Tom rocking a Weird Beard overall in the odd photos we managed to take of each other hard at work before settling down with a tasty beer in hand, courtesy of Curtis.



For this beer to be true to style, we've mashed in speciality malts, like caraRed, for the desired colour and graham cracker sweetness. Tasting this beer, you won't feel disappointed by the delicious malt character and we're pretty stoked we've hit the nail on the head here. We've also armed the brew with a big addition of clean bittering hop, Magnum so you really have the bitterness lingering in the after-taste. As well as Magnum, we've chucked in hearty doses of some of the United States' finest hops: Chinook, Nugget, Columbus and Simcoe to give the beer the dankness we had sought after.


You may enjoy The Duke of Dank, launching on keg and cask at The Duke's Head Highgate from Wednesday 12th August and on keg over the weekend at London Craft Beer Festival.

Dram & Brew Tasting Order Announced

It's not too long away before we host our beer and whisky pairing as part of all the excitement that is London Beer City. Together with Greg from Great Drams, we have expertly matched our all time favourite and special Weird Beard beers with some fantastic whiskies for this event!


The 1.5 hour tasting will kick off at Climpson and Sons Cafe, on Friday 14th August after hours at 7pm. All generous serves of beer and whisky will be offered in custom made, branded glassware and a guided tasting will be delivered by Greg of Great Drams and Natasha of Weird Beard. 

The line-up is as follows:

Welcome beer: 


Weird Beard Little Things That Kill (3.9%)
SIBA gold award-winning session I.P.A



Pairing 1: 



Four Roses Single Barrel 100% Proof (50%)
Former World's Best Non-aged Statement Bourbon
with
Weird Beard Five O'Clock Shadow (7.0%)
All-American I.P.A



Pairing 2: 
Highland Park 2001 Limited Edition (40%)
Travel Exclusive Whisky that should be on everyone's Whisky Bucket List
with
Weird Beard Fade To Black (7.0%)
Occasional brew, Black I.P.A



Pairing 3: 




Wild Turkey 81 (40.5%)
A versatile Bourbon that matches perfectly with this beer
with
Weird Beard Sorachi Face Plant (8.1%)
Limited release, Double I.P.A



Pairing 4: 




Ardbeg 10 (46%)
All-time Classic Islay Single Malt
with
Weird Beard Heaven and Hell (9.2%)
Special brew, Heaven Hill Barrel Aged Double I.P.A


All guests will receive a bottle of Jack Daniel's barrel-aged Sadako to take home with them. We will have more whisky and beer for sale for drinking in as well as beer for take-away afterwards.

More info and to book, visit here.

The Spreadsheet Ninja side of Brewing: Hop Contracts and Ninjaing the Ninja



So onto the 2nd installment of this little blog series. I even have a logo now!

Hop contracts are by and large a very good thing.  

A hop contract is a piece of paper that you sign that commits you to taking a certain volume of hops over the course of the year. There are a number of hop merchants that you can contract with and we frequently use Charles Faram as they tend to have the best range of available hops. It is vital for most breweries to guarantee the supply of interesting American/New Zealand/Australian hops that are so prevalent in current beer. It is also very useful if you contract at least 500kg for the year... At that point Faram's will store the hops for you allowing you to draw down from the contract without having to either store the hops yourself or pay for all the contracted hops upfront. To put this into perspective, our hop contract for this coming year is in excess of £40,000 and is over two tonnes of hops, not something we have the money or space to deal with all at once.

However, the availability of hops is always a hot and stressful topic at the brewery. Andy Parker sums up some of my thoughts nicely in his blog here. We in the UK only get the stuff that is left when the growing US craft scene has had its fill of the best of them.

Back before we started the brewery we knew that some hops would be very difficult to get hold of. Certain hops like Sorachi Ace and Nelson Sauvin are hoovered up in such large quantities by the bigger, more established breweries that they are almost impossible to get hold of unless you have a record of using them. If you are a start up you can't have such a record so you are left feeling that there is no way in. It took a lot of begging and buttering up the guys at Faram’s to get the small amount of Sorachi we did manage to get in the first year. We still can't get hold of any Nelson for love nor money.

Even when you have a contract, this is no guarantee of supply.  Hops are regularly shorted (a situation where the hop merchant gets only a percentage of their order and they pass this shortfall onto the brewers). Even when the hops arrive into the country can be a bit of an issue. Currently we are being told that there are no Simcoe pellets available, even though we have them on contract, that they have not arrived as yet. Not arrived! Hell, they were harvested 9 or 10 months ago... how long does the boat take to get across the Atlantic?

