Eber'kneesup - Winter ale

Winter beers tend to be a rather over the top affair. Brash names involving intoxicated reindeer and flavours that are more at home in fruit cake are what's associated with them and long may that continue! They are an opportunity for a brewer to get a bit experimental with the ingredients list and push the boat out in terms of flavour and in many cases strength too. 

My offering at DBC is a 4.5%er titled Eberkneesup which is based on an oaty mild recipe I've tinkered with by adding orange peel and star anise for a punchier flavour and a dose of cinnamon to partner up with the Bramling Cross hops and give it a really warming aroma.

Its certainly got the desired festive vibes to it (the bin smells bizarrely alluring at the end of the day!) but without going over the top flavour-wise in order to retain what I can only describe as quaffability. I want people to be able to have another pint of it rather than moving on to something 'a bit more bland', also helped by the fact it isn't 10% alcohol.

Have a wonderful holiday period and all the best for the new year.

Craft Beer & Real Ale

There has been a lot of discussion recently over the specific definition of both 'craft beer' and 'real ale' and some people have really got their knickers in a twist over it! CAMRA seem to be relaxing their traditionally conservative stance indicated by the introduction of both continental keg and American bottled stands into the GBBF.
I was lured into the debate when an  e-mail from Tony Egerton at CAMRA asking for my take on the matter appeared in the DBC inbox. It immediately reminded me of a rather lengthy blog post by the Brewdog guys. Martin and James joined the fray and suggested a series of defining points for 'craft beer' relating to size, authenticity, ownership and integrity. You can check it out here:

 http://www.brewdog.com/blog-article/defining-craft-beer.
So I gave it some thought while digging out the mash tun. I reckon forget size, after all Brewdog are turning into a giant themselves and could well find their 'craft' status revoked given their rate of growth by their own standards. It really should be about care, love and passion. Materials and processes should be chosen primarily for their desirable qualities and not because they are simply the cheapest option. i.e. A brewer is in charge not an accountant. 

The beer should be made by somebody dedicated to that profession and in my opinion someone who would do it as a hobby anyway. A brewer who is dedicated and understands the science of whats going on and why, not a production operative who is simply doing it for his wage packet and only cares about quality because its part of his KPIs. It's also about the company ethos as a whole in my mind. If they think of their product range as simply a brand portfolio then they aren't craft. If they put the beer in bottles that are anything other than brown for marketing purposes or whatever, they aren't craft. Basically the beer comes first!

Whether ale is real or not is another matter, its not just about ale in a cask anymore. Unfiltered keg beers exist; filtered and re-pitched cask beers exist (many big boys such as Banks's do this); Key-kegs (seen in the middle of the pic) now allow 'yeast in' beer to be served through a lager font and Cornelius kegs can be used to serve both variants through fonts or hand pulls!

In my mind if its got yeast in it then it's undergoing conditioning within the container it is being served from. Therefore forget handpull vs font and keg vs cask etc. Yeast in = Real ale. I suspect the debate is likely to continue but ultimately all anybody wants is a tasty beer.

Smokin' Bock - Rauchbock

Autumn, along with January, can be a quiet time for breweries in the UK. With the festive period looming and the British summer a distant memory trade tends to slow somewhat, particularly in the high %ABV bracket. It was therefore surprising that our MD and sales team were so on board with brewing a 6% bock, a historic style of German beer originating from the city of Einbeck, for November. 

Traditionally bocks are quite dark as well as strong. This is because the technology to produce the lighter coloured malt, necessary in making the pale lagers associated with Germany nowadays, had not been developed. There are now many different incarnations of this style such as, pale maibocks, freeze distilled eisbocks, and wheat dominated weissbocks. Interestingly bock is also German for goat, so it's fairly typical to see one featured on the label.

We decided on a more standard bock, goat and all, with a slight twist by using beech smoked malt. This gives our interpretation a smoky character in order to back up the sweet, malt dominated flavour profile created in ours by using large quantities of Munich style malt and having a high final gravity (necessitating the use of the special hydrometer, see pic).

We have just racked our Smokin' Bock into cask and I'm pretty happy with it. A tiny hint of pear drops on the nose, not what I was after but it should diminish, then that hit of smokiness which I was wanting. The flavour is all treacle and honey with a very low but balanced bitterness. We've decided to keep some back and are oak maturing it as a special treat for the new year, which we plan to bottle as a seriously limited edition. Prost!

Warlock - Pumpkin Ale

Warlock is the first seasonal that I did at DBC just over a year ago and I couldn't help but have another go at it this year. In fact its hard to come up with another beer that could potentially take its place at Halloween. Amber going on orange in colour; with a floral, grassy aroma and a sweet malty flavour; this 4% best bitter is brewed as an easy quaffing session ale.

