Harvest Moon - Saison

Harvest Moon is a hybrid saison style beer blending both British and Belgian styles to create a dry, refreshing flavourful ale. Plenty of wheat and light caramelised malts have been combined to give a sweet smoothness, whilst a low gravity finish and a brewing liquor high in salts imparts a dry, crisp character. Just to be clear in a brewery 'liquor' is treated water for making beer with, water is what's used to rinse the floor down.

Bottom fermenting British ale yeast was used to produce this batch as the trial brew back in early summer using the traditional continental strain wouldn't stop fermenting and resulted in multiple exploding containers and a very big mess in the warehouse! To counter the loss of peppery, spiced flavours through the yeast substitution fresh coriander and parsley were added to the beer during conditioning as well as ending up in the drayman's packed lunch (fair enough I guess). Despite sounding rather outlandish this addition of herbs is true to style in old farmhouse beers and is referred to as a gruit. Other options for herb and spice additions  in beer include caraway, yarrow, juniper, ginger, aniseed, heather and bog myrtle. Williams Brothers in Alloa are probably the most famous brewery for employing botanicals other than hops to flavour their beer with and I would highly recommend a tasting session.

Oh-T-Tea - Kristalweizen

June’s special is a rather curious brew called Oh-T-Tea. It's an American style Kristalweizen that has been infused with select botanicals in order to give a zesty, herbal character.

The backbone of this recipe is a standard Bavarian-style wheat beer using malted barley and wheat, and copying the water profile of Munich. From there the American twist is to ferment using ale yeast rather than classic weiss yeast in order to avoid the banana and clove dominated flavour and produce a crisp and refreshing, bright beer with lots of body.

Things got a little crazy as Italian bergamot, Madagascan vanilla, Thai lemon grass and kaffir lime leaves were all added to the kettle in the giant ‘tea bag’ pictured to produce citrus, earthy and grassy notes. Couple this with English Challenger hops added throughout the boil for bittering and aroma, and as a dry hop addition in fermenter has resulted in a beer that smells like iced tea with a slice of orange and a stick of cassia. An ideal thirst quencher in my opinion after a hot summer day.

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!