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.

Smokin'

Of the many wonderful things that autumn brings soft herring roes is fairly high my list of favourites. I am looking forward to some of this comfort food for lunch on this rain-sodden and blustery day. Washed under the hot tap, rolled in seasoned flour and fried in butter, then served on hot buttered toast with a mug of tea and plenty of black pepper, my mouth is watering in anticipation. Autumn is the herring season and that means local bloaters and kippers too. There are still a few traditional smokehouses in North Norfolk and I am blessed to have one of them just down the road from my brewery in Cromer. John and Frances Jonas have a 165 year-old smokehouse in their fisherman’s yard in Chapel Street. We have known them for years and Mrs Brewer is good friends with Frances. So it occurred to me that I could make good use of this asset by smoking some malt to boost the Poppyland Brewery retertoir. But then I had a further thought.

Bamberg of course is famous for its powerful rauchbier, made with beech-smoked malt. Various breweries especially abroad offer beers made with some smoked malt but sometimes I struggle to identify its presence, either because they didn’t use enough or the flavour has died away since leaving the brewery. Or maybe its just me. So, smoked malt is not all that unusual in beers but I don’t know of any that use smoked hops. It promises to offer a different, fresher smoke experience.“Smoking hops?” said one wag, “That sounds like something I used to do at college”.

My first experiment was to take one kilogram of crushed pale Maris Otter malt down to Frances, spread out on our largest roasting tin from the kitchen. It went into her smokehouse for just 24 hours to see what effect that would have. It was a kind of calibration exercise, although I have no idea what units smokiness is measured in. It came out smelling fresh and smoky, nice and sweet from the burning of oak sawdust. It was a good flavour (not fishy!) and significantly different from either the Bamberg malt or the peaty whisky malt I had smelt before. It had great promise but it wasn’t enough, neither in quantity nor in smokiness. It went into the first beer that Edoardo and I made in the Poppyland Brewery premises. Not un-naturally I called it Smokehouse Porter. But one kilogram in a grist of some 70 kg wasn’t going to have too much impact. That was when my imagination turned to smoking hops and dry hopping with them.

I had about 1 kg of wild hops that I had collected early one sunny October morning from a bank in Upper Sheringham. I had not dried them but put them straight into the freezer. From experience I knew that these hops would have a mild peppery, grassy, noble flavour. What would they be like when smoked? There was only one way to find out.

I took the whole carrier bag to Frances and she smoked them alongside her fish for 36 hours. The beer wasn’t quite ready for dry hopping when they came out, so they were left in the brewery for just over a week before they were used. They filled the brewery with their wonderful smoky scent. Being damp they began to molder before I could use them, so I put them into a kilderkin – all of them – and steamed them for about a quarter of an hour with my steam generator to ensure they and the kilderkin were sterile before running in the fermented beer.

I was thrilled with the result. The dark, molasses and malt-flavoured beer became suffused with a fresh and gentle smokiness that transformed it from a nice sweetish porter to a really great tasting beer. I bottled off 90 bottles.

Today I took down some commercial dried hops to Frances – US Centennial and NZ Wakatu. This time they are in large laundry bags and they will hang in the smokehouse for two days before I use them for dry-hopping two more kilderkins of porter for a couple of days. Then the last of the Smokehouse Porter will be bottled off, just in time for Christmas.

Now autumn has one more blessing to offer us – Cromer smoked beer.

Black IPA

Emelisse Black IPA

8% 33 cl

What actually is a black IPA? The answer is, rather a contradiction in terms and not actually defined anywhere, so far as I know. Well, let’s find out what this is like, if it thinks it is a Black IPA.

There wasn’t must fizz when I took the crown cap off but in pouring there was a reassuringly deep cappuccino-coloured head. There is an aroma that reminds me of gravy browning or Oxo cubes but without the savouriness. It comes from the malt I think and lots of it. There is chocolate aroma too, bitter chocolate, you know that 70% cocoa stuff. The first sip confirms that this is a beer to be reckoned with. The flavours are assertive and there is plenty of alcohol to entertain the tongue. It is bitter sweet, malty and hoppy (malty first, followed by the hops). It really is lovely. On smacking it around the mouth every millimetre of my tongue is being entertained, sweet at the front and on top, bitterness around the sides and at the back. Then a wave of alcohol soothes and reassures the palate that this is a quality beer.

This beer is as black as your hat and it retains a nice ring of foam and lacing on the surface. It just invites you to imbibe some more. So I do and it just gets better. I indulge myself and glug several drafts in one go, throwing it around my mouth to extract the maximum flavour on every taste receptor, all at the same time. Crumbs, this beer is a goer. It is so eager to please and to satisfy. I only bought one. I wish I had bought a crate but that would have set me back £46.20 for a dozen 33 cl bottles from René at Beautiful Beers in Bury St. Edmunds.

