Hello and welcome to the latest edition of The Brewers Journal. So here we are, time for our summer edition already. It barely feels that we’ve started 2023 yet we are nearly halfway through it. We’re thrilled with the early feedback to our newly-launched Brewers Journal video channel, which you can access via the homepage of our Brewers Journal website and also on YouTube. It’s a new way for us to tell the stories of the great and the good in this fantastic industry, and we’re enjoying the opportunity to do so.
And as you may have seen our Brewers Congress is once again returning in 2023, bigger and better than before! But it’s also happening earlier than before, too.
our Brewers Choice Awards. And guess what? If the awards are taking place earlier, the same must apply to our judging process. The deadline for entries to the 2023 Brewers Choice Awards is the 1st July 2023, which means you’ve got approximately one month left if you’re reading this edition soon after publication!
This year we are once again looking to crown the ‘Brewery of the Year’ following Lost and Grounded’s triumph in 2022. Who will follow Moonwake and Lakes Brew Co in becoming the ‘New Brewery of the Year’? While we are also on the lookout for ‘Beer of the Year’ and ‘New Beer of the Year’, clinched respectively in 2022 by Lost and Grounded and Field Recordings.
From speaking to attendees and all the brilliant businesses and breweries that help make the event possible, it was clear that holding the Brewers Congress so close to the busy Christmas period wasn’t ideal for everyone that wanted to take part. We want the event to be as open and inclusive as possible so we have therefore moved this year’s Brewers Congress to the 18th and 19th October.
The show, which will once again take place at The Business Design Centre in London, will feature a refreshed layout and an updated format to ensure everyone involved gets the most out of our two-day flagship event. Be sure to check the Brewers Congress page of our website for all of the up-to-date information.
And with the Brewers Congress taking place earlier than previous years, so do
Other prestigious categories include ‘Brewer of the Year’, sealed in 2022 by Colin Stronge and who will succeed Lara Lopes as ‘New Brewer of the Year’?
Elsewhere, we will decide who follows Abbeydale Brewery in creating ‘Branding of the Year’ while there will also be a new ‘Global Ambassador’ to take the mantle from Rudi Ghequire of Rodenbach. And once more, we will recognise a decorated brewer with the ‘Roger Ryman Lifetime achievement Award’.
To enter, or nominate, please copy the address below into your browser and best of luck!
https://www.brewersjournal.info/
Tim Sheahan Editor
We are the leading UK manufacturers of micro canning lines. At Micro Can we pride ourselves on our ability to supply a full turnkey package; the canning line plus all ancillary equipment and this is what sets us apart from any of the competition. Our range of canning equipment is capable of producing from 720 up to 4000 cans per hour, all backed up with UK service and 24/7 online support.
Contract
Our services include:
• Fluid collection
• Filtration
• Pasteurisation
• Carbonation
• Nitrogen dosing
• Testing
Some liquids we fill:
• Beer
• Gin & tonic
•
• Tomato juice
• Water
• Wine
• Soft drinks
News Analysis
On a backdrop of challenging conditions, new figures show that UK brewery figures are stable
Talking Point
The role plastics play in the brewing industry
Comment
Steps you can take to reduce running costs
Comment
Advice for brewery owners facing financial hurdles
Brewers Intelligence
The latest market updates from the fields of yeast, hops, grain and sales.
Marketing
Melissa Cole on what your brewery can do better, and how they can do it.
Meet The Brewery | Elusive Brewing
Berkshire-based Elusive now seven years young
Sustainability
How it will change the business environment
Case Study
Wiper and True invests in carbon capture
Brewery Tour | Vault City
Making sour beers accessible for all
Science | Dissolved Oxygen
Jaime Jurado on reconciling dissolved oxygen minimisation with carbon dioxide consumption
Science | Yeast pitching and propagation
Tim O’Rourke explains the role yeast pitching and propagation plays in the fermentation process
22
Dear John | Germany
John Keeling recently took time out to visit some of Germany’s fine breweries. Here he met some fascinating characters and absorbed a wealth of the country’s storied brewing traditions.
Tim Sheahan Editor tim@reby.media
+44 (0)1442 780 592
Melissa Cole Contributing Editor
Tim O’Rourke Technical Editor
56
Focus | Mead
The UK’s first ever mead fest was a huge success, and the drink looks set to see a renaissance in popularity. Melissa Cole picked up on the buzz.
70
Homebrewing
Robert Neale of The Malt Miller gives us the lowdown on the world of Hydrometers and Refractometers while Thom Stone of Liquid Light shares his homebrewing story.
58
Crossing
At a time where great beer is on offer across much of Europe Warsaw - and Poland more broadly – stands tall with a mix of exciting young brewers that also have an eye on tradition.
John Keeling Contributor
Josh Henderson Head of sales josh@reby.media
+44 (0)1442 780 594
Jon Young Publisher jon@reby.media
Reby Media 6 Grove Road, Hemel Hempstead, Herts, HP1 1NG
The Brewers Journal is a published four times a year and mailed every March, June, September & December. Subscriptions can be purchased for four issues. Prices for single issue subscriptions or back issues can be obtained by emailing: subscribe@ reby.media
The content of The Brewers Journal is subject to copyright. However, if you would like to obtain copies of an article for marketing purposes high-quality reprints can be supplied to your specification. Please contact the advertising team for full details of this service. The Brewers Journal is printed at Manson Group, St Albans, UK.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without the express prior written consent of the publisher. The Brewers Journal ISSN 2059-6650 is published bimonthly by Reby Media, 6 Grove Road, Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, HP1 1NG. Subscription records are maintained at Reby Media, 6 Grove Road, Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, HP1 1NG.
The Brewers Journal accepts no responsibility for the accuracy of statements or opinion given within the Journal that is not the expressly designated opinion of the Journal or its publishers. Those opinions expressed in areas other than editorial comment may not be taken as being the opinion of the Journal or its staff, and the aforementioned accept no responsibility or liability for actions that arise therefrom.
There are a multitude of factors affecting businesses across the UK in brewing, wider hospitality and beyond. There has been disruption to supply chains, periods of high energy prices, and the cost of living crisis. You can also add inflation, along with a challenging recruitment environment where getting the right person for your role is rarely a straightforward task.
However, at the time of going to press, The International Monetary Fund (IMF) revealed an upgrade to its outlook for the UK, forecasting 0.4% growth rather than a 0.7% contraction.
In a statement, it said the UK had been “buoyed by resilient demand in the context of declining energy prices” and that “the outlook for growth, while improving somewhat in recent months, remains subdued.”
The projected 0.4% growth is a reflection of the easing of global energy prices and improved wage growth. The update from the IMF arrived shortly after figures released by SIBA through its ‘UK Brewery Tracker’ revealed that brewery numbers in the UK remained “relatively stable” in the first quarter of the year.
In the period from January 2023 to the end of March 2023, figures show that some regions increased their net brewery number, with the overall UK number being down by just four on the start of 2023, equal to a 0.22% change. A better position than previously expected.
According to the research, Wales led the UK in terms of brewery growth. The country’s net number rose by five overall, while in the West of England numbers dipped by four. The same figure applies to the South East while the South West and North East of England both had a decline in overall brewery numbers
of just two. In Scotland, one brewery closure was recorded in that time.
However, in the East and Midlands regions there were two openings each and in the North West of England and Northern Ireland, figures stayed the same throughout the first quarter.
Looking at the UK as a whole, the research shows brewery numbers at the end of the quarter to be 1824. 145 of these are in Scotland, 29 in Northern Ireland, 263 in the North East, 209 in the North West, 180 in the East of England, 284 in the Midlands, 71 in the West of England, 107 in Wales, 331 in the South East with 205 in the South West. A drop, as mentioned above, of four from the 1828 recorded at the start of the year,
Commenting, the association’s chief executive Andy Lee said: “It is very positive to see some areas of the UK now in growth and a national figure which has beaten the odds to remain relatively stable, despite the challenges faced by brewers.
“Small breweries have a hugely positive impact on their local community, providing jobs, raising money for charity, supporting local initiatives, and providing access to the freshly-brewed local beers that are now in such demand across the UK. All small independent breweries deserve your support.”
This level of support should also extend to many brewery’s customers - the UK’s fantastic pubs - too. But numbers have been slowly declining across the UK for decades and recent shocks, such as the pandemic and the energy crisis, have put these pubs under increased pressure. Figures released by the British Beer & Pub Association (BBPA) showed that more than 150 pubs have disappeared in first quarter of 2023. The UK’s beer and pub industry supports close to 940,000 jobs, while adding £26.2 billion to the economy each year.
RESEARCH PUBLISHED THIS MONTH BY SIBA REVEALS UK BREWERY NUMBERS HAVE REMAINED STABLE DESPITE THE ENERGY CRISIS, THE COST OF LIVING CRISIS AND HIGH LEVELS OF INFLATION.
Lallemand has launched a new Saccharomyces cerevisiae hybrid yeast that offers a “game-changing solution” for no-and-low alcohol brewing.
LalBrew LoNa is a maltose-negative hybrid strain that has been selected to have ideal characteristics for the production of low and non-alcoholic beers.
Advanced classical and non-GMO breeding methods were used to select a strain that does not consume maltose or maltotriose, resulting in very low attenuation.
LalBrew LoNa is the first maltosenegative Saccharomyces cerevisiae strain specifically selected for beer fermentations.
As a S. cerevisiae strain, the company said it performs like an ale producing a clean and neutral aroma profile, no phenolic flavors, and significantly reducing aldehydes that cause worty flavours.
Additionally, the patented technology from the University of California Davis (USA) ensures that the strain will not produce sulfurous off-flavours, allowing the malt and hop flavours to shine through.
The brewing group, In Good Company Limited, has announced its craft beer brands Magic Rock and Fourpure have been reinstated as SIBA (Society of Independent Brewers) members. Following the new independent ownership of the breweries, this is the first time in SIBA history that a brewery has been given back its membership. After the sale of Fourpure and Magic Rock to Odyssey Inns Ltd in 2022, the breweries are now part of a new independent brewing group: In Good Company Limited allowing it to be reinstated to SIBA. With the ability to offer a selection of exciting craft beers from a single supplier, In Good Company provides the hospitality sector with an
easy way to serve up a range of craft beers.
Steve Cox, chief executive officer at In Good Company said: “As independent breweries, Magic Rock and Fourpure value the support that SIBA provides. We believe that it’s important for them to be reinstated as members of SIBA, as it allows us to connect with like-minded brewers and access valuable resources. “We’re continuing to look at ways of how contribute to the vibrant craft beer community and it’s a step in the right direction to do it as a SIBA member.”
The chief executive of SIBA, Andy Slee said: “SIBA are delighted to welcome back former members Fourpure and Magic Rock, who under their new ownership are now once again eligible for membership and for entry into SIBA competitions.
“I want to wish them both a warm welcome back to the fold, and to congratulate Magic Rock who picked up two Gold awards at their inaugural SIBA North East Independent Beer Awards last week.”
BarthHaas X has launched a new ecommerce shop which offers direct access to suppliers for thousands of breweries across the UK. The new platform has been designed to help breweries easily find and purchase the supplies they need to create highquality brews.
By offering direct access to top suppliers BarthHaas X, in collaboration with Muntons Malt and WHC Labs, is providing an innovative solution to breweries large and small during the cost of living crisis and helping them compete in an increasingly crowded market.
John Willetts, director of BarthHaas X, said: “We are thrilled to be launching this new platform and to be offering the smaller breweries a solution that will help them succeed.
“We believe that by providing direct access to top suppliers, we can help small breweries grow and thrive, and we are excited to be a part of that journey.
“So many breweries have to buy through third parties rather than direct from the
producers like ourselves, and this causes additional costs that small businesses, in particular, can barely support, so we wanted to produce a way for everyone to be able to have direct access to the best producers in the marketplace.
“Therefore we have got together with our friends Muntons Malt and WHC Labs to offer direct access to all of our products, with the beneficial cashflow protection and quality benefits that brings.”
Budweiser Budvar has collaborated with Thornbridge on its first ever collaboration lager to be brewed outside its home country.
The lager is called Czech Mates and is brewed with Thornbridge, the original UK craft brewery, home to award-winning craft beers and ales. Czech Mates will be available to purchase from May 16 from Thornbridge and major UK retailers. Bringing together centuries of Czech brewing expertise, the finest British ingredients and cutting-edge technology, Czech Mates is a Czech-style lager that aims to fuel a growing appreciation for quality, traditionally brewed lager across the UK.
Czech Mates is an “aromatic, crisp and beautifully balanced” 4.8% beer, brewed to the same high standards as all Budweiser Budvar and Thornbridge products, and made at Thornbridge brewery, located in Bakewell in the heart of the Derbyshire Dales.
The traditional Czech brewing method of decoction and long, slow maturing complement the British-grown Maris Otter malt and East Kent Goldings hops, while Budvar’s decades-old yeast strain makes the journey from Budweis to Bakewell to bring it all to life.
In addition, the famously soft water of the Peak District, just like that found in České Budějovice (Budweis), is ideal for brewing lager. Given its dedication to quality and authenticity in brewing, Thornbridge made a natural partner for Budvar. Research shows that the craft lager sector is growing faster than any other, and Czech Mates will set a new benchmark, the company said.
London’s craft beer scene is gearing up for a major celebration as the London Brewers Alliance (LBA) brings back its legendary LBA Festival on 17th June. With 50 London breweries and more than 100 different beers set to feature at the historic Fuller’s Griffin Brewery, this event promises to be the ultimate craft beer extravaganza.
The LBA Festival is a unique opportunity for beer lovers to come together and experience the incredible range and diversity of London’s brewing scene. Attendees will be able to taste some of the best and most innovative beers the capital has to offer, all while enjoying the fantastic atmosphere of one of the city’s most iconic breweries.
“The LBA Festival is not just about beer though, there will be a fantastic selection of food on offer to complement the beers, with a range of street food and other tasty treats to choose from. There will also be live music and entertainment throughout the day, ensuring that the festival is an unforgettable experience for everyone who attends,” they said in a statement.
Otter Brewery has launched a “new and exciting category” that it said bridges the gap between craft beer, cask ale and lager.
Fresh Ale is a new form of ale that is brewed in exactly the same way as Otter’s other cask beers, but rather than being filled into a cask, the beer is gently carbonated before being racked into a keg.
Otter Brewery’s Fresh Ale is dispensed slightly cooler than traditional cask ale but not as cold as keg, with a light carbonation that allows the beer to remain true to its cask ale equivalent in taste and body.
As the beer has been filtered, the ale remains in perfect condition for weeks rather than days, an important factor in the current environment.
Patrick McCaig, managing director at Otter Brewery is confident that the cask
ale sector has legs but it “needs to modernise” as well.
He said: “Our Fresh Ale concept arrives at a time when customers are searching out drinks that are flavoursome, gently carbonated and slightly cooler than traditional cask ale.
“Our first beer in this category, Amber Fresh, has been developed to help both revive and energise the ale sector (including cask) giving drinkers of all ages the confidence of quality when making their bar call.
“All too often a pint of cask ale can be disappointing and often this is largely due to the lack of throughput resulting from too many beers on the bar. Fresh Ale comes with a guarantee of flavour and condition.”
Two specialists in manufacturing equipment have teamed up to help brewers maximise consistency in their production through enhanced automation.
Brewery machinery expert, Collective Motion Brewing, is working in partnership with Krohne, a worldleading manufacturer of industrial instrumentation, to introduce flow tracking technology to keg filling processes for clients throughout the UK and Europe.
Collective Motion Brewing is utilising Krohne’s in-line and battery-operated flowmeters to enhance the accuracy of keg washer fillers with a repeatable transfer operation and reliable monitoring of flow rate, total flow and temperature.
Dominic Smith, director at Collective Motion Brewing, said: “The growing use of flowmeters to enable precision batch control is part of a wider trend of increased automation within the industry. We integrate Krohne’s electromagnetic flowmeters into our clients’ existing keg systems as well as supplying them for new facilities and equipment upgrades in conjunction with our own range of compact keg washer fillers.
“Krohne’s flowmeters are best-in-class for temperature range, accuracy, pressure drop and flow range. We’ve received
a lot of demand from smaller brewing businesses keen to move away from keg couplers and less efficient methods of filling.”
Chris Lawler, regional sales manager at Krohne, said: “These technologies are useful for breweries of all sizes, but they are especially suitable for smaller brewing businesses and microbreweries. They value the ultra-compact design for parallel installation and tight spaces, as well as ease of operation, with simple handling and no mobile devices needed for set-up.”
Tanks and process technology business Ziemann Holvrieka has been named official solution partner of Siemens AG. The partnership applies to automation systems, drives and Siemens Sistar Braumat expert module. Ziemann Holvrieka, which specialises in the brewing, beverage and liquid food industries is certified for “exceptional expertise in automation”.
From its base in Ludwigsburg it said it can provide “top-quality future-ready automation solutions” anywhere in the world in conjunction with systems from Siemens. In addition, Ziemann Holvrieka is celebrating a world first, as Koray Müftiler, key account manager of Siemens, explained: “I’m very pleased that the certification is now complete and that we can officially announce our solution partnership. This makes Ziemann Holvrieka the first plant engineering company in the market to be certified for Braumat and Sistar.”
The certificate was presented in Ludwigsburg by a Siemens delegation. Ziemann Holvrieka was represented at the ceremony by Klaus Gehrig, who said: “Cooperation between our companies in automation began decades ago.
Ziemann Holvrieka has therefore become an expert in Braumat and created highly efficient module libraries. This knowledge is unique in the market. So it’s appropriate that we should be the first to be certified for Braumat and Sistar.”
