Avery, Brown, Dredge and the Imperial Pilsner

On the 27^th of January, after the epic Musa Beer Dinner, Zak Avery, Pete Brown and Mark Dredge headed up to the BrewDog Brewery to brew the Avery, Dredge, Brown collaboration beer.  The Beer Dinner was brilliant and the pairings, beer and insights all of legendary standards, with the draft Dark Horizon (edition 3) vanilla ice cream show going down a storm.

With these 3 heavyweights coming together to brew at BrewDog those expecting fireworks will not be disappointed. We left the beer style, recipe and ingredients completely up to the beer writing dream team and they did everything on the brewday from mashing in, cleaning out the mash tun to preparing the FV to receive the wort.

Zak Avery has a fuller account of the day here http://thebeerboy.blogspot.com/2011/01/blood-sweat-and-beers-36-hours-with.html  but describes the brewing process ‘we babbled our way to the brewery, it quickly became apparent that rather than arrive with a recipe and a plan, we'd arrived with a concept - a noble-hopped strong lager. It turns out that concepts are all very well, but they don't get beers brewed. Sensing that what we needed was a bit of mild bullying, Martin took us out to the hop store and with a cruel-to-be-kind mantra of 'Do what you want, it's your beer', frightened us into formulating a recipe.1330kg of lager malt. 70kg of malted wheat. 50kg of Saaz hops. 5000 litres of water. Mashing in via an auger with a hopper on the floor, heaving sacks of malt into it, the previous night's cobwebs start to lift. Standing over the mash tun making sure the mash is smooth by pummelling it with a shovel blows away a few more. Head brewer Stewart Bowman supervising our efforts to a soundtrack of obscure German punk ensures that everything goes smoothly.’

Here is the original brew sheet for the beer. The beer is a imperial pilsner which we are also going to extensively dry hop. We are expecting this beer to be ready to rock in early April.

From our perspective, it was an honour to host the very finest beer writers this side of the Atlantic and 3 rockstars of the craft brewing movement at our brewery. We had a great day which also involved Martin cooking a lunch on beer battered locally caught mackerel on the gas burner of our pilot brewing plant. We are pretty excited about the beer and equally excited about the label text the beer writing dream team will come up with.  The plan is for Zak, Pete and Mark to each simultaneously host a launch event for the beer in their favourite local bar. It will also be available at BrewDog Aberdeen, on our website and at Beer Ritz, Zak’s store in Leeds.

Kill your heroes, make your own idols. Whatever. Just drink our beer. (Zak Avery)