January 2008

I attended the excellent Selden Arms Beer Festival over the weekend and I was once again astonished at the range of flavours available in beer. They carry St Bernardus Abt 12 from the St Bernardus Brouwerij in Belgium. Just for a few seconds I detected a distinctly floral note – Parma Violets – before the other malty flavours hit me. I never much cared for these sweets as a kid and I can’t have tasted one for nearly 40 years, but the clarity of the memories it triggered was a shock. Fortunately the 10.5% abv removed any further clarity from my mind almost at once. I will be looking out for this one again.

Earlier in the week I’d tried an aged beer with a distinctly cidery or fruit juice note, and later on I encountered a Fraoch Heather Ale from Williams Brothers. This had a very pleasant herb and ginger flavour, which it picks up from the malt, heather and sweet gale used in its preparation. Not a piece of ginger in sight.

I’d very much like to do something in a Trappist style. I wonder if there’s a market in the UK ?

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These arrived late last week:

A pump clip and bottle design

and a coaster

They look absolutely gorgeous IMHO. I’m really pleased with them

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There has been considerable commentry on the recent conviction of these three for the murder of Gary Newlove. He was kicked to death by a gang ‘fueled by cheap alcohol’. This has been linked to the recent stories of UK supermarkets selling lager at below cost. The supermarkets now face government regulation. Quite a lot of brewers feel that selling alcohol below costs should be stopped, and this is CAMRAs stance as well.

I worry about this because inviting further government regulation of the brewing industry is increasing a red tape burdon that is already considerable. We are just getting started and I’ve already had dealings with Companies House, HMRC corporation tax, HMRC VAT, HMCR Excise, our environmental health officer, and our local planning authority. That’s six groups of people and we haven’t managed a single firkin yet, there’s at least two more in the future, the licensing authority, and the trademark people.

Of course, complaining about additional regulation would be pretty small minded if it really did prevent the situation that Gary Newlove found himself in. But there are only seem to be only three sets of changes that might be contemplated. Raise the drinking age to 21 like the US (two of the three convicted were under 18), preventing drinking in public, or preventing alcohol being sold below cost in supermarkets.

Taking this one at a time, I can’t see changing the drinking age having much of an impact, it’s currently set at 18 so if they were drinking at ages 16 and 17 they were breaking the law already.

If the government legislates against drinking in public its going to impact people spilling out of pubs on a summers evening – drinks in hand, picnics, possibly sporting events and places like Glyndbourne. I suppose it depends on how you define public. It’s certainly going to criminalize a great deal of harmless behaviour, and to no great end. What you really need to target is being drunk in public. Drunk and disorderly is already against the law.

Finally there is the matter of selling alcohol below cost – if the regulation badly worded it will prevent me giving out free samples so that’s one potential problem for me (and my many happy customers). Looking at the products that are actually sold this way, they typically sit at around 3% abv, and they do not strike me as costing a great deal to produce. We don’t really know what’s in them because ingredients don’t have to be listed on beer. But its mostly water and something that can be fermented into alcohol along with some colour and flavour. We can get a hint of how much it might cost because Carling at 4.1 abv. costs around 64p per pint in a supermarket. Presumably this is sold at a profit however small, so a similar 3% product would be a bit cheaper, I speculate that it might be around 60p per pint once everything is taken into account. A pack of 12 will cost me £7.20. This is not really going to prevent anyone getting quite drunk, quite cheaply if they want to.

In other words, two possible official responses wouldn’t change the legal situation and a third is ineffective.

In fact, its the underage drinking and the drunk and disorderly behaviour that I really wonder about. One of the three was already on bail for another offense and apparently there was a history of anti-social behaviour in the area.

Call me naive, but where were the police ?

Where were their parents ?

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I had an email today asking me if we were nearly ready to start commercially. We’ve certainly moved a lot closer to this goal, although realistically using our own plant is still some time off. While we wait for the processes of planning applications, building, and commissioning, to move forward we are borrowing someone else’s brewery to get started. I’m hoping that our first brew day will be sometime in February and the first casks and bottles will be available in March.

It’s surprising how much incidental equipment and steps getting to this stage needs, over and above the things we do already as a matter of course. I sat down with Dicky and we wrote out the things we either had to do, or arrange for someone else to do, or buy. It came to 30 items. We’ve managed 6 so far but I have high hopes of next week.

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…so we are practicing wheat beers. Lightly hopped, slightly cloudy, well carbonated, and spiced. They are refreshing summer beers. The recipes typically include 50% raw wheat, using excess enzymes from the malt to convert starch to sugars. They can be a bit tricky to handle, one wrong step and you have 800 litres of porridge instead of a mash you can make beer from.

The question is of course, what spices ? Curaco and coriander is the mix used in Hoegaarden but its by no means the only combination allowed in the style. I’ve tried one with ginger, and at least one brewer appears to use Sunny Delight. Anyway, we are in a the position to play around with it a little. I’d really like to make a product that goes well with a well made curry.

So what spices ? lime and liquorice ? cinnamon and nutmeg ? ginger and scary ?

Suggestions to the usual address please.

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I’ve been aware some some time that there was a potential problem with hops in 2008, but it became clear in early December that the problem was actually quite severe. The rumour was that the UK hop factors (that is, people who sell hops) were closed for new business and even the biggest breweries were having trouble getting all the hops they needed. It’s even hit the mainstream media with a story appearing in the Economist.

There are several reasons for the hop shortage, late in 2006 a fire swept through a major American hop warehouse destroying an estimated 4% of that year’s harvest in the US. 2007 saw poor harvests throughout Europe particularly in the UK. This is on top of a generally low price for hops which has forced farmers to grub up fields and turn to more profitable crops. This seems to have resulted in the perfect storm for hops. Some varieties are completely unavailable, others are simply impossible to get at any price – and the prices have been rising, between 3 and 10 times depending on who you talk to.

Now there’s not much point in building a new brewery if you can’t get hold of a basic ingredient and quite a lot of my time in the last month has been devoted to trying to obtain enough hops to tide us over until the 2008 harvest in September. We had some good luck with one of the English hop factors who will certainly be our favoured supplier on English hops in the future. Although things were clearly very difficult for them we were able to obtain around about a quarter of our requirement. Other UK factors simply wouldn’t give us the time of day and as a result we will not be doing business with them in the future.

At this point things were looking fairly bleak and I seriously investigated the possibility of planting a hop garden. It’s quite an investment to make albeit not impossible, but this particular route out of trouble ran aground on two basic points. It takes 2 to 3 years for a hop garden to become productive, and although small amounts of hops can be dried in an oven or attic – you need specialised equipment to handle an acre’s worth. That is, you need an oast house. Not much point in trying to borrow one either, they only get used for a few days at a time shortly after the harvest. But everyone harvests with a day or so of each other. Needless to say, building an oast house is rather out of our reach financially.

I tried talking to some UK hop farmers directly, but there are very few of them that I was able to find and the one or two I did talk to were discouraging. They sell only to hop factors. In the end I though of contacting some continental hop farms – and thanks to our friend John Simpson we were able to talk to some farmers in Belgium. I separately made contact with some suppliers in Germany through my old friends in Munich (I lived there for 5 very happy years in the 80’s). Between us we’ve managed to buy enough hops to keep us going until the next harvest.

I paid for the last batch earlier this week. It turns out that the bank will only do a european cash transfer if we allow them to reveal the facts to parties outside the EU! So I guess the CIA knows I’ve been buying hops from Gemany now.

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