Of Guards and Fathers

It was 7.30am when my plane landed at Heathrow, the beginning of my 9 days back in the United Kingdom. Given the fact there was only an hour or so between that flight and the earliest flight to Inverness, I decided not to do a connection on the one ticket, and instead just get a separate ticket for the evening flight to Inverness. Thus I had the best part of half a day between flights, and as I mentioned in my last post, I decided to go to eschew the Tube into London proper, and get the bus to Windsor.

I had been to Windsor all of once previously, but I may have been about 12 years shy of being able to drink legally, and as such I don't remember much about that visit. There is though a family legend/inside joke that at some point whilst wandering near the castle, I asked my parents why it wasn't finished yet given the scaffolding that surrounded many of the buildings. I was then somewhat keen to walk by the castle to check up on progress in the intervening 40 odd years - there was still scaffolding to be seen, still not finished then I guess. It was getting pretty bloody warm by this point of the day, even though it was only 9.30 by now, so I took myself off along the river to get to my first planned stop of my tour of the town's hostelries.

It felt great to really stretch my legs after planes and buses, and also getting caught behind bimbling tourists (yes, I know) on the streets of Windsor in the early, comparatively, morning. Eventually I had to abandon the delights of a Thames stroll to amble my merry way through the Alexandra Gardens, through some railway arches and on to the taproom location of the Windsor & Eton Brewery.

Given that it was just a couple of minutes past opening time, I was the only person in the place, already with half a mind as to what my first beer of the trip was going to be, indeed my first beer in the UK since pre-COVID days, it had been that long. Alas the original plan went out the window as there was a problem with the Guardsman best bitter from the beer engine, so I went for Father Thames, a strong bitter - I am reticent to use the term "ESB" for strong bitters in the UK out of respect for the Fullers branding.

I had it in mind that as much as possible I would be drinking real ale while back in Blighty, and Father Thames set a pretty high bar, though I wasn't taking notes. According to the Windsor & Eton website this is actually a "winter bitter" brewed with local malt and Admiral hops. According to me, it was freaking delish, goodness me I love the marmalade thing that you get from Admiral, it is just a bit punchier than East Kent Goldings in this regard. The scrape of bitterness in the finish was enough to leaving me wanting more, and that first pint may have vanished in about four mouthfuls. Four mouthfuls of glorious real ale, all of those classic toffee sweet malt flavours, conditioned perfectly and at cellar temperature, the proper temperature if you are at all confused. If my fellow Brits cannot recognise that real ale is indeed intangible cultural heritage then they are lost beyond measure. So I had another while the magnificent bar staff sorted out Guardsman.

Once ready to be on parade, a pint was duly ordered, and being an army brat, I kind of geeked out on the pump clip, most likely for details a lot of folks would miss. For example, the central guard is a member of the Scots Guards, how can I tell? The tunic has buttons in sets of three, and the bearskin doesn't have a plume. Likewise the buttons and plumes are correct for the regiments being depicted, it's little things like this that I notice, yes I am weird. Fun fact, my great uncle was a guardsman during World War 2, Coldstream if I recall correctly, back when regiments in the British Army had their own mechanical and electrical engineers. In the aftermath of the war, the plan to create the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, aka REME, was concluded, and my great uncle was transferred over to the new regiment. Anyway, the beer looked like this...

Another classic southern English bitter, this time of the best variety, and perhaps more "classic" than Father Thames, as it is hopped with Fuggles, Styrian Goldings, as well as Pilgrim. I love that this is a properly bitter, bitter beer, clocking in with 40 IBUs, about the same as my own house best bitter, and funnily enough the same ABV of 4.2%. There is something about the aroma of Fuggles, and Styrian Goldings does it too for obvious reasons though it is less noticeable, that always reminds me of pipe tobacco. That note was present, floating around with the usual earthy suspects that Fuggles brings to the table. Something about the word "earthy" makes me think of hearty peasants bringing in the hay, and maybe there is a whiff of grass and summer in the mix too. Maybe I was getting carried away, but I seriously started entertaining the idea of re-formulating my house bitter to have a darker variant in the roster...what heresy was Windsor making me entertain?

