Mummy, Daddy, where does bottled beer come from?

Here's one we made earlier.

Beer festivals are great fun, they give a brewery, or at least the workers therein, a chance to get out from behind the fermenters and meet people. Though people have questions. Some good: "Where can I get more of your tasty, tasty beer when not at this beer festival? Even if I shall be drinking it for the rest of the day, as I scarcely imagine that there'll be a tastier brew to be had all evening and dare not waste any of my precious beer tokens on what will be undoubtedly a less enjoyable beer" Some understandable: "So why did you open a brewery?" To which the answer is obviously; "so we'd own a brewery and the alternative is to work in a office with other people." Some bad: "Do you have a lager?" To which the inevitable reply is; "yes indeed, we have both Ór Golden Ale Lager or Dark Arts Porter Lager". And finally the ones that require long and tedious explanations like: "So can I get your beer in bottles?"

To the off-licence, my friends.

So in order to avoid long and tedious explanations to people at beer festivals as to why we only have kegged beer (and the occasional cask), we decided to put the beer in bottles. Or rather, we decided to pay some putting-beer-into-bottles specialists to do the job for us, as the only thing longer and tediouser than the explanations about the non-bottling of beer is the bottling of beer itself.

And so after a few mundane e-mails about transport logistics and some thoroughly more interesting ones about making the label look cool, we arranged all the arrangements and sent off the first shipment of beer. Expecting that the next time we would see it, in 18 to 21 days, it'd be sub-divided into small 500ml sections, surrounded by glass.

This indeed came to pass.

The evidence of which we observed when we took delivery of the multitude of bottles of beer. Obviously a quick quality check was essential, unfortunately it turns out we don't possess a bottle opener, which we only realised after a frantic search around the brewery. But where there's a beer bottle to be opened, there's a key or a radiator or a shoe that can be pressed into service to accomplish the task. We'd previously been remiss in capturing such landmark occasions in the medium of digital imagery; but not this time! Indeed we sent a wee teaser of a photo, of all hand and very little bottle, into the digital wilds on our Twitter account.

Not just your average picnic...

All that was left at that stage was to load up the van and drive the beer to all the off-licences that had been busily pestering us, in the nicest possible way, for deliveries since the word had got out that a bottled Trouble beer was afoot.

So next time you see the Trouble stand at a beer festival, we're happy to answer any questions, with the exception of "So, when are you bottling the Dark Arts...?"  Though the answers given might variously be factual, facetious, curmudgeonly, brief or downright unbelievable depending on our mood, the time of day or if we've chosen underwear that is too tight.

Not what we had in mind for World Domination...

Source Code: only safe in the hands of a trained expert

Our brewery has a great trick of being able to scare the bejesus out of you all by itself. It happens when you stand too close to the chiller unit when it's just reached it's high temperature limit and chooses to click into action with nary a warning, emitting a deafening roar of fans and refrigeration motors, blindsiding anyone unfortunate enough to be nearby. Now I'm not normally one to anthropomorphise ugly bits of industrial machinery, but I reckon that chiller has gained intelligence in a Terminator Skynet sort of way and is out to get me. Luckily for us all, it's chosen not to try taking over the world and killing all humans but to use it's powers of evil to make sure it frightens me as often as possible. I reckon it's taken the fact that I called it's use of the Fahrenheit scale nonsensical, (which I standby, I get offended that we have to chill our beer to 33°F rather than 1°C). Generally we try to be a pro-SI units sort of brewery, though PSI seems to have slipped through the unit selection process, which is unfortunate as the alternative is "bar", which would seem to specifically lend itself to use by a company in the beer business.

Programming: a high pressure job

Anyway, it so happened that the subject of this evil chiller and the various unpleasant character traits that it's wont to display came up when we were enjoying a few-post match drinks in The Mill. (No prizes for guessing the beer of choice.) So during the course of the conversation it fell out, that the evil chiller was a source of disquiet in that it needed a good deal of manual intervention to keep beer at the correct temperatures during the various aspects of fermentation. Involved in this conversation was our soon to be Senior Process Control Engineering Consultant Shane, who immediately saw an opportunity for the practical application of his knowledge of electronics, programming and computery stuff generally, in that the process of checking temperatures, opening and closing valves could be readily automated. Computers being much more suited to that sort of thing than Stephen, who rightly objects to being asked to stand beside the chiller interminably to make sure it's chilling prowess isn't misdirected. (Seemingly sleeping and eating are also other priorities that he's using to try and absent himself from his chiller baby-sitting duties.) So it was an enthusiastic Shane that left the pub that evening, with a grand scheme concocted to automate the refrigeration process, fermenting in his brain. I was enthusiastic about the not having to crawl in behind the fermenters to open or close valves every time a change to the beer's temperature was needed. I was less enthusiastic about giving the chiller more processing power, after all maybe that's why it hadn't wiped out humanity yet: not a lack of ambition, but insufficient processing capabilities, that couldn't take it beyond occasionally frightening people.

