We Brought Homebrew: IPA edition (now with added entry requirements)

We're pleased to announce that we're going to run linked sessions for February and March at the We Brought Beer Homebrew Club. The February session (Feb 16th) will be on the critical appreciation of beer (we have special guest, Chris Hall joining us) and the March session (Mar 15th) will be about judging beer. In order for club members to get the most out of these two sessions we have invited them to brew an IPA and bring it along to the March meeting where it will be judged by all attendees. This can be any type of IPA, e.g. single, double, triple IPA, Belgian IPA, black or white IPA. It can be a clone of a famous example of the style, a revisit of a traditional recipe, or something entirely new. The beer can be all extract or all grain or anything in between. The only limiting factor for the beer is that it must be broadly recognisable as an IPA. We are brewing our own entry today. 

We are really looking forward to trying all the entries. But first, we'll be putting on our thinking caps for the next meeting and learning how to taste beer. Make sure you bring your notebooks.

Will you brew a clone of a famous IPA?

IPA Challenge: Entry Requirements 

If you are planning on bringing an IPA (which you have brewed) to enter in the IPA Challenge on March 15th then please do the following things in order to assist us with the organisation on the night:

• Bring your entry upstairs as soon as you arrive so that we can assign you and your beer with an ID No. and get them in the fridge asap
• Do not label your bottles as we wish to keep everything anonymous
• Bring at least 2L of your beer so that we have enough for a number of people to judge each entry
• Let us know what the ABV is - this is so that we can split the entries evenly across different groups
• If you haven't already done so then PLEASE email us in advance to let us know you're entering and style of your IPA as this will save time on the night
•  PLEASE NOTE we are going to have to limit the number of entries we are able to judge. In order to guarantee your entry please let us know asap that you will be entering a beer, as we may not be able to accept any further entries on the night.

Any questions about this session? Email us (see below).

For more information about the homebrew club please go here. If anyone is thinking of attending and would like to ask us anything feel free to drop us a mail or tweet:

cremabrewery@gmail.com
@femtobrewster
@Crema_brewery

NB: If you're brewing an IPA for the March session or you've already attended the club and you're brewing something else you can use the hashtag #wbbhbc so that we can see what you're getting up to.

We Brought Homebrew

It’s been a little while since we posted anything on the blog. That’s because we were busy planning our three week US beer odyssey (of which, more later) and when we returned from our trip we had some physical and mental recovering to do.

The other thing we’ve been doing is launching a new homebrew club at We Brought Beer in their newly opened shop in Clapham Junction. They don't just sell beer, they sell homebrew ingredients too. At Clapham they have a dedicated event space upstairs which is the perfect location for beer lovers to gather and get excited about brewing beer.

We held the first meeting on Tuesday 17^th November and we were surprised to see such a great turnout. It’s hard to know where to start with providing an ‘introduction to brewing’. Distilling a complicated subject down to its essence is always tricky. You could give a three hour lecture on malt and still not cover everything: but you have to start somewhere. The idea was to provide an overview of brewing ingredients, process and equipment, with separate sections on sanitation and temperature control. We might not be expert brewers but we are experienced and having made a few mistakes along the way we are happy to share what we've learned with people who are just starting out.

On Saturday 21^st November we did a live brew in the shop. This was the first time we had done an extract brew in three years. In fact it was only the second extract brew we’ve ever done*. The idea of this session was for people to be able to drop in and see what is involved and ask any questions they have about any aspect of homebrewing. We expect to do further one-off sessions on Saturdays in the future, and it’s likely the next one will feature all grain brewing.

Next month’s meeting is on Tuesday 15^th December, where we’ll be looking at recipe design and the use of specialty grains (within the context of extract brewing). In the New Year we’ll move on to more advanced topics such as the science of mashing in all grain brewing and critical appreciation of beer. Each session will start with a presentation before moving on to tasting beers. Further content will be guided by what club members would like to see. We're also looking forward to getting our brewing friends to come along and share their knowledge too, we already have a few of them pencilled in for future sessions (including judging beer, brewing imperial stouts with adjuncts, and making the move from homebrewing to professional brewing).