I spent a good few hours in the Windsor & Eton taproom before heading out into the wilds of Windsor to hunt down a few more of the pubs that I had put on my list to visit before I had to get the bus back to Heathrow and a plane to the Highlands. In those few hours I tried halves of some of their other beers, including Knight of the Garter, a 3.8% golden ale that was very much like a session American Pale Ale, bursting with the pine and citrus character of Amarillo, and Eton Boatman, a slightly stronger golden ale, that has more of a Southern Hemisphere hop character. Eventually though, head out I had to, there were other pubs to see, other breweries beers to try, and that will have to wait until another post.

A Little Help Goes A Long Way

As I mentioned in a previous post, I am heading to the UK in a few weeks, mainly for work, but with a little personal time chucked in as well. While I own the fact that I am a terrible beer tourist, I really don't plan my trips around breweries or beer cultures I want to visit - rather I go places and just see what is around. A key part of my planning process then, and maybe I a sad bandit for this, is to use Google Maps to find places in the locations that I will be, and then check out their websites to see if it is likely to be the kind of place I want to visit.

It is almost exactly 15 years that I wrote a post called "Do Pubs Help Themselves?" in which I lamented the standard of many a boozer website. My biggest beef was that many pub websites go to great lengths to tell you about their wine list, their cocktail list, their food options, but almost nothing about what beers are actually on draft, which is just as true for a tied house as it would be for a free house. So you would like to think that in our increasingly online world, pubs would have upped their game then, right?

Errr.....wrong. Sadly.

Maybe it is a product of the parts of the UK that I will be visiting, the north of Scotland, and London, with a minor detour to Windsor when I first arrive. Let's start with the positives though, the Windsor & Eton Brewery website is really useful, and as a result of reading that, and watching the Tweedy Pubs video on Windsor and Eton, I made the decision to spend my several hours between flights in and out of Heathrow by going west instead of east. I really like that they have their draft list in the taproom readily available, and so they will definitely be on the list of places to hit. Admittedly I'll probably go to their tied house, The George, as well, but they don't keep an up to date list of beers on their own website.

Also on the good side is the site for The Two Brewers, again for actually having a beer list on their website, but extra kudos for having the price of a pint on the list as well. I imagine I will be popping in for a pint of London Pride at some point in my day then.

My biggest challenge though, and I am sure there are reasons for this, but with so many tied houses in the English part of my trip, it does get really frustrating when there is a shared platform with generic information, and almost universally no list of what is on cask in a given pub - this goes for chains like Wetherspoons as well. Yes, the many Fullers pubs in the city have elegant, beautifully designed websites, but again I can't find out which beers of the Fullers Brewery range are available, making it pot luck to stumble across less regularly seen beers (at least from what I have been told) such as London Porter. I don't want to single out Fullers, as I have seen the same with Shepherd Neame, Greene King, and Nicholsons, though several Young's pubs tend to have at least a list, and occasionally pricing as well.

In the spirit of sharing around the opprobrium, places in Inverness and further north don't fare much better when it comes to an absence of useful information for the drinkers among us.

So, in the fifteen years since I first broached this issue, we seem to have gone from generally crap to being something of a curate's egg, which is progress I guess. Surely I am not alone in wanting to get a sense of what is on tap before I visit a boozer, whether this side or that side of the Pond?

Some Closing Thoughts

On Friday afternoon, with work concerns disappearing into the rear view mirror, and a little time to go until I had to pick up the twins from school, I was having a very fine pint of lager (but which one?? It was Vested Interest, a Franconian-style kellerbier) at the bar in the Selvedge Brewing taproom. As I reveled in the magnificence of that beer, which is a stunner in an already superb lineup, I heard news that instantly yucked my yum.