Still, at heart, I like to do things the easy way if at all possible, so I gave Shane the green light to go ahead with his operation and he didn't disappoint. A series of ever more complicated and incomprehensible technical drawings came winging to our Corporate Headquarters during the design phase, until the point where I gave up trying to decipher them and was happy to go with the nod and smile approach. I limited my input to reminding him that although the Fahrenheit scale is indeed silly, just be mindful of not airing that view within the brewery itself, and especially not near the evil-minded chiller.

The Trouble Fermention Control Nerve Centre

So the "go live" date, as those in the computer nerd business say, is just upon us, so if this is the last blog post ever then you'll know what has happened: we have over-specced the equipment, our evil chiller has seized control of the spare processing capacity and is now waging a war against mankind. And has no doubt, ruined the beer in the process.

On the upside, if the chiller is merely playful rather than some sort of genocidal maniac, which we all hope, it'll make us a little more environmentally friendly and gives Stephen a chance to go and have dinner and a sleep.

I have a feeling though that Shane won't merely be content to stop with upgrading the fermentation process, and other automation processes will soon be envisaged. Before that happens, I really ought to give him a small token to say thanks for his good work, I think a selection of some classic sci-fi movies would be appropriate: The Terminator, The Matrix and Robocop seem like a good start.

The Dark Days Aren't Over.

The tap font to look out for!

So things have settled into something of a routine at Trouble HQ, the crisises that we stumble our way through have become less crisisesier and the time between them has increased. Which is all well and good for keeping stress levels in check but less good for writing blogs where people are expecting to hear about exciting and interesting stuff. Honestly, apart from the car crashes, and the fighting zombies it's been general routine mundanity. Filling up, and emptying, various sized stainless steel containers seems to be the order of almost every day. That, and wondering why they're called "stainless" when they need constant cleaning. I'm going to give the good people of Sheffield the benefit of the doubt and presume there was some kind of typographic error when the original name was conceived, and that somewhere the space between the "n" and "l" got lost in translation. Those being days when the correction of misspellings was a considerably more difficult operation.

Kegged, labeled and ready to go.

Though as a result of this constant cleaning, we noticed that we had several clean fermenters to spare, that would be eminently suitable to use to ferment beer, the hint for their use being in the name. So we made a dramatic and momentous decision that we'd double the range of beer that we produced. Overnight we'd increase our range by a massive 100%. Although I might be overselling the drama or momentousness of the decision, I'm sure I'm spot on about the accuracy of my figures. Our previous range of one beer would be increased to two beers; a 100% increase, ask any mathematician, I'm sure they'll tell you the same, before berating you for the elementariness of the question. Thereby reinforcing my long held opinion that there are stupid questions, despite academia's reassurances otherwise.

Dark Beer, Dark Logo, Shiny Fermenter.

So with the mathematics of increasing production taken care of, we moved on to the thornier issue of the form that this new beer would take; that it would be a dark beer for some contrast had been the consensus view. However some said stout, others said porter, yet others said they're both the bleedin' same anyway, as a rose by any other name would still taste as sweet, assuming you were in the habit of eating rose bushes. (or Rose's bush, as a to-remain-anonymous friend of mine did for a while, well before they split up anyway.) We settled on the porter option, to be called Dark Arts, and the bleedin' difference between it and stout is one that I'll leave to be judged by anyone with a pint of it on front of them. The pub being the ideal location for the airing of such generally inconclusive debates, and doublely so when it comes to the vexed question of beer categorisation.

We also went with a more complex grain recipe, with chocolate malt and black malt thrown into the mix, in addition to some flaked barley, the idea being that it would be a more malt driven beer, with the hops being cast in the supporting actor role this time.

• Dark Arts Porter is currently on sale in L. Mulligan Grocer, Stoneybatter and Glennons, Allenwood.

I'd like to put it on the record...

As anyone who ever been to a pub well knows, some of the greatest ideas to ever come to man can be born there. Alas this is usually outweighed by the vast amount of genuinely nuts ones. But thankfully most of us have the good sense, when the morning-after rolls around, to be able to tell the difference. Either way there's usually a fairly clear demarcation between the two. The idiotic ideas are quickly dismissed, normally with a cheery: "jaysus, we talked some amount of shite last night". Just occasionally there's an idea that crops up and stubbornly refuses to be one or t'other, usually making wild swerves between either side, a bit like Jim McDaid driving home from the races. Is it genius? Is it crazy? These are the kind of notions that should be paid serious attention. After all, one of them was the idea to open a brewery, and look at the Trouble that got us into.

So it was at one of the many informal Trouble Brewing board meetings in the pubbie, (we have them there so we can combine such meetings with quality control, i.e. drinking our own beer, and market research, a.k.a. drinking other breweries’ beers), that one of these defiant half-casked ideas reared its head. I'm not sure which of our merry little party mentioned it, I know it wasn't me anyway, but it came to pass that someone suggested a brewing competition, open to home brewers, that we would brew as a once off special. "That's genius", said someone. "That's crazy", said someone else. "Who's round is it?", said someone else with different priorities at that point. "It’s like finding a 2 euro coin when you bite into an onion", said someone else who enjoys weird non-sequiturs. "Ah, your right of course", said someone else, at this increasingly crowded meeting, who specialises in pointless platitudes. Thankfully these board meetings aren't minuted.

So it came to pass that we went ahead and put the competition together, with our usual "what could possibly go wrong?" attitude (generally the answer is: a lot), and released it into the free roaming plains of the Internet and waited. Then after five minutes of waiting, we stopped waiting, realising that such things are defiant of our MTV-generation attention span, and went and did some more productive stuff. Though once again our record keeping let us down and there's no record of what that productive stuff was. I've a strong suspicion that I single-handedly solved the economic crisis. Obviously someone's messed it up again rather quickly, but since none of it was documented, I guess we'll never know.

Anyway, we let the competition ferment, as is befitting brewers, and by closing date we were delighted to find that a grand total of 15 different beers, of various hues and styles, had found their way to us. So now we have 30 bottles lined up in Thomas's conditioning room ready for judging. He insisted on there being two of each bottle in case one got broken or befell some other misfortune that interfered with its beery well-being. Even though that policy did make sense, I chose to interpret that as him being a chancer on the mooch for free beer.

We now have the judging date finalised and the talks are in progress to find suitable candidates for judging panel who’ll do the blind tasting, and will pick the big winner. Hopefully they’ll have finely honed beer sensitive taste-buds and also fit in the appropriately ridiculous Edwardian judges’ wigs we’ve already purchased. Though I’ve a feeling the latter criteria may determine a greater weight of their suitability, and head size be damned.

Visitor numbers are up this month.

There was an event recently that made me call into question whether some of our more well-worn clichés can be trusted. The cliché in question being; "they couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery", I'm having this new found self-doubt after we organised said piss-up, in our brewery, and found it not quite the simple and straight-forward enterprise that it's made out to be. In fact, it takes quite a lot of planning and organisation.

A career in McDonald's awaits...

The invitees were the good people at Irish Craft Brewer (soon to be Beoir), a group that to whom beer is anything but small beer. Unless it is literal small beer, and then they'll undoubtedly be able to tell you the very definition of small beer. In short, they are the folks that know their beer. Anyway, we'd put up an open invite on the ICB website and organised a bus from Dublin to bring everyone in. So we were heartened to see that when the day rolled round that there was a healthy list of people interested in coming along. It was also nice that the rain stayed away, no means a certainty in mid-summer in Ireland, I was working off the theory that Irish people using barbecues angers the rain gods and they seek retribution upon us with a damp sodden summer for affronting them. Hence I disguised our barbecue as a tumble-dryer until the last possible moment, and it seems to have worked and the sun shone.

Interspersed between the ICB crowd, we snuck in sneakily a few members of The Mill Trouble Brewing Appreciation Society, to give them their full makey-uppy title. Who get their moniker by manfully keeping the craft beer tradition alive in The Red Windmill (i.e. our drinkin' buddies). Obviously they're not to be trusted with the serious business of brewery tours, by breaking out a game of footie in the field nearby, instead of picking our brains about brewery operations and such. Most uncouth behaviour.