We’re launching our popular, high quality beer yeast in 100 g pouches (so packs, under inert atmosphere), bridging the gap between our 11.5 g sachets (so packs under inert atmosphere) and 500 g bricks (hard packs, under vacuum). So now, whatever your brewer’s profile, you get extra convenience and flexibility.
For details and to purchase, visit fermentis.com or get our app
Plastic is a “wonder” synthetic polymer which can be moulded, extruded, or pressed into a whole range of essential products and a large amount can be partially or completely recyclable. On the downside, plastic is principally made from oil and natural gas and takes a long time to decompose.
Larger plastic items take up to 1000 years to decompose in landfill, while plastic bottles take 450 years and plastic bags up to 10 to 20 years. Every year, we produce 300 million tonnes of plastics, with 8.8 million tonnes of these dumped into the oceans. It has been estimated by 2050, there will be more plastic than fish in the oceans.
Many manufacturers are aware of the public’s disapproval of plastic in general regardless of how it might be recycled and have found alternatives which are not so damaging to the environment, for
example changing to using paper cups and straws.
A lot of secondary and tertiary plastic packaging has been removed or replaced by other materials, such as cartons in place of trays and shrink wrap, and removing plastic hi-cone which threatens wildlife
Plastic will still play an important part in primary packaging.
Plastic beer bottles have never been a major part of the beer portfolio because they need to be specially coated to preserve beer quality, making them expensive, but they are still required at certain sports events.
Casks are generally made of stainless steel, which is durable and can be reused for decades, but represents a high capital investment. A number of craft brewers use plastic casks, which are not so durable but give good service and the plastic from broken casks can be recycled.
Ease
PLASTIC WILL CONTINUE TO PLAY A VITAL ROLE IN PROTECTING AND KEEPING FOOD AND DRINK FRESH. IT IS NOW UP TO SOCIETY TO FIND A RESPONSIBLE WAY OF USING, PROCESSING, AND DISPOSING OF IT, EXPLAINS TIM O’ROURKE, TECHNICAL EDITOR OF THE BREWERS JOURNAL
Recently a manufacturer of plastic shives and keystones is working on a programme to collect and recycle the fittings, saving cost and resources.
Kegs are also made from stainless steel and designed to be able to withstand pressure. They are durable but costly to buy and replace if lost or stolen. Most plastic kegs are used for single trips, they are lighter and a useful alternative for package smaller volumes or for export where the container are not returned.
Petainer manufactures a single use PET lightweight plastic kegs suitable for handling carbonated beer and when totally recycled is reported having 30% lower carbon footprint than the equivalent stainless-steel keg, requiring
less cleaning, lighter weight, and delivery only. It is the responsibility of the customers to recycle the container and the manufacturer reported a recycling rate of 19% in 2019.
KeyKeg is a double walled keg system with a multilayer bag for beverage protection. All KeyKegs sold in the UK are produced in County Durham which reduces the overall co2 emissions in the production process. KeyKeg uses a range of different plastics in their production process which contain a minimum of 50% recycled materials, used KeyKegs can then be recycled when returned to one of their active collection hubs. To recycle KeyKeg it is sorted, grinded, washed to regenerate the monomer materials. There are very few independent surveys comparing real life cycle of cradle to grave performance between stainless steel and plastic kegs.
Greenhouse gas emissions comparing stainless steel with plastic kegs in different scenarios. Results are shown in kg CO2-e per litre kegged beer. The study was conducted in a Swedish brewery, and it was assumed that the stainless-steel kegs made 80 trips before being recycled. The single trip plastic
kegs were made in the Netherlands and in the first example went to the local recycling for incineration and in the second example was sent back to the Netherlands where it was stripped down for recycling.
Plastic is not the problem. It is how we use it and how we dispose of it. Plastic will continue to play a vital role in protecting and keeping food and drink fresh. It is now up to society to find a responsible way of using, processing, and disposing of it.
Unnecessary plastic should be removed. Breweries have actively removed plastics from secondary and tertiary packaging. If plastic packaging is required, choose the right plastic for the application with recycling in mind. Choose from suitable alternative natural materials made from paper (cellulose) and seaweed.
➢Improve recycling performance. The biggest difficulty is returning the plastic for recycling and having the appropriate facilities to recycle the plastic and return to the manufacturer.
➢Some companies such as Key Keg have set up recycling centres and are actively trying to encourage users to return their used containers.
➢A lot of plastic finds its way to municipal recycling centres and the average performance of recycling plastic is pitiful.
Figure 1: Michael Martin, Sjoerd Herlaar, Aiden Jönsson & David Lazarevic “From Circular to Linear?” Assessing the Life Cycle Environmental and Economic Sustainability of Steel and Plastic Beer
Kegs, Circular Economy and Sustainability volume 2, 2022, pages 937–960
Figure 1: Greenhouse gas emissions comparing stainless steel with plastic kegs in different scenarios. Results are shown in kg CO2-e per litre kegged beer
The prospect of energy bills substantially increasing from April is a major concern for countless breweries and cider producers. The government has confirmed the next stage of the Energy Bill Relief Scheme for businesses is being allocated £5.5bn over a year, compared with the original scheme’s £18bn for six months.
The cut still offers some support, but thousands of pubs and breweries will still face an uphill struggle in the years ahead. If that sounds like a gloomy outlook, we can bring some welcome good news for brewers: with a combination of rigour, ingenuity and planning, they can make significant savings on running costs to mitigate the impact of their energy bills.
Various quick wins can be gained from routine measures. For example, a simple check of the temperature sensor for calibration could save a few hundred pounds per year. Making sure the heating element is descaled is also very effective as limescale build-up can dissipate the heat and prevent correct heat transfers between water and heating elements. One of the most common and avoidable causes of cost inefficiency is the presence of leaks within equipment. Leaky compressed air pipes make compressors work harder and use more electricity to perform. Water valves should also be kept leak-free. An investment in water-saving technologies can deliver savings in the long-term. Automated washing machines such as cask washers, keg washers, and CIP systems can reuse grey water to prerinse containers/tanks and save water
that would otherwise go to drain.
Chemical dosing is another area of production that offers potential savings. Making sure the correct dosing is applied each time will increase efficiency and reduce expense, so it’s worth introducing a standard operating procedure to ensure that the process is consistent.
Alternatively, the built-in consistency of automatic dosing equipment is another investment that will deliver long-term returns, saving hundreds of pounds in overdosed chemicals as well as being more environmentally responsible.
Within the industry there is a growing appreciation of the value of automation. In the coming years, automated processes and control will be the most effective way for beverage manufacturers to grow sustainably and reduce their energy and resource usage.
THERE ARE STEPS THAT BREWERS CAN TAKE TO REDUCE THEIR RUNNING COSTS AMID THE ONGOING ENERGY CRISIS. HERE DOMINIC SMITH, DIRECTOR AT COLLECTIVE MOTION BREWING, EXPLAINS HOW WITH ATTENTION, AUTOMATION AND INNOVATION,
Generating a skill matrix helps to ensure the best coverage of skills across all departments and shifts, thereby increasing efficiencies and reducing waste.
We advise many brewers to review their processes across both production and packaging. It’s rarely given much thought in the busy day-to-day running of a brewing business, but a thorough review can form the basis of a standard operating procedure (SOP) which is a superb way of unifying the approach across all teams and functions.
Generating a skill matrix helps to ensure the best coverage of skills across all departments and shifts, thereby increasing efficiencies and reducing waste. It’s worth getting in touch with machinery and raw material suppliers to see if there is a skill gap in the operation of a certain piece of machinery which may need addressing with a ‘toolbox talk’ or a refresher course.
In some cases, bespoke changes to equipment configurations can make facilities more energy-efficient. Many brewers will be familiar with problems posed by the energy-intensive process of heating water for a keg machine detergent set. Gas-fired steam generators are often an unaffordable investment for smaller businesses and a sufficiently large electric steam generator is often impossible when multiple cold stores and other production equipment are already hogging the mains supply. However, a little creative thinking and technical nous can open up new possibilities. As an alternative to feeding mains cold water to the detergent set and steam-heating it, we have worked with customers to develop solutions which feed pre-heated water from a separate hot water tank.
The tank offers added value as an efficient way to heat bulk amounts of water for cleaning and other internal processes, delivering greater efficiency through dual use and a less energyintensive system in service of the detergent set. Sometimes all it takes is a step back to examine the wider functionality of production facilities and how they can work in unison. Brewers value consistency in their processes to ensure consistent results. However, there is a case to deviate from familiar methods when there is a less energy intensive alternative. For example, brewers traditionally hot-rinse kegging equipment, but it’s possible to switch to cold rinsing without increasing risk of microorganisms and product contamination.
We recently worked with a microbiological laboratory on a series of tests which showed there was no significant difference between a hot rinse and cold rinse when followed by the steam sterilisation cycle. A reduction in temperature can be compensated by other factors such as the turbulence and
velocity of fluids and the chemical strength and composition of fluids. The brewery that participated in the test has now fully adopted the cold rinse system. We would never recommend trialling new methods without professional guidance, but sometimes a leap into the unknown can pay valuable dividends.
Any manufacturer, regardless of the product or sector, will benefit from a periodic health check on its facilities and regular servicing of their machines. It’s especially important for breweries - costly downtime or product recalls are problems they can ill afford in these challenging times. We would recommend yearly maintenance as a bare minimum, but the optimum solution is a structured programme of Planned Preventative Maintenance.
It’s the most reliable way to avoid a fault or breakdown in equipment, providing peace of mind in the knowledge that production will remain in smooth operation. It’s also useful for checking and addressing inefficiencies caused by limescale, leaks and other problems which can build up over time.
It could never be claimed that the measures we’ve outlined represent a magic bullet which will eliminate all the cost pressures facing breweries, but they certainly make a significant difference. Increasing efficiency through automation, giving regular attention to the condition of equipment and bringing more clarity and consistency to operating procedures can be a very effective combination in improving profit margins.
There are a number of issues to consider – no doubt at the top of this list is how to keep the lights on and continue trading. However, significant care should also be given to the legal implications of your decision making as soldiering on may leave more than a sour taste in your mouth. As a director you are in charge of the management of the company’s business and responsible for ensuring that decisions are made in line with your statutory duties pursuant to the Companies Act 2006.
One of the fundamental statutory duties you owe is to promote the success of the company for the benefit of its shareholders. However, this duty shifts when a company is struggling, such that decisions may need to be made for the benefit of the company’s creditors as a whole instead.
The point at which you should have regard to creditors’ interests is when you know or ought to know that the company is insolvent or bordering on insolvency; or an insolvent liquidation or administration is probable. It is not always easy to determine when the creditors’ duty is triggered but the general rule of thumb is that the greater the financial difficulties of the company, the more weight should be given to the creditors’ interests. Therefore, it is easiest to picture this as a sliding scale whereby a solvent business should be run for the benefit of the shareholders, a company bordering
insolvency (i.e. cash flow or balance sheet insolvent) should be run for the benefit of both the shareholders and the creditors, and finally, where there is no reasonable prospect of avoiding insolvent liquidation or administration, the creditors interests should be paramount. Ultimately, there is no ‘one size fits all’ with this test and the particular circumstances of your business will need to be considered when determining whether the creditor duty arises and if so, when it arises. The implications of failing to make decisions in the interests of the creditors when the duty arises should not be taken lightly either, particularly if the company does eventually end up in administration or liquidation. This is because an insolvency practitioner will be appointed over the company and will investigate whether the directors are at fault for the events leading to its demise.
If you were in breach of your duties as a director or continued to trade the company when you knew or ought to have known that there was no reasonable prospect of avoiding insolvent liquidation or administration, then you would be exposed to potential personal liability. It is therefore imperative that you spot the signs of financial instability as early as possible and take immediate precautionary steps to limit the potential harm to the company, its creditors, and you personally. The most important way you can limit harm is by seeking professional advice in order to consider the options available to you. An effective turnaround strategy may dispense with the need to enter into a formal insolvency process, but it needs to be managed carefully. Professional advisors will be able to assist you with the different restructuring options available to the company including, for example, rationalisation and extra financing. Many breweries that operate taprooms, pubs or bars will also utilise a group structure in which each ‘outlet’ is shielded
within a separate company ultimately all owned by the founder(s), the benefit being that if one bar were to cease being profitable and closed down or in a more drastic scenario, if the brewery itself were to close, then the other bars could potentially continue to trade. A recent example of this is the closure of Totally Brewed’s brewing business but with the planned continuation of their successful Beeston bar. Therefore, setting up your brewery and bars with the right corporate structure is crucial.
If a solvent turnaround strategy is not viable, it may be that the business can still be salvaged if the company is placed into administration. In such circumstances, the administrators may seek to sell the business and assets as a going concern immediately following their appointment (known as a pre-pack sale). Taking Wild Beer Co as an example, the business and assets were purchased from its administrators by Ashford-based Curious Brewery meaning the business was saved and the employees retained. Placing the company into administration is not usually suitable if the business cannot be saved and so an alternative option would be to place the company into liquidation. Liquidation brings about the end of a company and the appointed liquidators will look to sell the assets so that a distribution can be made to the creditors.
It may be that you are able to pay off all of your debts in full, but you simply want to cease trading in order to realise the company’s assets. In such circumstances you may consider placing the company into Members’ Voluntary Liquidation (solvent liquidation). This would require you to swear a statutory declaration of solvency and the members would need to pass a special resolution to commence the liquidation and appoint a liquidator.
When I retired four and a half years ago I had several objectives. One was to do more travelling, and one was to enjoy pub lunches to the max. I also wanted to keep and maintain my connections and relevance in the brewing industry. Not being the Fuller’s head brewer anymore meant I could take a much different viewpoint. Being retired, of course, left me with more time to fill and what better way than travelling the world drinking beer.
Now I have always preferred cask beer, and this is partly due to poor British versions brewed by the Big Six in my youth. Now with the rise of Lost and Grounded, Utopian Brewing amongst others this is not the case anymore. However, I have always maintained that if you want to drink a good German style beer than the best thing you can do is go to Germany.
So, I planned a little jaunt to Berlin, Köln, Nuremberg, Bamberg and finishing in Munich. Now I was taking Symone along too and although she is into her beer and also a tour guide for Fuller’s , I could not do 100% beery things so a little touristy side had to be planned too.
The first thing I did was to ask on Twitter for suggestions and thanks to everybody who replied but it was impossible to do all of them despite them all being good. Also thanks to the advice from Twitter as I used the train app and managed to get my tickets and the trains!
So off we headed to Berlin, which is a wonderful city. I enjoyed the beer scene but simply sight-seeing in Berlin was wonderful. We stayed at a central
location near Checkpoint Charlie which was ideal for what we wanted to do. I had been in contact with Louise Krennmair and had arranged to meet at a bar called Forsters Feine Biere, a short train ride away. We also met the rest of the Berlin crew - Ben Palmer and Louise’s husband Andreas.
Andreas even gave me a copy of his book on Vienna lager (so I will have to go to Vienna to see if there is any Vienna lager in Vienna). He also bought me two examples of Berliner Weisse to try. A very nice evening indeed. Ben is a PhD candidate at VLB Berlin and was eager to pick my brains. This took all of five minutes.
Then onto Köln the home of Kölsch of course. Needless to say, I did try one straight away in my hotel, but I had an horrendous train journey due to a German train strike! I really needed a beer. The first thing you notice when you get out of the station is the magnificent cathedral. It is quite a sight and I recommend you get a look around it. I had not planned any beery visits, but we did try a number of bars and had a pleasant stay in Köln.
I had planned several beer-related trips in Nuremberg and Bamberg though. I had contacted Markus Raupach who I met whilst judging beer in London. Markus lives in Bamberg and had kindly offered to organise a few things for me.
The first thing he arranged was a trip to Tucher Brewery in Fürth. We met the good folks from the brewery for lunch first and a few beers. I was delighted that they like London Pride too and a great love of British ale. I must admit I did enjoy their beer too. It was an old brewery in Nuremberg and very good looking it is
too. They experiment with barrel aging there and I was delighted to try some from the barrel. Luckily their beer was easily available near our hotel, so I tried some of their beer in the wild as well. The next day we travelled to Bamberg. What a great trip that turned out to be. We met up with Markus and a group of trainee beer sommeliers in Bamberg before walking up to the historic beer cellars for a tour.
This is where breweries would ferment beer and store it, the cellars were also used in the second World War for shelter and some factories were also relocated there. Absolutely fascinating.
We then had a brewery tour given by the retired head brewer Martin (I know how he feels). The highlight of the tour was the tasting directly from the tank which not only brought back memories for me but was the best beer of my holiday. We finished by having dinner together before catching our train back to Nuremberg. Lastly, we travelled the short distance to Munich for the last four days of our trip. Munich, although a very famous beer city, was to be just a tourist experience with no beer events. Well, I had agreed to that before we had even taken off for Berlin and sometimes being a tourist is nearly as good as being a former head brewer on tour.
Ben is a PhD candidate at VLB Berlin and was eager to pick my brains. This took all of five minutes.”
So how does the current market look when compared to previous years? Back in 2019, low and no alcohol beer production accounted for $16.65 billion of global revenue. Fast forward to 2023 and that figure has grown to $20.16 billion, and growth is expected to continue at a CAGR of 9.3%, reaching 28.79 billion by 20271,2.