Virginia's only craft malting company, my good friends Murphy & Rude, are closing their doors at the end of May.

To be honest, I don't know the ins and outs of why Jeff has decided to shut up shop, so I am not going to speculate on that. From what Murphy & Rude have told customers though, they were looking to scale and it became clear that the challenges of scaling made it unfeasible. What I do want talk about though is the ramifications of their coming demise.

From a very personal, and entirely self-centred, perspective, I am bummed that I am going to have to re-formulate all my homebrew recipes. For several years now, I have committed myself to brewing as much as possible with only their malt. My reasons are pretty simple, they are local, they malted, for the most part, Virginia grown grain, oh and their malt made my beer a lot better. While my best bitter was perfectly good with Maris Otter or Golden Promise, when I switched to using Murphy & Rude English Pale malt, the ante was upped quite significantly. Fresh malt makes a massive difference in terms of flavour. I also have recipes that I have designed specifically for Jeff's malt, my Haus Lagerbier is built on his Virginia Pils malt, which uses the Violetta strain of barley, as has the most recent versions of LimeLight, my lime witbier. As such, I will have to drop some dollars on stocking up on my preferred malts, and some containers to keep rodenty bastards at bay, so I can carry on brewing my favourite recipes for as long as possible.

Taking a broader perspective, there are several local breweries who are now in a similar position, though obviously with far more at stake as they make their living from Murphy & Rude malt. If I remember rightly there were about 12 breweries in Virginia that only used Jeff's malt, but something like 50 outfits using it at some level, including in some wonderful award winning beers. All of these will have to be re-factored for different grains, and in some cases find new suppliers, set-up accounts, contracts, etc, etc.

Taking it slight broader yet, there are farmers with grain in the ground right now who will have to find a new customer for their harvests. Most of those farmers, as I mentioned earlier are in Virginia, with some in Maryland and Pennsylvania, according to the M&R website. Hopefully the malting companies in those states will be able to pick up those harvests.

I don't think it is overstating the case to say that the loss of Murphy & Rude is a tragedy for the craft brewing and allied industries in Virginia. As Josh Chapman commented in my article about Murphy & Rude in Pellicle:

"When you close the distance between supplier and producer, things can only get better".

With that distance inevitably widening again, we are all the poorer for it.

Note: all the pictures here are beers I made exclusively with Murphy & Rude malt.

Making Bolt

I am going to the UK in about five weeks time, mostly for work, but also taking the opportunity of being over there to go an visit my parents in the north of Scotland - basically get to Inverness and keep going north, yeah, that north. 

The primary purpose for the trip is a work conference in London though. I haven't been to London in absolutely ages, I think the last time I was there was on one of my trips home to Scotland from Prague, when I would take the bus from Czechia to London and from thence up to Glasgow, and on to the Isle of Skye for the ferry to Uist. I honestly have no idea when I last spent a few days in London, it might be way back in the dim and distant past when we would go and visit my nan when my little brother and I were proper nippers - I have a core memory of watching "It's A Knockout" safely tucked up in her sofa bed.

In amongst all my looking at pubs in and around Westminster, I'll be staying just round the corner from the Abbey, I have been keeping an eye out for places that stock Timothy Taylor Boltmaker. Now, I realise that it is available in bottles, and I intend to get a couple to bring back to Virginia with me, but you really can't beat traditional British beers as Odin intended, from a beer engine, preferably with a sparkler attached...

But why Boltmaker specifically? Well, it all began when I watched a video from a YouTube channel called The Barnyard Brewhouse where he brewed a recipe inspired by Boltmaker. Every time I have got back to the UK in the last 20ish years, getting some Timothy Taylor Landlord has been high on my list of priorities, but I have overlooked their other beers, to my shame I am sure. Also, though, I have brewed a few times with Wyeast 1469 West Yorkshire yeast, which is reputed to be the Timothy Taylor strain, but I've never really been happy with any of the beers I have either brewed or drunk over here using that strain.

