Trip to Norway: Part 2. The Old Way: Mølstertunet

Norway, like many countries, is experiencing a healthy growth in the number of startup breweries but it also has a farmhouse brewing tradition going back centuries that it is alive and well in the districts of Voss, Møndal and elsewhere. On my first day in Voss I got to see examples of both: the old at the wooden farmstead of Mølstertunet, part of Voss Folkemuseum (this post) and the new brewhouse at Voss Bryggeri some 12 kilometres away from Voss (see Part 3). 

[By the way: the o slash character ø is fairly common in Norwegian and is pronounced somewhat like a German o umlaut ö. To say the word for ale - øl - round your lips and push them forward while saying "earl". Hope that helps.]

My trusty mobile has become an invaluable tool and now I almost entirely depend on it to run my life. A bewildering array of tools and services that only a few years ago would require a van load of devices and documents to provide its functions are now available in my trouser pocket. It is truly marvellous and yet my careless reading of the digital map of Norway on my phone would twice lead me the wrong way. Eventually I found the path up the hillside to the Voss Folkemuseum but not before I had the opportunity to inspect a lot of Norwegian domestic architecture and garages on the outskirts of town. More interesting than you would think actually.

A genuine turf roof, laid on layers of birch bark

What every man would want: a shed with a turf roof.

I was probably the only visitor up there that morning so Brita Tveite, the museum attendant, had to take a great bunch of keys to open up the ancient farm buildings for my inspection. Abandoned in 1927 when the two farming families who had occupied its 16 buildings built themselves new houses nearby, Mølstertunet remains untouched by the passage of time. Its dark wooden buildings beneath turf roofs and local slates (skifer in Norwegian) look just as if the old inhabitants would come around the corner at any moment.

I was left to my own devices and I wandered from building to building. Though it was a museum, the intervention of labels was almost non-existent and that made it easier to be transported one hundred, two hundred, three, even five hundred years into the past and I imagined the hearth alight, the smell of wood smoke and the conversations in Norwegian dialect as the days' chores were done. Everything was of wood: walls, ceilings and floor, utensils and containers. In contrast to the echoing terrazzo and marble of Italian rooms, the atmosphere is hushed, homely and wonderfully warm to the touch. And yet, when I looked closely I could see through the gaps where the walls meet the floor. "Wasn't it cold and draughty?", I enquired. "No", I was assure. "When it was occupied, all the gaps were stopped up and when the fire was lit they were very cosy."

The farmhouse with hops growing beside the door

Outside, the small farmyard was perhaps greener now than when rough shod boots tramped over it but there were huge slabs of flat rock laid in strategic places. Hops grew up the wall beside the farmhouse door.

Included among the cluster of buildings was the all important brewhouse, for beer was an important component of farm life, providing hydration and sustenance for hard workers, relaxation and entertainment after the day is done and comfort on long winter evenings. Back in the day they produced lower strength beer for daytime refreshment but today the only beer that seems to be brewed is the strong, dark vossaøl and modern variants of it. At the very least vossaøl is brewed in the autumn, ready for Christmas. Some brewers make vossaøl five or six times a year or for special occasions such as weddings. The attendant showed me the brewhouse, with wooden mash tun, copper cauldron suspended over the hearth, wicker sieves and wooden ladles. They had all the equipment to brew a vossaøl. The farm even produced its own malt, for there was nowhere to buy it and of course they used "kveik", the family yeast, that was handed down through the generations. It was preserved by drying in freshly ironed linen or on a complex wooden puzzle called a yeast ring, to tide them through periods when they weren't brewing regularly.

This open hearth room dates from around 1500 AD.

Mash tun (left) and fermentor

I asked Brita Tveite about traditional brewing but she professed her ignorance of the details, saying she would try to contact one of their joiners who was a traditional brewer. "They must be fairly thick on the ground", I thought. "That's three I know of already."

The modern Voss Folkemuseum building, cast in concrete using coarse wooden shuttering in imitation of the wooden farm buildings just downhill (to the left).

Sure enough, Magnar Garatun came and found me in the museum galleries and we had a half hour conversation, which I recorded, amongst the displays of traditional wedding costume and Viking drinking vessels (ølkjenge). He lives on a farm at Mjølfjel, to the west of Voss that has been in (his wife's) family for about 300 years and he learned about vossaøl brewing from his 80-year-old father-in-law, who also made his own malt when he was young. He evidently enjoys brewing with father- and brother-in-law for while it takes all day (and father sometimes nips off for forty winks in the middle of the brew) the occasion is a convivial one as they consume plenty of vossaøl while they brew. That might explain why he was hazy on the details of temperatures and gravities but he said that it was all written down in a book which they referred to on the day. They brew normally once a year, in October for the Christmas beer, or more often if they are going to have a party or a wedding. Their vossaøl is strong, around 9 or 10% and it has to be dark and thick if it is for Christmas.