At a more local level, this growth varies significantly by geography. The key markets in Europe for low and no alcohol beer consumption remain the mature markets of Spain and Germany. However, these countries which have traditionally been large consumers of low alcohol beer have significantly lower growth rates than the emerging markets of the USA and the UK. In 2021, Germany and Spain clocked volume growth of just 2%, verses an expected CAGR of 28% and 6% up until the year 2025 in the USA and UK3. In the last few years we have seen several entrants to these growth markets from the larger brewers. These include Guinness 0.0 from Diageo, Lost AF from Brewdog and Carlsberg 0.0%. Several smaller breweries that only produce low alcohol beer are driving trends in these markets, notable examples include Athletic Brewing in the USA, and Mash Gang, Big Drop and Infinite Session in the UK.
The drivers for the growth in this market have not changed, with the number one reason for consumers limiting their consumption of alcoholic beverages being to improve health outcomes, as well as to save money4.
Key technologies are driving innovation in the production of low alcohol beers. While the methods for producing these beers have not changed greatly since I previously wrote about this subject,
better solutions are emerging from both avenues which are commonly used to manufacture these products. When taking the alcohol removal route, reverse osmosis appears to be the technology leading the market. Here the benefits of lower temperature operation impart an advantage over distillation methods with regard to the final product quality. Reduced costs and modular options, allowing for flexible scalability have further lowered the barrier to entry. New fermentation based solutions are also emerging. These have fewer energy inputs than alcohol removal technologies, lowering the cost of production and negating the need for capital expenditure. At CBC in May, Lallemand launched their new LalBrew® LoNa™ strain. This strain has considerable advantages over previous strains used for the production of low alcohol beer.
The breeding technique used to produce the strain introduces genetic material from a true brewing yeast. This gives the strain a genuine brewing pedigree when compared to other strains which are exclusively derived from environmental sources, and not well suited to a brewery setting.
Improvements seen when using this strain include a greater ability to reduce aldehydes, chemicals which cause the sweet and worty flavour in low alcohol beer, as well as an inability to produce the POF and H2S off flavours, which are commonly associated with yeasts used to produce low alcohol beer. Looking beyond the technologies used for producing the beers themselves, one area which seems likely to expand in scope over the coming years is the application of flavour enhancers to improve the flavour of low alcohol beer.
Already there are products available from companies such as Totally Natural Solutions which are specifically designed
WAY BACK IN THE JANUARY OF 2020, I WROTE IN THE BREWERS JOURNAL ABOUT GRASPING THE OPPORTUNITY THAT LOW AND NO ALCOHOL BEER REPRESENTED.
BACK THEN, CRAFT BREWERS IN THE UK WERE JUST STARTING TO DIP THEIR TOES INTO THE MARKET. THIS NEW ARTICLE SHOULD STAND AS AN UPDATE ON THE CURRENT STATE OF THIS MARKET, AS WELL AS A DISCUSSION OF THE CURRENT TECHNICAL INNOVATIONS DRIVING THE GROWTH IN THESE PRODUCTS
for use in low alcohol beer. The desire to maintain clean labelling means that ingredients derived from common beer ingredients are preferred over synthetic additions. Lallemand already creates yeast based products like this for use in the wine industry, and an expansion of these solutions into the sphere of beer is something we may explore further. A final point, and perhaps the one most likely to cause issues for the craft brewer, is the need for microbiological stability in low and no alcohol products. At present, tunnel pasteurisation is the gold standard technology for the pasteurisation of these beers.
This is a barrier to entry for many, as acquiring a tunnel pasteuriser is both costly and space intensive. It is my hope that we will see better craft options appearing here as well as other technologies suited to the task. Brewers would be well advised, if they cannot pasteurise themselves, to consider contract packaging as an option.
As the low and no alcohol beer market continues to grow, we will see further innovations in both the consumer and technological space which will continue to improve the low and now alcohol offering available to the drinker. The trend for healthier living and wellness is not going away, meaning that this sector is likely to grow for many years to come. With the growth in this market, microbiological stability and food safety regulation may well increase. To minimise this possibility, brewers should adopt high standards and pasteurise wherever possible.
u https://www.forbes.com/sites/ katedingwall/2022/02/28/as-the-nonalcoholic-category-continues-to-growboozefree-beer-will-be-the-space-towatch/?sh=22ea60686d5d
u https://www.researchandmarkets. com/reports/5744216/non-alcoholic-
beer-global-market-report
u https://www.theiwsr.com/no-and-lowalcohol-in-key-global-markets-reachesalmost-us10-billion-in-value/
u https://www.lallemandbrewing.com/ en/united-states/lona/
Andrew Paterson has been in the brewing industry for over 10 years. With a background in biochemistry and a masters degree in Brewing and Distilling, he joined Lallemand as a technical sales advisor in 2018. Prior to joining Lallemand, Andrew worked at craft pioneers Brewdog, before joining Darkstar as the Head Brewer. He now covers the UK and Scandinavian markets, supporting breweries in the use of Lallemand products.
At Swansea’s Beer Riff, brewer Rhys Pillai is delighted he’s secured his Nectaron hops this year.
“I’m completely sold on it,” Pillai says, after first brewing with the New Zealand wonder hop last November in his rotational release “It’s All About …” “People who’ve contracted it this year will be rapt. It’s just going to blow up and I think it will be flying out the door.”
New Zealand Hops Ltd says British brewers who want to get their hands on this wonder-hop will be able to do so, with plenty available after the hop’s justcompleted third season of commercial production.
“It’s going to throw a punch at those American varieties,” says Pillai. “It’s almost the ultimate hop for those fruit flavours. You can blend American hops to try to get that flavour whereas here it’s in one hop. And you don’t even have to use crazy amounts of it.”
Nectaron was released in 2021 after 17 years of breeding, research, and trials. A gigantic cone, physically (it can fill the entire palm of your hand), it’s also a giant when it comes to flavour and aroma.
“The descriptors on the spec sheet are bang on, the punchy pineapple, passionfruit and peach coming off it is just … wow. What a hop,” Pillai says.
Nectaron’s performance, especially as a dry hop, reflects the chemical composition: high in total oils (1.5-2ml per 100g), low in cohumulone (26-28%) , high humulene-to-carophyllene ratio (3.6), and relatively high alpha acids (11-13%) for an aroma hop.
Nectaron is partially named for the scientist who bred it for New Zealand Hops Ltd, Dr Ron Beatson, formerly of the government-owned Plant & Food and the man known as the godfather of Kiwi hops.
He said there was once a saying within
NZ Hops that they were looking for “the golden fleece, the unobtainable one … a hop with good oils, good all-round chemistry and which suited growers and brewers alike — and that would be Nectaron.”
Pillai started using Nectaron last year and he’s found that while it stands out brilliantly on its own, it works extremely well with other varieties.
He doesn’t use it in active fermentation, believing he gets a “better expression” of Nectaron’s true character without biotransformation. He thinks it’s the New Zealand hop variety that will help British craft beer drinkers understand what Kiwi hops bring.
“While lots of brewers use New Zealand hops, consumers don’t fully understand the flavours of those hops, but Nectaron is a good hop to bridge that gap, because it’s so fruitful.”
James Heffron, at Verdant in Cornwall, has built his brewery around extensive use of New Zealand hops, mainly Nelson Sauvin and Motueka, but he’s learning about Nectaron and has 2.5 tonnes contracted for this year.
“It’s got pineapple, stone fruit and other fruits I can’t even name, but it doesn’t shy away from being dank and that’s integral to the hop. It seems to punch through really well into the beer. You smell the bag of hops and that’s what you get in the beer.”
Nectaron has been available in New Zealand for a number of years when it was known by its trial name, Hort 4337, so brewers downunder are familiar with its powerful flavour, smooth bitterness and high level of oils.
Since its release it’s been a go-to for fruitforward, less-bitter hazy IPAs but there’s an emerging trend for its use in less imposing beers.
Grant Caunter spent 20 years with Heineken before he decided — mid-
NEARLY 20 YEARS OF BREEDING, RESEARCH, AND TRIALS WENT INTO THE DEVELOPMENT OF NECTARON. A HOP THAT IS RESONATING WITH BREWERS IN THE UK, AND BEYOND, EXPLAINS MICHAEL DONALDSON FOR NZ HOPS.
Covid and mid-life — to give up beer, move back to New Zealand and start State of Play, New Zealand’s only nonalcoholic brew brand. Nectaron was a revelation to him when he returned home from Europe.
“I used to think that the signature of New Zealand hops was Nelson Sauvin but when I smelled and tasted Nectaron I though ‘wow, this is the signature of New Zealand hops and the future of New Zealand hops’.”
He uses Nectaron in an unfiltered non-alcoholic beer, noting that it brings “power” in the form of a “massive fruit bowl, in-your-face aroma” followed by a backbone of “adult bitterness”.
“With heavily dry-hopped beers you often get a big hello and not much of a goodbye, but with Nectaron you get the nice hello but also a sustained bitterness for the goodbye.”
At multi-award winning Urbanaut in the Auckland suburb of Kingsland, Yorkshireborn brewer Dave Huff uses Nectaron in only one beer, the brewery’s biggestseller — a 2.5% session IPA called Jaco.
“I used to think a hazy shouldn’t go below 4% — just for the body — but when the challenge arose I thought maybe I can make it 2.5% and that’s where Nectaron came in. It’s a showstopper.”
It works in the session IPA because its high oil content adds texture and palate weight, while the low cohumulone
means he can ramp up the flavour without adding aggressive bitterness.
Chris Ward at Steam Brewing uses a lot of Nectaron for one of his bigger clients, Bach Brewing, notably in their Planet Nectaron IPA. Apart from the “dominant, round flavour” he says Nectaron delivers its flavour punch in velvet glove of smooth bitterness.
“Nectaron has a range of fruit character that spans across tropical and stone fruit territory at high intensity. It can be successfully single hopped like a Citra or Mosaic, and similarly provide a solid base when used in high proportion that allows for synergy with other hops to create something special.
“Although you could happily go 100% Nectaron, I’d generally be recommending maxing out 50-60% of hop load. As with any variety of hop, each brewer will have an opinion of when enough is enough, but I’ve preferred the beers where we’ve used Nectaron at high rates to be accompanied by a blend of NZ, or NZ and American, hops to get the best overall balance of hop flavour. “An added bonus is that when used at the right rate Nectaron doesn’t have the perceived ‘harsh’ bitterness that some other Australasian hops can bring, meaning you can add more than its counterparts with lower risk of overdoing it.”
Brian Watson of Good George is one of New Zealand’s most experienced brewers and he said Nectaron is critical to their low carb hazy pale ale, Social League.
“When you’re down around 1000 with your gravity, or zero plato, you’re expecting the hops to do some heavy lifting in terms of adding perceived body, and Nectaron is essential to that. But it’s also adding more fruit character without adding bitterness — you can’t add bitterness to those low carb beers without the residual sugar to balance, so it’s about punching flavour and aroma in there without bitterness and Nectaron does that.”
Huge fruit flavours, exceptional aroma, smooth bitterness, plays well with other hops, works over-time when used as a dry-hop … no wonder everyone wants to get their hands on this hop. The once “unobtainable” is now widely-available.
While lots of brewers use New Zealand hops, consumers don’t fully understand the flavours of those hops,” Rhys Pillai,
Markets have been tracking lower with softness especially in 2022 crop which has only a short time remaining to move the surplus in wheat. Some farmers are carrying 2022 crop wheat into 2023 crop to minimise the lost opportunity from an earlier sale at much better prices.
A differential is building between the discounted 2022 crop and the 2023 crop to arrive in August which still has the major part of the growing season ahead of it and hence carries weather risk. Feed barley prices have been following feed wheat pricing, with malting barley holding historically strong premiums given smaller plantings and continued quality uncertainty through to harvest.
French values for both feed and malting barley have been hit by the news that China is giving strong consideration to removing the punitive import tax on Australian barley which will open up the market again and reduce the reliance on
France as the primary source of barley, together with other suppliers Canada and Argentina.
The start of 2023 went from one extreme to another. There was the eighth driest February in 188 years and the third wettest March in 288 years.
The majority of the spring barley due to be planted in England was completed in ideal conditions within the month of February. The subsequent rainfall in March stopped field operations and at the time of writing (mid-April) activity has now restarted and is progressing well in remaining areas of Northern England and Scotland.
Other spring crops have been severely impacted by the rainfall delay in March, principally sugar beet and potatoes, but with better weather ahead there is optimism that crops will catch up.
The spring barley planted in February is looking in very good condition and at this stage prospects for above average yields look promising. Winter barley crops have also enjoyed the rainfall in March and are
THE WEATHER AT THE BEGINNING OF 2023 HAS GONE FROM ONE EXTREME TO ANOTHER, WHICH IMPACTED PLANTINGS BUT AS ADAM DARNES, BREWING & DISTILLING MALT SALES MANAGER AT MUNTONS, SAYS THINGS ARE PROGRESSING WELL.
looking in great condition at this stage, ahead of 2022 crop.
Drought in Spain and Portugal is likely to result in a barley harvest at or below the bottom end of the normal range. Spain typically produces 6-10 million MT of Barley, meaning this will result in significant imports from Northern Europe of feed barley to service a large animal feed demand.
Spring barley plantings in France were completed earlier than usual in February with similar conditions to Eastern England.
Plantings in more Northern areas, for example Denmark, have restarted this week and will likely progress well with drier conditions forecast.
During the first quarter of 2023, from January to March, the Pint Please application saw an influx of over 10,000 new beers worldwide. This represents a significant growth in the number of available options for beer enthusiasts. Below are the most popular beer styles of those 10 000+ new beers which were added to Pint Please. Leading the charge is the IPA category with 7.9% with New England IPA / Hazy IPA with 7.6%. Interestingly in third are Sour / Wild Ales with 4.9% followed by Imperial IPA / Double IPA with 4.4%. Fifth in the table are Golden Ale / Blond Ales with 3.5% and then Imperial Stout with 3.4%. Towards the end of the findings are American Pale Ales with 3.0%, Pale Lager with 2.9%, Pilsner accounting for 2.9% then Pale Ale - International at 2.8%. IPAs, NEIPAs and Sours are still the styles breweries most like to brew. The top ten list of most popular beer styles of new beer releases of Q1/2023 is almost identical to 2022. So the last three months remained pretty much the same. The rise of New England IPA to become the second most popular beer
style of new beers is quite remarkable, considering that the style is so young.
We also analysed the alcohol by volume (ABV) levels of the Pint Please app’s top three most popular beer styles. For those who prefer a hoppy IPA, the most common ABV of the new beer releases was a satisfying 6.0%. If you’re a fan of the juicy, hazy NEIPA, your brews tend to pack a slightly stronger punch at 6.5% ABV. And for those with a taste for tang, sours were found to have an average ABV of 5.0%.
The beers listed in the table below are all India Pale Ales (IPAs) and come from various countries including France, Sweden, Spain, the United States, and Finland. Not a surprise that these IPAs are almost all 6.0% ABV or higher since usually, the higher the ABV the better the ratings. These beers are highly rated new India Pale Ales and were added to Pint Please during January – March 2023.
IN EARLY 2023 IPAS STILL REIGN SUPREME WITH THE RISE OF NEW ENGLAND IPAS SHOWING NO SIGN OF SLOWING DOWN, EXPLAINS JUHA KARPPINEN, THE COFOUNDER AND CEO OF PINT PLEASE.
In conclusion, the app has once again brought exciting discoveries to beer enthusiasts with its influx of over 10,000 new beers worldwide during the first quarter of 2023. IPAs, NEIPAs, and sours remain the top three most popular beer styles of new beer releases.
The analysis of alcohol by volume levels shows that the average ABV varies slightly between the top three styles. As the world of beer continues to evolve, Pint Please remains a valuable tool for discovering new and exciting brews. Cheers to the next round of discoveries.
The rise of New England IPA to become the second most popular beer style of new beers is quite remarkable,” Juha Karppinen, Pint Please
"Everything that we were looking for in a canning line, this line has... it's really reliable, it's really robust... it was really a no-brainer at the end of the day that this was the line to go with."
~ Dan MacKinnon MacKinnon Brothers Brewing
Creating an idea and spreading an idea has a lot behind it, and it has changed a huge amount in a very small time. But it remains a relatively simple principle, which can be implemented on a micro or a macro scale. It’s also one I think the brewing industry, particularly in these incredibly tough times, really needs to take a moment to think about.
The main driver behind me wanting to write about this started, as it so often does, out of frustration at not getting press releases and being shaken out of that frustration by Round Corner Brewing taking the incredibly proactive step of sending me their current proposed release schedule for the year.
I have not been sent a brewing schedule by a brewery in 15 years. The last one I recall being sent was from Shepherd Neame telling me what their seasonal
schedule would be for the year. Just think about that – a decade and a half – before someone thought that one of the most prolific beer communicators in the country might need to know what a business was going to be selling for titles they write up to three months in advance for.
However, it’s also endemic, and I happened across a TED talk by a bestselling author. This was prompted by some random thoughts I had on the fact that we are an industry that all too often holds our cards too close to our chests. Whether deliberately or through the sense of fear that the often hand-tomouth nature of this business can evoke, we fail to communicate far too often.
As Godlin points out in his talk about The Tribes We Lead, the world has changed
TOO OFTEN BREWING BUSINESSES FAIL TO EFFECTIVELY COMMUNICATE WITH THEIR TEAMS, THEIR CONSUMERS AND THE PRESS. IN DOING SO MELISSA COLE, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR OF THE BREWERS JOURNAL, SAYS THEY ARE MAKING THINGS MORE DIFFICULT THAN THEY NEED TO BE. BUT SHE ALSO HAS ADVICE TO SHARE, TOO.
immensely from when we started with an efficient factory, started by Henry Ford (as problematic as he was) under the idea that we could change the way the world worked by automating, something that resonates in the world of brewing. As efficiencies increase, beer is cheaper to turn out and the overheads of a workforce can be decreased and those profits can be, in turn, used elsewhere. But at some point that becomes a zero sum game as it hits a point where sales and output balance themselves out. The next stage, Godlin posits, is advertising. If you can get enough money and tell enough people then you can sell more, but this model requires you to act like you are the best, you are the top of the chain (an example of this being taken quite literally is by larger breweries siting billboard adverts in close proximity to smaller competitors), taking average ideas and pushing them out to the masses, because average is the easiest way to get the most people.
