We've been meaning to brew one for a while. The first beer we ever made was a stout from an old courage recipe circa 1970. Its the only beer we've remade time and again in exactly the same way. Most of our beers recieve little changes and additions evolving and improving all the time but the stout we thought perfect from day one and have never messed with it. I very often as a little tradition have a stout every Saturday after the bar closes if ive been working. I really like our stout a lot.
I've been spending a lot of time looking at historical recipes recently. I find them a good way of trying to get into brewers heads of the time. Often i see things i wouldnt do and it casues me to rethink things and look at things afresh. Looking at old recipes or any recipes really is a bit like looking through someone elses eyes which definitely forces me at least to think in different ways.
One of the things ive seen and wanted to brew for a while is the 1914 Courage recipe found here.
As we have a new packaging tank (O2 levels prepack are at an alltime low :) more on that in a future blog maybe) We were able to split this batch into three and make seperate additions.
Version 1 of this beer is simply the recipe found in the link, rich unctuous, a classic British imperial stout. Version 2 and 3 have ingredients added to enhance and compliment the flavours already there in the original beer. We're not telling what they are though but would be interested to see if people can guess.
We're launching this beer at the excellent Indyman Beer Con this year and will have all three versions on over the weekend. Come say hi and maybe we'll find a prize for whoever guesses the right additions.
Head of production, Chris JJ Heaney will also be doing a talk on our cuvee beers in the cellar that weekend at some stage. We'll be sampling every beer from 2013-2016 and discussing both religion and science. There may or may not be incense and or religious iconography.
It
was disappointing for us that were unable to work with our assigned
partners at Panhead Brewery in New Zealand, but issues with
communication, arising we are told from there recent sale to the Lion group made the process of collaborating on this beer within the
given timeframe not possible.
Due
to scheduling conflicts and time constraints we were unable to brew the
beer at the time we would have liked, but we feel confident that as
well as tasting great for the launch, the Royal will age exceptionally
well, building additional character and an enhanced flavour profile over
time.
Partizan
Brewing are proud to announce our beer brewed as part of this year's
Rainbow Project. Violet was an exciting colour for us to work with and
sparked lots of ideas and potential conceptual directions. Eventually,
we found ourselves fixated firmly on the assignation of purple as the
colour often associated with royalty in numerous cultures around the
world. We looked at beers brewed to celebrate the Coronation year, and although this could have referred to a number, we
settled on a barleywine - a big beer that would allow richness and
complexity, with boozy notes that seemed appropriate for a celebratory
drink!
We
began to think of other references to royalty that might pair well with
this and the subject of noble rot arose - the fungal growth that
appears on the skins of wine grapes, thinning the skins and perforating
them, allowing a raisin-like drying that increases sugar concentration,
ultimately suited to producing a rich and complex wine such as Tokay or
Sauternes.
We
chose to add concentrated Riesling juice to our fermentation, resulting
in a nuanced sweetness and vinous character in the final beer. We were
delighted with the results and trust that the finished article would be
fit for the table of any king!
So ourselves and a few of our neighbours are sharing the walls and taps of a North London pub this evening and for the next couple of weeks. You can find more details on http://www.beerkat.pub/.
We werent sure about vinyl on the wall due to bubbling and the lighting is tricky in the venue for hanging prints or posters. We really liked the nooks and crannys and exploring the place felt fun though so we decided to work with that.
Alec, who does our art has built four colorful characters and hidden them throughout the pub. Whoever is the first to find them all, capture them on camera and post on either instagram, facebook or twitter will win a very special prize.Make sure to copy us in on the post so we know youve put it up.
Whoever is first to post up all four characters will win a mixed case of beer from the brewery delivered to there door. We will include some rare treats not available anywhere else, aged beers and unreleased ones too, as well as our core range of beers.