Magnar Garatun, the museum joiner

Because there are many brewers they can nowadays buy malt, for instance Münich malt at Voss Gass in Skulestadmo, where they also sell propane gas and brewing equipment: everything they need really. They have a special room on the farm, with a big 180 litre 'copper' fired with wood. They use juniper (einar) infusion for washing down and brewing liquor (made from a couple of plastic bags full from the woods) and they mash in a plastic mash tun. Proceedings start at 7 o'clock in the morning. They brew all day and finish maybe at 8 o'clock. They boil the wort for "some hours", so they start with 120 litres and reduce it to 90 litres. Other people have said it is boiled for 3 hours. At the farm at Mjørfjel they like a good hoppy taste so they use vacuum packed pelleted hops (but he couldn't remember the variety) but he also uses the wild hops that grow around at the museum. For dispense, they use a Cornelius keg nowadays but previously they used plastic (Coke) bottles, which were not so good he says and before that it was wood, of course. They normally keep the beer a fair time before it is all gone; "we can't drink it all at Christmas."

A selection of ølkjenge: communal drinking vessels with horse's head handles

In Voss they have had a competition for the last 5 years, although last year may have been the last as the numbers had dropped off. It took place in a small guest house on the way to Bordalen (about 20 minutes from Voss) and  30 or 40 brewers used to enter one and a half litres of beer and there were 4 or 5 judges. They tasted all the beers and ranked them. There was a variety of beer, both good and bad and sometimes there was some discussion because some were thought not to be in the traditional Vossaøl style. I asked if many of the brewers used kveik and he hesitated. He said there was one man he knew of who was regarded as a good traditional brewer, his name was Himmler, but it is not so usual to use kveik nowadays as it was easier to buy yeast from the store.

A Voss marriage procession. Note the bride in the third row wearing the headgear unique to Voss

The wood carver made two identical sets but only this one survives.

The toastmaster on the left is carrying an ølkjenge for the vossaøl.

 I wandered around the museum and enjoyed the display but I didn't see a yeast ring; that would have been good. I wonder if they have one in the collection. The centre-piece is a beautifully carved wedding procession (Ridande vossabryllaup) made by a well known carver, Gudleik Brekkus. A similar second set was lost in a fire, so this is the only one surviving. I was also very taken with a temporary exhibition of cartoons by the talented and much loved Voss man, Ivar Kvåle. He was a little older than me and died only recently although he looked very fit and athletic in his recent photos (he was a marathon runner too and a musician). The clock ticked round and soon it was time to head back down the hill to take the bus to Voss Bryggeri (see Part 3). 

Trip to Norway: Part 1. Providence and Serendipity

I suppose it all started with my eye. A naevus (a kind of mole) in my eye had been under observation since 2010 and this year it started to show signs of change. That’s dangerous because there is a good chance that it is eye cancer (choroidal melanoma) and so it had to be treated, just in case it was malignant. I went to London for an operation and then to Clatterbridge Hospital on the Wirral for proton beam treatment in June and here I was, post-treatment and apart from minor irritations, I was in good health and with fairly good sight. But it had made me aware of my mortality and it made me think.

“Life is for living”, said Stef. “Where do you want to go on holiday this year?” I briefly considered South Africa but then said “Norway”. Selfishly, I wanted to do some research there because for a year or so I have been following the blog of Lars Marius Garshol, a Norwegian and he had got me interested in Norway’s traditional farmhouse ales – maltøl, or more specifically vossaøl, the farmhouse ale from Voss in the west of the country. More to the point Lars had actually deposited some of the family farmhouse yeast – kveik- at the UK’s National Collection of Yeast Cultures which is in Norwich and as it happens I had also recently made their acquaintance when they visited Poppyland Brewery on a fact finding tour. Talk about coincidences!

“Do you really want me to come?” she said. That was thoughtful of her and I tried to be as tactful as I could in replying. “Well, for me it would mainly be a business trip”, I said. “I would be pursuing my goals and would want to be fairly energetic in achieving them. If you came too it would be a rather different trip.” She could see my point and knew she would never be able to keep up. A few days later she said quite out of the blue, “Okay, I’ve just booked you on a flight to Oslo with Ryanair, £10 each way. You leave of 22 September. But I want a holiday too. Let’s go to Italy, I fancy Bologna.” “Okay, you book an apartment in Bologna and I’ll cook for you”, I agreed.

And so it was that I found myself re-reading Lars’ blog and planning my trip to Norway. All that was fixed was that I was landing in Norway on 22 September. I wanted to brew with the kveik from the NCYC but first I needed to know what vossaøl tasted like. I needed to track down a traditional brewer, make friends with him and get him to share a bottle with me. So I decided to head for Voss and take it from there. I would land in Rygge airport, take a train to Oslo, stay overnight in a cheap hotel and continue the journey by train to Voss the following day. When I set off I still had no contacts to follow but thought I might get some leads if I visited the Voss Brgyggeri or the Ægir pub and brewery at Flåm. And then another one of my amazing coincidences kicked in.

Oslo Sentralen Statsjon

Aass Brewery at Drammen. One of the breweries I wasn't interested in, photographed from the train.

I was on the train from Oslo to Voss. Everything in Norway is new and squeaky clean. They have invested all that North Sea Oil wealth in substantial infrastructure improvements and continue to do so: roads, railways, tunnels and so on. I was impressed by the railway; quiet, smooth and comfortable with plenty of leg-room. I had booked a seat at the discount price and it turned out to be the aisle seat but when I got there I found that the window seat was unoccupied, so I placed by bag on my own seat and sat in the window seat. The scenery of forest, lakes, mountain torrents, small fields and the occasional station passed me by and I was fascinated as I looked out of the window. We were standing in a station some way down the line and I was daydreaming when I became aware of someone trying to attract my attention. “Excuse me, but may I sit in this seat?” she said. “Oh I am so sorry! Actually, this is your seat, by the window”. “No that’s alright, you can stay there”, she said. So I moved my bag and we settled down for the remainder of the journey and I continued to watch the scenery swish by. It wasn’t until we got to the mountains that I started to get up and excitedly look out of all of the windows to get the best views of the landscape. It was then that we began to speak. “Is this your first time here?” she asked, as if it wasn’t obvious enough. “Yes, I am going to Voss. I am a geologist, which is why I am so interested in the rock and the scenery but I am also brewer and I want to find out about farmhouse yeast and beer. I have been following a blog and only know the name of one person who makes it in Norway and that is Sigmund Gjernes, who lives somewhere near Voss. So I am going there to Voss to see if I can find someone who will share a bottle of vossaøl with me, before I try to brew it myself in my brewery in England.”

View of Klevavatn (I think) from the train between Finse and Myrdal

“Well”, she said, “I am going to Voss, I live there. And I also know Sigmund Gjernes. I used to work with him.” You should have seen the look on my face. I was incredulous. What were the chances? I was in a foreign country to seek an audience with a particular brewer and found that not only had I booked a seat on a train that carried someone who knew him but I had actually plonked myself in her pre-booked seat!

“I also have a brother and he brews in the old way, with kveik. I could see if he would meet with you if you like. He lives in Bergen but he is coming to Voss on Saturday.” What? I mean WHAT!? It couldn’t get any better if I had planned this for a year. But it just happened, spontaneously. When we got to Voss, her daughter was there waiting with the car and they kindly took me on a short detour through the town, pointing out a couple of bars I might to visit and there were the offices where Sigmund worked.

True to her word Anbjorg called me later that evening to say that she had spoken with her brother John and he would be pleased to meet with me on Saturday evening. This had the makings of a great trip.

A Great Way to Lose a Day

It happens every now and then. You have something in your diary that is cancelled at the last minute. Mentally you have written that day off, so when you suddenly have a ‘free day’, what do you do with it? I’m not one for lazing in bed (oh okay, sometimes I do), but as a rule I try to get some ‘me’ time in and do something crazy instead.

So it was that last Thursday I decided that the time could be spent, squandered if necessary, on a deeply experimental brew. For some time I have been following the blog of Lars Marius Garshol, a Norwegian IT developer who takes his beer hobby very seriously and writes a very honest and engaging blog. He is currently researching some of the more obscure and ethnographic parts of the Baltic and Scandinavian beer world. He is telling us about Norwegian farmhouse beer – maltøl (more on that later) – and also about his travels in Lithuania and beyond. Now it so happens that my mother-in-law is Lithuanian and she is on her last legs as I write this; so I have been reading @Larsga blogs with interest. One of the styles he describes from Lithuania is a baked beer called keptinis and his latest blog describes the scant information recorded by historians and ethnographers. Responding to a challenge laid down by @thornbidgematt in a recent tweet I thought I would have a go.

I say that the information is scant: there certainly isn’t a recipe and some of the information is contradictory. The outline of the keptinis process is that the grains are made into loaves and baked, then mashed and the wort is fermented without boiling. It is a raw beer. What I don’t understand yet is, why would you do that? By all accounts it is hard work and time consuming, so there must be a good reason to make beer this way. What possible reasons could there be?

In broad terms any process (like baking) must either produce something that you want (like breaking down complex ingredients to something simple, creating some colour (from Maillard reactions) or developing flavour) or else it is there to prevent a problem, like infection by bugs that you would rather avoid by sterilisation.

If you do bake the mash it seems to me like a great way of destroying the enzymes that the maltsters have carefully generated from the barley. The job of those enzymes is to convert the starch in malted grains to maltose (a sugar) so that the yeast can ferment it. It seems wrong to subject the enzymes to heat and very likely destroy them. Along the way you may get some flavour and colour but it does seem rather dodgy. On the other hand, if you are not planning to boil the wort before fermentation you need some way of controlling the bugs you don't want; like killing off the naturally occurring bugs such as Lactobacillus that live on the grains, or otherwise you will always get a sour beer. Keptinis is not reported to be especially sour, at least not when it is fresh.

So I went in to this brew day not quite understanding why they used this method and having to best guess the exact ingredients, quantities, temperatures and timings.

The guidance given by the ethnographers in papers that was reported by Lars is vague and contradictory. While farmhouse 'styles' are notoriously variable there are a number of features that seem quite impractical to me:

1. The malt bill suggested by the historian Juozas Petrulis (1975) was "1 kg pale barley malts, 2 kg rye malt, and 2 kg oats". I regarded this to be the perfect recipe for a stuck mash. The quantity of oats in particular, without the use of rice hulls to aid the flow, was asking for trouble.

