We’ve got a lot of work on here sprucing the place up, cleaning out forgotten vessels and planning an inventive brewing schedule that’ll churn fresh brews out in the ol’ Nick of time for the Christmas break.

No recipes to share just yet, but anticipate a stout or two and a stab at a festive red.

Back with more to report soon, promise…

Many seasonal brews later, it’s April 2011 and life in the Boxshed is much the same as it was this time last year. It’s Dark Ale time once again in the brewery, while milds, porters and stouts are also fobbing away at my local. None of this beer is going to mash or drink itself – time to get back to black.

We’ll be posting some more updates soon enough, beginning with the outcome of this dry Suffolk stout, currently conditioning in the shade during a surprisingly hot and sunny East Anglian spring. In the meantime, get out in the sunshine yourself, visit your local community pub and check out the dark stuff coming onto taps and stillage.

It’s probably your round…

A test brew and full-on firkin-size brewday culminated in a complex stout which we’re fortunate enough to have on tap at a local ale fest.

The Dark Ale Days festival at The White Horse pub in Edwardstone, Suffolk opens in around an hour’s time at midday Friday 30 April, and runs until Monday afternoon. There are bands every day providing a suitable soundtrack to complement a selection of over 30 milds, porters and stouts from far and wide, including one brew from the Boxshed.

The as-yet-untapped Penny Black Suffolk Stout features eight types of grain as well as three hop varieties grown at the Boxshed. It tasted pretty good in testing and direct from the fermenter, but of course we actually have no idea how it will arrive in the glass. Fingers crossed and many thanks all the fine people at The White Horse and attached Mill Green Brewery who will be working their ale-drenched socks off all weekend serving up all that dark stuff.

See you there?

More details on the brew itself another time.

The Snow Drop fermented out as expected and was moved into secondary for a further five days. We added a good chunk of Goldings dry hops in both fermenters at a rate of 100g to 50 litres. After hoiking these at the end of secondary, we racked 20 litres into a Cornie, filled 24 glass beer bottles and put the rest into clear bottles for ‘test drinking’ over the next few weeks!

One week priming with light Spraymalt in the warm then four weeks cool conditioning.

Anyway, here are the last few photos for this brewday before the next one, which will get its own overdue post in a few days…

We named it Boxshed Snow Drop for a few reasons. Outside the Boxshed the actual snow has now gone but the snowdrops are all coming through. We also have a little white Pekin hen called Snowdrop who is the only one of our birds to have laid through the cold Winter. But mainly, it should prove to be a nice Drop to have while watching the next deluge of Snow!

It’s a pretty selfish recipe, to be honest designed to be drunk by a motivated brewer! It’s over 90% pale malt and uses Target and Northdown as copper hops, with favourites East Kent Goldings and Mount Hood as aroma and steeping additions, all in large measures.

We went for a shorter brew length this time to enable a more vigorous boil without too much mess. A three stage batch sparge began with a cool mash and ended with a hot mash out. Sadly we lost a few litres to the copper when the pelleted hops swamped the hopstopper completely, but still managed to stow away 40 litres or so at the target gravity of 1.047. We’re hoping for a brew in the 4.4 – 4.6 ABV range.

Fermentation is taking place at the cooler end of the recommended scale at around 66-68 degrees, and we’ll test for progress towards 1.012 on Monday.

Really looking forward to drinking this one!



*EDIT: Checked progress on Monday after a pretty unspectacular fermentation to discover that both bins are already down to 1.013. That US-05 is a strange old yeast, but very effective! Brew looks pale and cloudy. We’ll leave it a little while longer and then transfer into secondary fermenters later this week to get rid of some of that yeast and trub and give it a chance to drop a bit clearer.

It’s been quite some time but this first brewday of 2010 will be a premium pale ale with plenty of hops, just how we like it.

Quite exciting really, so there’ll be more updates later, and hopefully a beer or two to fuel the brewer in the cold old shed…

It was really difficult to get a brew on after such a long hiatus and such a disappointment last time out. There was also Christmas and all those snow days to contend with between brews, which made it seem even longer (and the Boxshed colder and less inviting). Remember back when you were small and you spent the whole summer holidays riding bikes, climbing trees and making mud pies only to discover when back in school in September that you couldn’t even remember how to hold a pen? Well it’s a bit like that. Only with snowballs not mud pies. And a brewer’s paddle not a pencil.

