A Day At The Micro Brewery

As a keen consumer of beer since being about 16 years of age, I have recently had my interest in real ales rekindled. After the slow, early 90s death of cask conditioned beers I switched almost exclusively to Guinness - a drink I love, especially in comparison to the blandness of 'smoothflow' keg bitters and the even blander and ubiquitous Carling lager. I still would drink a real ale whenever I came across one, but the pubs and bars I usually frequented didn't offer them.

Gradually though, I was aware of the renaissance of real ale production, particularly in the micro-brewery sector and the availability of these beers in my local Wetherspoons, in some variety. Wetherspoons wasn't my favourite watering hole at the time, but I made the odd trip, just for the exceedingly well kept real ales.

Hot liquor, mash tun and Copper (r-l)

Then the brewery, round the corner, at Blakemere - The Northern Brewing Company - started to sell its beers through my local The Old Star and the real ale thirst was once again revived. I have a long connection with Blakemere in general, and through a mutual friend I got to know the guys at the brewery some years ago. Their beers are also regular guest ales in the local Wetherspoons and more and more this chain pub became my local, and now I find myself supping proper beer in there several times a week.

Chatting to my friend Paul, the brewer at Northern Brewing Company over a beer one afternoon, he invited me to come and have a 'brew day' and make 1500 pints of a real ale, next time I was off work. I agreed to this in a nanosecond and arranged the day.

Brew Day
Seven twenty in the morning, I arrive at the brewery as agreed and it's a case of getting stuck straight in; everything in the brewing of real ales is time sensitive and has to be done in a strict order according to the recipe. I was making Blakemere Gold today.

Mashing in.

The first task was 'mashing in' - or mixing the correct amount of malted barley with hot liquor (water) and ensuring it is thoroughly stirred in, bending over the mash tun with a specially designed paddle, stirring a 'porridge' that gets thicker and heavier as each bag of malted barley is poured in. At 7:30am, this is a real wakener!

This mix is left in the mash tun at a carefully monitored temperature for an hour, steeping. The process is undertaken at the optimum temperature for extracting the natural sugars from the malt.
After the allotted time has elapsed, the sugary liquid is drained off into the copper. This sweet tasting liquor is known as strong wort, I filled a cup from the copper and it was very much like an Ovaltine without the milk, naturally sweet and known in the trade as 'brewer's breakfast'.

Digging the used malt out of the mash tun

Once the malt is nearly dry, a process called sparging commences; a consistent shower of hot water is evenly laid over the top of the barley in the tun, to extract the remaining malty sugars. Sparging continues until the copper is full, and ready for the next phase of this ancient operation. What surprised me was that at no point was any sugar added - all the sweetness, the food for the yeast, was obtained from the barley - completely natural. The original gravity of the strong wort is measured using a hydrometer, this gives an accurate measure of just how much sugar is in the mix, a key to calculating the alcohol content once the beer is ready.

The bittering hops are added to the wort in the copper, and the massive heating element is fired up to bring the mix to the boil, and to keep it boiling for about an hour. The hops added at this stage are chosen to control just how bitter the taste of the final brew will really be.

Adding the aroma hops

Meanwhile the back breaking job of digging out the barley from the mash tun has to be done, these sweet tasting husks are are the only bi-product of the brewing and are collected by a farmer for animal feed, that's providing an opportunistic magpie doesn't eat them all first.

It's time for a mug of tea and a breather while the contents of the copper bubble away, the hoppy, malty aroma is almost intoxicating in itself and no alcohol has been produced yet!

The final step whilst the wort is still in the copper is to add, for this recipe anyway, the aroma hops, and stir them in so they're all soaked and infusing the brew with their wonderful perfume.

The fermenter

After the boiling has finished the resulting liquor is cooled down using a heat exchanger to around 24 degrees and the golden coloured, fragrance laden liquid is transferred to the fermenter, ready for the addition of yeast; then it is left in a temperature controlled environment for the yeast to work its magic. As the brew starts to leisurely ferment (each bubble produced corresponds to some alcohol) the less than relaxing task of digging out and cleaning the copper has to be done, while it's still steaming. It's like a hoppy sauna in there, and luckily brewer, Paul, took pity on me and undertook this job.

It's now about 1:30pm and I'm pretty exhausted - there's a lot of hard work and effort that goes in to making a craft beer, a true real ale. So as a thank you, I cooked up one of my favourite bar snacks - currywurst - and we finished the shift with sausages, a glass of one of their bottle conditioned beers and retired to Wetherspoon's for a pint, or two.

Next - the tasting!