Well, is this a Black IPA or is it an Imperial Stout? To be honest it reminds me of Guinness Extra Foreign Stout, which is a lovely beer and very good value for money because you can often find it discounted as it doesn’t seem to sell for some reason. I love it.

Surely an IPA needs to be both high in alcohol and assertive in the hop department. In fact the hops should be dominant over the malt in my opinion, although the malt needs to be pretty solid to support those hops. I reckon in this excellent beer the malt is actually the dominant partner, probably plenty of specialty malt too. There are plenty of hops but the flavour and sweetness of the malt actually carry the day. So in my book that places it into the stout bracket. It is not a beefed up pale ale/bitter, it is a beefed up stout, or even an Imperial Stout. God, it’s lovely. But nah, it ain’t an IPA in my book, black or not. On second thoughts I gather that American East Coast IPAs do favour the malt over the hop-bomb, so maybe it is an IPA. It is academic really.

Now we are down near the bottom I had better consider some of those elusive flavours. In the burp the hops are subdued, not your big in-your-face American IPA hops, not citrus but quite well mannered English or maybe American hops that would make a good modern-day session bitter but plenty of them and balanced with sweetness from the malt. There is bitter chocolate as I have said; a touch of coffee and cocoa. Am I imagining fondant cream? Maybe I am. It reminds me of one of those indulgent chocolate ice cream concoctions, but on stilts. I wish I had brewed this (You will Martin. One day, you will). It is the bottom of the glass now and there is just a dessert spoonful left. It is so lovely I don’t want to finish. I want to come back for more but if I do it will be gone. There, it is gone and all I have is the memory and the scrumptious flavours that are still playing around in my mouth.

They are still there.

Ooh. That was a good beer. Thank you, Emelisse. I am not sure this is a Black IPA but it is fantastic.

I went back to the bottle and found a couple of millilitres in the bottom. It was enough to give me another little hit of that flavour. Aah.

Winston's Temper

‘I am not enjoying myself very much’, said young Winston Churchill in a letter to his mother.  It was a Wednesday, the second of September 1885 and the 11 year old boy was staying at my house, Chesterfield Lodge, in Cromer that in those days lay on the edge of town, close to the newly opened Cromer Beach railway station. The weather had been fine and he was looking forward to Saturday when his mother would join him and then he would have her all to himself for a whole ten days. He was not getting along at all well with his governess, whom he felt was very unkind, strict and stiff. Adding to his woes he had a stomach upset and a temperature, which he put down to some liver he had eaten.

Chesterfield Lodge, Cromer about 1900 very much as it is today

“My temper is not of the most amiable”, he wrote. “I am counting the days till Saturday. Then I shall be able to tell you all my troubles.”

Young Winston in 1884, aged 10

Those troubles included a contretemps with his governess when he petulantly threw an ink pot at her with damaging effect. She may well have met Dr Robert Fenner when Winston was ill, but she summoned Cromer’s only doctor, to act this time in loco parentis. Young Winston was led upstairs by Dr Fenner “who played an active part in making ‘the punishment fit the crime’”.

Dr Robert Fenner, (right) and his partner Dr Herbert Dent, who recorded the incident in his memoirs.

No doubt this episode will one day help to sell my house, as it is documented by Winston himself that he stayed here and augmented by the memoirs of Dr Dent, who was partner to Dr Fenner. I thought I would commemorate the fact back in 2010 by brewing a dark and brooding beer which I called “Winston’s Temper”. This was before I had the Poppyland Brewery but I wanted to brew it again. So yesterday, I did. This was only the second brew on the premises and the first I had done solo. I have to say that I am pleased with my efforts as, despite the shenanigans of the Russian Doll kit, I produced 240 litres of what promises to be a very tasty strong and black IPA. It should be in the bottles shortly after Winston's 138th birthday, on 30th November. Cheers Winston.

A couple of other little things link us to Winston. Firstly, he died (by then a great statesman) on my thirteenth birthday, 24 January 1965. I can vividly remember watching his state funeral on our old Pye television. Secondly, there is a brick in the back wall of the kitchen that is carved with a large letter W. I can’t prove it of course, but I like to think that Winston was showing off to his little brother Jack and getting his own back for the unhappy time he had at Chesterfield Lodge.

Who carved this initial many years ago?

Like all my beers, this one is based on the amazing Maris Otter malt that I obtain from Branthill Farm near Wells next the Sea. This is what gives the beers such amazing depth of flavour. This and the variety of hops - Centennial principal among them.

The Barley to Beer Project is funded by: