A collection of delightful lunatics…

So, yesterday found me with a day off and nothing else to do but go hang out amongst the carefully choreographed lunacy which is a brew day at Wild Weather Ales over in Silchester, who’d happened to have invited Blackjack Beers down for a collab.

The thing was, that the guys had caught wind (via ‘By the Mash Tun‘) of the fact that I’d used a clone of one of their recipes as a basis for my recent foray into fruity hefeweizens and they politely demanded I bring forth a sample for judgement.

Guns don’t kill people, bananas do…

So about the original – Back in 2017 the WWA did a collab with Mad Hatter Brewing Company which resulted in yet another outstanding Frankenbeer in the form of ‘Tornado Top Hat’, which I would describe as a pretty adventurous take on the traditional ‘hef. Complimenting the trad banana-ey, ester-ey vibe which comes with the hefeweizen territory, the guys basically just crammed bananas where bananas shouldn’t be crammed for a much-lauded double naner flavour. Result… great success:

So anyway… back to the matter in hand (this isn’t an advert for out of production, unavailable craft beer). Lets talk about Hefelhoff2

The Verdict…

Anyway, it was put to the guys (Iain and JD of Wild Weather, and Rob from Blackjack) that we should play a game of ‘drink the beer’. I won’t go into the vicious, unsolicited and indiscriminate use of chili pepper extract which Iain inflicted on the poor, unsuspecting Rob from Blackjack (if you want to see that, watch the episode), but for those whose mouths weren’t a raging chili inferno, the beer went down pretty well. Even if I do say so myself.

I suspect there was a significant element of ‘be nice to the new guy’ at play here, but the feedback was unanimously good. Which was a pleasant surprise. I was expecting a bit more brutality, but thankfully this was apparently aimed squarely at Rob. Lucky me, I guess. On a side note – I tasted the chili mango hef. Apart from it being about 5 times too hot, it was really quite a good pairing. I think I’ll have a crack at that one later in the year. Fuck your seasonal chili stouts in winter. Chili Hefeweizen for Xmas, I say. I already have an image in mind for Heffelhoffmas

What’s next?…

Well! Whilst at WWA, Iain handed me a small amount of the top secret ingredient of ‘Full of Beans’ and issued a challenge to see if I can make a decent approximation. Challenge accepted! But in the mean-time while I have a think about how I go about reverse engineering their beer, the episode will hopefully appear early next week, and we are also set to start filming episode 2 of CraftWank this weekend. Capital!

So, there was this grand plan. A wonderful plan. Better plans might have existed, but this one was brill. I was going to make a low strength beer for this party we are throwing, so that we would have less vomit to clear up from the flower-beds, come Sunday morning.

Because this batch was going to be of a modest strength, I decided to call it ‘Booze f’t’Baby’ after a Reeves and Mortimer sketch.

So off I trot to the brew-house (its a garage really, but brew-house sounds wankier. Come to think of it, brau-haus sounds even wankier still. Lets use that from now on). Anyway, yes… off the the brau-haus I go and get busy trying to make a 2 or 3% abv beer. All goes well… sorta.

Now this is where the fuckery happens. It turns out, that in a rare fit of brewing efficiency, I have actually managed to get an amazing (for me) level of fermentable sugar out of the meagre amount of grain I used. So my anticipated abv was a slightly pokier 3.6% assuming I would get a final gravity somewhere around 1.010.

‘Sod it’, I think. 3.6% is still pißßwasser in my book. Name stands.

Well, checking gravity this morning before dry-hopping, I observe the gravity has dropped further… giving me a strength of 4.3%. Knackers. Definitely not booze suitable to give to an infant. Perhaps session-able? Maybe. But definitely just a plain old IPA now. So we need a name change:

Here endeth the lesson in not counting one’s chickens before they have fermented. Yet again I have aimed for one thing and once more achieved something else altogether. But hey…

Just a bit of background behind the curious naming of the West Berkshire Brewery‘s Dr. Hexter’s Healer (now discontinued) clone which my mate James and I had a crack at last week.

So basically, moments after flame-out, whilst circulating the wort through the plate chiller to sterilize any nasties in there, I made a crucial error. I had not factored in that I had upgraded my wort pump from this puny little fellah:

to this badger:

Now, the thing is, that the new pump outputs at a significantly higher pressure and flow rate than the old plastic piece-O-crap, and genius here hadn’t figured out that when I had previously been able to drape the hose over the side of the kettle without it doing anything untoward, that was no longer the case. So hose goes flailing and jets a good pint or so of ~95°C wort down my side.

Not sure if you have ever doused yourself in near boiling sugar solution, but you’ll have to take my word for it that its quite the painful experience. Ended up with a blister about the diameter of a Fray Bentos pie, with similar juice content. The blister didn’t last very long… hence the ‘peeler’ bit.

So moral of the story, unless you like massive, suppurating wounds, be careful with your hose.

Well, it had to happen eventually. I’ve made a website. Its a bit wank. I’ve done it on wordpress and then tried to make it not look like wordpress. Not a huge success on those stakes, I reckon.

Anyway, perhaps in time this will be a useful place to go to find home brewing resources. Then again, perhaps it will just be another waste of time project that I start and never get round to finishing. Who knows?

So keep your eye on here. See whats crack-a-lackin’.

Love,