Here's a few photos of the lunch we had yesterday as part of the London Beer City celebrations. Thanks to the guys from The Brewery Kitchen who were an absolute pleasure to work with and provided us all with some truly wonderful food. Beers were courtesy of our selves and our two very talented neighbours who it was a real treat to spend the afternoon catching up with and sharing beers. We hope that everyone that came enjoyed it just as much as we did :)
London beer City is not very far away and it is our turn this year to host an event with our good friends at BBNo and the Kernel brewery. Rather than the usual format we wanted to have a lunch this time and realised our own space is not big enough. BBNo kindly offered us the use of there brewhouse floor to host the event. As space is still limited in the brewery and this is our first event of this type, we will be keeping numbers low to ensure it is a comfortable afternoon for all involved so there will only be 30 tickets available.
The food will be provided by the excellent Brewery kitchen and each course will have one beer suggested for it from each brewery, 3 beers (1/3 pint) per course. We hope this means you can discover which pairings work best for yourself this way.
We brewed our first beer on the new kit today so thought we'd make it something a bit different. Here's the first few drops of liquor running into the mash tun this morning.
Having read a little more about X recently we thought we'd change ours a little. A beer that has changed a fair amount itself over the years. It started life as a relatively pale beer, reasonably hopped by todays standards and 7%+. It dropped to around 3% by the 50's,was quite dark (usually) and used very little hops.
Quite a change.
Seems fair we follow suit and start changing ours around a bit
We hadn't based our previous X recipe on any specific beer, more a very vague notion of what we thought X was probably like towards the end of the 19th Century. Having read a bit more it resembles a Barclay Perkins recipe we found from 1886 which wasn't much like any other X ales we saw from anywhere else in history having a fair amount of brown malt in the grist and being around 6.5%. Not even at Barclay Perkins themselves could we see another like this (they were quite "experimental" it seems), so maybe we were being very unintentionally very specific...
It's amazing how much this beer has changed so we thought it would be interesting to brew a range of different and slightly more specific and historically accurate ones and post up what we're doing.
Starting for no particular reason other than it looking the most palatable to us we began right in the middle of X's history, 1915 at the Courage brewery.
We lifted this recipe from Ron Pattinsons blog so props to him and Kristen for spending the time researching and uploading it. There's a few changes but all in the spirit of achieving something more representative of the original beer with the resources available to us.
Recipe Specs ---------------- Batch Size (L): 2000.0 Total Grain (kg): 404.000 Total Hops (g): 4492.69 Original Gravity (OG): 1.057 (°P): 14.0 Final Gravity (FG): 1.015 (°P): 3.8 Alcohol by Volume (ABV): 5.45 % Colour (SRM): 14.5 (EBC): 28.6 Bitterness (IBU): 26.2 (Tinseth) Brewhouse Efficiency (%): 90 Boil Time (Minutes): 60
Grain Bill ---------------- 145.000 kg Fawcetts Vienna (35.89%) 145.000 kg Fawcetts Mild (35.89%) 40.000 kg Fawcetts Maris Otter Pale (9.9%) 24.000 kg Fawcetts Crystal (5.94%)
50.000 kg Invert 3 (12.38%) added towards end of fermentation
Hop Bill ---------------- 444.3 g Cluster Pellet (5.2% Alpha) @ 120 Minutes (Boil) (0.2 g/L) 376.2 g Cluster Pellet (5.2% Alpha) @ 120 Minutes (Boil) (0.2 g/L) 1350.8 g East Kent Goldings Pellet (4.1% Alpha) @ 120 Minutes (Boil) (0.7 g/L) 1150.7 g East Kent Goldings Pellet (4.1% Alpha) @ 120 Minutes (Boil) (0.6 g/L) 600.4 g Goldings Pellet (4.2% Alpha) @ 120 Minutes (Boil) (0.3 g/L) 570.3 g Goldings Pellet (4.2% Alpha) @ 120 Minutes (Boil) (0.3 g/L)
Misc Bill ----------------
Calcium Sulphate and Calcium chloride in the mash (I didnt write this down and I'm loathe to leave my comfy desk right now) If anyone really cares ask in the comments and i'll go have a proper look. Single step Infusion at 70°C for 60 Minutes. (to mimic the limited attenuation) Fermentation started at 18C and capped at 23C
