Good Evening from Sydling St Nicholas UK

[Basher]

Rokdoc you will have to take it easy drinking that beer through a long slow cook.
I’m looking forward to tasting your stout meat pie with puff pastry and left over KK brisket cooks


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[tony b]

Wow! That's a large batch of beer (20 gallons!) I'm actually going in the opposite direction and brewing smaller batches (1-3 gallons), as without beer club meeting and other festivals, I don't have an outlet for full 5 gallon batches. If I have to drink it mostly myself, I get bored with it well before it's gone and I'm ready to move onto another style. 

[RokDok]

@Basher I will take that advice- the beer is really to have something special to toast the arrival of the KK - I'll have to make something a little bit more sensible in strength for   those long & slows - although 18 hours is a long time, and I'd have to practise.

I've just had some very exciting news that my KK has now left Surabaya and is heading towards Singapore on the first stage of its journey !! It would be amazing if it got here for Xmas.

Mrs RD is equally happy -  the quid pro quo of this deal is that we get new sofas and we have a trip to the manufacturers booked for next week.

@tony b Tony, was a big batch of beer - I bottled 70 bottles or so for a couple of friends who helped brew, and another couple of friends took away a 30l fermenter each.

So I brew big batches but it is a very social occasion and in reality I only drink a small fraction of what I brew.

There will come a time in the future when I won't be able to manage to safely lift and manage that amount of kit though - but it is nice having a well stocked garage with various  beer of various vintages - the beer changes as the months and years go by.

You're smaller batch brewing has got me thinking though..... maybe one of those Speidel Braumeister all in one kits ???

Cheers 

 

RD

 

 

 

 

[tekobo]

Excellent news on all fronts @RokDok ! I suspect Christmas is optimistic but your beer will be in tip top condition for a new year celebration.  Hurrah.

[Basher]

Tekobo can you and Braai help rokdoc our with his oversupply of beer?
He’s making me thirsty.
35c (95f) predicted here on Wednesday and 80% humidity..... here comes Christmas.
If you can put a couple of days together like this you will clean that garage out in hurry.

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[tekobo]

12 hours ago, Basher said:

Tekobo can you and Braai help rokdoc our with his oversupply of beer?

Sorry, I am of no help there.  I don't drink beer.  That said, I had an interesting experience in a pub a couple of years ago, age 50.  I tried all their ciders and didn't like them.  The bar man asked me what I like to eat.  I said blue steak and blue cheese.  He offered me a lambic beer.  He was so right.  It is the only beer I have ever liked. 

[Basher]

Sorry, I am of no help there.  I don't drink beer.  That said, I had an interesting experience in a pub a couple of years ago, age 50.  I tried all their ciders and didn't like them.  The bar man asked me what I like to eat.  I said blue steak and blue cheese.  He offered me a lambic beer.  He was so right.  It is the only beer I have ever liked. 

Tekobo thank you for reminding me of this lambic beer.
I was once part of a club where we would match food, beer, and cigars.( bit of a wank really) I did however, enjoy an open fermented beer- lambic beer- and I thought it was Austrian. For 20 years I forgot the term. Never forgot the experience. Given I forgot the term” Lambic”, I haven’t been able to source this beer since. I’ll seek it out now.
BTW my daughter devoured blue cheese from the age of 3. Always thought this was astounding as she is a fussy eater now.
Also BTW, look out for Monteith’s green apple cider. It’s a Kiwi cider that tastes like Granny Smith apples.... very refreshing on a hot summers day.


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[tekobo]

2 hours ago, Basher said:

I did however, enjoy an open fermented beer- lambic beer- and I thought it was Austrian. For 20 years I forgot the term. Never forgot the experience. Given I forgot the term” Lambic”, I haven’t been able to source this beer since. I’ll seek it out now.

Glad to be of help.  I might seek out a lambic beer, or two, here too. 

[tony b]

The top lambics are from Belgium, made by monks in actual monasteries, some even cloistered. You go up to the gate, ring the bell, place your order and money on a "lazy Susan" in the gate, spin it around. Magically, it spins back with your beer. You never see or talk to the monk on the other side. 

[RokDok]

21 hours ago, Basher said:

Tekobo can you and Braai help rokdoc our with his oversupply of beer?
He’s making me thirsty.
35c (95f) predicted here on Wednesday and 80% humidity..... here comes Christmas.
If you can put a couple of days together like this you will clean that garage out in hurry.

Basher - I think it would be ungentlemanly of me to pick up that gauntlet. It would be rather difficult to clean the garage out - although it would be great fun trying.