Imagine then my interest being piqued when The Craft Beer Channel, as part of their series on cask ale, went to Timothy Taylor and the head brewer, whilst showing them around said something to the effect that their yeast has evolved to need invert sugar to really get going. Hmmmm, I may have rewound that part of the video to make sure I had heard correctly. Indeed I had, they add about 5-7% of sugar to the wort, with this nugget in mind, and the very helpful ingredient list on the Timothy Taylor website, I set to coming up with a localised version of Boltmaker, using as I always do now, Murphy & Rude malt, and this is what I will be brewing in a couple of weeks:

• 69% English Pale
• 7% Biscuit
• 7% Crystal 40
• 7% Munich 9
• 5% Brown
• 5% Invert Sugar 1
• 17.5 IBUs of Fuggles at 60 minutes
• 9.5 IBUs of East Kent Goldings at 15 minutes
• 4.5 IBUs of Styrian Goldings at 5 minutes

For the invert sugar, I will use the very handy directions from Ron's book "A Homebrewer's Guide to Vintage Beer".

If everything goes to plan, when I get back from the UK, I will have a 3.9% abv Yorkshire style bitter on my kegerator, and hopefully a mini-keg cask or two in the cellar, with which to do a taste comparison with the bottles, and my memories of cask Boltmaker in London, which should still be fresh.

Aged Porter and Mild

In 2017 I designed and brewed a beer with Three Notch'd Brewing in Charlottesville, Blackwall London Porter. The recipe for Blackwall was based on copious amounts of research into porter brewing in the middle of the 19th century, and named for the docks in London which were so central to the history of the British Empire.

 

Featuring about 30% brown malt, the beer was only brewed a couple of times, but at the last brewing in 2018, I made sure to get myself a growler's worth for a little project. Beer hacking, to use Evan Rail's term. As well as my growler of Blackwall, I bought a bottle of Orval, which I promptly drank and pitched the dregs, containing all that brettanomyces goodness, into the growler, and soon enough the gasket on the swing top was thoroughly deformed as the additional CO2 created by our friend brett was expelled.

Yesterday, after nearly 8 years of the growler sitting on the shelf in my beer room, I took the opportunity of the head brewer from Selvedge helping me transport my new-to-me kegerator, to finally broach the growler.

I had two major concerns when I unclipped the lid...a geysir of foam, or being as lifeless as the grave. Thankfully neither happened and as you can see from the picture, there was carbonation in the beer, but not to excess, though the glass I poured for Josh did overflow, but that was more user error on my part than the beer itself.

So how did it turn out? Well, while it is true that I didn't take any notes, Josh and I had a pretty wide ranging conversation around what we were experiencing. In terms of the aroma, that classic barnyard character was present, not overwhelmingly so, however. Maybe it is because I grew up in a very rural area, but I have always found that character to be somewhat comforting. I was most relieved though there was no real vinegar aroma, and it was still identifiably a porter I was shuffling my nose about.

Tastewise I was getting some interesting nuttiness, I imagine from the brown malt - fun fact, when we first brewed the beer, the brewers at Three Notch'd were a little reticent about using 30% brown malt in the grist. I am glad I stuck to my guns on that one. Also in there was that thing which is often described as "vinous", which in this case reminded me of sour cherries, but lingering in the background was an umami character that I absolutely love in dark beers, just a merest wisp of soy sauce, but good quality soy sauce rather than industrially produced.

Clearly the presence of the brettanomyces had dried the beer out a little more than it had already been, but it wasn't like sucking lemons, just there was a tartness that I enjoyed. Nearly 8 years sitting around had meant that the hops were barely perceptible as anything more than bitterness in the finish. Overall I was really happy with how it turned out, and I enjoyed a couple of glasses, even persuading Mrs V to try a little as well.