The biggest bugbear this year is the availability of Citra. Citra is our biggest usage hop accounting for about 25% of all the hops us we have on contract and the instrumental hop in Mariana Trench, our best selling beer, and Faceless Spreadsheet Ninja. Unfortunately it is a very popular hop with other breweries so the demand is large. This year for some reason, perhaps there was a lower yield on the citra crop, or one of the big US brewers decided they wanted a lot more but Charles Faram received only 70% of their expected ration. As such, they passed this shortfall onto the brewers so we only got 70% of the citra we were expecting. 

So how does a ninja deal with this kind of bump in the road? 

Be Prepared: 
As you may expect we were sensible enough to order more Citra than we needed, particularly the pellets we use for dry hopping. This got us through the start of the year.

Be Flexible: 
Faceless Spreadsheet Ninja in concept was a single hop Citra but as soon as we were shorted we changed to Magnum for bittering, which also allowed us to keep the price down slightly.

All was going well until we started to ramp up our production of Mariana Trench. We keep running out of Mariana so had to brew it more regularly - twice as often as planned in fact. A quick spreadsheet later and we realised that we had *just*  enough Citra to brew Mariana at this accelerated level for the rest of the year, so where did this leave this Ninja's dearest beer...

Plan B:
We had to make a sacrifice, we had to ninja the Ninja. We had to come up with the “Variations on a Ninja” series.


So what are the Variations on a Ninja series?


First up is MAC Spreadsheet Ninja, almost ready to release, perhaps a play on the Apple Mac where this Ninja first encountered spreadsheets. It uses Mosaic, Amarillo and Centennial and is less tropical than the Faceless version but its crisp hoppiness put a very big smile on my face.



The second variation is Traditional Spreadsheet Ninja, this is lagering away in the fermenter at the moment. It uses the Saaz hop, which you all will of course know is traditional in Czech Pilsners. Even if our brewery water treatment brews more German style pilsners, it is currently tasting great from the fermenter, so expect to see it in a month or so.


We have other ideas, Experimental Spreadsheet Ninja using Experimental 431 as the hop and Faceless Wordprocessor Ninja with Aurora, Bobec, Celia and Dana hops. Whether these get brewed, this ninja can't really say.





Dram and Brew - London Beer City Event


For those that know me, if I am not drinking beer, I am partial to a dram of whisky. So it makes perfect sense that one day I decided to treat myself to both, a little while before everyone jumped on the bandwagon of beer and a 'bump' or beer and boiler makers. Together with my fellow colleagues and beer friends, we would often be at a bar with the two drinks sat side by side, well-matched and we wouldn't have it any other way.


What's to love of this combo then? Well, both beer and whisky are made from malt; one brewed and the other distilled. Since they share a common ingredient, they can quite easily share similar flavour profiles attributed by the malt: bread-y, spicy, biscuit-y, roasted, caramel...etc. If you contemplate the other flavours used to describe beers: fruity, phenolic, floral, grassy and so on, you can appreciate similar descriptors can also be applied and are sensor-ally used for mapping the flavour profile of whisky. What all this boils down to is that there is plenty to work with when it comes to pairing the two. Then there is a whole host of history and tradition which beer and whisky share, but most important is the fact that they are both (awesome) social lubricants.


With this being the basis of why I love the two together, I thought for London Beer City to share the enjoyment of beer and whisky with others. Pairing up with Greg from Great Drams who in 2014 paid us here at Weird Beard a wonderful visit, means together we have an exciting, pulling-all-the-stops-out line up for our event. What we have to offer showcases some all-time favourite, some special and some new Weird Beard beers carefully matched with whiskies. We've got a mix of Bourbon and Scotch Malt whiskies for our selection of beers, which range from IPA to stouts to certainly satisfy all palates. Our set of beer and whisk(e)y pairings have been expertly curated and we trust our guided tasting of these two beverages will be a fantastic sensorial experience. After the 1.5 hour tasting, there will be the opportunity to purchase more whisk(e)y or beer for drinking in as well as sales of beer for take-away.