However Godlin, most especially through the way the world works now, believes tribes are the most important thing. They connect silos of people to create a movement and this is only possible through communication. Any business is a movement. A series of silos to connect in order for it to function; whether it’s a small business of just a few people or a much larger one, the key is to connect those silos of people into a common goal. Now, I appreciate this sounds a bit like a cult but those who create them are remarkably good at what they do and you can take learnings from that, without it getting creepy, and the first way to do that is engender loyalty. It’s important to note that loyalty should never be blind, we’ve all seen how that can go, but it is something that can be earned through simple steps and the very first building block of that trust and loyalty is open communication.
If your sales staff don’t know what’s going on in the brewhouse but it’s plastered all over social media that some highprofile brewer has popped in to sprinkle some hops on something, how can they honestly tell excited customers what’s happening?
If the brewhouse doesn’t know how much demand there is for something out there, then how can they gauge how much to brew? And if your PR & marketing department doesn’t know there are worryingly low levels of demand for a product being generated by customers, how do they know they need to big it up to the press, or through social media, to consumers if the sales staff aren’t telling them?
In reverse, just think how furious everyone in the business would be if sales wasn’t telling the accounts department who they needed to bill or if the brewers didn’t communicate to your maltster they need an extra tonne of pale malt for the next brew day?
And it’s not just about convincing people that they want something they don’t already have yet. This is undoubtedly one of the biggest heffalump traps the brewery industry has fallen into. It relies on the next big beer, instead of building a business that focuses on bringing together those people who have a sense of wanting to be part of something more than just lurching from hype beer to hype beer, breweries often have a tendency to grab at the available instead of building the steadily attainable and rarely look outside of their immediate circle.
A lot of this is what has made the industry a white cis male-dominated world. It’s the need to hold on to the reigns, stay in your lane, make sure that you collaborate with those people that will bring that little sprinkling of hype dust to your brewery, because a failure to move out of your silos means you never challenge the status quo.
In my experience, that also leads to a sense of myopia and a dissonance between those who really want to connect with you, who want a sense of being in a tribe and how they receive your information and, more importantly, how you continue to lead it. This comes not just from the top but from all layers of your business. If someone has joined a business, they almost certainly really want to be there, so how are you telling them the story of what you believe, what you want to be out there. How are you engendering a sense of belonging and
belief, so that they can go out and sell that sense of belonging and belief for you and continue to build your tribe?
Again, I urge you not to think of this as a cynical tool, that way a sense of omnipotence lies, but to use it to create an honest change which does lead to more successful business… oh, and for the love of god, send me press releases.
If your sales staff don’t know what’s going on in the brewhouse but it’s plastered all over social media that some highprofile brewer has popped in to sprinkle some hops on something, how can they honestly tell excited customers what’s happening?”
Melissa Cole
Jamil Zainasheff called our friend Sean at Siren to see if we were legitimate - I don’t blame him one bit!”
Seven years since starting Elusive Brewing, its founder Andy Parker remains as unassuming and humble as ever. But the decorated award-winning brewer, alongside managing director Ruth Michell, have long since established the Finchampstead-based business as a leading light in the UK brewing scene. And integral facets of that journey have been the importance of community and collaboration, whether that be with local brewers or those from across the Atlantic.
Jamil Zainasheff is a hero to many brewers. Having scooped more than 500 brewing awards, he is also a highlyrespected author. Zainasheff was in London at the end of last year to deliver a keynote address at our very own Brewers Congress event.
And as a self-confessed member of said brewer’s fanbase, Parker reached out to the US brewing icon to invite him for a collaboration at Elusive HQ. It was handy then that Zainasheff’s good friend Sean Knight is the head brewer at Siren Craft Brew, which is a mere stone’s throw from Elusive, put in a good word and helped get the brewday over the line.
“So Jamil, what would you like to brew?” Parker recalls asking. “We love everything about the West Coast, IPAs - Red, Brown, Black, all of them!”
“When I hear brown ale, I think of Tasty’s Janet’s Brown Ale,” replied Zainasheff.
Mike ‘Tasty’ McDole was one of the most prolific and influential people in modern homebrewing and a good friend (and TBN co-host) of Jamil’s. His Janet’s Brown beer was featured in Jamil’s book and went on to become one of the best known and loved homebrewing recipes out there, brewed the world over. Tasty sadly passed away in 2020 after a battle
with cancer. So in tribute to Tasty, they took his recipe for Janet’s Brown and brought it bang up to date by fermenting it with WHC Labs Hop Unlock, a socalled ‘thiolised’ yeast which can unlock aroma compounds. It was then mash hopped with Cascade (to promote bound thiol levels) that lead to a super aromatic and tasty American Brown Ale. In addition, Elusive made a donation to Macmillan Cancer Support in Tasty’s name and their good friends at The Malt Miller to produce kits released alongside the finished beer.
But that project was merely one of many that Elusive have taken part in recently. Not content with brewing together, Parker and Zainasheff have just signed a joint author contract with CAMRA to collaborate on a new book, The Modern Homebrewer. CAMRA will be publishing this in Autumn 2024 with the aim to cover all the latest products and innovations, covering ingredients, process and equipment.
And earlier in 2023 there was the launch of the latest iteration of the International Women’s Day Home Brew initiative, and also the brewery’s first Brave Noise beer - a global collaborative effort to provide inclusive and safe environments for women, BIPOC, and LGBTQIA+ people throughout the beer industry. Then last month, the brewery marked its birthday with the return of its popular home brewing competition, something that has helped launched the professional brewing journey of outfits like Middle Child and also most recently - Snowmoon. In short, business as usual for Elusive, which means being busy… very busy.
But the brewery has come a long way, and evolved a great deal since being founded back in 2014. Although one thing has remained the same and that it’s a business that creates beer with one eye on tradition and the other on taking things to the next level. It’s just that Andy now has more help in
SEVEN YEARS YOUNG IN 2023, ELUSIVE BREWING CONTINUES TO DELIGHT WITH ITS WEST COAST PALES AND IPAS. THE BUSINESS, RUN BY FOUNDER
ANDY PARKER AND MANAGING DIRECTOR RUTH MITCHELL, IS A LEADING LIGHT IN THE UK SCENE AND ONE CENTRED ON INCLUSIVITY, COMMUNITY AND CAMARADERIE.
Ruth has delivered consistent sales growth and demonstrated strong leadership skills,” Andy Parker, Elusive Brewing
spreading the message of Elusive, thanks to the appointment of Ruth Mitchell as managing director last summer. With more than 13 years of industry experience Mitchell has a proven track record of delivering sales growth through sustainable business development. Former roles at Adnams, West Berkshire Brewery and Utopian Brewing have seen her work across many key areas of the industry, enabling her to build a deep and formidable skillset. With full responsibility for the leadership and development of Elusive Brewing’s business, she is playing a key role in taking the company forward.
“I feel that me joining Elusive was definitely a product of lockdown,” she explains. “Back in April 2020 Andy was doing home deliveries of his beer. His colleague Ricky had been furloughed and I had also been furloughed shortly after starting my role at Utopian Brewing. “Add to that, my other half Paul - who then worked for Oakham - was in the same position. Ultimately we we were sitting at home, bored and trying not to kill each other!”
Parker was busy brewing, but also delivering his beers to the great and the
good Berkshire, and exhausting himself in the process, while the would-be MD was “sat doing nothing five miles down the road”.
“I messaged him just to plead that we could help him out. And soon Paul and I would come in and do the Friday beer deliveries. It was honestly just an excuse to get out of the house, it was fantastic!” says Mitchell. “And before long, that turned into me helping out with bottling and the odd bit of brewing, too.”
As restrictions eased, Elusive would reopen its taproom and Mitchell would
be there to satiate thirsty drinkers eager to enjoy the delights of the on-trade once more. “It was lovely to come in and talk to other people. But when the world got back to ‘normal’ I was sad at not being able to do this anymore,” she says. “Thankfully Andy felt the same way so I ended up never leaving, just like a stray cat!”
Mitchell started with Elusive in a sales and marketing capacity. “There was a natural need,” says Parker. “Ruth had already imparted a lot of her experience at that point, so it was really just a case of making things more formal. But to have someone come in with that focus has enabled us to grow.”
He adds: “It was all very natural. The demand was there, we just needed someone to unlock it. And with that we’ve been able to add some extra tanks and also invest in our very own canning line.”
Ruth Mitchell and Elusive Brewing was a perfect fit. And last year Parker would acknowledge that further by appointing her as the brewery’s managing director. “I was delighted to make that appointment and step down from the role, which allows me to focus on product development and quality. Since joining us, Ruth has delivered consistent sales growth and demonstrated strong leadership skills whilst increasing our operational efficiency across all areas of the business,” Parker says. “It felt like a natural progression to hand the day to day running of the business over to such an experienced individual and it’s exciting to give Ruth the freedom to execute her vision for the brewery’s next phase.”
With Mitchell’s expertise on board, Parker says he wants Elusive to be viewed more as a team rather than just a one-man band that he fronts. “I want Ruth more at the forefront of this business,” he explains.
And with her dealing with sales, marketing and planning responsibilities, among many others, Parker can focus more on production, packaging and process improvements. “All the stuff that goes into making the product falls to Andy, and getting the product out falls to me, smiles Mitchell. “I just tell himplease don’t make anything I can’t sell.”
Thankfully, that’s not a problem faced by Mitchell and team Elusive. Since those very early days of brewing a Smoked Ruby Mild, Parker found his feet with West Coast Pales and IPAs. “I learned very quickly that you can’t run a business brewing and selling Smoked Ruby Mild,” he laughs. “Which is just as well because West Coast beers are the ones I love to brew and drink.”
And those are the beers the public love Parker brewing, too. One such number is Oregon Trail, which has arguably become the brewery’s flagship release. A 5.8% West Coast IPA, it’s brewed with Extra Pale Malt and features Chinook, Simcoe and Columbus in the Hop bill. These combine to deliver a resinous profile with a citrus undertone while the bitterness help to balance the light caramel flavours of the malt. The success of that beer has led to a bigger, bolder version in the form of Double Oregon Trail while Midnight Oregon Trail, is the much-loved beer given the Black IPA treatment thanks to the addition of roasted malts.
But Elusive are not a one-trick pony. Far from it. Other beers such as Level Up: American Red is a fan favourite and remains an important beer in the brewery’s journey, as is Overdrive American Pale Ale and releases like its Coffee Porter - Spellbinder.
The brewery’s size also means Parker has the ability to “play around a bit” with other beers, too. One such example is the decadent 10% Sticky Toffee Imperial Stout released earlier this year.
“We’ve always had room to do that, it’s one of the benefits of brewing 15HL of a beer,” he says. “There’s no pallets to go out, as it all moves through in cask, keg and can. But the success of beers like Oregon Trail have definitely given us the freedom to do these one-off releases.”
Regardless of the beer released, one aspect of business Parker feels has much-improved at Elusive is in planning and pre-selling. “If we packaged all of the beer in our tanks and hadn’t pre sold any of it, we wouldn’t physically have any space to put that beer! he says. “We don’t have room for things to be hanging around but it also means the beer is
leaving in super-fresh condition, too.”
And these beers are also benefitting from the use of pressurised tanks. “The quality, especially of our Pale Ales, has gone up a notch from my point of view. I feel that we are a bit more grown up,” he adds.”
Like its peers, lockdown changed much at Elusive. Prior to the pandemic, small pack rarely appeared on their radar. But the change in consumer habits resulted in visitors leaving with bottles of beer filled direct from the taps. And now, with the addition of their canning line, small pack accounts for approximately 30% of their production and 40% of revenue.
Parker explains: “We know we need to look at a slight expansion. There are two units here that will soon be available, but we will need to work out where it’s more cost-effective to stay here or relocate entirely. There’s lots to consider.”
Mitchell adds: “Personally, I’d really like us to be more accessible in terms of public transport. But that being said, there are lots of new houses being built near here, too. I also love being so close to Siren. There is a benefit of people coming out to see both businesses. As Andy says, its a balancing act.”
As an active and celebrated homebrewer before starting Elusive Brewing, having a business that has now turned seven is somewhat surreal for Parker. Especially when he has a rare moment to take a
step back and reflect. “Yeah that’s weird when you think about it!” he laughs. “Particularly when you look at the collab with Jamil. It completes the circle a little because I listened to his podcast in those early days home brewing, and I still do now. Early on I’d be pestering brewers like Summer Wine to see if they’d let me collaborate with them. And now I have people approaching me. Personally, that’s the biggest compliment you can make. I’ve never wanted to be a brewer that wasn’t welcoming. I know I’ve benefitted a lot from others, too.”
Parker is a highly-regarded, awardwinning brewer, and has made many friends in the industry. The same applies to his colleague Mitchell. “With the exception of my family, the most important people in my life I’ve met through the beer industry. My partner, Andy, my best friends, they’ve all come through the industry,” she recalls. “Yes, it can sometimes be difficult to separate work from your social life but at the same time, that’s because you’re working in a job you love.”
With Elusive Brewing seven years young in 2023, Andy and Ruth are proud of their journey and excited about the road ahead. And one year into her role as managing director, Mitchell is satisfied for a number of whole number of reasons. “I’m really proud of the business here, and that it’s still here after the challenging few years we’ve all faced. I love the community we’ve created both online, in the taproom, and the friends made along the way,” she says.
“But personally, my greatest achievement was Andy going on holiday. That he felt comfortable to take time off, leave the country and trust me to look after Elusive was huge. He went away, enjoyed himself and I still didn’t manage to burn the brewery down!”
With the exception of my family, the most important people in my life I’ve met through the beer industry,” Ruth Mitchell, Elusive Brewing
Prior to my brewing career, I studied business for nine years. For most of my school days, our teacher used to roll down a penstained projector screen and we would watch episode after episode of Dragons’ Den, the YouTube documentary on ‘how things were made’ (would strongly recommend baked beans) and even the occasional episode of the Office (UK). Whilst this may come across as slander to my educational guardians, Levi Roots’ Reggae Reggae Sauce was a smash hit both in the classroom and the kitchen, my knowledge of baked beans is pub quiz winner worthy and my ability to quote the office has won at least a few cheap laughs over the years.
We did also learn one of the fundamental business evaluation tools, the S.W.O.T analysis. Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Strengths & Weaknesses are internal to a business, Opportunities & Threats are external to a business.
Its simplicity is its beauty as it forces you to analyse your own business from within and pigeonhole an entire external environment in to threats to your business and opportunities for growth. In this article we will explore how sustainability will change our external business environment which could affect your brewery in either a negative way (threat) or offer potential for growth (opportunity). Let’s get into it.
Threats are negative external factors that could cause damage to your business and often include negative market share factors, product cost changes, reduced supply of key ingredients, disruption in
routes to customers, and government policy changes.
Let’s relate these to the topic of sustainability.
Eco consumerism is trending high with 40% of consumers indicating they have chosen brands/products that have environmentally sustainable practises/ values, which is a whopping +6% on the previous year.
Whilst complex to calculate and even more complex to compare. There is some information to suggest beer has a bigger impact on the environment in comparison to its alcohol and nonalcoholic competitors.
So, could the combination of eco consumerism and beer being ‘seen’ as a CO2e heavy product be a factor in the global decline of beer consumption? There also could be an argument made for eco consumerism influencing the ‘macro’ vs craft beer consumer trend. The three largest brewers, Heineken, ABInbev and Carlsberg, are in an arms race to achieve net zero by the same date. Could the eco consumerism rise be timely with their incredible focus on sustainability and their power of marketing to cause a shift towards macro beer drinking once again?
Plenty of ingredients to choose from here. But let’s choose a pretty essential one, water. Integral to the entire supply chain and of course to the brewing process itself. The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) predicts that the demand for water in England will exceed supply by between 1.1 and 3.1 billion litres a day by the 2050s.
CHRIS LEWINGTON, THE FOUNDER OF BREW RESOURCEFUL, EXPLORES HOW SUSTAINABILITY WILL CHANGE OUR EXTERNAL BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT WHICH COULD AFFECT YOUR BREWERY IN EITHER A NEGATIVE WAY OR OFFER POTENTIAL FOR GROWTH.
2050 seems like a long time away. But couple the demand increase with one of the many consequences of our accelerated climate change - more droughts – and you start to see a shorterterm threat. The period of drought alone is intense on water supplies, but they also have a lasting effect on the overall availability of water.
So, the water providers may restrict water availability for your brewing process or your suppliers’ processes, reducing availability of raw materials requiring water in manufacturing which in turn would drive up price. Also, there are quality concerns to mention as low water levels cause water suppliers to switch your source of water frequently (and no, they have no obligation to tell you when this happens).
This is going to be significant if you have supermarkets as your current route to customer, equally if you would ever like too.
Supermarkets are under pressure to tackle their colossal impact on the environment. And where do supermarkets look first when they are under pressure? Their supply chain. “Five major supermarkets – the Co-op, Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Waitrose – have reaffirmed their commitment to halve the food system’s environmental impact this decade and unveiled new measures to engage suppliers to meet this goal.”
Sarah George, Edie, Nov 2022Fantastic news for the environment and challenging for the suppliers, those not in a position to fit their new criteria will be discarded. Remember, supermarkets are ruthless capitalist machines when they set their sights on the alcohol supply chain expect challenging goals, specific data demands, tight deadlines and no loyalty. With the threats covered it’s time to bring the fresh air of positivity.
