Humpty Dumpty Brewery

Award-Winning Ales

Mary Anne and Craig were on hand at the Kings Head pub in Norwich last week for the awards presentation ceremony for the Norwich CAMRA beer festival.  We were delighted to take three awards this year: our Porter was joint third in the porters, stouts and milds category, while we took both the second and third place awards (in fact, joint second) for our Golden Gorse and our autumn seasonal, Hop Harvest Gold.

Hatching a New Beer, Part III, Dialling in the Colour

This is the third in a series of posts about the design of our Easter seasonal, Bad Egg.

One cool thing about making homebrew in a commercial brewery is that you have pretty much anything you need right to hand in large volumes.  If you need hops, grab a handful.  Sanitiser - use the 20-litre jugs.  Grain - we make a very small dent in a 25-kg bag.  Clean out the fermenter? Power wash! 

For the second round of the beer, we decided to focus on the colour, since we would know fairly quickly (about six hours later) how we were doing.  Since the first candidate was rather amber in colour despite having 5.5% colouring malts in it, we decided to up the level of all of the malts, adding an extra percent each of the caramalt and crystal malt and another half percent of the chocolate malt.  We left the hopping alone - 100% Goldings.  Same amount as before. 

Another twist sees us working to adapt our brewing procedure to the new water supply.  Anglian Water has recently changed the supply of our water from pure well water to a combination of well and treated river water.  The effect is to reduce the hardness by about 25%, and in our neck of the woods, where the water is very hard, that is a welcome thing.  But this in turn required us to reduce the addition of brewing salts to the mash water, which we have done generally both in the pilot brewery and in the commercial operation.  This means that we have some additional variability between this batch and the last, but there's not a lot we can do about this. 

We kept the mash temperature the same, and were aiming for a bit more water recovery from the mash/sparge part of the process to get the final gravity on target without just adding diluent liquor (water) at the end.

We had a first look (and taste) of the result last weekend.  It's still fermenting a little (present gravity was about 1.020), but the colour is spot on.  A thing of beauty.  The hop character is right there, too.  We reckon when the fermentation is complete - maybe this weekend - we'll be able to tell where we want the hopping to go from here.  The beer was a little sweet and the hopping a bit aggressive, so by the time we lose the sweetness it might be over the top on bitterness.  To work on that, we'll probably reduce the hopping a little bit. 

Hatching a New Beer, Part II, The First Crack

This is the second in a series of posts about the design of our new spring seasonal, Bad Egg.

We design our beers from a pilot scale of 5 imperial gallons on a homebrew setup that reasonably mirrors our 10-barrel (360-gallon) commercial operation.   At the smaller scale, we lose some of the finer controls (eg, fermenter chilling), but otherwise the process is similar enough to yield reproducible results when we scale up to full production.

We start the process by determining the characteristics we are looking for in the beer:  in this case, we're aiming to dial in the gravity (%abv), colour, the body and the hop.  For this beer, we are looking for a 4.1% beer, red to brown in colour with reasonable malt body and a hop-forward finish.

Beer colour and body are functions of the type of grain we select for the beer.  The backbone of the beer is still fine Norfolk-grown Maris Otter pale malted barley.  Even a dark bitter will be more than 90% pale malt.  This will be blended with colouring malts to make the malt bill, or grist.  To get a beer in the reddish-brown spectrum, we're looking to use a combination of crystal, caramel and chocolate malts, all of which are roasted by different methods to yield different colours and characteristics.  The colouring malts will also impart some non-fermentables which will contribute to the beer's body.

Each of these malts will contribute a particular amount of sugars, starches and proteins to the first stage of production, which is called the mash. To know how much malt you need, you need to know your brewery efficiency.  This is how much of the full potential extract the brewery is typically able to realise in the mashing process.  Our brewhouse efficiency is in the high 70% range.  The rest of the sugars we can't recover go with the spent grain for animal feed.  Our homebrew set-up gets a lower extraction efficiency than the commercial brewery, which has to be taken into account in formulating the recipe.

For this beer, we decided to aim for 5.5% colouring malts: 3% crystal, 2% cara and 0.5% chocolate.  You can get carried away with dark malt pretty quickly and wind up with porter-dark beer, so we decided to start small in the first go.

For hops, we decided to go with 100% Goldings, with about 33 bittering units (pretty middle-of-the-road bitterness for a 4.1% beer), but with a big dose of aroma hops at the end. We're mashing on the hot side - about 154F (68C) to go for a bit of body.  We're using our house English ale strain of yeast.  And with these parameters we hatched the first candidate.

And how was it?  Well, it wasn't a bad first effort.  We didn't get as much volume as we were expecting, so it was a bit on the strong side, and it wasn't as dark as we are hoping for.  The large dose of aroma hops made the beer aggressively bitter at first, but this faded after a week or two of maturing to leave a pleasant and drinkable beer.  Not a release candidate, but it definitely gives us some pointers for the next round.