I can't remember the exact quote, but I do recall seeing that well aged porters were described as being "racy and mellow", an epithet that now makes sense to me after this experiment. It's just kind of a shame that to repeat will mean brewing Blackwall at home again sometime...oh darn.

From one extreme, we went to the other, by broaching my final mini-keg "cask" of dark mild that I brewed earlier this year, and boy was that just flat out awesome. I think I need to get myself another couple of mini-kegs so that my mild brews can all be cask rather than in the keg. This one, Crystal Conjunction, was fine on keg, but with natural carbonation it absolutely shone. It's good to know that you can make very solid beer at home...

Homebrew Blitzed

I used to enter homebrew competitions far more regularly, then kids happened and brewing took a bit of a back seat for a few years. Eventually though, things eased up and brewing become a more regular part of life, getting a proper kegerator definitely helped, as did getting a chest freezer for cold fermentation and then lagering. For the last couple of years I have brewed, on average, once every three weeks - well, the kegerator won't feed itself after all, and getting beer on tap in my own kitchen is freaking awesome.

Admittedly I dipped a toe back into competition world last summer when I submitted a couple of brews to the Dominion Cup, but not knowing that feedback is now online rather than sent in the mail, I have no idea how they fared, other than not getting any gongs. To be honest, I didn't actually know that until Sunday morning when a friend told me that feedback was through the app for Virginia Beer Blitz, which was on Saturday.

I entered three beers in this year's competition, my tmavé, house best bitter, and a dark mild that I brewed back in January to use up some odds and ends of malt I had acquired. I didn't have any expectations of medals, my system is deliberately as basic as humanly possible, and given the advances in homebrew kit and processes in the years since I last regularly entered competitions it is almost like going head to head with near professional brewers. Seriously, some of the gear that you see folks brewing with on Instagram or on YouTube is insane, so really my goal in entering is simply to get decent feedback and for my beers to score at least 30 points from the available 50, which is defined as being "very good, generally within style parameters, some minor flaws".

So how did it go...let's start with the lowest scoring beer, which was my tmavé.

For reference, I wrote about the brewing of this beer, which I call Černý Lev, at the end of last year, even though I didn't brew it until January. I am kind of sad that the keg is almost finished as it has been a thoroughly decent drop, garnering a 30/50 at Virginia Beer Blitz, with both judges noting some oxidation. I am pretty sure that the oxidation character came about because I thought I needed to transfer from its original lagering keg into a new one as I thought there was a CO2 leak in the keg -  it turned out that the gas connector itself was the problem. Ah well, still, not a bad result.

Next up with a score of 31 out of 50 was my house best bitter, which doesn't really have a name, but is based on the beer I designed for Three Notch'd that was known as Session/Bitter 42, originally the former, then the latter.

I will be bluntly honest, I was expecting this one to get panned, simply because I do not use crystal malt in my bitters at all, as in never, ever. I just don't like the caramel sweetness that comes along with crystal malts, and so the only specialty malt in this is Biscuit malt. Unfortunately in the US there is not just a paucity of bitters, whether ordinary, best, or extra special, but of the ones that make it here they are invariably of the brown, caramelly type, and so folks can get confused by something without those flavour notes. I have also pretty much switched to using Endeavour hops, which are a modern English variety, but again expectation of "English" hops here means East Kent Goldings. One judge noted that the beers would benefit from "boosting the caramel", but without caramel malt in the grist, I am not sure what I would be boosting. Both judges did note a slight astringency, which I also picked up when I first tapped it, so I am going to start looking more closely at my well water profile and its mineral content, as well as maybe dropping the mash temperature a touch.

On then to the beer that scored the best, with 32 out of 50 it was a one off dark mild that would be impossible to recreate given the very odd weights of specialty malts, but which, I think, looked gorgeous poured from the kegerator...