2. One wonders if there are enough enzymes present to convert the starch, from only 1kg of pale malt.

3. Would the baking process not destroy what enzymes there were?

Here is what I did, intending to make 19 litres of beer by the Brew in a Bag method:

3kg      Pale Maris Otter malt                                                

2kg      Rye Malt

0.5kg   Flaked oats

100g    Green garden Goldings hops

250ml  Yeast slurry (cultured from a bottle of Helsingborgs Kaffestout)                                         

The dry malt bill was mixed in a large bucket until even. Then 1.5kg at a time were put into a large mixing bowl and about 1.4 litres of near boiling water added, enough to wet all the grains and make a stiff mix. 

This was quickly put into a shallow baking tray to form a flat 'loaf' and turned out onto a newspaper. Four of these were produced, which fortunately was as much as I could fit in my oven. The instructions in Larsblog said to lay them on a bed of straw but I didn’t have any straw, so I used newspapers, as I guessed that the purpose of the straw was to absorb excess liquor during baking. 

They were taken to the kitchen and placed on oven shelves and baked at 190C for one hour. At that point three of the loaves had developed a toasted crust (a little darker in one corner) but the fourth (see second shelf up) was still soggy and pale, so it was placed back in the oven for another 30 minutes until it looked like the others. This contradicted the guidance in Larsblog which said bake at 177C for only 20-30 minutes but my loaves hadn’t cooked much by then and certainly hadn’t developed a toasty crust which is mentioned. One report in Larsblog said to bake the loaves until black and crisp but I thought that was just too extreme, and unlikely to produce any fermentable wort at all, so I ignored it.

The newspapers absorbed a fair amount of strong sticky wort that oozed from the base of the loaves. The original instructions called for straw but I didn't have any. A certain amount of the straw must have stuck to the loaves, so it must have been added to the mash too. I tried to remove as much of the paper as I could but it was very sticky. I might think of something else next time, if there is a next time.

The loaves were quite flat and apart from the crust were still very moist inside, despite being baked for much longer than the recommended 20-30 minutes. I took them out and set them to one side. They began to harden up a little as they cooled, as a cake would. They looked like giant flap-jacks.

A bucket was sterilized with Peractic acid and filled with 11 litres of boiling water, one kettle at a time. It was insulated with a large duvet. 2 litres of cold water were added to bring the temperature down to 72C. Then the baked malt, still slightly warm, was crumbled into the mash tun. I tried to crush the harder crust in a pestle and mortar, as recommended, but it wasn’t crunchy enough. The temperature of the mash had reduced to a perfect 65C. A further 1.5 litres of boiled water was added, by which time the 5 Imperial gallon (23 litre) bucket was fairly full. The whole mash was stirred and the lid put on and kept insulated for 4.5 hours (yes, 4.5 hours) inside a sleeping bag and a double duvet. After 2 hours the temperature was still 65C.

I quite forgot to add the hops to the mash, so 100 g of green garden Goldings were taken from the freezer and boiled separately in a couple of litres of the wort for 20 minutes. This was thought to be equivalent to 50 g of dried hops that should have gone into the mash to give an estimated IBU of 25 units.

After nearly 5 hours the temperature was still 64C (good duvet!). The hopped wort was added and the wort was strained off through a brew bag into a freshly sterilised bucket. The mash was gelatinous and very reluctant to run through the fine mesh. In the end I was satisfied to use only a 1mm sieve, then a after that collapsed under the weight I settled for a conical stainless sieve but it was still very slow because the mash was so gelatinous.

It seems like a huge amount of work (no, it WAS a huge amount of work) and the extract is not very good. I recovered only around 9 litres from the first runnings at a gravity of 1055. Vast amounts of liquor have been absorbed by the gelatinous grain and weren't running out. In total 16.8 litres of liquor went in and only 9 came out (before sparging). Should I sparge? It was half past midnight.

I sparged with a relatively small amount of boiled water, as I didn't want to reduce the OG too much. It came down to 1050 and at that point it was one o'clock in the morning. I pitched yeast cultured from Helsingborgs Kaffestout, aerated with an electric hand blender (whizzer), put it in the airing cupboard and tumbled in to bed at 1.30am.

...

The next morning I whisked the wort again to aerate it and encourage the yeast to grow. By the evening there was no discernible fermentation activity. I was concerned about infection, so I whisked again with my blender and tipped a packet of T58 in to the wort. By Saturday evening there was still no activity. On Sunday morning the wort was flat still and it looked disgusting (below). I tasted the wort. It was not especially sweet, had a certain acidity but most crucially had an thick mouthfeel, like engine oil. It was horrible. I had a feeling that there were no fermentable sugars in the wort at all and it was just jam-packed with unfermentable dextrins. Whatever bugs survived the baking were probably beginning to sour the mash. I thought that with that slimy mouthfeel and the growing acidity, this wasn’t going to produce a beer that I or any body else would want to drink!

Out of sheer curiousity I have put the brew back into the airing cupboard, just to see what happens. But I have every expectation that it will end up going down the drain. Was it a wasted day? It was certainly exhausting and I am still recovering from the late night. I doubt it will produce anything drinkable but it has been an experiment and even failed experiments teach us a lesson. What would I do differently next time, if there is a next time? I will hopefully be armed with more knowledge (maybe resulting from this blog) but at least I won’t be attempting it for the very first time; I have some experience now. I must certainly look at the malt bill and the baking times and the temperatures; they must be critical. Maybe I baked it too hot and/or too long; maybe just too much was loaded into my oven. Maybe...

