Brewing more sour beer – Weekly Update

At the end of another busy week for all of us we ended up brewing another beer on the weekend. But not just any beer. Another sour beer to be specific. It’s not always that we brew on the weekends, but Richard asked if I wanted to join him down at our Sour Brewery to brew a Brett IPA, so I said sure.

Now just to clear things up, I don’t spend a lot of time in the brewery brewing or packaging beer. With the brewery growing as it has, some of us need to focus on marketing and sales. Designing labels and so on. I am nor brewing expert, but I have learnt a lot from Adam and Richard, first as home brewers, then as partners in Beerbliotek in the past six and seven years.

I do enjoy being back in the brewery brewing beer, mashing in, cleaning up spent malt and getting back to doing physical work again. It’s great to brew beer.

A usual brew day starts at 7am, and in our case ended at 4pm. So it’s a long day. A lot of the day is spent checking temperatures, transferring liquid and cleaning. Let me try and explain the process as simply as I can. I’ve linked to Wikipedia, if you’d like to read more.

The start of the brewing process is what is called mashing in. That’s when you add the malt to hot water to extract the sugars, in what is called a Mash Tun. The sugars you need to convert to alcohol with yeast during fermentation in a fermentation tank.

The entire brewing process is a very slow and patient affair. You can’t rush it. You have to get as much sugars from the malt as you can. That means the malt has to lie in the mash tun, in 65C water for about an hour. This creates what is called wort, or sugar water. Once the wort is ready, you transfer it to a kettle, and then sparge in some more water into the Mash tun.

The entire process is called Lautering in which the mash is separated into the clear liquid wort and the residual grain. Lautering usually consists of 3 steps: mashout, recirculation and sparging.

Our Sockerbruket Sour Brewery has a 1000L capacity, so you need to end with more than 1000L in the kettle when you start boiling up the wort, because you lose so much water when it’s boiling.

In the kettle you add hops, which adds the bitterness to the beer, but also some aroma. In this sour beer we didn’t add much hops, as it’s supposed to be less bitter than Pale Ales and IPAs.

After we reached the end of the boil, we transfer the wort to a fermentation tank, but not before we run it through a recirculating chiller, to cool it down.

The final process is to add the yeast to the fermentation tank and clean the brewery. The beer we brewed today was a Brett IPA, which is why we used Brettanomyces yeast. Now back to the waiting game for the yeast to eat the sugars, and coming up with a name. Suggestions welcome 🙂

Spending some time at our Sockerbruket Sour Brewery today, gave us an opportunity to do some housekeeping. That’s when we found one of our first home brews called “Head of Steam”. You can still see the original logo, which has been simplified since then. We have brewed that same beer again once we started the brewery, but called it “California Common – Steam Beer” and it was number 14 in our beer library. It’s a classic Californian style beer, which is traditionally an easy drinking Pale Ale, but fermented with lager yeast to reveal some interesting aromas and flavours.

We’re very happy about the feedback we’ve received about our Berliner range. Two weeks ago we added our fifth to the group “Man goes crazy for peaches“. For now, only “A Passion for Gingers” will be available at Systembolaget in Sweden, but we’re adding one more very shortly, while it’s still summer. The collection is starting to look really nice together, and we hope everyone has managed to taste at least one of them.

During my trip to Stockholm this last week I walked past this Carlsberg truck and thought to myself, if that is a quote by Carlsberg, it’s probably the best quote in the world. It’s good when much larger companies also help promote cans.

The trip to Stockholm was to catch up with some friends at Nya Carnegie Bryggeri, for the third anniversary of the Swedish Craft Beer magazine coHops. It was great to see such a big, automated brewery such as Nya Carnegie. Very impressive, if you compare it to how small we started, bottling and labelling by hand.

The night also included coHops launching their discussion forums Beer Buzz, where they held a discussion panel. The panel included Petri Karhukorpi (Coppersmith), Jessica Heidrich (S:t Eriks), Christian “CC” Eikner (NCB), Hedda Spendrup (Spendrups) och Fredrik Glejpner (Original Brands). Moderator är vår egen Johan “Portersteken” Lenner.

Every week we go through our social media notifications, and interact with our followers. Some of them have really cool introductions. Here’s one that caught our eye this week.

We hope you enjoyed a bit of brewing news? We’ll keep you updated on the progress of that Brett IPA, but for now, it’s time to enjoy the weekend.

Until next week. Keep well.