There is a large amount of irony, given what I just said about crystal malt, in the fact that this used 5 types of crystal malt, 15, 40, 60, 120, and 260, as well as dose of chocolate wheat. Hence I named this Crystal Conjunction. It's kind if hilarious then that one judge commented that the "absence of balancing caramels and light roast/chocolate impact the overall character". Literally all the specialty malts were crystal or chocolate malts. Obviously mild is not something that is wildly common, heck it might as well as be an endangered species over here, but I have come across a concept many times in the US that a mild is basically an uber session stout - which is simply not true, the range of possibility within mild makes it a beer you can take in so many directions, as borne out by the BJCP guidelines themselves.

As I said, I didn't get any awards for my beer, but it's fun to get the feedback and think about how I could improve my processes, even though I am pretty much guaranteed not to go splurging money on the latest gizmo. My primary reason for making beer is to have something on tap in my kitchen that I enjoy, and that my friends enjoy when they come round, that I have pointers to improve that experience is a good thing then.

Get Your Goat

Goodness me, it has been a while.

This last weekend, Mrs V was up in Washington DC for the annual American Montessori Society conference, she being a Montessori teacher and all that. Thus it was that it was just me and the twins from Thursday night through until Sunday afternoon when she got home.

What to do though with a pair of 8 year old boys with sufficient energy to power a small city, especially on Saturday, as they had school on Friday. Thankfully I got a text during the week from a Welsh friend asking if we fancied taking our combined brood of children for a hike or some kind of adventure, followed by chilling out at a brewery given that the weather was supposed to be glorious. Spoiler alert, it was.

We settled on visiting Luray Caverns, a karst system in the Shenandoah Valley, not too far from Harrisonburg, which is one of the most beautiful cave systems we have ever visited. This was the second time the twins and I had been, but the first for our friends.

Having wandered through the caves, taken in the car and caravan museum, which, thrillingly for this nerd, includes a Morgan three wheeler from the 1920s (I think), and then the Shenandoah Valley Heritage museum, with old houses and interesting displays on the German immigrant communities in the valley, it was time to hit a brewery for some lunch. Said brewery was an hour's drive, through some lovely countryside, having eschewed the hell of I-81, to get to Weyer's Cave and Alpine Goat Brewing.

I had been to Alpine Goat just the once before, when out and about in the Valley promoting my book, "Virginia Cider: A Scrumptious History", and I had a grand time. The owner came and joined us, us being Mark and I, and eventually so too did the relatively recently hired brewer, Jared. They were still working through the previous brewer's batches for the most part, and while decent enough, the star of the show had been one of Jared's own creations. I took a mental note to get back when everything on tap was his, not planning that it would take me more than a year.

To get to Alpine Goat there is a little bouncing along a gravel track, but the views from the brewery and its beer garden over to the Shenandoah National Park are more than worth it. Seriously, if there is a more picturesque brewery in Virginia, I haven't been there yet. Having packed the kids off with a ball, frisbee, and boomerang to snag a table with space for them to play, we went to the bar and naturally I ordered the pilsner, described on the website thus:

"Our German Pilsner showcases the delicate noble hop profile from Tettnanger and Mittelfrüh hops, layered over 100% Bohemian Pilsner malt. Expect a well-balanced bitterness and subtle floral notes, characteristic of the style. With a clean, crisp finish, it's a refreshing choice for any beer enthusiast."

Clearly I didn't take any pictures of the beer, oops. However, the beer lived up to the description, and very nice it was too. Having polished that off while waiting on a food truck lunch, my second pint was the Vienna lager, and again it was a very respectable beer. Thus fed and watered, we spent a very chill couple of hours letting the kids run themselves ragged, they would sleep well that night for sure. Spoiler alert, they did.

Mrs V and I really enjoy heading over the mountains to spend time in the Shenandoah Valley, whether going that way for cider or beer, and in Alpine Goat you can safely say that we have added another location to the list of places to visit. So, if you're ever that neck of the woods, head up the gravel road, park on the grass, and enjoy one of the most charming breweries around right now. Next time I will take better note and maybe even a picture or two...of beer.