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 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 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!