As to the day itself, our idea was that if we opened the brewery bar for people to help themselves (a Trouble Brewing version of the gimmicky pour-your-own-pint tables), filled the barbecue with burgers and hot-dogs then most likely a good day would be had by all. The barbecue however wasn't self-service, and I spent the first half of the day being manly and cooking meat outdoors, but in a safe controlled environment as nature intended. Though much of the credit must go to Kathryn and Mairead who pretty much did all the real work of preparing the non-meaty goodness part of the spread. Though I think Homer Simpson put it best when, through the medium of song, he opined "you don't win friends with salad..." Sorry ladies.

The cute furry kitten, the only one not on the beer

After the wonderful, delicious and beautifully cooked food was eaten, the crowd reassembled at the brewery to top-up their pint glasses and have a look around. There was also the opportunity to fuss over another attendee that was not officially invited, a cute furry kitten that had decided that it wanted in on this brewery tour business. It was about this time that Thom and Stephen, mainly to distract from the show-stealing cute furry kitten, mounted the platform to thank everyone for coming and announce that Trouble Brewing would shortly hold a competition on ICB whereby people could submit their own beer and the best would be brewed as a once off for the round of festivals next summer. Thom also gave a overview of the brewery set-up, but I think in his heart he knew already that it was a little redundant, as I suspect he knew all in attendance were already well up to speed with their brewery knowledge.

So after a few more drinks, a few photo opportunities and some time for a chat, the bus arrived back for pick-up, we emptied the brewery and filled the bus and headed back to L. Mulligan to relax with a few more beers. We left Thom behind to take care of mundane brewery duties in preparation for brewing the following day and Mairead to take care of the cute furry kitten that she had only moments earlier adopted.

The obligatory team photo, from L to R we have...

So until next time, assuming I can indeed fight my way out of a human-size wet paper bag, which after the experience of recent events, is no way certain.

Something for the (Longest) Weekend...

I've always been a big fan of the Good Friday drinks ban, it has many advantages, not least of which is the slightly counter-intentional effect of promoting the day as one of the most important drinking days of the year. There's no other day that you can combine having a few beers at home with a very civil civil rebellion. I always make it a point to make sure that Good Friday stands for "Good Number of Good Beers Friday" in my house. So this year I was expecting that having a brewery full of beer that I might be able to avoid the pre-prohibition enactment in every off-licence in the country on Maundy Thursday. It didn't quite work out as I'd expected. Rather counter-intentionally having a brewery full of beer meant that it proved to be the soberest Good Friday I can remember, that is, it was a Good Friday I can remember. In the end I had one token pint of beer, before a very early night, the reason for this was the day was spent preparing for the Franciscan Well Easterfest in Cork.

We'd signed up to be at the Easterfest a few weeks earlier, despite the fact that we still didn't have a functioning brewery, though we were nearing completion. We figured that it was just about possible that if the beer gods smiled upon us (i.e. worked our arses off) that the first batch would be ready just in time. So we'd presented ourselves with a deadline, and as every college student knows, there's nothing like a fast approaching deadline to get you motivated. So we got the brewery completed, roughly on time, got it cleaned up, did our initial test, and completed our first brew day, all with enough time to let the beer ferment and condition. Though we barely had time for a hearty round of "hurrahs" and "jolly good show chaps", (we'd chosen "international-pretend-to-be-upper-class-English-day" for our brewing), before having to sort out all the other festival related paraphernalia needed. So while the beer fermented, which is fortunately a labour diffuse process as we also had to get a bar built and source the bar taps and fittings. Not to mention ordering a big orange banner and lurid orange t-shirts.

All of which brought us to Good Friday, the day that we had precisely timed the beer conditioning to end, and one day before the festival started. This meant that the pre-festival rush to get the kegs cleaned and filled, and the van loaded and driven to Cork was on. Not overlooked was the fact that we had our very first taste of the finished beer ourselves, for if that went badly we'd be making a very forlorn and apologetic call to the Franciscan Well and probably going home to hide in the wardrobe for the weekend instead. But fortunately we didn't have to deal with this eventuality and we were off to Cork to set-up stall. All of which meant that by the end of Good Friday bed beckoned rather than the now traditional session.

So by the time Saturday rolled 'round we were ready for our first taste of beer festival life on the other side of the bar, but only after we'd unloaded the van, set-up our bar, made sure the beer was pouring properly and got the little light in the bar tap to illuminate. And naturally we also had to introduce ourselves to the other breweries who were in attendance and who were all very welcoming especially since we were the new kids on the block, in the non rubbish-80s-boy-band sense. It wasn't long after that the doors were opened on the festival and we sold our first ever pint of beer, which we'd named "Ór" from the Irish for gold, it being after all, a golden ale. The Franciscan Well wasn't long about filling up either, so throughout the day there was a steady stream of customers curious about our new beer, with plenty of questions that we were happy to answer. Not forgetting to mention plenty of pints being poured and drunk too. Though there was a good deal of halves being served as well, clearly with so many beers to taste at the festival a lot of people were having a half of each, obviously overlooking the fact that we'd created a session beer.