But look, it really is happening – here’s the evidence! More updates on the actual recipe another day.

*Late night update : Sheer volume of pellet hops blocked up the hopstopper. We dropped a few litres short to avoid recirculating the fine hop powder, but still took enough for a couple of cornies in two FVs at 1.047

From John Palmer:

“When a yeast cell dies, it ruptures – releasing several off-flavors into the beer. When you have a large yeast mass on the bottom of the fermenter, you have a large potential for off-flavors due to autolysis. If this ever happens to you, you will know it… …at a minimum, a beer that has experienced autolysis will have a burnt rubber taste and smell and will probably be undrinkable. At worst it will be unapproachable.”

Bugger, bugger, bugger.

We’ll brew it again.

One fermenter seemed more badly affected than the other, so I’ve kegged up the better batch with some spray malt priming, more out of sentimental hope than anything else. The rest has sadly gone down the drain.

This is a bit of a blow, because it’s the first ever batch – even from the days of kits – that has been ditched. Too much work and no time at the weekends to look after brews – what’s the world coming to?

Silenus! Why have you forsaken us?

We’ll reserve our keg of Timmy’s Original for December, and perhaps some Dark Garden too, but will be tapping the Brown Corduroys this weekend and drinking it over forthcoming Bonfire nights. Ideally we’ll brew twice more over the next three weeks to create a Boxshed Dry Irish Stout ’09 (yummy with port!), plus an-all new Premium Pale Ale, maybe with a twist.

This means paying bills for old supplies and restocking with Marris Otter and one or two other speciality malts, ordering up some liquid yeast and preparing a starter for the stout, fixing two poppet valves in two faulty kegs, getting hold of some new sanitisers, cleaning a lot of bottles and other vessels, devising a new recipe for a fun pale, and seeing the Timmy’s Original safely into kegs.

All we’ve managed to do this weekend however is move the Timmy’s Original from primary fermenters to clean secondaries. It reached 1.012 with no problems, looks clear, smells great and just needs to be cared for this week prior to racking. Dry-hopping is also an (unlikely) option, but we’ll update if we go take that route.

In the meantime, for no good reason, here are a couple of photos of the Timmy’s transfer, leaving all that once-frenzied trub nicely behind.

PS – There’s an Autumn beer and cider festival going down every day this week at The White Horse, Edwardstone, Suffolk, culminating in a blue grass shindig on Hallloween itself. If you’re in the area, you really ought to pop over there for a pint or six. Here’s the brew list.

Rock Art Brewery now employs himself, his wife and seven others, all busy mashing and marketing innovative heavy-hopped beers for American microbrew lovers. But now Matt is subject to a cease and desist nuisance order from a billion dollar corporation and overnight his business aswell as the livelihoods of his employees are suddenly at stake.

– Hansen blends the MONSTER brand energy soft drink in California, is worth over a billion and has global distribution agreements
– Matt brews a 10% ABV anniversary barley wine called Rock Art Vermonster for a small loyal customer base

There is clearly no brand infringement case here, but in US law a cash-rich company like Hansen can appeal court verdicts repeatedly until the smaller company that is often in the right, can no longer pay up the $65k a time it takes to fund those court appearances.

We realise that UK pubs and breweries are having the rugs pulled out from under them every day, and quite rightly these issues feel closer to home because they affect us more directly. Like many of you, we do what we can to support local breweries and our community pub. We even remember to pay our fees to CAMRA and force ourselves to drink more than we probably ought to at its festivals. But we couldn’t help feeling frustrated by Hansens’ treatment of this New England microbrewer and thought we’d share. It’s, well, its just not an obstacle the guy would have thought about while brewing in his basement – like us, he was probably more concerned that he’d remembered to switch all his taps off.

If we were American, we’d say the situation sucked big time. As Brits, we still think it’s a poor show, and hope you’ll join us in supporting Rock Art brewers – they need your clicks and emails, even if we can’t place beer orders from outside the US. Shame.

****UPDATE : 22nd October 2009****
We’re delighted to say that for once sense prevailed and Rock Art won this round of the battle against corporate America. It’s all official, The Vermonster is free, and everyone can stop writing to Hansen and get back to their beers. Good stuff.