It cost me a day but I now have more experience in making keptinis than almost anyone else alive. I just don’t have any keptinis yet. Ha ha ha. Cheers.

Gluten-free beer: why not?

I was buying Belgian chocolates for mother-in-law in the chocolate shop in Cromer when I got chatting with Digby, the owner. "You're opening a new brewery? ", he said. "In Cromer? Oh, I love beer. I used to drink a lot of it but can't drink it now. I've been diagnosed with coeliac disease and beer makes me ill. Why don't you brew a gluten-free beer?" Now, there's a thought. With that I promised I would look into it and see what I could do.

Several months went by and I was busy getting the brewery up and running and learning my craft but one day I thought of Digby and began to search the Internet for the subject of gluten-free beer, of coeliac disease and gluten-intolerance, and hey, just what is gluten anyway? I quickly found that  there are lots of unfortunate people out there who love beer and yearn for the flavour (and the effect) but just can't enjoy the products designed for them. I discovered that most gluten-free beers are brewed with ingredients other than barley that are naturally free of the protein complex known as gluten. Cereals such as sorghum, chestnut flour and other ingredients have been used but to many people the results are not quite what they are hoping for. The flavours of these substitutes are, well, just not beer as they know it. Sometimes close, but no cigar. You can brew beer out of almost anything and through the ages people have tried them all but barley is the grain of choice and there is a reason for that. It tastes great. I didn't want Poppyland Brewery to make inferior 'beer' from non-barley grains, so I searched on.

Then I discovered that there is a second route to gluten-free beer: make a great beer from barley as usual but treat it in some way to remove or de-nature the offending gluten. The complex of proteins - hordein and gluten - from barley and wheat irritates the gut of many people and in severe cases the villi in the small intestine can be permanently damaged. Ingestion of gluten for them is a serious and debilitating issue. Yet most suffers are not affected if the level of gluten is less than 20 parts per million (ppm). I have not yet found a method of actually removing gluten but its long chain molecules can be chopped up into their constituent parts - peptides - and thus are harmless to coeliacs or gluten-intolerant people. This can be achieved by using an enzyme, broadly termed a protease, or more specifically Proline Specific Endo-protease, whose job is to cleave the long protein molecules into smaller chunks.

Protein in beer is something that brewers have had to deal with for years, because it comes out of solution, making 'hot break' (undesirable grey solids) and cold break that float to the top or fall to the bottom. Protein makes the beer cloudy. Since the 19th century, when we started drinking out of clear glasses, the production of clearer and paler beers has been the goal of most brewers. Cloudy beer is generally considered undesirable (usually mistakenly so in my opinion). There are brewing processes that help to reduce protein haze but much can be done by choosing low protein barley in the first place and two-row barley (as opposed to six-row) is the premium product with which to make the finest ales. The Maris Otter barley malt that I habitually use is such a low protein barley, so I was already on the right track.

Today's drinkers are highly attuned to the look as well as the taste of beer, mainly through marketing hype by the breweries. A beer that turns cloudy when you put it in the fridge is not what the breweries want at all. That's caused by soluble proteins becoming insoluble at lower temperatures and precipitating in suspension - making 'chill haze'. Beer is big business, so a lot of research has gone into making it 'better' and more desirable for customers. A company called DSM in the Netherlands developed a product that is designed to prevent chill haze in beer and it is marketed under the name of Brewers Clarex (introduced in 2005). It is very effective at chopping up the long protein molecules into shorter ones - peptides - which don't come out of solution at low temperature, so the beer remains perfectly clear. Some of that protein is gluten, so it too is destroyed by the active enzyme. Lo! and behold - a side effect of this process is to render the beer 'gluten-free'.

I contacted DSM about Brewers Clarex (http://www.dsm.com/markets/foodandbeverages/en_US/products/enzymes/brewing/brewers-clarex.html) and asked them where I could get it in the UK. The salesman told me that most of it goes to the USA*. Maybe the best thing, he said, would be for him to send me a sample to try. The smallest they do is a 500 ml sample bottle. As it only needs 3 - 7 g per hectolitre (100 litres) of beer that sample was going to last me a long time. My brew length is only 320 litres at most and I brew up to twice a month, so it should last at least a year and a half. It is stable and only loses 5% efficacy per year, so it won't spoil before it is all used up.

A tiny quantity of enzyme (20-25 ml in my case) is added to the fermenter at the same time as the yeast. Over the course of the fermentation the yeast agitates the beer at a molecular level and the enzyme gets to do its work cleaving the gluten. So by the time the beer is ready to package it is well below 20 ppm gluten and in some cases completely undetectable. I initially used a gluten-in-food test kit from Imutest to check that every batch of beer had been dosed with Clarex. But since September 2014 I have changed the testing regime and now use the most sensitive assay available for highly processed products such as beer, which is a competitive R5 ELISA. The specific product I use is the Ridascreen Gliadin Competitive conducted on every batch by Murphy & Son and so far it demonstrates that Brewers Clarex reduces gluten to under 10 parts per million. So a litre of Poppyland beer contains less than the minimum daily dose of gluten that is thought to be safe for coeliacs.