The Sunday was more-a-less a carbon copy of the previous day, with the work behind the bar consisting of serving thirsty beer drinkers, making sure the beer was pouring correctly and lugging about kegs of beer as they emptied and needed to be replenished. And full kegs are heavy, heavy things, so after all our efforts to get the beer into them in the first place, I was more than happy to see them empty again so soon. Mainly because it meant that people had been happily drinking "Ór", but also because empty kegs are a lot easier to lug about.

And even though our drive home following day was before the opening of the new motorway and we got stuck in Abbeyleix as expected, it was a very satisfying weekend where we got to meet loads of beer enthusiasts and have a few sneaky halves of not only our own beer, but some of the other breweries beers too.

So that's not why it's called a Grain Bed?

When they're making "Trouble Brewing: The Movie", probably about this time next year, there'll be a moment when the last of the skilled tradesmen leave the scene and the morning sun glints off a pristine and shiny brew kettle and the there's a moment of silent reflection, before one of the three main protagonists who remain on the scene, turns to the others and says something cheesy and Hollywood like "...so let's see what this brewery can do", before there being high fives all round. Which is a perfect example of why Hollywood movies are better than real life. The reality was of course that when the moment came when we were ready to start our first brew, we were all too busy with a myriad of other things to even notice the absence of a stirring John Williams soundtrack. (The main Trouble Brewing site has our contact details for any of the major movie studios who are almost certainly looking to pay us a big pile of money for the exclusive film rights, and as you can see, I'm happy to be involved and to hopefully get a credit as script editor.)

The brewing machinery hadn't even time for a proper polish either to give it that Hollywood gleam, but since making beer was the aim and not hosting a presidential reception, though which I'm sure is something that is only a matter of time too, we didn't concern ourselves with it. We'd previously concerned ourselves with the making the inside of the equipment very clean indeed, as is only proper if our aim of brewing pristine beer was to be achieved. Anyway to be brief as I can, (which isn't something comes easy to me, it'd be akin to a bear riding a unicycle, it can be done but it doesn't come naturally), The brewing process goes something like this: grain and hot water into the mash tun, leave for a bit, add more hot water and send over to the kettle, bring to the boil for an hour, and add hops at various intervals, finish boil, chill and send into the fermenter and add yeast. And though I think my attempt at being brief and non-technical went well, it did serve to detract horrendously from bringing the skill of the brewer into the equation, as there are innumerable parameters that can make all the difference between the bland and the delicious. Not least of which are the choosing the right grains and hops, something that I think, in my admittedly biased opinion, that we managed to achieve.

What I also think my brief description of brewing misrepresented, was that it made the brewing process seems fairly straight-forward, however on brew-day number one, it was quite the opposite. We learned that heating a 2 meter high tank of water takes a long time, and that if your brewery has a pumping system that was seemingly designed by Erno Rubik you have to be paying a lot of attention to make the water go where you want. Though we managed by dinner time to have kettle boiling away, and not just to make tea, though we did this also, though not using the brewing kettle for the tea making, that'd be a touch of unwarranted overkill. After the boil was done and we had another go on Erno's crazy pipe-work we had cold water pumping through the heat exchanger and were ready to cool the contents of the brewing kettle that was just coming off the boil. Alas, the time taken in heating the water earlier was nothing in comparison to the time taken to cool the boiling wort at the other end of the process. So about 18 hours later, or so it seemed, and after reminding ourselves about once every two minutes to have plenty of cold water for the next batch, the beer was cooled and in the fermenter, with the yeast added and some of us contemplating sleeping on bags of used grain that we'd cleaned out of the mash tun rather than face the long and tired drive home.

Despite the long first day I'm already looking forward to the next day's brewing, I'd imagine it'll be a much improved process when we apply everything we've learned from brew day one, in fact I've already ordered the John Williams tape in anticipation...

p.s. We're also twittering, or tweeting or whatever the hell it's called. I expect the next missive on that latest medium will be to announce the existence of this missive on this medium, no doubt creating some kind of feedback loop that'll probably destroy the Internet.