The problem with doing a pumpkin beer is that trying to source pumpkins outside of October is actually quite difficult and being a monthly special the beer has obviously got to be ready for delivery prior to the month commencing. In fact the first time round there was a countrywide pumpkin shortage which led to some frantic phone calls and price negotiations after I confidently promised to deliver a bona fide pumpkin ale. 

No such difficulties this year as I was much more organised, even to the point where I prepared my pumpkins by carefully dicing them the day before rather than nearly resorting to frantically bashing them with a mallet whilst mashing in on the day! The pumpkin mash, all Styrian hops in the kettle and post-fermentation dry hopping in tank with Lubelski whole hops gives this ale a little tweak at every turn. I really enjoy making this one and it's likely I'll be doing it again next year.

Midnight Blinder - Foreign Stout

Midnight Blinder was an old Goldfinch Ale, a microbrewery that was located in what is now the skittle alley of our brewery tap Tom Brown's in Dorchester. I'm told that in those yonder days Midnight Blinder was simply liquored back to produce Flashman's Clout, which in turn was further diluted to produce Tom Browns. Not so any longer, both Tom's and Flashman's have their own grist formulations with the latter containing a significant amount of dark chocolate malt to give it its complex malty flavour.

Midnight Blinder was going to get its own grist recipe too and it was going to be far cry from its original incarnation. I decided to go  much darker with this 5% stout than Flashman's, all the way to 90EBC. Verging on Ink black, only seriously heavy imperial style porters and a handful of hardcore black IPA's coming in higher.

The hop profile was also going to be combination of old and new. Challenger for bittering and East Kent Goldings in for flavour would then relent to American hops in late for an aroma to match its look. I decided upon Galena and the now often overlooked Cluster, a predecessor to Cascade. Both of these hops can be too much for lighter beers to handle and impart a zesty, sort of blackcurrant hit to the aroma which combines really well with the large amount of chocolate rather than roast malt I decided to add for a sweeter character.

Wetherspoons got involved with this beer and have bought around 400 casks to date, which has given it a good deal of exposure and helped to raise the profile of what we're all about at DBC. It also meant my dad who lives several hundred miles away was able to try it and he let me know that he approves!

DBC IPA - India Pale Ale

There is a fair amount of debate over what an IPA should be in terms of bitterness, strength, character and aroma. People have even written entire books on the subject of IPA's (Pete Brown's Hops and Glory is a good read).

A lot of the newer breweries are producing creations with levels of hop flavour that really do make your tongue feel funny while many traditionalists continue to produce the more balanced and lower ABV variants that have been consumed in vast quantities for decades.

I was inspired by a dry hopping experiment I'd done with an old colleague where a standard pale ale was taken to new heights of glory by the addition of a rather large amount  of Chinook. The flavour of this hop is wonderfully unique, it's all pink grapefruit and zesty goodness, and it had to be included in my offering!

In the end I decided the DBC IPA should be a beer dominated by A-list hops including the likes of Cascade, Summit, and Apollo along with whole leaf Chinook for dry hopping. Caramalt and wheat were added to the grist to provide a biscuit flavour and help with head retention respectively. Topped off with a start gravity of 1062.5 to give it a final ABV of 6.5% meant this beer was set to be no shrinking violet.

Rocking motion through the use of our fork-lift was also applied to the beer during its conditioning, in a similar manner to madeira, with the hope of recreating some of the agitation that the real McCoy would have undergone on its transcontinental maritime journey. Had some really good feedback off this one, with plenty of people crying out for more and some Ale aficionados journeying far and wide in search of it. Wish I'd made twice as much, as I write we've long sold out.

Elderweiss - Hefeweissen

Elderweiss was conceived as a bit of a rebellion form the norm. I wanted to brew a foreign style of beer with specialist yeast and do something that was a bit different to what had been done before in terms of monthly specials as well as our core range. So a cloudy 5% wheat beer then!

Along with the mix of Styrian hops at the end of the boil I also opted to go for hefty dose of elderflower (also known as holunderblüten) syrup too to give it a more floral character. This really did help balance out the archetypal wheat beer flavours of banana and cloves formed during fermentation by the special hefeweissen yeast that we propagated up from a small vial in the pictured vessel.

Despite the stress of step mashing on our kit to help break down the proteins and beta-glucans from the large amount of wheat in the grist this really was an enjoyable beer to brew. The end result was also pretty decent especially given the only other time I had made a weissbier was in my Parent's kitchen whilst still at university!

Introduction

Hi I'm Oliver Kitson and I'm the Brewmaster at Dorset Brewing Company's Jurassic Brewhouse.

I thought about starting a brewer's blog back in January and its taken 6 months but I'm now finally up and running. I'm going to be focusing on experimentation with beer and doing things that are out of the ordinary in terms of the day-to-day running of a brewery and beer production. So this will include things like monthly specials, beer festivals and making other beery creations.

Plenty of other foodie types are embracing blogging and social media and it really is time to get on board, so here goes.