There are some fierce critics, especially in the USA, who state that brewers using ingredients that contain gluten can never claim their beer to be gluten-free. But in the EU there is no such category of food labelling as 'gluten-reduced'. It is either 'gluten-free' if under 20 ppm, 'very low gluten' if below 100 ppm or 'contains gluten' if above. The Brewers Clarex has no effect on the quality of the beer - either flavour, texture, colour or any other parameter as far as I can tell (and the manufacturers assert), so I have now adopted the treatment of the fermenting beer with Brewers Clarex as standard procedure and I am happy to offer my beer to the public as 'gluten-free'. The Coeliac Society raises no objection to this method of treatment and coeliac and gluten-intolerant customers who have tried Poppyland beers report that they suffered no deleterious effects but I always recommend proceeding with caution.

If it is so good, why don't other breweries make gluten-free beer? Well many of them do use Brewers Clarex as a cure for chill-haze, especially the big brewers. They just don't sing about the side-effect of creating gluten-free beer. I think that the addition of a small amount of an enzyme, which is derived from a common fungus called Aspergillus niger, is not difficult to do, is cheap and not deleterious to the quality of the beer and if it benefits coeliacs and gluten-intolerant people: WHY NOT?

* since writing this Murphy & Son (www.murphyandson.co.uk/) have gained the UK franchise to sell Brewers Clarex.

Wedding Saison

There is no doubt about it, becoming a brewer puts you in the spotlight. People are paying good money for your creations, and you have to deliver, so it is vital to receive good feedback from customers. Positive, critical feedback helps you make better beer. Not everyone's palate is the same, so you can't simply please yourself all the time (well, most of the time you do) so when people do come back with comments - good or bad - it is really helpful and certainly influences what I do in the future.

So when one of my best customers came back to the brewery and told me how much he enjoyed the saison it was a real confidence booster. But I wasn't ready for what came next. 'We have a wedding coming up next year and I wondered if I could buy some beer to give to our guests at the reception. Maybe you could brew one for us'. I had only brewed a few relatively few times, so the pressure was on. 'Yes, I can brew you a beer' I said confidently, 'what would you like?' We decided on a saison, packaged in half champagne bottles, corked and caged and I would design a label. He ordered a hundred bottles.

In the ensuing months I brewed in other breweries and borrowed a Russian Doll brew kit from Brendan but when that suffered a catastrophic failure I was without the means to brew at Poppyland. As spring approached I was worried that I needed to get started if the saison was going to be at its best for the August wedding. At last Brendan delivered a mash tun and a kettle and lent me a fermenter and the necessary pumps and pipes. I was in business again. So the first brew on the 14th of May was the saison. I was thinking that it should be possible to re-visit one of my earlier saisons, Out of the Blue and its brethren from the same gyle, Seafood Lovers' Ale and Flowers of the Field. In late June and early July the elderflowers would be out and that would make a nice addition to the saison and there was just enough time to have it matured and conditioned by the date of the mid August wedding. The beer was brewed and racked and I went on holiday to Italy, where the elderflowers were already in bloom. The groom's parents had asked if they could accompany me in the field to gather the elderflowers, so they could feel that they had a hand in the making of the beer, so on my return we had a lovely afternoon mooching through the lanes on North Norfolk, seeking out the very first of the elderflowers, for the season was late after a dreadful long winter and a terrible spring. We gathered the last heads just as the sunny afternoon deteriorated into spots of rain and gathering cloud. But it was a very pleasant way to spent an afternoon.

The saison which had been maturing in two kilderkins was dosed with Soraci Ace hops and the elderflowers. The flowers were picked from their heads (which takes ages) and steamed for a few minutes in the kilderkins and the hops were added before the beer was run in and left to stew to absorb the flavours for 17 days. The beer was bottled on 10 July, just over a month to drop clear and condition in the bottle. If left longer it would continue to improve.

The design of the label also proved to be a collaborative effort. A friend of the happy couple had done a lovely caricature of Alice and Ben and I was asked to incorporate it into the design. Then came a line drawing of Voewood, the striking venue near Holt that would be used for the reception, and a monogram incorporating their names and the date of the wedding. I amalgamated the caricature of the couple and the drawing of the house into the front of the label and overlaid 'Wedding Saison' in a suitably carefree font. I was pleased with the design and so were Ben and Alice and Ben's parents.

Next came the collection of the order and the feedback on the beer. I hoped they liked it and that it was well-behaved and frankly I had my heart in my mouth as I awaited the verdict. It was a great relief then when Paul sent this message:
'We thought we would wait until we had time to properly enjoy a taste, so we tried a bottle last night, and we were not disappointed. It fits the bill as a perfectly balanced ale. We particularly enjoyed the elderflower notes which came through, and think that it is an ale which will be enjoyed by all the guests whether they be beer drinkers or not. We met the happy couple for lunch today as well Alice's parents, and we have given them a bottle each to try before the day, so hopefully we will have some feedback from them too. They were all certainly very impressed with the presentation, and thought the design of the label was perfect. We will be more than happy so serve it to the guests and are sure it will add to the day. Thanks for all your efforts on our behalf, and there will be more feedback to follow.

