March 2010

As well as making it and running around getting beer to thirsty customers, my family is suffering it’s annual dose of poor health. Blogging has been light and will probably be so for a few more days. In any case having witnessed the Augean Stables of the Dispatches episode earlier in the week I’m too sick of politicians to write much about them. There are many other more hardened bloggers who can do it better than I.

In the meanwhile, it’s budget day again. Undoubtedly beer duty will go up again (apparently it’s already factored in to government cash projections). I’ll listen but mostly to have a giggle at the Badger of Doom’s fantasy future GDP growth guess.

In the meanwhile, for those of a shaving persuasion – here’s a money saving tip that deserves to be wider known. I’ve been using the same triple bladed cartridge for a record (for me) 3 months at this point although I do actually strop it every day.

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…a busy week with much going on at the brewery and also the world at large. I’ve just got the Hoptoken artwork and samples are being tasted today. With luck there will be more time for commentary next week.

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…a few yards away from the ancient church of St Mary de Haura, East St, Shoreham.
Hope to see you there.

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I’d intended to go to today’s trade session at the Sussex Beer Festival which I missed last year because of the death of my father in-law. I was planning to park up in Shoreham and take the train in to Hove. On my return I was getting a lift from the wife if I’d given in to the temptation of that second pint.

Work completed. Family permission obtained. Handbrake applied and car locked up when:

…Bingly Bong. My mobile phone which now has a bell ringing theme (instead of a quacking duck) goes off.

Voice: ‘Hello, this is Steyning Primary School. Your boy has developed some itchy spots that are bleeding. He’s sitting with me here now. I’ll just put him on’

Me: ‘Hello ?’

Very small and unhappy voice: ‘Daddy can you come and get me ?’

The Dr. has prescribed a bottle of foul tasting jollop and the boy is off school temporarily. As for me – I hope to be at next year’s trade session instead. Third time lucky.

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On the 24th of March the Badger of Doom will stand up on his hind legs in the Commons and deliver a ‘vote for us’ budget.

It will be interesting to watch. There is an acknowledged deficit of around £178 billion. In fact it’s much higher than that once the Enron style PFI and pension liabilities are taken into account. On the other hand if he does raise tax, for example VAT to around 22% it will impact Labour’s chances in the election. If he cuts spending he’ll get the same reaction from the 30% of state funded individuals who plan to vote Lab.

The most likely outcome ? Duty on all forms of alcohol except Whiskey will go up. It’s a racing certainty.

The real budget will happen shortly after the election.

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Spotted this on the way home from delivering beer to the Sussex Beer Festival this evening. We’ve got Black William, Merry Andrew, Velocity, and Ropetackle there.

Guess it proves the pen(cil) really is mightier than the sword.

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We’ve been planning a new beer for some time, but the snow at the beginning of January – followed by the requirement to rapidly replace some of our inventory – have delayed things until last week. This last Thursday, I fnally got our act together and the first batch of Hoptoken, or possibly Hop Token, is now fermenting. It’s filled the brewery with the scent of orange blossom.

Most of our beers get most of their flavours from the malt and to a lesser extent, the yeast that we use. It’s not that hops are an afterthought, but they’ve played a less important part in my recipes. This is partly down to personal taste and partly down to a historical accident.

The taste aspect down to the peripatetic nature of my career which saw me spending 5 years in Munich in my younger days, and developing a taste for Munich’s local brew – Hefeweisen Wiessbier. This is a cloudy wheatbeer notable for it’s low hopping rate. You’d hardly know that it was hopped at all. My taste in beer has been skewed towards the lower end of the bitterness scale ever since, although since returning to the UK 5 years ago I’ve gradually come to enjoy bitterer brews and even the occasional IPA.

The historical accident was that we started the brewery in the middle of a hop shortage. In fact for the first 6 months it looked like we would be making beers without hops at all. I pretty much had to beg for our first few kilos and I still get a little frisson fear whenever I talk to a hop merchant (suppose they’ve run out ?). So the first recipes I put together had relatively small amounts of hops. They also tended to use continental hops since these were the only ones I could get hold of.

Hoptoken is different. We’ve been long aware of the gap in our lineup, and the discussion on whether or not to do an IPA or something similar has been going on for months. I asked around a number of our customers and in the end we’ve settled on around 4%, blondish, and about 40 IBUs (about grapefruit levels of bitterness). This is not too extreme but it’s certainly noticeable as it will activate the bitterness sensors at the back of your throat and even in the roof of your mouth.

We had some trouble deciding what to call it. In fact, virtually every hop related name and pun has already been taken and there’s no doubt that the name we’ve finally come up with: Hoptoken, is an obscure bit of history. These were tokens given to hop pickers in Sussex and Kent when the pickers took a measured amount of hops up to the oast houses. At the end of the day (or week) the hop tokens could be exchanged for real currency and so they were marked sixpence, 1 shilling and so on, as well as the name of the hop garden. There are people out there who collect them (inevitably) and we are looking at getting something like a hop token made up for us.

So what hops are we using ? This first example revolves around Amarillo hop from North America, but it looks as if the basic recipe will work with other varieties as well. We intend to produce a few variations such as Spalter and Willamette. Obviously these will taste different so it will be an opportunity to see what impact a particular variety of hop will have on a brew.

Hoptoken Amarillo is fermenting nicely and I expect it will be available casked and bottled within the next few weeks.

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This Saturday between 9am and 1pm. Hope to see you there.

News on our new beer(s) later on today I hope.

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Home this evening to discover the Health and Safety Executive have sent me a piece of knotted string ! Apparently I can order up to five more pieces of knotted string. For free. If you ignore the cost of what must be around a few quid per knot extorted from taxpayers once postage and labour (yes, it appears to be hand knotted) are taken into account.

This is to ‘help me keep the promise’ although the actual promise is not specified. How about this. I promise to send the HSE a letter under the FOI demanding they reveal how much money has been wasted on this pointless exercise. I might further promise to try an get the brains behind this particular ‘idea’ named and held up as a laughing stock throughout England.

It would seem that no one in the public sector seems to have grasped the situation. We are collectively – skint. Skint means that daft campaigns showering bits of knotted string on an unsuspecting population are more than risible, they are actively unwelcome.

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