The Good, The Bad and The Hazy

Our new Ellon brewery, 4 months in…………….

We have now been brewing in our new home in Ellon for 4 months. It has been a steep learning curve for us as we got grips with all our new brewing equipment there. Overall we have had a very solid start to 2013 and I just wanted to give you all on update on how we have settled into our new home; from the issues & challenges to the things that have been great.

We bit the bullet and invested heavily in amazing equipment in our new brewery. It was an expensive bullet to bite (thanks for the help Equity Punks and HSBC bank!) but we wanted to have equipment that enabled us to make the best, most flavoursome beer possible.

From our Rolec Brew-House (also used by Stone, Brooklyn & Lagunitas), our state of the art centrifuge so that we can completely avoid filtration, to a patented ‘Hop Cannon’ we developed, everything at the new brewery is focussed on making completely awesome beers. And that is pretty much all we care about. However, it has not been all plain sailing in 2013.

The first issues we had at the very start of 2013 were with our new centrifuge: Using a centrifuge to completely forgo filtration was always going to be a challenge with our sky high hopping rates (we totally broke our trial centrifuge in 2012!). In January we ended up completely choking our new one several times and loosing loads of beer. Some batch yields were as low as 50% - owch! To make matters worse, as the centrifuge tried in vain to dump the excess of hops we flooded it with, the beer was exposed to oxygen and consequently many of the beers had high oxygen content which meant more destroyed beers and a few rogue bottles that made their way out to the market unfortunately.

Batch 000 was an example of an oxygenated beer due to this issue and definitely was not our finest work. Excess oxygen causes beer to age and deteriorate faster. Luckily all those issues were resolved by the end of January. By changing where in the tank we draw our beers from and by modifying our centrifuge (thanks for the help Alfa Laval engineers) our oxygen content is much lower now than it ever has been and yields are great too. It was just a bit of a struggle getting there.

The other main issue we had is that we wanted to tickle the beer so lightly with the centrifuge that we ended up packaging some very hazy beer, complete with hop sediment in bottle. This had no adverse impact on taste or on beer quality at all (the beers tasted great). However during January, February and early March a few of our heavily hopped beers had a decent amount of sediment in the bottles. Fine if you pour it slowly, definitely delicious, but just a bit confusing for customers in a beer which is not strictly bottle conditioned.

This has also now been resolved by modifications to the centrifuge and by installing a trap post centrifuge to catch any rogue hop particles and ensure the beer is reasonably clear. Taste is always more important than absolute clarity in our book. Our new set up delivers beer which is pretty clear but still retains all the mouth-feel, flavour and aroma that aggressive filters and pasteurization destroy.

Throughout the teething issues our brewing team were working incredibly hard and did a great job in ensuring we got up to speed as quickly as we did in the new brewery!

Over the last 4 weeks our core range beers (Dead Pony Club, 5am Saint, Punk IPA, Libertine Black Ale and Hardcore IPA) have all been tasting as good as they ever have in bottle and in keg. With everything now dialled in at the new brewery and with the brewing system we have there we are excited about being much more consistent with our core range beers than we have been in the past. Punk is now most definitely back and tasting epic!

Our small batch special beers have also been exciting this year. Jack Hammer has achieved an incredible following in a very short space of time and the flexibility of our new system lets us make much better lagers and also wheat beers than we could before– look out for a BrewDog hefeweizen in the next week or so! The current batch of Zeitgeist (the first batch brewed at Ellon) is also by far the best Zeitgeist we have ever made.

We have also started our experimental brewing program at our old brewery, now affectionately known as The Dystopian Puppet Hobby Centre. The first sour beer we brewed there ,a collaboration with our friends at Brodies, launched in our bars last Saturday and is a 5.2% Tayberry Berlinner Weisse. 

With everything dialled in, locked and loaded we are looking forward to making some killer beers for you guys over the remainder of 2013 and beyond.

Craft Beer for the People,

james and the team x