And Ben added:
'My Dad showed me the beers at the weekend; they look absolutely fantastic! Thank you so much for all the work you've put in. I'll make sure we get some good publicity shots for you!

Good luck and best wishes to Ben and Alice, what a lovely couple:

Step up young man

I have often spoken of how my journey into brewing so far has been blessed with good fortune and good timing and with many happy coincidences. Resources, advice, opportunities and chance meetings have just appeared before me exactly as I needed them. But perhaps the greatest of these chance meetings was the day I pitched up at Brendan’s brewery, ostensibly to buy a corking machine for my home brewing, not knowing about his crusade to raise a new generation of brewers or the Barley to Beer Project (funded by the Leader Programme). It was mid October in 2010 and late in the day when on a whim I decided to detour to Ickburgh and see if the IceniBrewery was open. On arrival just before dusk Brendan Moore was characteristically on the phone. When he got off we fell to talking about brewing and I let slip that I was going to be redundant soon and had been contemplating a new start in microbrewing. I knew enough that I was determined not to compete head to head with the established breweries but that was all. Maybe I would brew premium beer, possibly Belgian style beers and IPAs and sell them in bottles, as opposed to casking it for the pub trade.

Two hours later Brendan was still in full flow, telling me how I should not follow his own career trajectory, brewing as much beer as possible, delivering it all over the country, selling to pubs for relatively little gain and arriving home exhausted, only to get up the next day and do it all again. All this was reinforcing my own notion to brew better beer, so the customer gets an amazing experience and the brewer can get a just return for the time and financial investment. This notion is something of a mission with Brendan. Some brewers are dismissive of this approach and sceptical too of the prices that Brendan claims could be charged for beer, if it is done right. Don’t follow the traditional British brewing model, he said. Look to the Americans and the Italians who are reinventing what beer can be: innovating, experimenting, pushing the boundaries, astonishing the public and winning new admirers who are willing to pay premium and super premium prices. Brew from the till backwards, he said. Make the best beer you can, take infinite pains but decide what profit you want to make and calculate your selling price accordingly, taking all your fixed and variable costs into account. The beer might be £10 a pint, or £20 or even £30 but if you put passion and commitment into brewing this beer you will find the customers. And with good margins you won’t need to find so many customers, because you’ll be brewing beer that has impact and will keep for a very long time, so you will not need to brew so much to satisfy the drinker.

This is a hard business model for the average brewery to take on board. Beer has been traditionally considered as a cheap drink for the working classes, a thirst quencher, a provision that is sold in pubs and supermarkets. Volume counts and price is important so the brewers have to work really hard just to keep up the output. This was not the model for a one-man-band brewer like me, who is entering semi-retirement but at the same time starting out on a new part-time career. The trend in beer sales is downward. Pubs are closing every week. The brewing world is changing. Craft brewing on the other hand is steadily growing, taking market share from the big industrial brewers. But craft beer needs to be different to the traditional brewing trade. Despite the number and diversity of beers and breweries in Britain, many are simply variations on a theme, not all that different from each other, crow-barred into a session beer format and frankly sometimes rather dull. Appealing to a mass market can mean finding the lowest common denominator, within a tight envelope of flavour, style and price. There should be nothing that would frighten the horses and recipes, ingredients and processes are pared to the bone for maximum efficiency. Many make beer that is merely adequate; optimized to make the best profit, not the best beer. This is industrial beer and it has been this way since the early 19^th century. But it doesn’t have to be that way. There are amazing ingredients out there and processes you can employ to make unique and satisfying beers - extraordinary ales. This is the way to go he said. Look at the Slow Food movement, look at bakers and cheese makers and other artisans who take immense pride in their work and who are cultivating niche markets for their extraordinary products. Look for new ways to market beer and innovative places to sell it.

I was persuaded to join the East Anglian Brewers Cooperative and encouraged to help establish this new model. Membership also opened up the opportunity to buy the best Maris Otter malt from Teddy Maufe at the Branthill Farm at favourable prices. I have written elsewhere about the pleasure I have in driving from Cromer to Wells with a boot full of beer to sell to the Real Ale Shop and returning with a boot-load of prime malt to turn into another batch of beer.

Members of the East Anglian Brewers Cooperative debate the issues of the day at West Lexham.

I was also able to benefit from a series of workshops, briefings and seminars that Brendan has organised with Tastes of Anglia. Funding from the Barley to Beer Project has brought about training days in 2011 and 2012 that were just heaven-sent for a start up microbrewer like me. They have given me knowledge, business insights and skills that have eased my passage into professional brewing. I went to training days on malt, hops, making extraordinary ales (slow brewing), marketing with video and social networking, building a luxury brand. On those days I networked with other brewers, both established and newcomers and was briefed by professional tutors, maltsters, brewers, hop-factors, media experts and management consultants. They were good fun. I recorded many of the presentations on my tiny digital sound recorder and I have been able to play these back at will in order to fully absorb the wisdom they imparted. With help from the media experts I set up a website, a Twitter account and use Facebook to network with my customers. These courses inspired me and provided practical knowledge. The subsidy from the Barley to Beer Project has not only made it possible to stage these events but also made them affordable. I am very glad that I came on the scene when I did and was able to benefit from them.