Whilst it was labelled a threat above, The Craft Beer Report 2023 issued by SIBA cites “48% of consumers think
sustainability credentials of a brewer are an important factor when choosing a beer”.
So, the UK trend of eco consumerism has transcended into the craft beer market rather than shifted eco consumers away (for now). This looks like a serious opportunity for progressive craft brewers to me. One huge advantage small/ medium businesses (craft brewers) have over corporations (macro brewers) is their adaptability. So, whilst the ‘threat’ of the macro brewers using sustainability to gain market share is there, it can be used against them if the craft brewing industry acts quick enough because it can achieve macro goals far quicker.
Did you hear the government’s commitment to being net zero by 2050? Well guess what folks, almost £5 billion of funding is available to help UK businesses become greener as part of the government’s commitment to reach net zero emissions by 2050. Get a grant via local council or direct government grants for your next sustainability capital expenditure project!
Furthermore, if you’re looking to expand your business via external funding routes. You will need an operational sustainability plan to access them, as investors will need to see their investment protected.
Becoming more sustainable via resourcefulness (consuming less, producing more) in your brewery will reduce your monthly costs and increase the amount of beer available to sell. Importantly for the opportunity aspect it will also provide protection against changes in supply of raw materials and utilities.
Finally, resourcefulness requires no capital expenditure as standard so you can start your sustainability journey today.
Start your sustainability journey today. Why let sustainability become a threat? Why not take the opportunity sustainability presents to innovate, motivate and progress your business?
You can start with small changes today whilst you make your wider strategic plan
for tomorrow. Nothing should prevent action today, progress can start slow it will build momentum later.
But what help is there out there for me? How do I make a long-term strategy? There are three steps to start your brewery and businesses long term sustainability strategy.
Education is fundemental. Knowing your scope 1,2 & 3 is one thing, understanding how to use that to create and influence change is better. And you can get both from 86-Carbon Literacy Training Data is next. You can’t create, track and analyse any progress without data, that’s life now. In house is always possible should you want to tackle it. If outsourcing data capture, management and reporting is more your thing. The best value software in the market is Zevero. Check it out, its outstanding.
A key message I wanted to get across is regardless of any emotions towards sustainability, there is an integral business case that shouldn’t be side-lined. Yet ironically, business has been at the heart of the climate crisis. The relentless drive to out compete one another has led to us negatively impacting the very world we need to survive. So perhaps, whilst ‘the business case’ will cause most businesses to adopt a sustainability programme. In fact, the answer to sustainability lies in collaboration. We as the craft brewing industry already have such a wonderful openness and collaborative nature. Now is the time to use that platform to better our industries carbon footprint. Be transparent, share everything, be loud and be proud of the journey you are embarking and take your fellow brewing compadres with you.
Fermentation is at the epicentre of every brewery. Without it, there is no beer. In very simple terms, the fermentation process is as follows:
Yeast eats sugars contained within malt grains, and produces alcohol and CO2. The alcohol stays in liquid form, and transforms malty liquid (wort) into beer. During fermentation, CO2 bubbles out of fermentation vessels in gas form, wafting away into the atmosphere, without serving a useful purpose
That third stage has been a bone of contention at Wiper and True for a while now, and sits at the heart of an incredibly exciting project that the Wiper and True sustainability and production teams have been hard at work on for several months. Since we first began brewing, we, like most small to medium size breweries, let the CO2 bubble out of fermentation vessels into the atmosphere. This is the way we’ve always done things, and had never really considered what could be done differently. Until now.
In the process of building our new brewery, we thought long and hard about the best investments we could make into becoming a more sustainable business. Something that jumped out straight away was the possibility of carbon capture: that is to say, recapturing the carbon dioxide produced as a byproduct of fermentation, rather than letting it drift away into the atmosphere as a wasted byproduct. Once ‘caught’, the gas can be stored in a large tank, before being
used for other parts of the brewing and packaging process.
Carbon capture got us really excited, chiming with our passion for the circular economy approach, looping an effective waste stream back into our business for reuse. This has two very clear, very appealing benefits, both of which help build a more sustainable business, in the holistic sense of the word: independence and resilience.
Until now, the carbonation of our beers (the injection of carbon dioxide is what gives beer its characteristic fizz) has depended on us purchasing carbon dioxide from a third party; a volatile market that’s often susceptible to shortages and price surges. Through installing carbon capture technology, we cut our dependence on this third party, giving us end-to-end control of CO2 use in the brewery. This in turn produces a financial benefit, saving us money which we can then reinvest to fund yet more sustainable projects. Carbon capture technology also builds our business’s resilience, reducing our exposure to extreme fluctuations in CO2 prices.
Once we’d realised the potential of carbon capture, we began our hunt for a machine that would suit our size of brewery. Most of the technology available had historically been built for huge macro breweries, and cost an eye watering amount of money. Luckily for us two machines that perfectly suited smaller breweries had just been launched onto the market, representing huge advancements for the industry. After much research, we opted for the Dalum unit, produced in Denmark.
Designed and manufactured by Kim Dalum who had previously worked for a company making these large and expensive machines. Using his expertise, he downsized the technology to work on a small scale.
In a nutshell, the technology captures the CO2 from fermenting beer, washes out the impurities, compresses the gas to high pressures, condenses out unwanted gases (oxygen) to purify it further, liquifies the CO2 and pumps it back into our CO2 cryogenic tank, ready for reuse in carbonating the beer, purging tanks and in the sterile packaging process. We are delighted that this equipment has now been installed and is successfully up and running in our Old Market production site.
So what does this all mean for the sustainability of our brewery? Well, aside from giving us security and independence, the technology also effectively reduces our carbon footprint. The more carbon dioxide we can capture when we ferment, the less is added to the atmosphere at our hands.
The Dalum carbon capture unit we have now installed has capacity to capture roughly 60-70 tonnes of CO2 per year. At Wiper and True, this allows us to capture carbon dioxide produced as a byproduct of almost every beer we’re currently producing, and also covers us for our future growth, when we’ll be brewing even more beautiful beer. When such time comes that we are brewing so much beer that we need to capture more CO2,
we can create more capacity by installing a second Dalum unit.
We strongly believe that this technology is the future of sustainable brewing, and are delighted to be at the forefront of testing out these new machines; ours is the second unit to be successfully installed in England. The first brewery to commission the unit was Gadds’, the Rasmgate Brewery over
in Kent. We couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate this massive leap forward in brewing sustainability than brewing a beer with Gadds’ themselves; our collaborative classic best bitter will be out at the end of May. Here’s to Kim and his team at Dalum, and a more sustainable brewing future.
Wiper and True’s new carbon capture unit, installed at its Old Market brewery
Last year, 2022, was a year of change, a year of growth and a year of evolution for Vault City. There were new faces, new beers, collabs, supermarket listings and also its taproom and smokehouse popping up on Portobello High Street. They brewed some of their new favourite beers and even released one of their top-rated beers of all time. With that they had the bar set for 2023, something they’ve already well hit.
“It’s a testament to the team that we came into this year off the back of a global pandemic, seeing production double, the quality of the beer increasing all the time and having a huge number of projects completed successfully. It was a remarkable 2022 for us,” says Steven Smith-Hay, co-founder of Vault City.
During that time the brewery released more than 65 beers: from sessions to mid and “high vaultage” sours. They experimented with a lot of pastry/dessert sours in 2022, a style which they had only dabbled with before, and found themselves going back to basics with some of their final releases, focusing in on the humble fruited sour beer for which they’ve always been known. They also collaborated with nearly 40 breweries last year, with 20 brews completed at the Edinburgh brewery and 19 away from home: including their first ever international collaborations. The return of travel, post-Covid, meant more collabs abroad, finding themselves at 27 festivals around the world, with them even brewing a festival exclusive – just 300 litres of 999g/L Strawberry Banana Vanilla Crunch, a nod to their 999g/L series using the legal maximum amount of fruit while still calling it a beer.
And while the team has grown to more than 20, the business also adopted a four-day week operating from 8am to 5.30pm Monday to Thursday, with the working week reduced from 40 hours a week to 35, a new working schedule that was phased in over eight months from April 2021.
But following a whirlwind 2022, and as we near the mid-point of this year, Smith-Hay and the brewery haven’t rested on their laurels - far from it. And that’s involved major equipment investments across the board.
“Coming into 2022, we noticed that we had problems with capacity, problems with packaging and also problems with the level of losses that we were seeing. As a result, the main goal for last year was to invest in projects to see that side of the business improve,” he explains. “So we’ve doubled capacity. We installed 10 75 hectoliter FVs specially designed by Willis European to fit the space that we’ve got. They are approximately one metre wide and very tall and also two 150 hectoliter FVs. In doing so, that allowed us to come into this year with excess capacity.”
Smith-Hay adds: “The losses we were seeing in our beer were pretty high given that we are very fruit-forward usually adding 200g p/l of whatever fruit we are using. These losses were somewhere in the high 20s coming into the year. But with the addition of our new decanter centrifuge, we’re hoping to reduce that down below 10 and hopefully sub 5% losses, all while not impacting the flavour profile of the beer.”
And on the packaging front, Vault City were one of the first UK customers to invest in The CP10 from Micro Can Canning Machines. The system is a twin lane 10-head innovative counter pressure
FOUNDED BACK IN JANUARY 2018, VAULT CITY OF EDINBURGH IS GOING FROM STRENGTH TO STRENGTH, FORECASTING TRIPLE DIGIT GROWTH IN 2023. HERE WE SPEAK TO ITS CO-FOUNDER STEVEN SMITH-HAY ABOUT THE EARLY DAYS OF VAULT CITY, ITS RECENT INVESTMENTS IN CAPITAL EQUIPMENT, AND THE BREWERY’S AIM TO BRING MORE PEOPLE INTO THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF SOUR BEERS.
filling and seaming machine with the ability to change can size at the turn of a wheel and the flexibility to fill products of various carbonation levels the CP10 offers more versatility for the operator. The twin lane setup allows the operator to run lanes independently. This was complemented by a UK-first end-to-end packaging solution from Dutch business Zomerdijk Engineering.
These investments have been integral in increasing the efficiency of the brewery’s small pack operation, all-important in getting their beers to market, which have increasingly involved listings in various supermarket chains.
“Supermarkets have been key to our journey. We were one of the first companies, after breweries such as North Brewing and Northern Monk, that probably came as a surprise for supermarket entry. I was acutely aware of the impact that could have had on the brand,” he says. “But we went in with a very honest and open attitude. We explained to people that COVID taught
us a lot of very hard lessons that we almost couldn’t have recovered from.
“The big one was that as you grow overheads you need to have dependability and with supermarkets we’ve got that. So currently in Tesco and Morrisons there are beers that you can’t find outside of supermarkets in can format. And we do also have another couple of supermarket contracts lined up this year, too.
“I think it’s a great thing for consumers where they can go into a supermarket and pick a beer off the shelf at a reasonable price point and hopefully start their beer journey. I think something like Tripled Fruited Mango from Tesco or Peach and Passionfruit Bellini from Morrisons - these are beers that people can easily pick up, and have relatable flavours. They will then hopefully enjoy sour beer and look at where they can get more. Be that visiting a bottle shop to either pick up more Vault City or the other amazing UK sour breweries.”
Independent trade remains the lifebloodThey saw the spare room, which was a Customs and Excise warehouse and said ‘this is a bit strange’, Steven SmithHay, Vault City
of Vault City, while recent supermarket listings have given the brewery increased stability in a challenging market. But regardless of where you’re buying those beers, the goal for Smith-Hay and the team is to provide a quality enjoyable product and to also make sour beers more accessible for all.
He explains: “The name itself doesn’t do ourselves any favours. I don’t think the term ‘sour beer’ has the greatest connotations to people who don’t understand what the category is all about. I think, for us, we’re trying to flip the beer journey on its head. You tend to see people starting off with your IPAs and Pale Ales, maybe moving onto Stouts and they pick up a Saison and go ‘What’s this?
“You then often move onto appreciating Sours in the form of Lambic, Gueze and Berliner Weisse. Typically, that would be reserved for craft beer aficionados and probably at the end of your craft beer journey. But what we’re trying to do is to open up that category and be a lot more accessible to allow people to approach craft beer from the other side. So you’re trying Sour beers as your first drink. I believe that our beer can be more accessible than Pale Ales and IPAs. It can be something like Strawberry Sundae tasting like strawberries and cream or Cloudy Lemonade tasting like the lemonade you make at home.
“I think what has been really key to our growth is that accessibility and that it also does what it says on the tin. There’s nothing worse than you try a beer that says it tastes like chocolate, marshmallows and honeycomb and it just tastes of sadness. So we’re really keen to make sure that our beers do exactly what they say.”
While Vault City calls itself a brewer of modern sour beer, Smith-Hay also feels that such descriptors don’t tell the full story when it comes to the beers they produce.
“It almost needs its own entire set of BJCP guidelines. People talk about sour beer simply as sour beer but we talk about it framed as ‘Are we making a tropical beer? Are we making a Pastry beer? Are we making something berryforward?’. Take our collaboration with
Bruichladdich Distillery last year. We took a sour beer base with lemon verbena and we aged it in classic Bruichladdich barrels,” he says. “There’s such a wide spread available to us, such a broad palette that we can paint from. It almost does need its own definition, its own categories.
“It’s also quite funny to see to see people pointing at it and getting up in-arms about what we’re doing. Telling us that it isn’t beer and it’s all terrible. These people need to take a look at themselves and realise what they’re getting angry at. There’s a place in the world for Landlord and Oakham Citra and there’s a place in the world for Cookie Dough Dreamcake.”
Starting out in 2018, Vault City has always been focused on exploration. At the heart of their beers is the brewery’s house culture and mixed fermentation base beer paired with real fruit ingredients. And they use literal tonnes of it in their recipes. And they’ve come a long
way since Smith-Hay was brewing at home. Formative weeks and months that presented their own hurdles to overcome.
He recalls: “Homebrewing for me started I think around about 2011, using kit from the Morley Home Brew Centre. I picked up a Woodforde’s Wherry, and by the time that had finished fermenting I think I had another four buckets on the go. I started off trying to clone beers at the time such as Punk IPA and Innis and Gunn Rum Cask.
I made a SMASH beer, single malt, single hop. I didn’t understand single malt that well and used all black malt. That was horrendous, goes without saying! From there I progressed through to Grainfather 70 litre batches and I installed eight beer taps in my kitchen. It got to the stage where I was unable to give away the amount of beer that I wanted to produce.”
So the next obvious step was to start commercial brewery….
We’re trying to flip people’s beer journey on its head, Steven Smith-Hay, Vault City
“HMRC came around for a visit to see the kitchen, and to see the cellar. They saw the spare room, which was a Customs and Excise warehouse. ‘This is a bit strange, but we heard you wanted to start a brewery so we needed to have a look,’ they said.
“Environmental Health came around to make me install an automatic door closer on the kitchen door so the cat couldn’t get in when we were brewing. I also had to install a sign on my bedroom door saying ‘Customs and Excise WarehouseDo not enter if you have any cigarettes in your pocket or if you’re drinking a beer’. And things would soon escalate from there.
“We installed a 400 litre, three-vessel kit. I was a jumped-up homebrewer, which I still am. Though I still haven’t brewed properly on the equipment here, unfortunately. The kit was very much cobbled together, poor efficiency. But you know what, we made good beer,” he recalls. “It was fermented in the cellar in 200 litre batches, so a typical 400 litre batch was split two ways. Bottled by hand using the beer taps in the kitchen which was a long process. It would take all day to do 40 cases, all
bottled-conditioned in my spare room. I don’t think I could afford to keep the temperature that high during the current times!”
Smith-Hay adds: “And then we would jump about Edinburgh delivering it by hand. We quickly got recognition as being someone to watch. We landed at Beavertown’s Extravaganza festival and did all the craft beer festivals in the UK. There was an obvious demand and that was the point in which we had to ask ourselves do we continue this as a hobby or do we throw ourselves into a sour-only brewery. At the time that was just not a thing. There was no sort of brewery that had taken the all-sour route.”
“We looked at it and decided to give it a bash and that’s when we’d make the move to Dundee where 71 Brewing took us in. We took up home in their warehouse, using 500sqm space to fit in four 40HL FVs, two Meheen lines and some storage, too. That’s when we started building the brewery from the inside-out. Once we moved here to Portobello one of the last additions was actually the brew kit because we had everything else!”
Come January 2021, the team brewed their first beer at their current Portobello site. It’s a 5,000sqft site, moving from the four 40HL FVs at 71 Brewing to its 10 75s and the two 150s. Kit that makes the
facility feel smaller with each capacity addition. “We now need another site to continue growth,” he muses. And further growth is unsurprisingly high on the agenda for Vault City as we move through this year. Smith-Hay is excited
about the months ahead but he’s also mindful of the challenges the industry faces as a whole.
“Success in 2023 for a lot of people will be still existing. It’s a bleak landscape at the moment for a lot of breweries. So we’ve got a plan to get through,” he explains. “We talked earlier about the investment we’ve just put in. We’ve got a great accountant and the with the increase in energy costs, increase in staffing, increase in hire-purchase costs, loan repayments, they gave me an eye watering number that we need to hit every month to stay alive.”
Smith-Hay adds: “So a lot of the end of last year was spent trying to plan for the year ahead. That looks like a big growth in export, big growth in on-trade and we will continue sending out our rotational lines out to bars and bottle shops as that’s still our bread and butter, alongside growing our presence in supermarkets.