Details:

Friday 14th August

7.00pm-9.30pm

After hours at Climpson and Sons Cafe

Price includes welcome beer & set of a whisky-beer pairings 

Limited to 30 spaces, so please book early to avoid disappointment

Brook Green Market and Kitchen - Saturday 18th July

This coming Saturday, we'll be at Brook Green Market from 10am-3pm as part of their Craft Beer Fest, which they're hosting this month and invite you to come along! More details can be found here.



Situated in west London, the market is more than a place selling FARMA certified products. Alongside there interactive demonstrations and produce sales there will be bottles of our beer for you to purchase throughout the day for drinking on site or takeaway. That's not what this market is simply offering this weekend though....Team Weird Beard will be there so you can meet brewer and co-founder Gregg. He will also be giving free tutored tastings of our beers: Mariana Trench and Black Perle, the latter having recently won 2 silver awards at the recent SIBA regional beer competitions. On top of these guided tastings, there will be carefully curated and matched, beer and food pairings offered by the market's streetfood vendors. And if that's not enough, we shall be holding beer talks ad hoc by our Cicerone certified beer server, Natasha, so that you can really get to know a bit more about beer.

We're expecting the market to be a great and innovative way for both the west London food and craft beer scene to come together and you'll surely walk away knowing more about us, beer, our products and our industry.

Hope to see you there!


A reluctant farewell.

This wasn't really the subject I wanted my first blog to be about but after just four short months I will be leaving Weird Beard.

My Dad was diagnosed with cancer last year and after multiple surgeries and treatment it's still on the move. At this point I'm faced with the very difficult but also very simple decision to leave London to be with my family.


Bryan and Gregg have been very supportive, including letting me use the blog to announce this news. My other request was to let you all know about my job here as lead brewer and what's been going on since I arrived.

Starting in the brewhouse we've made adjustments to yeast and fermentation to get the beers tasting cleaner. Upgrade works have taken place on the mash tun and we've installed a new CLT and HLT to help make double brew days run quicker and smoother.

Production has increased as we've found more ways to improve efficiency. Regular QC during the conditioning stage has helped us to get the beer into your hands tasting the best it possibly can.

Packaging was pretty military but we've managed to push it a bit more, we're on the cusp of automation which is very exciting. This has all led to Gregg and Natasha having to sell a lot more beer (although you guys seem to have obliged!)

Work has just been completed on our cold room for packaged beer and the automated labelling machine is running like never before (thanks to some great technical minds in our team).


Natasha is working hard to make sure we appear at as many of the best beer events at home and abroad, she also posts some nice informative stuff on social media to keep you all up to date with the length of Bryan's beard, how many cups of tea I've drank and some behind the scenes brewing shenanigans. Not to mention our more regularly occurring open days, trust me when I say she's definitely made it worth the trip out west to see us!

We've put together a production schedule to make sure we meet the demands of our customers, honing the core range and making sure we don't run out of Sorachi Ace or Citra...

I'm proud of the work we've done over the last couple of months, I'm genuinely working on some of the best beers I've ever brewed at the moment. The next batch of Little Things That Kill is my baby (we offer hop choices around the staff for each batch). I chose Simcoe, Cascade and Willamette. It's in the conditioning room under lock and key as Bryan can't seem to stop drinking it, that's a fair compliment. Our 200th brew is also close to being unleashed, a triple IPA loaded with Sorachi, Summit and Apollo hops!

What I'm trying to get at is there's a really great job just about to open up and I'm urging somebody to take it. The four months I've been here have been a transitional period for Bryan and Gregg as they see their home-brewing days slip further into the distance. The team they've got around them are helping them to cement their place on the map as one of London's most exciting breweries, producing more beer every week it seems.

I had plans for the coming months, most notably moving to force carbonation in keg and introducing wet yeast. We've also talked about doing a Berliner Weisse and Gregg's wild yeast barrels are producing some truly exciting results (watch that space).

If you're an experienced brewer with a lot of ideas and ambition you'll do well to take on this role. I'm sad to leave it but feel lucky to have been a part of it at this most exciting of times.


I'm going to get settled in with the family but I'm sure it won't be long before I'm doing something in beer. Not quite the right time to start a brewery but I do have some interesting ideas forming. If you've got the patience keep up to date with me on Twitter ;) and I'll see some of you over the coming months as I try to keep myself up to date with the beer scene.

I'll sign off by saying a big thank you to Bryan, Gregg and everyone at Weird Beard for supporting me and I'll miss you guys a lot!

Cheers,

Jonny.