The ciders here are from the couple of ancient trees in the garden some with a bit of pear juice from the recently planted Perry espaliers. I don't use any sanitising chemicals and don't add any yeast - just juice the apples stick in a sealed bucket for a few months over winter, prime with a bit of sugar and bottle. Some are 5 years old and the taste changes over time. They are quite dry and don't taste like commercial ciders.

Together with the beers of various styles and ages there is nigh on 500 bottles here.

Plus a couple of hundred bottles of Bronze Trippel and this years cider/perry in the house in the warm getting a second fermentation to provide a bit of fizz and the still fermenting Big Bad Matt Black Stout ......

I'm getting carried away here but if @Braai-Q, @sovsroc, @Sir Bill want to come down and anyone else for that matter and give it a try I'm up for it !!

Bring meat.

@tekobo - I've taken on board what you've said about beer..... but I have something special for you... I've spent the day rubbing down soffits and rafters ready to repaint and fit new guttering, and I'm a bit cream crackered need to eat and do my duo lingo, so it'll be a bit later..... Cheers RD

 

 

[Sir Bill]

2 hours ago, RokDok said:

I'm getting carried away here but if @Braai-Q, @sovsroc, @Sir Bill want to come down and anyone else for that matter and give it a try I'm up for it !!

Bring meat.

That is so kind @RokDok - This forum is full of so many kind and interesting, as well as intelligent people - its a pleasure to be involved even though I don't have a KK  

[RokDok]

5 hours ago, tony b said:

The top lambics are from Belgium, made by monks in actual monasteries, some even cloistered. You go up to the gate, ring the bell, place your order and money on a "lazy Susan" in the gate, spin it around. Magically, it spins back with your beer. You never see or talk to the monk on the other side. 

That's my holiday destination for 2021 sorted then, a religious retreat with a twist .... or a spin (sorry).

 

11 hours ago, tekobo said:

The bar man asked me what I like to eat.  I said blue steak and blue cheese.  He offered me a lambic beer.  He was so right.  It is the only beer I have ever liked. 

' Wild ' yeasts - both of them.

8 hours ago, Basher said:

Given I forgot the term” Lambic”, I haven’t been able to source this beer since. I’ll seek it out now.

Also seek out "Gueze" - it's a blend of new (c. 1 yr ) and old (more than that). There are still fermentable sugars in the New Lambic -  fermentation continues after they are mixed. The beer is put typically into champagne style bottles where the secondary fermentation provides the fizz.

I think there is a bottle of it in the middle of the top shelf of beers in my photo.

As no one has pressed my "off" switch and Mrs Rock Dock is knitting a Xmas jumper in front of the fire - I have a little story about Gueze.

I started making cider and beer about 6 or 7 years ago. In the North of England there is a lab which acts as a kind of historic (and current)  yeast library - you can get yeasts from many of the now sadly defunct British breweries, including current ones if you ask nicely . 

You get a test tube with a little agar slope with a few colonies of yeast on, from which it is fairly simple to propagate enough yeast to brew a batch of beer.

So I made a large batch of generic beer, divided it into six fermentors and added a different yeast to five of them. I then took some wild yeast from cider that I'd made - i.e. those that were on the surface of the apples from which the cider was made.

The difference in the flavours of the beers was astounding. When it came to the wild yeast beer - it tasted almost like cider, I thought it was off and tipped the whole fermentor full down the drain.

Anybody still awake ??

Fast forward a few years and we are in a bar - The Little Bear in Brugges, Belgium. A bunch of us from the village had gone over for a few days break. My friend suggested that we should taste some Gueze - it was not cheap. One friend screwed up his face and couldn't drink it , I immediately had an overwhelming sense of deja taste - the wild beer that I had so naively tipped down the drain. Of course I liked it.

Another experiment a couple of years later, making a totally locally sourced beer.

Hang in there @tekobo, there's a bottle with your name on !

I got a sack of barley from a farmer in the village and malted it at home. You basically wet the barley, get lots of containers, spread it a few inches deep and keep turning it every few hours and after a few days it develops little rootlets and tiny shoots. This means that the grain has produced enzymes which have the potential to break down the starch stored in the grain (unfermentable) into fermentable sugars.

At this point you have to rather sadly kill all these tiny seedlings to stop them growing further and you then have your malt from which you can make beer.

You do this by kilning - or in my case putting it in the oven at a temperature which kills the plant but doesn't denature the enzyme.

Having spent the day doing this I left the last batch to 'kiln'  in the oven overnight.

The next morning the oven was a complete mess and there was a dark sticky goo on the floor around the oven. At that point Mrs RD had difficulty understanding the science of malting. 

A big clean up followed during which I leant on the oven door and broke the spring loaded mechanism.

The oven / range company had been taken over, production had stopped and there were no spares available.

The range has two ovens and it was only the smaller oven that the door wouldn't close.

I couldn't therefore see why Mrs RD was making such a fuss. Even when I got it to almost close with some Gaffa-tape and it looked pretty good to my eye, there was no let up.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I used this home made malt, water from the culvert flowing through the garden, hops from the garden and wild yeast from the apple trees to make this wild beer.

It tastes a bit like Gueze, certainly inspires curiosity and best of all has an aroma of blue cheese. So, if you come down to clean out the garage @tekobo , there is something for you to drink.

 

 

[RokDok]

34 minutes ago, Sir Bill said:

This forum is full of so many kind and interesting, as well as intelligent people - its a pleasure to be involved even though I don't have a KK  

You are looking through the window, the temptation to open the door of the sweet-shop and step inside will get harder and harder to resist....

I'm not a betting man but ....

[Basher]

Rok you are living an interesting life.
I once sat with a friend in his garden shed on the edge of The Forest of Dean where he had tapped a 50 gal oak keg of home made cider.
2 pints later i struggled to walk in a straight line.
Good to hear the backyard scrumpy remains alive and well.


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[Braai-Q]

On 11/25/2020 at 8:38 PM, Basher said:

Tekobo can you and Braai help rokdoc our with his oversupply of beer?

The UK has just had new COVID-19 tiers announced. The lowest infection rate areas are allowed the greatest freedom (Tier 1) which is about 1% of the population. Tier 2 allows you to go to the pub but you have to have a meal with a drink. Tier 3 is the toughest lockdown. So to translate:

Tier 1: Pints

Tier2: Pints with chips

Tier 3: No pints

So depending on where @RokDokis on the Tier system, I think we'll be ok to help out.

[Braai-Q]

26 minutes ago, Basher said:

Rok you are living an interesting life.
I once sat with a friend in his garden shed on the edge of The Forest of Dean where he had tapped a 50 gal oak keg of home made cider.
2 pints later i struggled to walk in a straight line.
Good to hear the backyard scrumpy remains alive and well.


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There are two drinking experiences which stand out in my life which offered two of the most traumatic hangovers known to man. The first involved cider. The second involved cider. 

The first, I was a student and started drinking at lunch after lectures and managed to cause a traffic jam because I decided to cycle back home to my res. I was on the local radio (traffic helicopter also known as 'The Flying Fox') as I'd been drunkenly weaving up a steep hill in Oxford and caused a massive traffic tail back because I wouldn't let anyone past. Oxford is a cyclist city but congests very easily. The Police officer who encouraged me to get out the way was very playful and kept chasing me about until I was given a lift home. I woke up around 7pm the following evening and couldn't lift my head from my pillow. The second time. A suitable amount of time having lapsed between incident 1 and this incident, we had been drinking something called 'Old Pig Squeal' in Devon. Their slogan was 'It'll separate the men from the boys and the tankards from their handles'. 

Cider is dangerous.

[Braai-Q]

1 hour ago, RokDok said:

Also seek out "Gueze" - it's a blend of new (c. 1 yr ) and old (more than that). There are still fermentable sugars in the New Lambic -  fermentation continues after they are mixed. The beer is put typically into champagne style bottles where the secondary fermentation provides the fizz.

 

Now you're talking. Geuze is my favourite style and this is my go to beer: https://beerconnoisseur.com/beer/oude-geuze-boon

My father in law is a beer aficionado and pointed me in the direction of this. 

I don't drink huge amounts of beer but there are some situations where only a beer will do. 

[Braai-Q]

.

Edited November 27, 2020 by Braai-Q

[tekobo]

@RokDok I am certainly up for trying a beer in the style of Gueze and would be very interested in your cider.  Does the pub next door do rooms?  Will need to stay over to avoid encounters with police on the way home.

Sofas and KKs seem to go together at the moment.  Methinks @Sir Bill needs to get into a sofa buying conversation with his wife.  Might speed up his KK trigger finger.  

[Braai-Q]

46 minutes ago, tekobo said:

@RokDok I am certainly up for trying a beer in the style of Gueze and would be very interested in your cider.  Does the pub next door do rooms?  Will need to stay over to avoid encounters with police on the way home.

I like the scale of your ambition @tekobo I will be over the limit and I'm not afraid to admit this will happen. 😆