“The shift towards four packs and supermarkets can’t be missed. The single cans on shelves are shrinking and
shrinking while four packs are the future for supermarket sales. I know it’s not in my best interests to say this but I feel like when we task ourselves with making beer to a budget, we actually tend to make some of the best beer that we’ve made. Some of my personal favourite beers that we’ve made are our two core beers, Strawberry Sundae and Cloudy Lemonade. In my opinion these are exceptional beers and I can say that now because I have no longer have a hand in making stuff anymore…”
Increased presence in supermarkets all leads in to the brewery forecasting tripledigit growth again in 2023. But it’s not all about growth, either.
“We want to continue to ensure that we’ve got all of our costs captured and making sure that we try and be as good an employer as possible. We’ve got a lot of staff members to look after now. We need to make sure that the business is rock solid, and also that they’re taking a fair wage. I feel we are doing that.”
We are making sure that we try and be as good an employer as possible, Steven Smith-Hay, Vault City Revolutionize
It cannot be denied or underestimated that breweries have their specific flooring and drainage challenges. These can be related to hygiene, large liquid discharges, chemical resistance, health and safety (H&S), longevity and can even be determined by the lease of their brewery building.
Other factors include heavy traffic, impact from casks, beer, acid and caustic spillages; thermal cycling, aesthetics and humidity. These requirements influence floor design, drainage and materials selection.
Concrete, a highly robust flooring material that structurally supports any building, is widely used in breweries and has its own disadvantages. Concrete is porous and can absorb liquids, beer and caustic cleaning chemicals that can attack the cement matrix- resulting in the rapid breakdown of a concrete surface or worse. Concrete can dust when trafficked, which is far from ideal in a food & beverage environment. What’s more, the material can also deteriorate due to regular use from vehicular traffic, movement of heavy kegs, and pallet trucks.
A concrete floor is very important as it’s the structure that supports the building and the weight of any brew kit or fermentation vessels. A concrete floor is expensive to replace, so all efforts should be made to protect this very important part in a brewery.
Hygiene should be a top priority and brewers must ensure that their flooring solution has a hygienic surface, and it meets strict hygiene standards set for the food and beverage (F&B) industry on avoiding microbial growth.
According to EU law, any floor in a F&B facility should be impervious and easy to clean, concrete on its own does provide
this. Durability is next in importance, any flooring solution must be able to withstand rigorous cleaning that involves highly corrosive chemicals such as caustic and peracetic acid, thermal shock from hot water, high temperatures, thermal cycling and steam.
It’s also worth remembering that an appropriate drainage system, which is often-overlooked and under-specified, must also be installed to take away the waste liquids associated with beer production. It is recommended that either stainless steel, fully welded drainage channels or stainless-steel floor gullies are used.
These should be installed as near as possible to areas where the spillages or discharges take place - so that pipework can be directed straight into the drainage to avoid spillages running over the floor. In addition, an ideal drainage solution must include drainage “falls” which is another EU stipulation. Drainage “falls” also save clean down time as spillages don’t have to be squeezing away to drain. Flooring is a long-term investment, and brewers must conduct in-depth reviews of their facilities based on workload and their specific environment to identify key requirements before selecting a flooring solution.
Seeking external help from experts is a great way of getting relevant recommendations. For instance, Kemtile we advise breweries on all aspects of selecting appropriate flooring including tiling, drainage design, hygienic walling systems and much more that enable brewers to improve health and safety whilst leveraging longevity.
It goes without saying that spillages from water, chemicals and beer are common occurrences in brewing environments. Constantly wet floors lead to slippery
BREWERS HAVE THEIR OWN UNIQUE FLOORING NEEDS TO MEET THEIR BREWING DEMANDS. SO WHAT ARE THE MAIN FLOORING CHALLENGES FACING BREWERIES AND HOW CAN THEY BE ADDRESSED? DAVID PRIEST, KEY ACCOUNT MANAGER AND HEAD OF MARKETING AT AT KEMTILE EXPLAINS ALL.
floor surfaces that can result in an increased risk of slips, trips and falls. In fact, statistics from HSE show that slips and trips are a major cause of injuries in the UK workplaces. Brewers must install flooring in compliance with H&S advice and compliance by specifying slipresistant floor surfaces to reduce the risk. Moreover, health and safety isn’t a one-time thing, rather, it is an ongoing process. Brewers need to follow best practices day to day to ensure the flooring solution is maintained by regular cleaning so it retains its properties in the long-term.
Periodic on-site inspections can also be a great way to ensure the flooring is continuing to do its job effectively and brewing businesses can set these up with flooring experts once the job is completed. Choosing a flooring partner who is familiar with the industry’s process is a help here - together with proven install expertise.
Flooring specialists should be able to identify what sort of flooring and drainage is required and it does save time and effort if you are buying a ‘single source’
solution - so product and installation are all from the same company. Some providers can even offer support on other aspects of work - such as civil works - in a total turnkey solution. What’s more, brewers must also be confident that the company can meet all the required health and safety standards for the food and drink sector.
Look for providers who are certified by well-known accreditation schemes and
members of respected trade bodies. Accreditations with HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point), CHAS (Contractors Health and Safety Assessment Scheme), EHEDG (European Hygienic Engineering & Design Group) plus membership of FeRFA (the Resin Flooring Association) and other trade organisations reassure on compliance, health and safety, quality and high performance.
THE UK’S FIRST EVER MEAD FEST WAS A SOARING SUCCESS, ATTRACTING HUNDREDS OF VISITORS TO TRY THE ANCIENT HONEY-BASED DRINK WHICH, ACCORDING TO MARKET RESEARCHERS, LOOKS SET TO SEE A RENAISSANCE IN POPULARITY, SO CONTRIBUTING EDITOR MELISSA COLE WENT DOWN TO PICK UP ON THE BUZZ.
Fortune Business Analysis is predicting sales will more than treble globally to over one point five million dollars by 2028, and UK producers are starting to band together to ensure they get a slice of the action.
Speaking to journalists before Meadfest commenced at Gosnell’s meadery taproom in SE London, James Lambert, CEO of Lyme Bay, the largest UK producer of mead, said the highest hurdle was engaging consumers about what mead is and how broad the category is: “For us the biggest challenge is that the average consumer doesn’t necessarily know what mead is.
“We’ve seen growth of 20% in the past year and going back over the last 10 years we’ve had solid 10% growth yearon-year but if you asked me to define the consumer I couldn’t do it for you and whilst who know there is consumer demand via our own website, Amazon and other sales the biggest challenge is to get through the gatekeepers, who do you talk to about it? There is a buyer for cider, a buyer for wine but there aren’t category buyers for mead.
“For mead to gain real traction in the UK, we need listings in major retailers for the short to medium term growth of mead in the UK before we start to define mead styles.”
A sentiment Tom Gosnell, owner of Gosnell’s Mead, agrees with: “We’ve had a lot of long discussions about whether
we should be categorising our meads, we make very sessionable mead, which isn’t like the traditional stronger ones, but it remains that consumers are still not fully aware of what mead is exactly, which is one of the reasons we wanted to hold Meadfest.”
With 30 professional meaderies in the UK, the market still might be seen as niche, but it’s something that Gosnell
believes is ripe for expansion, especially if you make sure your product is seen as having more than one use.
“With our draught mead, we want to make sure it works hard for the venues, so we have some recipes like the Peckham Lemonade for quick cocktails that will yield extra GP from our tap.”
There’s also no doubt that there is a huge market for mead if it can tap into the key trends for consumers as well, which includes sustainability, natural products and a good story behind the brand, but it could also rely on innovation such as Gosnell’s head mead maker Will Grubelnik’s wine and mead making loves colliding in the limited release Pinot Noir Pyment, where stem and seed pinot noir grapes and mead collide, with the mead offsetting the tannins and bitterness of the seeds and stems with the former balancing out the sweetness of the latter allowing both mead and grape variety to sing in harmony.
Other meaderies that impressed on the day were Shire Meadery, with Dr Benjamin Guscott at the helm, based on campus at Aberystwyth University and taking a seriously science-based approach to mead, and Mountain Mead from Mike Cooke, who teases out the terroir of various honeys in a beautifully balanced fashion. And, for beer lovers, there’s a good start from Brood meadery, which is producing some hopped meads amongst others.
There is a buyer for cider, a buyer for wine but there aren’t category buyers for mead, James Lambert, Lyme Bay
Iguess you could say that craft beer has helped make beer fun again. And I think we are playing our part in doing that.”
In March, tens of thousands descended upon the Marshall Józef Piłsudski’s Municipal Stadium, the home of Legia Warsaw Football Club. But unlike upcoming games against Star Mielec and Raków Częstochowa, it’s not football the fans were in town for. No, it’s a passion of a different kind.
In March, the latest iteration of the Warsaw Beer Festival took place. And with it, there are some 1200 beers were on offer and much more, besides. The bi-annual event, co-founded by Paweł Leszczyński, showcases the best beers from he city of Warsaw, the country of Poland and beyond.
The latest festival came at a time where Warsaw has recently been crowned the ‘European Best Destination 2023’, winning the accolade over some 21 other European cities.
But before focusing on the present, let’s first take a step back. The brewing industry in Poland has a long and rich history and today, it is one of the largest beer producers in Europe and has a vibrant brewing culture with a variety of breweries and beer styles.
The two largest breweries in Poland are Kompania Piwowarska and Grupa Żywiec, which together account for over half of the country’s beer production. These companies produce well-known brands such as Tyskie, Żywiec, Lech, and Warka, which are widely available both domestically and internationally. However, the Polish beer market has also seen a growth in the number of small, independent breweries in recent
years. These craft breweries produce a variety of innovative and unique beer styles, often using local ingredients and traditional brewing techniques. But Polish beer styles are diverse and reflect the country’s brewing traditions and cultural influences. One such beer is Grodziskie, a traditional beer style that originated in the town of Grodzisk Wielkopolski in Poland. It is a smoked wheat beer that is characterized by its light body, refreshing acidity, and distinctive smoky flavour.
Grodziskie is brewed with a high proportion of smoked wheat malt, which gives it its characteristic smoky aroma and flavour. The beer is usually light in colour, ranging from pale yellow to straw, and has a low to moderate alcohol content. The smoke character can vary depending on the level of smoking of the wheat malt, but it is always present to some degree.
Pop into one of Warsaw’s many revered beer establishments and you’ll hopefully be able to enjoy a Grodziskie in some shape or form. But this style is now just a small part of the beer and brewing fabric that exists in the city, and beyond. Beer is widely enjoyed beverage in Poland. And in the last two decades, the volume of beer produced increased by more than 60 percent. The flourishing market provides employment to thousands and also supplies the government with billions of euros in beer excise duty annually.
According to research from Statista, 2022 saw the excise rate on beer in Poland amount to 9.43 zloty, an increase of 10 percent compared to the previous year. The excise duty on beer is forecast to reach over 12 zloty per one hectoliter for
AT A TIME WHERE GREAT BEER IS ON OFFER ACROSS MUCH OF EUROPE – WARSAW, AND POLAND MORE BROADLY – STANDS TALL WITH A MIX OF EXCITING YOUNG BREWERS THAT ALSO HAVE AN EYE ON TRADITION.
each Plato point in 2027. In the last two decades the average beer consumption per capita almost doubled and amounted to 5.1 liters in 2020. The report added that in terms of regional consumption, the Mazowieckie (Masovian) and the Śląskie (Silesian) voivodeships gathered the biggest population of beer devotees. In 2020, the two regions had the highest sold value of beer in Poland, both accounting for 2.24 billion zloty.
And moving to the present, there are more than 400 breweries in operation across the country. A figure that’s potentially closer to 450. Annually, these businesses are producing some 2500 different brews. Many of which will be on offer at the upcoming Warsaw Beer Festival.
Initially held in 2014, the festival was the first event of its kind in Poland. It continues to bring together modern Polish craft beer tastes and the hottest trends. Modern brewers in Poland are passionate, uncompromising and eager to challenge bland traditions to create striking, modern beers. And the Warsaw Beer Festival is the place to experience the best of the best.
“When we started this festival, Poland was something of a desert for good beer,” smiles Leszczyński. “If you wanted something modern, new, exciting that meant you had to go abroad and that wasn’t necessarily easy.”
He adds: “So when we first launched, we showcased lots of new breweries and lots of new beers. Let’s say there were some drinkable beers but some less so. But now, this year alone we have 1,200 beers on offer and I would say it is really hard to find one with flaws.
“The number of breweries has skyrocketed but, importantly, so has the quality. The breweries, on the most part in Poland truly care about the beer they are producing. They know you need quality ingredients, quality processes and a really good distribution model to succeed.”
Leszczyński is proud of the role that his festival has played in helping the craft
beer sector grow in Warsaw and Poland more widely.
“In the bigger cities, right now, everyone knows what craft beer is. Even if that is primarily only means that they know what an IPA is. It’s a start. These beers can sit alongside styles we have made well for a long time, such as Grodziskie and Baltic Porters. I truly believe that Baltic Porters in Poland are the best in the world,” he explains.
At the recent festival, and in the many bars in and around Warsaw, these beers are pouring in addition to a real wealth of other styles too. A Triple Fruited Gose? No problem. A Cherry Wild Ale? Easy. Bourbon Barrel-Aged Banana Stout? Of course…
And Leszczyński believes part of the the success of the craft beer “movement” is that there is something for everyone.
“Craft breweries have made beer fun again,” he says. “They’ve shown that beer doesn’t have to be a boring liquid with no taste. The invention, innovation and
passion is there for all to see. And the consumer is reacting to that.”
The Polish demographic enjoying these beers is represented at events such as the Warsaw Beer Festival. “There is a, sometimes lazy, preconception that craft beer drinkers are all white guys in their 30s. To that I say come to our event and you will see that the mix is much, much, more diverse,” he says. “It’s my mission to show that great beer is for everyone, not just a small, privileged crowd. And I think we are achieving that.”
The Polish craft sector has grown and evolved in recent years and, like in other geographies, Leszczyński believes that this happened for a number of reasons. “I really do believe that craft beer and the culture of craft beer happens in the opposition to something,” he says. “In the past, there was little tradition when it came to beer drinking. We mostly drank at home. But craft beer has made beer a social occasion, it has allowed people to experiment and do things their own way. And that is only a good thing.”
And in Warsaw, these beers can be found and enjoyed in a genuine mix of establishments. “We have the newest Old Town. Our Old Town is newer than the New Town, how often do you hear that!” he laughs. “But yes, there is a great mix, that’s for sure. You have the old, and you also have the new.”
Breweries both old, and new, pour their beers at the Warsaw Beer Festival. While one brewer exhibiting may produce only 200 litres per batch, another might export to countries across the globe. But for Leszczyński, they must share the same ethos if they want to play a part in the event.
“There is a common language in this world we call craft beer. And that is based on a love of creating a quality product that people can enjoy. It’s why we do what we do, and why we continue to do so. Seeing people produce great beer and enjoy great beer is what drives me. It gives me the energy to always strive for better, just like the industry we are part of here in Poland.”
There is a common language in this world we call craft beer. And that is based on a love of creating a quality product that people can enjoy. It’s why we do what we do, Paweł Leszczyński, Warsaw Beer Festival
TThe author was invited to present this work at the Brewers Congress in, London in December 2022. A ‘good place to be’ in terms of bulk beer dissolved oxygen in a Bright Beer Tank (BBT) would be 25 parts per billion (ppb) O2. Understanding real consumption of carbon dioxide in our production processes, and quantities available for harvesting, are the beginning of our picture of what is realistic and possible within our brewery walls…the first step in evaluating investment in carbon dioxide reclaim or enhanced reclaim processes. It is hoped that this paper will provide the toolkit for calculating what the Brewer needs to quantify. (Hint: it would be a fine project for a brewery engineering intern!) Table 1 presents data on how much CO2 is created in fermentation for an 11.2 deg Plato (SG 1.0448) wort, and the data represents the author’s past work in quantifying generation and recovery. Approximately 50% of the carbon dioxide created in fermentation is recoverable, but with use of a CO2 distillation set for gas purification into holding tank, the total recovery possible increases. A brewery distributes CO2 at a pressure about 1-2 Bar in process areas and
a maximum of 6 Bar in packaging. A 100,000 hL/year CO2 consumption would be (approximately):
Processing: 553,550 kg
Packaging: 186,700 kg
Total: 740,250 kg
Therefore, 7.4 kg CO2 are required per hectoliter
The amount of carbon dioxide required to maintain the top pressure on the beer in the BBTs would be of the order of 50,000 kg when the plant is running at 100,000 hL a year. And all that gas could be recovered.
For decades, the standard for gas purity was 99.5% and higher, yet add-on technology exists in the form of CO2 stills, where lower purity gas can be harvested. An enhanced recovery plant could be plumbed so that it it uses purge line gas from the existing plant as a feedstock.
When liquid CO2 from the bulk tank is vaporized its volume increases by 25 times, so the volumetric concentration of impurities in the gas phase is 1/25 that in the liquid. As these re-boiled gases rise through the liquid they absorb impurities
THIS PAPER BY JAIME JURADO, A PASTPRESIDENT OF THE MASTER BREWERS ASSOCIATION OF THE AMERICAS, REVIEWS HOW MUCH CARBON DIOXIDE IS AVAILABLE FOR RECOVERY, AND ANSWER THE QUESTION OF HOW MUCH IS REQUIRED. HE ALSO TOUCHES ON COMMON STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURES AND EXPLORES CALCULATIONS IMPORTANT IN THIS AREA. THIS PAPER WAS FIRST PRESENTED AT THE 2022 BREWERS CONGRESS.
from the liquid. Purification efficiency can be improved by using gas from the bulk tank to absorb impurities from the liquid exiting the liquefier before it reaches the bulk tank. This process occurs in a packed tower/still. The purity of CO2 could be 90% and the upgrading would be fine.
Table 2 is work shared by Chaz Benedict, who did an impressive quantity and quality of focused work on Dissolved Oxygen (DO) during his employment with Hach. He illuminates that the greater the impurity (oxygen) in the bulk carbon dioxide, the direct and immediate impact on beer in BBT. As one expects, the greater carbonation required, the greater the dissolved oxygen in beer. It seems counter-intuitive to look at influence of entrapped, minute quantities of air (oxygen) in bulk purchased CO2, but it’s good to remind ourselves that there is a direct impact on dissolved oxygen in the beer.
100 ppb DO at atmospheric pressure is equivalent to = 0.0076 mm (compared to 760 mm at sea level) - so the proportion dissolving in the beer is going to be minimal once you have a flat fill. BBTs always start filling with an agitated (sometimes it is described as ‘volcanic fill’!), but the desired fill state is quiescent so as to minimize gas absorption form the gas on top of the beer in the tank being filled.
We can fill BBT with de-oxygenated water & then push it out with CO2, and deploy a gas-phase tolerant oxygen sensor to the outlet of a CO2-only purge, and we would see that the transition between DAW-filled tank and transition is a sharp cutoff. Compare that with purging of air by CO2 gas, and the same
meter would present the change in composition of high-% air and 100% CO2 as a curve. Air and CO2 tend to mix, even with the quietest/slowest CO2 purge. Such common practices illuminates that the process requires more than just one tank-fill-equivalent of CO2. Filling the tank with de-aerated water (DAW) completely removes ALL air (so needs only a single tank-fill of CO2 to push out)
Different breweries have differing opinions and best-practices that are applied in purging air from BBTs and other tanks:
u Fill to 15 psi from bottom and purge slowly from the CIP arm twice (down to 1-5 psig)
u Low and Slow: low pressure CO2 in the bottom of tank and an open blow off: Use about 4psi CO2 feed for approximately 150 minutes to on a 100 bbl BBT….15 min/10 hLs
- Reference point: to get the DO reading under 500 ppb (max)...that reads as 95% CO2 on the Zahm & Nagel tool, Figure 1 or Pentair’s device for measuring CO2
quality.
u Purge properly transfer pipes / hoses / pumps etc. with DAW, and then blow out with CO2 (or nitrogen). Or purge first with CLT water, then blow out with CO2 (or nitrogen).
u Purge with water from CLT then push it back to CLT with CO2
Too often we know we waste CO2 at this stage. Specifically at Step 4 described below:
1. Pressurize tank with CO2 from 0.5-1.2 barg
2. Fill with beer, displacing CO2
3. Empty tank, maintaining CO2 pressure at original top pressure
4. De-pressurize tank, venting excess CO2
5. If greater than 6 rinses have been carried out, perform caustic or acidphase cleaning.
6. If caustic-washed, purge air from tank by blowing in 1 tank volume of CO2. The following section explores quantification of how much carbon dioxide is consumed in some familiar processes: Gas required for BBT processing, Gas required for processing five Hoyer tankers each week, Gas required for processing two BBTs twice
A. Gas displaced by beer in a BBT
Assume top pressure is 0.7 barg
Density of CO2 at 1 barg =1.951 kg/m3
Mass of CO2 = (0.1)(1.7)(1.951) = 0.331 kg/hL
B. Gas released by de-pressurization
Mass of CO2 = (0.1)(0.7)(1.951) = 0.137 kg/hL
C. Gas required for purging (note that a common “purge volume” in a vertical tank is “1/7” of the tanks overall volume.
Mass of CO2 = (0.1)(1.951)(1/7) = 0.0.279 kg/hL
Total = A + B + C = 0.4959 kg/hL
Five Hoyer Tankers per week, 190 hL each
Each tanker is 19 m3 volume
Filling against top pressure of CO2 which is vented
mCO2 = (1.5)(1.951)(19) = 54.58 kg… (assume top pressure is 0.5 bar g)
Each year: mCO2 = (50)(5)(54.58) = 13.6 T
Then purging usage...and assume Four tank volumes of CO2 used
mCO2 = (4)(1.951)(19) = 145.5 kg
Annual mass = (5)(50)(145.5) = 36.38 T
Total consumption is 13.6+36.38 = 50 T/year
2 BBTs- each emptied twice daily, 100 hL each
Each BBT is 10 m3 volume; caustic-based CIP once/week (each tank)
Filling against top pressure of CO2 which is vented
mCO2 = (2)(5)(1.7)(1.951)(10) = 331 kg… (top pressure is 0.7 bar g)
De-pressuring: Each week: mCO2 = (2)(0.7)(1.951)(10) = 27 kg
Then purging usage…assume 2 tank volumes of CO2 used in purging
mCO2 = (2)(10)(1.951)(2) = 78 kg
Total weekly mass = 331 + 27 + 78 = 431kg
Annual mass = (50)(431) = 21,555 kg = 21.55 T (ie, typical for a 100,000 hL annual regional brewery)
Lagering tanks caustic-CIPd after every use: Each tank is purged by blowing CO2 through tank
Mass of pressurized CO2 displaced by beer:
mCO2 = (0.1)(1.7)(1.951)= 0.326 kg/hL… (top pressure is 0.7 bar g)
Mass released by De-pressuring: mCO2 = (0.1)(0.7)(1.951)= 0.13 kg/hL
Assume 1 vol CO2 used in purging air from tank after CIP...
mCO2 = (0.1)(1.951)= 0.195 kg/hL
Total Mass CO2 consumed = 0.326 + 0.13 + 0.195 = 0.65 kg/hL
daily, and an Ageing tank/Lagering Tank that is CIP’d after every emptying. The calculations are all similar, and these examples form a calculation template that can be adopted and implemented for calculations in your brewery. The author hopes you find them useful examples.
Please note that decisions about how long to purge can vary widely, and there is no standard. In broad strokes,
horizontal tanks would require more CO2 purging because ethe beer surface area is so greater than in a vertical tank. In the sample calculations below, the author applies different quantities of purge gas in the situations. He certainly knows that many breweries do not have gas meters to measure CO2 consumption at usage point, and that many breweries are satisfied in using a timed period of purging. Yet… a quality gas meter that
displays totalized CO2 applied…is a good investment and allows a true picture of CO2 usage to present itself.
The brewer has several options available for recovering Carbon Dioxide, and more are coming. Not long ago, a brewery would need to approach 1 million hL a year to justify a comprehensive and robust carbon dioxide recovery system. The craft brewer today is facing unprecedented and rising costs for its CO2 purchases, and fortunately there are solutions available to them to harvest their carbon dioxide and greatly reduce outside purchases. We already see these new solution-providers display their technologies and trade studies and offer case studies. An exciting future for their right-sized engineering is on our horizon. The author, past-President of the Master Brewers Association of the Americas, is grateful for the opportunity he enjoyed in being invited to the memorable Brewers’ Congress in December, 2022 in Islington, organised by the Brewers Journal, especially as it allowed him a reason to travel from Pennsylvania and celebrate Derek Prentice being honoured. Across the author’s 39 years in brewing (which includes three years in distillation, flavoured malt beverages, natural/ botanical soft drinks and cannabis beverages), he has never encountered as inspirational and wonderful role model as Derek, whom he met when he joined as a Junior Engineer at the Truman, Hanbury & Buxton Brewery in 1984. Some years later, he had the privilege to return to the UK and work on optimisation projects at Courage Berkshire Brewery, and he was delighted to be inspired by its leaders Greg Stones and Paddy Johnson. In late 2022, he took up new employment in one of the world’s largest chocolate plants in Northeastern Pennsylvania where he appreciates wonderful and exciting processes with his (patient) Cargill colleagues who express such passion for quality chocolate… yet he knows it was his tenure in brewing beer where he found his place. He is fortunate in serving as Plant Superintendent at Cargill Cocoa & Chocolate, NA in Hazleton, Pennsylvania today.
Yeast is a living organism (a single cell fungi) capable of converting sugars to alcohol. Yeast colonises or “infects” the fermentation, using nutrients to produce new yeast and to build up energy until all the available nutrients are used.
When all the nutrients are depleted, the yeast settles out and goes into “hibernation”, or stationary and settlement phase until they are presented with more nutrients, allowing them to grow and multiply again.
The science or craft of the brewer is to manage this process to produce an effective fermentation. The brewer has to have a system to introduce the yeast into the wort to start the fermentation and remove the yeast again once its work is complete.
Yeast management in the brewery is part of a continuous cycle of cropping followed by serial re-pitching, with excess yeast being removed and sold as a brewery co-product and new yeast being introduced as a brewery culture.
Fermentations can be pitched with yeast recovered from a previous brew or with a new batch of yeast grown up from a culture in the brewery or commercial dried or stabilised liquid culture. The yeast cells must be thoroughly mixed with the cooled and aerated wort from the brew house to ensure an efficient fermentation.
The most effective yeast mixing is by pitching in line during the transfer of the cold wort from the wort cooler to the fermenting vessel. It is essential that the pitching yeast used is in a healthy condition.
The excess yeast is either sent to waste or goes forward into the maturation tank along with the green beer.
Before pitching, the yeast should be checked for microbial contamination (contaminants should be absent), yeast density (number of cells per ml), yeast viability (% live cells - >95%), yeast vitality (physiological status of yeast - healthy), and temperature of storage (yeast normally stored cool 2 – 4oC).
During fermentation the number of yeast cells increase by between three and five times, but the initial pitching rate must be sufficient to ensure that there are an adequate number of cells present to fully utilise all the available sugars. Pitching rate required depends on:
u Original gravity
u Yeast strain
u Type of beer (ale or lager)
u Fermentation temperature
u Fermentation design
A typical Ale fermentation requires a pitching rate of around 8 to 10 million cells per millilitre or 0.5 litres of yeast slurry per hectolitre of wort for at 1045 (11.25%) gravity.
A typical Lager fermentation, which is generally carried out at a slightly lower temperature, is pitched at a slightly higher rate around 15 million cells per millilitre or 0.75 litres of yeast slurry per hectolitre of wort at 1045 (11.25%) gravity.
It is important that most of the yeast cells pitch are alive. Usually, yeast used for re-pitching will have over 95% living cells. The number of living cells are reduced by poor storage conditions or excessive acid washing. Under pitching the wort will result in a slower fermentation which can lead to:
1. Longer lag phase before fermentation starts (this may also give bacteria an opportunity to thrive and grow before true fermentation gets going)
2. Inadequate attenuation leading to incomplete utilisation of wort sugars and higher than specification final gravity.
EFFECTIVE FERMENTATION IS A SCIENCE AND A CRAFT.
HERE TIM O’ROURKE, TECHNICAL EDITOR OF THE BREWERS JOURNAL, EXPLAINS THE ROLE YEAST PITCHING AND PROPAGATION PLAYS IN THAT PROCESS.
3. Low yeast count at the end of fermentation resulting in longer diacetyl stand and potential flavour problems.
4. Because of the longer fermentation cycle yeast health may suffer resulting in a poorer fermentation when the yeast is used again.
But how do we control yeast count at pitching? There are several techniques which can be used to calculate pitching rate. The four most common ones are:
The slurry is carefully diluted and transferred to a hemacytometer cell where the number of yeast are counted. This is the standard reference method and by knowing the dilution is possible to calculate the total yeast in the slurry. The pros of this method are that it is simple to use, requires a low investment and results can be obtained quickly. The respective cons here are that it is open to human error, difficult to interpret and the process measures all cells including dead cells. Results need correcting for
viable cells only.
To correct for yeast viability the sample is stained with methylene blue where dead cells stain blue under the microscope and live active cells are colourless.
The NucleoCounter® YC-100™ is an automated cell counter which uses a camera to count the total number of yeast cells and a fluorescent dye, propidium iodide (PI) which is a nuclear staining (nucleic acid binding) dye that enters dead cells with compromised membranes and identifies the dead cells give an accurate measure of live yeast cells.
While this is simple, quick and reliable, it also requires the use of an expensive instrument and also requires calibration.
A slower method involves plating out a sample and growing and counting the number of yeast colonies. Living cells
with grow showing viable colonies only. Using slide culture results are available after 18 hours while using plate culture it takes three days. While it delivers accurate results, it can be affected by growth conditions while flocculant strains can aggregate giving a false count.
Commonly used in conjunction with a centrifuge it gives a measure of the wet yeast solids as a sediment and can be calibrated to give a reasonable approximation of yeast cells as shown below with results from Wyeast Labs USA. While this method is rapid and simple, it also requires calibration.
Yeast Capacitance (Kell Cell) Live cells (with complete plasma membranes) produce electrical capacitance when placed in an electric field. The total number of live cells are counted as they pass the probe. It works by putting an electrostatic charge onto each living yeast cell and then recoding the number of pulses as it passes a sensor.
This option is very accurate for living cells (intact plasma membranes). It also gives a total number of viable cells pitched while being rapid and simple. However, it requires calibration and there is a cost involved.
Image copy from Ray Anderson Brew Hist 121 pp 6 2005
Hansen’s Pure Yeast Culture Apparatus 1883Up until the end of 19th Century, Brewers either relied on the natural floral in the Brewery or back slopping (re-pitching) as the source of yeast in fermentation.
Carlsberg Brewery in Copenhagen had sourced their yeast from Spaten Brewery in Munich but in 1883 it developed “yeast sickness” and investigations showed it was due to a major infection by a wild ellipsoid shaped yeast.
The chief microbiologist Emil Christen Hansen was able to separate the two yeasts and developed industrial equipment to grow up (propagate) the pure yeast culture which quick spread and adopted by brewers around the world.
Repeated cropping and re-pitching of yeast can lead to poor fermentations and pick up of yeast and bacterial contamination. To reduce this risk a new yeast culture should be grown. The reason for yeast propagation include:
1. Eliminating mutant yeast cells
2. Eliminating bacterial infection which can produce ATNC (nitrosamine control).
3. Replacing ageing yeast cells which cause slowing down of rate of reproduction.
4. Replacing ageing yeast cells which have changes to cell surface effecting flocculant behaviour.
5. Replacing ageing yeast cells which often show different metabolic behaviour and flavour of beer.
6. Removing dead and dying cells which contribute proteases which attack foam proteins & produce unwanted flavour notes.
7. There is a reduction in viability &
vitality over time - re-establish strain proportions.
The yeast cultures used for propagation are usually stored in a central location under liquid nitrogen at -1960C to reduce any deterioration to the yeast cells. This culture is used to produce yeast slopes which can be used by the Brewery Laboratory to prepare yeast for propagation. These slopes have up to 6 months shelf life un-opened in a standard fridge and a scrape of yeast cells are removed to produce a start culture.
When planning yeast pitching or propagation system it is necessary to grow the yeast up incrementally. Usually the first stages are under aerobic conditions which encourages yeast growth and yields higher concentrations of yeast cells per ml when compared to fermentation conditions.
Yeast from long term storage is replated onto an agar slope for immediate use and stored for up to two weeks in a fridge.
A scrape of yeast from the agar slope is transferred to sterile wort and shaken to allow them to grow.
The first stages are carried out in the laboratory starting from a slope, and after around 20 litres of culture has been produced it is transferred to the Brewery propagation plant.
The last stage of yeast propagator is usually run near pitching temperature (to avoid thermal shock) and as a fermentation to retain the flavour profile of the beer.
It is usual to transfer the whole content of each vessel to the next vessel which should contain sterile wort and the transfer should be made while the yeast
is still actively budding to eliminate the lag phase.
Yeast growth is carried out in normal sterile brewer’s wort with the addition of zinc salts for yeast growth and antifoam to prevent excess fobbing during aeration.
Yeast should be transferred during active growth (budding) to maximise growth and to avoid it progressing to stationary phase.
Fermentations can be pitched with yeast recovered from a previous brew or with a new batch of yeast grown up from a culture in the brewery or commercial dried or stabilised liquid culture. The yeast cells must be thoroughly mixed with the cooled and aerated wort from the brewhouse.
Typical pitching rates:
u Ale yeast generations 8 - 20 or even 100’s
u Lager yeast generations 4 - 16, average 4 – 8
u Dried yeast is generally only used once and sent to waste.
1. Hough, Briggs and Stephen “Malting and Brewing Science”
2. Lewis and Young “Brewing”
3. Ray Anderson The Transformation of Brewing: An Overview of Three Centuries of Science and Practice Brew Hist Soc 121 pp 5 – 24 2005
4. Dr Hilary - Yeast Propagation Brewers Guardian Articles Yeast Series October 1997
5. Tim O’Rourke – Yeast Fermentation –Brewers Journal B2N7 2022
Significantly reduce microbial stabilisation costs, while protecting the sensory appeal of your beer
Sterile filtration is a gentle alternative to pasteurisation, lengthening the shelf-life of your beer at reduced costs in energy consumption, water usage and waste product. It is proven to retain the unique and desired characteristics of your beer better than traditional pasteurisation techniques. BEVPOR BR filters offer the longest service life and therefore the most efficient and lowest cost of operation for sterile filtration applications.
To find out more, visit Parker.com/BevporBR
BEVPOR BR Filters
THOM STONE IS THE FOUNDER OF NOTTINGHAM-BASED LIQUID LIGHT BREWING COMPANY. A LOVE OF SIMCOE WAS THE INSPIRATION BEHIND HIS FIRST RECIPE, WHICH IS ALSO SHARED OVERLEAF.