The club is aimed at novice brewers – those who are yet to brew their first beer or who have only been brewing for a little while. Although we are of the opinion that one should never stop learning, even if you're an expert. The club aims to provide a forum where we can all exchange knowledge and opinion (and our beers too obviously). The joy of homebrewing is in discovery, learning and discussion. 

For more information on the homebrew club and other events at We Brought Beer follow them on Twitter for updates: @WeBroughtBeer. Any questions, queries or suggestions from club attendees can be sent to: homebrew@webroughtbeer.co.uk.

*We popped in to dry hop the beer yesterday (it's a standard pale ale brewed with Centennial and Equinox). We should be able to package it next weekend. No idea how it will taste but we're curious to find out!

The Homebrew Sessions Vol.3: Brewing with Adjuncts

Branching out from 'standard' brewing practices, how do brewers go about creating some of their more experimental beers*? According to homebrew legend John Palmer an adjunct is 'any non-enzymatic fermentable. Adjuncts include unmalted cereals such as flaked barley or corn grits, syrups, and refined sugars.'

Levelling up the Crema Brewery

For those that follow us on Twitter, you've probably noticed that we've come a long way from home-brewing with a big stock pot and some plastic buckets. As we've accumulated more kit and refined our brewing process, we felt it was time to share our experiences with the home-brewing world.

Collaboration Home-brewing. Yes, it's a thing. Part 1.

It's been a while since we've blogged about our own brewing, even though we've been doing a fair bit of it and recently won another accolade for one of our beers. So after writing about some of the less pleasant social aspects of the UK beer culture, we felt it was time to say something about the three beers we've brewed with our friends. The first of these is aging nicely and will be ready in August. The second might be one of the best beer we've brewed to date. Maybe. The third was brewed a few weeks ago and will hopefully be another high point in our brewing career.

This post is in two parts, that's due to length but also due to problems with Blogger deciding what it does or doesn't want to save, ending in sweary curses and a pledge to switch to Wordpress sometime very soon.

Part 1

In August last year, two Brooklyn-based friends of ours, Martha and Doug, came over to the UK to do some things, including watching the Ashes and drinking loads of beer. While we'd been corresponding about the trip, we hit on the idea that we should brew a beer together while they were over here staying with us. Even better, we should brew a beer that would take a year or so to mature, which would be ready just in time for their next visit to London for WorldCon in August 2014. So right then we knew we were looking at something high in ABV and complex in flavour which would happily wait until we were ready to drink it.

During our email exchange we discussed different styles of high ABV beers: Imperial Stouts, Barleywines and Old Ales... We settled on an Imperial Stout that drew on a historical British recipe from 1914. Martha and Doug are fans of brewing historical recipes and we wanted to try brewing a high ABV beer with some experienced home brewers, so this choice made perfect sense.

Through the power of the internet (and some clever use of Beersmith), we collaborated on the recipe so that when it came to the actual brew day (the day after our trip to the Great British Beer Festival 2013), all the ingredients had been delivered, the yeast starter made and the water measured out. We decided to do a double mash for this brew as the grain bill for the full mash was too much for our mash tun. While it is a good idea to mash twice when you've got too much grain for your tun, it makes for a long brew day and that was our first mistake - as we had a table booked for dinner on the other side of town.

Grains...but only half

Our second mistake, was not checking the manifold inside the mash tun was properly connected to the outlet. However, we didn't realise this at the time and hilarity ensued as we attempted to deal with what we thought was a stuck mash (blowing up the tube; spraying wort in Doug's face), but we were actually making things worse. Eventually, we gave in and transferred all the grain and wort to a spare container. Once we uncovered the manifold we realised what the problem had been. Quickly remedied, we had the grain and wort back in the tun and lauter/sparging resumed. The second mash was fairly painless so we managed to get the brew back on track. Despite the early set back, the rest of the brew day went well and we managed to make our table at Dukes Brew & Que, so we could show Martha and Doug that the British can do great BBQ and brew great beers to go with it.

Messy Sparging

In the end, the original gravity of the beer was a bit short of what we wanted, so we did some calculations and added some sugar to the fermenting wort in controlled batches. This helped lift the ABV to where we wanted it and now the beer is happily aging away in bottles. We cracked a couple at a bottle share in December; it was still a bit young but definitely on its way to becoming a fantastic brew ready for sharing with selected folks in August.