Paul Corbett of Charles Faram, hop factors brought and introduced 70 samples of hops from all over the world

Inside the old piggery at West Lexham brewrs get to handle and smell the hop samples.

East Anglian brewers enjoying lunch at Tony Hook's pop-up restaurant at West Lexham, the venue of several training seminars.

I have made a few mistakes along the way and still have a lot to learn but I would have been making many more and much bigger mistakes without the advice and guidance from the Barley to Beer Project. Above all however I think it is the support and encouragement that stops me wondering off into the wilderness. Over the past few months I have found that Brendan was right. There is a market for super premium extraordinary ales. Every now and then I look at an email he sent. It explained why some of the courses didn’t tell me exactly what I was expecting to hear – practical, technical advice on how to brew. He retorted with this:

“It is not you (who has used more hops than any other brewer and has studied more beers) that needs help. It is YOU and me who can break the cycle. Look to real innovators like George and Neville (who gave us the miracle of Maris Otter - set less seed and get 50% more yield, and it is the best malting barley ever) and Teddy Maufe (who turned a small chapel on this farm into the saviour of his farming life).
“The reason you are not getting any technical advice on brewing extraordinary ales is because there is none where you are expecting to find it. You are our expert. Step up young man, your way is clear, your stage is empty, burst in and fill it! The rest of us still have these Fuggles to use up and I know a brewer who decides on what he brews by the number of labels he has left to use up because his printer gave him a good price on fifteen thousand.”

So, stand back, here I come… I am about to burst in.

North Norfolk's Happiest Journey

I first came to the North Norfolk coast as a child. I recall it well; it was 1960. The Mini was recently released and our family friends Thelma and Archie had one. We met up with them in Cambridge and journeyed on through Breckland, with its haunting gnarled pines, through Swaffham to Fakenham for a coffee and then on the Dry Road to Wells and to our destination at Holkham Bay. Mum, Dad and I trailed behind the smart Mini in our dun coloured Ford Prefect. Mum was the driver, as Dad hadn’t learned to drive at that time. In those days Lady Anne’s Drive was the start of a long heavy trudge through fine silver sand leading to Holkham Bay. It sapped the strength of little boys who struggled with picnic hampers and deck chairs. On arrival at the beach we had a further half mile to reach the sea, for when the tide was out the bay was an open expanse of golden rippled sand and whispy shell banks. What a contrast today now that the marram grass has helped to build up sand dune barriers that enclose the bay and in their shelter the mud has settled and samphire and sea purslane has grown up. It makes you feel old when you witness coastal change in your own lifetime.

In my teens I was a bird watcher and frequently came to the North Norfolk coast to visit Cley Marshes and Salthouse and the pines at Wells. Since the late nineteen seventies I have made my home here and now I have become a brewer in Cromer.

As a member of the East Anglian Brewers Cooperative I am able to buy malt directly from the farm where it grows. As part of the Barley to Beer Project, Teddy Maufe sends his prime barley from Branthill Farm near Wells to Crisps Maltings at Great Ryburgh near Fakenham. They keep his Maris Otter barley separate from everyone else’s. They malt it separately too and send it back to him. So I regularly find myself travelling my favourite road – the A149 coast road from Cromer to Wells. Past the ducks at Salthouse, past the Walsey Hills where I camped as a teenager with Kevin Baker (now with the BTO), past the East Bank at Cley, that legendary spot where so may rare birds have turned up and where the equally legendary Richard Richardson once entertained the bird watchers with his mimicry – taking the Mick out of other bird watchers, as well as imitating bird calls.

Onwards I drive, with a boot full of beer to sell to Teddy for his Real Ale Shop, the financial saviour of his farm. Once there I deliver my beer and have a look at what the other Norfolk brewers are making and I may buy one or two, just for market research you understand. I load up my crushed malt from the barn and pay the man in the shop. Then it is the return journey. I stop in Wells and buy pork chops and other delights from Arthur Howell’s butcher’s shop in Staithe Street. The pigs are slaughtered on the premises. They only come from Wighton just down the road. They walk into the yard at the back of the shop thinking they are on a day out to Wells. No stress, before they are despatched and their sweet succulent meat is out in the front shop in no time. All his meat is good and it is little wonder that the top restaurants around here use him.

At Cley I call in on another of North Norfolk’s food heroes. Cley Smokehouse isn’t the last one left (I use one in Cromer for smoking malt and hops) but there aren’t many and it does have some lovely produce. I am very fond of their buckling – hot smoked headless herrings that just melt in the mouth, or various tubs of seafood such as potted shrimps or taramosalata. It is a joy to park on the flint pebble pavement outside the shop; maybe I will look in at Picnic Fayre and a real treat is to call in and say Hi to Sarah in Pinkfoot, the wildlife art gallery across the street.

It is such a happy journey, a green journey, carrying beer in one direction and bringing malt and delicious food on the return. It brings me entertainment and gladdens the heart. A sideways glance may bring a glimpse of a marsh harrier quartering the marsh or a skein of a thousand gaggling geese. Today I think I shall visit Steve at the Binham Chequers to see what he has been brewing. 

I am so glad I am a brewer in Norfolk.