Recipe creation has always been my favourite part of brewing. Right from the start I was uninterested in going down the route of premade kits, and after months of obsessive research I developed and brewed my first recipe. This was originally a dry malt extract (DME) recipe with steeping grains and several additions of a single hop, in this case Simcoe. I knew I loved Simcoe from drinking various beers containing the hop and it is still one of my favourites to this day, despite often having some unpredictable variability in flavour.
Although this beer never ended up making it onto the Liquid Light roster, I did reformulate the recipe to make our very popular hazy table beer – Obscured By Clouds.
Before we get into the nitty gritty of recipe details, here are a few tips that will help you in your homebrewing journey. Keep good notes. Take notes at every stage of the process, whether this be timings, PH, temperature, or simply tasting notes. It’s amazing how often you will forget the small details, making it hard to make tweaks to recipes and process down the line.
Talking of which, change one thing at a time. If my school science teacher Mr. Brockbank taught me anything, it was to minimise your variables. Treating brewing as a scientific experiment may not sound like the most exciting approach to some, but applying this basic principle will allow you to really learn something with every brew.
If you are not happy with your brew, then think about what you would like to change and choose one improvement at a time. For example, the first time I brewed this recipe, I had issues with fusel alcohols due to lack of temperature control, so decided to use a less vigorous yeast with less of a lag time. This resulted in a much cleaner beer with no off flavours and less yeast character, really allowing the hops to shine through. Which leads me neatly to the next point - Temperature control. Despite brew day being the fun part, beer is made in fermentation. I can’t stress enough how much a good method for temperature control will transform your brews.
Whether you’re fermenting with a Kveik strain at around 30c or a lager strain at 12c. The ability to keep the beer at the correct temperature and even raise it for a diacetyl rest will not only make for far cleaner brews, but also improve consistency. Obviously, there are many other things to consider when trying to improve the quality of your beer. Including but not limited to, sanitising, ingredient quality, water profiles and carbonation methods. But many people have covered these better than I could, so I suggest seeking out some good books or podcasts on the subject.
Liquid Light’s taproom in NottinghamRECOMMENDED READING
Home Brew Beer – Greg Hughes – 2013
Mastering Homebrew – Randy Mosher – 2015
IPA – Mitch Steele – 2012
The Joy of Homebrewing - Charlie Parpazian – 4th Edition – 2014
For the Love of Hops – Stan Hieronymus – 2012
Water: A Comprehensive Guide for Brewers - John J. Palmer – 2013
Yeast: The Practical Guide to Beer Fermentation – Chris White & Jamil Zainasheff – 2010
Malt: A Practical Guide from Field to Brewhouse – John Mallet – 2014
How to Brew – John J. Palmer – revised edition – 2017
REQUIRED LISTENING:
Basic Brewing Radio – James Spencer Et al. – 2005 to present
Brewing With Style – The Brewing Network – Jamil Zainasheff Et al. – 2013 to 2017
The Jamil Show - The Brewing Network – Jamil Zainasheff Et al. – 2006 - 2009
It’s amazing how often you will forget the small details, making it hard to make tweaks to recipes and process down the line.” Thom Stone, Liquid Light Brewing.
This is my recipe for a West Coast style American Pale ale. I have included malt extract and all grain versions. Exact strike and sparge temperatures will depend on what kit you are using. Homebrew equipment has come on leaps and bounds since I last brewed at this scale so I will leave that to your own experience with your gear.
I have left out any water additions as this will be dependent on source water. When using extract, I can recommend using RO (reverse osmosis) water, usual available from local Aquarium supplies store or garden centre.
This is because malt extract will innately have its own water profile due to the process of making it. General rule of thumb for a beer like this is to lean towards sulphates over chlorides, roughly in a 2 to 1 ratio.
Although some brewers swear by all-in-one water treatment products, I personally like to use separate Calcium Chloride and Calcium Sulphate. This gives you much more control over your ratios and gives you more choice of water profiles for various styles.
Bitterness level here may look low, but I have always found
5.3% ABV / 12.5 Plato
85% efficiency
Batch Volume: 23l
Boil Time: 60 min
Mash Water: 16.64 L
Sparge Water: 13.96 L
Total Water: 30.6 L
Boil Volume: 27.5 L
Pre-Boil Gravity: 1.046
Temperature — 65 °C — 60 min
Vitals
Original Gravity: 1.050
Final Gravity (Fixed): 1.010
IBU (Tinseth): 32
BU/GU: 0.64
Colour: 7.7 EBC
that it is best to err on the side of caution at this scale. It’s very easy to overdo the IBU’s with a high alpha hop like Simcoe. However, Simcoe does have a low cohumulone percentage, meaning the bitterness should be smoother than some other hops of similar AA%. However, if you know your kit and what bitterness levels you like then go ahead and tweak the early additions to suit.
Once crashed go ahead and package as desired. Although when I first brewed this, I was still bottle conditioning, it didn’t take long for me to graduate to corny kegs. A batch size of about 23 litres should leave you with around 19L of beer for a corny after all losses to yeast and dry hops. Make sure you syphon gently to the bottom of a clean purged corny, trying to avoid oxidation.
Once you’ve brewed a few other people’s recipes or cloned a few commercial beers I can highly recommend having a go at formulating your own. There are lots of free websites and apps for recipe formulation (one of my personal favourites being BrewFather). Before you know it, you will be writing more recipes than you possibly have time to brew just for fun… or is that just me.
Hops (223.4 g)
3.4 g (7 IBU) — Simcoe 13% — Boil — 60 min
30 g (9 IBU) — 5% — Boil — 10 min
40 g (17 IBU) — Simcoe 13% — Boil — 5 min
Malts (380 g) If using malt extract, steep these grains in muslin bags in wort for 30 mins @70°C
190 g (4.5%) — Caramel/Crystal Malt — Grain — 19.7 EBC
190 g (4.5%) — Briess Carapils — Grain —
2.6 EBC
Other (3.85 kg)
3.85 kg (91%) — Muntons Light Malt Extract — Liquid Extract — 4.9 EBC OR
4 kg (91.3%) — Crisp Extra Pale Malt — Grain — 3.4 EBC
50 g — Simcoe 13% — Aroma — 0 min
80°C hopstand
100 g — Simcoe 13% — Dry Hop — day 5
Yeast
2 pkg — Fermentis US-05 Safale American 81%
Fermentation
Primary — 19-21°C — 4 days
Dry Hop — 14 °C — 3 days
Crash — 3 °C — 7 days
Carbonation: 2.4 CO2-vol
Left Handed Giant recently installed a 36 kilowatt solar PV system that is generating electricity for them at just 3p per kWh.
That compares with the 15p to 18p that most businesses their size are paying for power from the grid.
It’s not surprising that LHG’s Finance Director was so enthusiastic about it.
CleanEarth have done solar installations for half a dozen breweries in the past year or so. Between them they will see savings of more than £1.2 million over the next 25 years. They’ll also prevent nearly 1,500 tonnes of CO2 from entering the atmosphere.
Callum’s right. From both the environmental and the financial perspective it’s a complete no-brainer.
Free site survey and energy audit
Call Ed Lennon on 01208 895576
cleanearthenergy.com
Callum Bickers, Left Handed Giant
Goodh Brewing Co Ludlow Brewing Co Moor Beer Verdant Brewing Co Wiper & True
YOU MAY HAVE SEEN THE INITIALS “OG” AND “FG” ON A RECIPE, BUT WHAT DO THESE MEAN? ORIGINAL GANGSTER? FINAL GOAL? FUNKY GORILLA? HERE ROBERT NEALE OF THE MALT MILLER EXPLAINS ALL.
These are references to “specific gravity”: in short, a measurement of the density of a liquid. On this scale, 1.000 is water. Anything thicker than water (beer, blood, etc.) is higher. You can measure specific gravity with tools like a hydrometer or a refractometer. Let’s find out how to use these and why gravity measurements are useful…
When we make beer, we dissolve sugars from malt into water, making it more dense than water alone. Yeast consumes these sugars during fermentation, so we can see how fermentation is going by checking the gravity of our brew. The beer will become less dense as the sugars are eaten up; once the gravity stops changing, we can assume the yeast is finished.
This is important as many recipes require steps to be taken at particular points in fermentation. You might see an instruction to raise the temperature for a diacetyl rest when your beer reaches a specific gravity, or to add dry hops. Measuring the gravity of your brew gives you a true picture of the progress of your fermentation, far more so than looking at bubbles in an airlock. Even when there are no bubbles visible, fermentation can still continue, shown by small gravity drops.
When you see an OG reading on recipes, you can think of this as a target or expected value: depending on your equipment and how well your brew goes, you may get a slightly different reading. So always take your own OG measurement before
you pitch your yeast. Final gravity (FG) is the gravity when fermentation is finished. Again, on recipes this is an expected value based on the typical characteristics of the yeast used and the malts in your recipe. When your beer reads the same gravity for two to three days and is in the region of the expected target, this is your final gravity number.
As well as showing you the progress of your fermentation, measuring gravity also lets us take a reasonable guess at the level of alcohol in the beer. When yeast eats sugars, it releases carbon dioxide (hence the bubbles through your airlock) and ethanol (alcohol). By measuring how much of the sugars in the beer have been consumed by the yeast, we can calculate a rough ABV.
To estimate the ABV, you need to know both your OG and FG. On our website have a calculator that`will work out the ABV based on the difference between the two gravity readings. However, this is not a true measure of ABV – it wouldn’t get past Trading Standards! To calculate a true level of alcohol you have to account for ethanol being less dense than water, which is more complex. But for homebrew purposes –knowing if your latest creation is a session pint or if a half will knock you flat – the simple calculation should suffice.
Good recipes always include an expected OG and FG value. However, this is just an estimate, based on assumptions about the amount of sugars in the types of grain included and how efficiently these sugars can be released during the mash. In reality, OG can be affected by everything from the particular extract yield for a particular batch of malt – they can change from harvest to harvest! – as well as factors like mash temperature, water volumes, your particular equipment, etc. Similarly, your actual final gravity will depend on the specific circumstances of your mash, the health of your yeast, etc.
There are so many assumptions and interconnected variables required to calculate OG and FG values that it’s no surprise the
Refractometers will give you an immediate picture of how efficient your mash is.
numbers sometimes don’t line up as you expected. If you’ve ever looked at a recipe in a book or in our shop and wondered why the OG and FG numbers don’t match those that come up in your preferred recipe builder app, this can be why. It’s vital, therefore, to take your own gravity readings so you can track how your beer actually comes out. With real data from your own brews, you may find you can adjust variables in your recipe app – such as brewhouse efficiency – to match the expected gravity values in a recipe to the way your brews actually go.
To measure the gravity of your beer you’ll need a measuring tool such as a hydrometer or refractometer.
Traditional hydrometers: These look a bit like glass cooking thermometers, and they are weighted to float in liquid. You read the scale on the stem at the waterline. You can put the hydrometer directly into the beer in your fermenter to get a reading, but most brewers draw a sample into a trial jar first. This eliminates any risk from opening up the fermenter lid and the need to sanitise the hydrometer. If you’re midfermentation, the krausen (the foamy head created by the yeast) will also make it nearly impossible to read the hydrometer correctly. Pulling off a sample means you can swirl off any bubbles in the way and take your time with the reading. Getting a reading is really simple: just drop the hydrometer into the sample and let it settle. When it’s stable and not bobbing, look at where the waterline of your sample
meets the stem of the hydrometer. In a narrow trial jar, you might see a slight curve where the liquid meets the glass stem – this is a meniscus like you see at the edge of a glass of water. Try to ignore the curve and read at the flat part of the waterline. It’s important to avoid having chunks of hop debris or yeast in your sample to help get a clear and accurate reading.
One thing to bear in mind is most traditional hydrometers are calibrated to 20°C (look on the original tube for your hydrometer to check this). If you take a reading of liquid at significantly lower or higher temperatures, it might need to be corrected for accuracy. Fortunately, we have a calculator online to to help. Another thing to note about this kind of hydrometer is that, because they’re made of glass, they’re really fragile, and they are weighted to make them float. This means they have an unfortunate tendency to roll off worktops and smash just when you need them. It’s a good idea to store your hydrometer in the plastic tube it came in, and to only take it out when you’re about to make a measurement.
A good all-round hydrometer is our triple scale hydrometer. This allows you to measure from 0.990 up to 1.170 and has highlighted scales for normal beer and wine ranges. Pair this with a trial jar and you’re set for pretty much any fermentation. If you want a little more precision in your readings, a large scale hydrometer is the key: these read smaller ranges of gravity, so the divisions on the scale are larger, making it easier to see the exact measurement. For lower gravities, use our 1.000-1.060 range hydrometer. For higher gravities, use
our 1.050-1.100 range hydrometer. Depending on the beer you’re making, you may need both, or just the lower range hydrometer (a 5% ABV beer will usually start at an OG around 1.050).
Digital hydrometers: If you want frequent gravity readings (and the fun of automated data collection), a digital hydrometer is a good upgrade. These work on the same principle as traditional hydrometers – they calculate gravity based on how they float – but combine this with wireless digital technology such as Bluetooth or Wifi. They are usually designed to be left in your brew throughout fermentation, allowing you to get real-time fermentation readings without having to draw samples or open up your fermenter. Most digital hydrometers also measure the temperature of your wort – because they are sitting right in your brew, this can be a much more accurate picture than thermometers stuck outside the fermenter. Because they float in your fermenter, the measurements from digital hydrometers can be affected by the foam from fermentation (krausen) or floating hop debris from dry hops. This can make them a little less accurate than a traditional glass hydrometer. We prefer to use both kinds of hydrometers together – using a glass hydrometer for OG and FG readings, and a digital hydrometer to get a real time picture during fermentation.
The Tilt wireless hydrometer is the original Bluetooth digital hydrometer and comes in a variety of colours – very helpful if you want to run multiple Tilts across different fermenters. The Bluetooth signal is strong enough to transmit through steel fermenters and fridge doors, but you can further extend the range with the Tilt Repeater. The Tilt Pro is the bigger brother
to the regular Tilt and is designed for large fermenters (60 litres / half bbl and upwards). The extra size means it’s more stable through vigorous fermentations, and the sensors read to an ultra-precise four decimal places (e.g. 1.0000) for even more detail on your beer. You get improved Bluetooth range and battery life too.
Refractometers: You can also measure gravity during and after your mash. This will give you an immediate picture of how efficient your mash is, meaning you can make adjustments before your boil, such as adding malt extract to make up for a less efficient mash, or diluting down a stronger wort. However, because hydrometers are calibrated to work best at fermentation temperatures, they are not accurate at typical mash temperatures, so for this scenario it is best to use a refractometer.
Refractometers work by passing light through a very small sample. Sugar refracts light differently than pure water, so by measuring the level of refraction you can see how much sugar is in your wort. To use a refractometer, take a small sample from your wort. You only need a few millilitres, so a pipette or syringe is ideal for this. Put a droplet of wort onto the glass lens, close the lid, then hold the refractometer up to the light. Look through the viewing end and adjust the lens until the scale comes into focus. A line will run across the scale at the gravity reading for your sample.
Because alcohol will affect the readings through a refractometer, you need to calculate and apply a correction factor if you use a refractometer for mid- or post-fermentation gravity readings. We find it’s overall more accurate to use a hydrometer for fermentation readings, and keep our refractometer for mash gravity readings instead.
Sysmex is proud to introduce our innovative, rapid solution, specifically developed for use in industrial microbiology testing environments.
Proven for a variety of microbial applications such as yeast viability, total bacteria and viable bacteria
Delivers productivity, standardisation and simplicity on a single platform
Provides accurate enumeration of microorganisms in comparison to traditional assays such as plating and microscopy
The perfect solution for process control in distilling, brewing and beverage-producing industries
For further information or to request a virtual product demonstration, please email flowcytometry@sysmex.co.uk uk.sysmex-flowcytometry.com
•
•
•
•
•
www.enterprisetondelli.co.uk info@enterprisetondelli.co.uk
Realtime fermentation gravity and temperature monitoring with graphing, optional remote temperature control and our new CO2 purge device.
www.dotmatix.net
020 3475 1420
Gravity Systems was formed to meet the growing demand in the craft beer market for a single source for all brewhouse, fermentation, services generation and distribution. www.gravity-systems.co.uk
+44 (0)1733 834264 enquiries@gravity-systems.co.uk
www.bestmalz.com
PakTech designs and manufactures 100% recycled, recyclable and reusable packaging handles. PakTech is the smart and sustainable packaging solution.
www.paktech-opi.com
handlesales@paktech-opi.com
Phone: +1.541.461.5000
www.carlingpartnership.com
+44 (0)1483 893 100
YEAST
Est 1809
www.fawcett-maltsters.co.uk
+44 (0)1977 552490 sales@fawcett-maltsters.co.uk
www.lallemandbrewing.com
+44 (0)7930 451687
Since 1774, Rankin continues to supply reliable closures that help seal, protect and add value to your brands.
www.rankincork.co.uk
sales@rankincork.co.uk
+ 44 (0)1844 203100
www.simpsonsmalt.co.uk
+44 (0)1289 330033
www.galxc.co.uk
+44 (0)23 8086 7168
We supply the finest quality kegs & casks in the world, manufactured to the highest industry specifications. We provide 50 litre kegs, 30 litre kegs, 4.5 gallon Pins & 9 gallon Casks.
www.keglogistics.com/united-kingdom
+44 (0)7734 035562 SHorrox@keglogistics.com
Fermentis is an expert in the art of fermentation. Our active dry yeasts and yeast derivatives cover almost all professional requirements: from safeguarding production to expressing sensory characteristics.
Discover our products on www.fermentis.com
Contact us at fermentis@lesaffre.com
