Treated the Queen and Boo Boo to a day out in the Cotswolds. My ulterior motive, of course, was to check out the Hop and Vine homebrew shop in Burford. The guy in there had good chat, and although the shop was pretty small, there was a good range of equipment and kits. However, if you wanted grains, hops or yeasts, you’d probably be disappointed.

I bought a new tap for the keg that Fendog broke in the imfamous Exploding Keg incident, and, having no grain for a proper brew, I decided to buy a beer kit and get it going before Fendog got back to Oxford and reclaimed his fermenter. We’ve not done a kit beer before so I went for a trusted brand – Woodforde’s of Norfolk.

Fendog has often turned his nose up at this Norfolk company. But having examined the packaging, I can put his mind at rest. Its actually made by Muntons, just a few minutes drive from Fendog Farm in good ole Suffolk.

Keen to try something new and a bit different I went for their Barleywine kit, “Headcracker”, and got it on the go as soon as I got home. The only downside is that, being rather strong, it only makes 23 pints whereas most kits will do 40. Hope its worth it.

We are having a great bank holiday weekend enjoying the superb hospitality of the Family Fendog at their farm in Suffolk. Very pleasant times are had sipping G&Ts on the lawn playing croquet with the Fentastic Four while Papa Fendog finishes bringing in the wheat harvest. It reminds me a lot of my own family upbringing on the council estates of Middlesbrough…

The best thing about the farm is the Workshop where Q spends a lot of his time. The workshop is the kind of shed that the A-Team always used to get locked in. It contained all sorts of power tools, welding equipment, scrap metal, mechanical devices, etc. This is where the long-awaited cider press is going to be built…

When it was originally enacted in 1516, the Bavarian Purity Law stated that beer should only contain water, hops and barley. It’s a simple recipe that hasn’t changed much through the years. So, with these strict restrictions governing their product, brewers have been forced to extremes when differentiating their products from competitors. Some spend millions on slick advertising, or getting some celebrity to endorse their beer. But for smaller breweries and craft bewers, it’s not that easy. However, being free of the constraints of corporate marketing departments, they’ve been able to develop bizarre, sometimes offensive and always attention-grabbing names for their beers, this has led to a fine tradition of strange beer names. At What Would Jesus Brew?, we intended to continue the tradition.

This means that naming your beer its often trickier business than making it! So I need your help – I’ve set up a new poll for you to vote on what to call my new batch of stout. Please register your opinion, and feel free to suggest new names for future brews.

I also stumbled across this Random Beer Name Generator which is of questionable help. But quite fun.

Trenchfoot and I finally acquired the pressurised keg from the Squire, and having cleaned out the rather soily odours, we filled it with the OBC that had been stewing in my room for several weeks. The one drawback to the keg approach, as opposed to using coke bottles is the agitation of the priming sugar for the secondary fermentation. I gave it a good initial shake when we first bottled it, but was not content, so gave it a further shuggle that night. Dissatisfied at the output the handle grip was giving me, I decided to switch grip. As I was doing so, I lost control of the keg, and it rather inconveniently chose to fall on the tap. An impressive explosion ensued, such that my walls are now covered in beer. Amazingly I managed to salvage an impressive 10 bottles of beer (brew2 finally got the treatment it deserved).

Brew day at the Lab as Fendog and I set up an IPA using the recipe below. Again, we use the church’s Burco boiler (made more efficient after a good descaling). We must remember next time either to do the boil outside or use the extractor fan. By the end of the one hour boil, there was beer dripping from the kitchen ceiling.

The recipe was adapted from one found on Beertools.com except that the original recipe used Glacier hops rather Willamette. But I couldn’t get hold of Glacier. According the Beertools analysis this should be a pretty hoppy IPA, but it didn’t smell like it. So who knows how it will turn out.

Discovered a great Czech beer in Tesco called Bernard Dark. I bought a couple of bottles primarily because they had re-sealable tops (like Grolsch bottles) and I thought that would be pretty useful for our homebrews. It was a bonus that it was very nice beer too (unlike Grolsch).

Fendog was particularly impressed as the bottles have “Bernard” embossed on them. He has been endeavouring to go by the name Bernard for the past few months and was well chuffed at the thought of having is homemade beer in bottles with his name on! In fact, I am so jealous that from now on I intend to go by the name United Dairies.

Off to visit the Outlaws for a week tomorrow, so it’s a perfect time to set up a brew at home as the fermenter wont be anyone’s way for the coming week. (Space is at a premium at Chez Trenchfoot which is why most of the brewing takes place at the Lab).

Fendog is also away at the moment so I’m flying solo for this one – my first adventure in speciality grain. First problem – something big enough to do a 5 gallon boil. Thankfully I remember the old church urn which is no longer used as the tap unit has perished. With a couple of flanged corks from my wine-making supplies and some brute force, I manage to block the tap. Bingo – the perfect thing to use for a boiler (in fact lots of homebrewers use these Burco boilers).

I used the recipe below for an Imperial Stout which I found on Beersmith. Of course, the SRM of the grain and the alpha acidity of the hops don’t exactly match those on the original recipe. I’m not sure if I should have done some maths and changed amounts to achieve the same colour and bitterness. I guess its hard to tell if you’ve never tasted it. I will just have to see what this is like and go from there if I want to perfect the recipe.

Can’t wait to see how this turns out!

• Batch size:         18.83L
• Boil volume:       18.83L
• Boil time: 60min

 Ingredients: 

• 0.8kg     Muntons Light Dry Malt Extract
• 1.8kg     Muntons Light Liquid Extract
• 0.25kg   Crystal Malt
• 0.25kg   Roasted Barley
• 0.14kg   Flaked Barley
• 28g        Target hops (60 mins)
• 14g        East Kent Goldings hops (60 mins)
• 1 pkt      Irish Ale Yeast (WLP004)

Racked my Tesco Value pineapple wine which has had plenty of time to ferment but was stubbornly bubbling through one blip every few hours. I added a campden tablet, half a teaspoon of fermentation stopper and also sweetened it with 500g sugar as I am going to make this into a dessert wine.

Its tasting lovely and will only improve after being in the bottle for a few months. Am going to let it clear for a few days and them bottle it and try it at Christmas. Nice.

I have discovered that there is actually specialist software to help you with your beer brewing! The two best that I have seen are Beertools and Beersmith. Both allow you to design, adapt and scale recipes, calculate final colour, bitterness, alcohol content and cost, produce brew sheets, and hundred of other things. They both also have a huge database of different ingredients, recipes, and beer types with information about them.  These are going to prove really useful and I am sure you will see us using them in future brewing exploits.