SSBC Newsletter

Past Newsletters

October 2009

Business:

10/13/09 27 members attending (Business was addressed after the presentation so that Dann didn’t have to wait through it)

• Be sure to pay your dues for this year.
• This year’s SSBC Holiday Party will be at Brian Shurtleff’s again.  We need to determine a date for it.  The options are Dec. 1st, 8th or 11th.  We will decide over e-mail (actually, via voting on the new member forum).
• Braggot barrel – we need to drain and bottle 10 gallons out of the barrel so we can replace it with 10 gallons waiting to go in.  Need a date for that.  With Moat Mt. on the 14th and the pub crawl on the 21st, not sure when we can do it.
• New/prospective members introduced themselves (there were 3).
• The Wort Processor’s Ciderfest is Oct. 25th.
• Pub Crawl – Nov. 21st, 19 members are signed up.  It will be about $750 for the bus, the club will pay half and the attendees will split the remainder.  Looks like roughly $20/person.
• Experimental Club Brew – this year we’ll be trying different grains.  Sign-up for your grain will be handled via e-mail or the forum.
• Meeting Topics – November is Irish Red style/competition and Frank Chenette signed up to present it.  January is the Aged Beer style/competition.  Since Jeff M. gave the original presentation on this, he agreed to present the follow-up as well.  This is where we will judge the beers we’ve been aging since that last presentation.
• Oktoberfest 2010 – Brian S. is going to Oktoberfest in Munich next year.  If anyone is interested let him know – you’ll need to start making plans and booking lodging now.  So think about it.
• South Shore Brewoff – The first items to be taken care of for our club-sponsored competition will be due to be addressed in November.
• Bulk grain buy – is there any interest in another bulk grain buy?  It appears so.  Brian will handle the sign-up.
• Report on the NH Homebrew Jamboree – apparently it was a great time.  SSBC won the (questionable) ‘People’s Choice’ award.

Presentation:

Brewing in the UK – Dann Paquette

Dann has been an established brewer in our area for several years.  He started brewing in 1991.  He recently spent a couple years or so brewing at a brewery in England, and we were lucky enough to get him to come to the meeting and talk about how different the beer world is across the pond.  

Dann’s current project is the Pretty Things Beer and Ale Project.  He brews his beer in other people’s breweries, when he can convince them to give him access.  However, it is not contract brewing as he is doing the brewing, just on someone else’s system.  

Dann brewed in Yorkshire, which is in northern England.  There are no forests there, and lots of sheep.  There are stone pubs everywhere.  Pubs used to be ‘tied’ to specific breweries, but in the 90’s legislation was passed that changed this.  Rather than solve the ‘tied house’ problems, most pubs ended up being bought by a few companies and continue to serve mainly beers from the larger breweries.  Some smaller ‘free’ houses still exist, and local beer from smaller brewers is available at these establishments.  

Bitters are the main drink in England.  A brewery will generally have many types of bitter in their portfolio, with possibly only slight differences between each.  Slight changes to hop amounts and styles as well as color can result in a ‘new’ or different bitter that can be sold.  

Dann laid out 3 unwritten rules:  

1)    The English drink wine with dinner, not beer (this is a throwback from Roman governance and thereby influence)
2)    Beer is drunk in pubs – bottled beer is not frequently kept in the house.  Wine is drunk at home.
3)    Men drink beer, women drink white wine.  

These rules generally affect the perception of beer as a beverage in England, effectively reducing its importance and limiting overall sales (despite what you may have imagined about the English as a beer drinking people).  It is hard for breweries to get beers into grocery stores.   

The large chain stores which dominate England require brewers to make a certain beer to their specifications, with the packaging/labels they demand, and at their price – which is often below the actual cost of making it!  The stores say this shouldn’t matter, because the brewery gets tons of free advertising by having their product carried by the store and displayed.  

In the US, there can be many different styles of beer that sell well because it is taxed on the volume of liquid.  In the UK, it is taxed on volume of alcohol.  Taxes go way up for higher alcohol contents, starting just over 4.2% abv.  This means breweries make mostly beers below this level due to costs, and over time the public has come to see any beer greater than 4.2% as overly strong and are generally scared away from them (which also means there is no real demand for beers above this level – a Catch 22, if you will).  The pubs don’t want a beer that doesn’t sell, and the consumers generally won’t even buy these in bottles (see rule #2 above) so there is little demand for any type of beer such as this in England.  

English beer is ‘simple’, in that it is out of the brewery in 4 days.  Thus there is no time for blending different batches for consistency or anything like that.   

Since beer is taxed by alcohol content, it is extremely important for brewers to always hit their target abv.  They employ various tricks to accomplish this as needed, and the brewing process is directly affected by this requirement.  The beer needs to be completely dry so that there’s no sugar left in the cask to ferment further (and raise the alcohol content above the advertised level).   

One tenant of English brewing seems to be ‘aim high’ in original gravity, and then ‘liquor back’ to the intended OG.  They aim high because it is obviously easier to lower the OG than raise it after the boil.  ‘Liquor back’ just means to add water in after the boil to hit the target OG.  However, this process leads to inconsistencies in the bitterness levels of the same beer from batch to batch, due to the dilution of the beer.  It also changes the color, although many breweries add caramel color to maintain consistency.  But ‘liquoring back’ also tends to make beers more watery in general.  

The term ‘bottle conditioning’ in England means something different than in the US.  There, it means to just fill bottles from the cask and cap them – no additional sugar or yeast are added.   

‘Real ale’ (aka proper cask ale) leaves the brewery 4 days after brew day.  For the brewery that Dann worked at, the beer would drop from around an SG of 1.044 to 1.022 over the course of a day, then finish at 1.010 (always).  On the third day after the brew Dann would top-crop the yeast, then put the beer into conditioning overnight.  The next day, they would put it in the cask with some finings – but no additional sugar and rarely any dry hops.  

Once the cask is in the pub, they vent it for a week (which lets oxygen back in).  This starts another short fermentation cycle that absorbs the large amount of diacytel still in the beer and makes it a really nice pint.  

And that’s the process in England, highlighting the differences and why they are that way.

If there are any updates or corrections, please contact Rick Rodriguez