Blackfriar, and my big Guinness Discovery

Inside the Blackfriar

My first stop was the slightly touristy Blackfriar Tavern, just on the north side of Blackfriar Bridge. They have good pub grub here, so I had a bite to eat, and tried a couple of the cask ales they had on tap. I first tried the Deuchar’s IPA, on cask. This is a British IPA, and it’s a pretty good one, but it’s not anything like an IPA in the states. The hop presence isn’t nearly as pronounced, and it’s not nearly as strong a beer. However, it is a well-balanced beer that’s very refreshing, and very easy to drink. I would order it again, but I didn’t, because I wanted to try as many beers I can’t get in the US as possible. So my next beer was Guinness.

Guinness Extra Cold at Blackfriar Tavern, London

The very first thing I noticed upon taking my first sip of the Guinness was how unbelievably cold it was. Even in the states they don’t serve it this cold. This was particularly shocking given that I’d just had a wonderful cask ale served at cellar temperature. Why was it so darn cold?

I took a look around the bar for clues, but there were none, so I asked the bartender why the Guinness was so cold and she said “Ah, it’s Guinness Extra Cold”, and she pointed at a tap that was clearly branded by Guinness with the “Extra Cold” label on it. My heart sank. When I asked if she had any other Guinness on tap, she said no. Oh man. Was all of the Guinness in London going to be like this? Turns out it wasn’t. It’s actually quite unusual in my experience to *not* be offered a choice when one orders a Guinness in London.

So how do they get the Guinness to be so cold? Do they put it in a separate fridge or something? Is it some kind of spooky glycol cooling system? What’s going on? Well, there’s no separate fridge. Guinness (or perhaps the distributor) provides a small refrigerator box that is small enough to be placed unobtrusively under the bar. The kegs are kept with the rest of the kegs in the cellar, so it is around 12C (around 54F) at the point where it’s tapped, but then it runs through this cooling box, which brings it down below 5C (around 40F). It’s far too cold for me. I serve the beer out of my kegerator at home at somewhere between 48-54F, and that suits me about right. I was not at all surprised at the beer temps in London as a result. When beer has actual, desirable flavors, this temperature is very pleasant!

Here’s the “Extra Cold” tap, for those on the lookout:

Guinnes "Extra Cold" Tap Branding

Note that it’s right next to what is perhaps the only lager in the place: Foster’s, which is also served super cold, and which I learned later also utilized a cooling box under the bar. Lots of pubs in London serve lagers that americans would recognize on tap, and they serve them very cold. The interesting thing is that if you’re in a pub frequented by locals, these beers seem to be seen as “alternative”, and you very well might not see them at all!

I read everything there was to read in this tavern, and it was a bit of an eye-opener. They had a pamphlet that would guide you along what I believe is a fictional trail of a mayor of London from long ago, hitting pubs along the way. All of them, I believe, are owned by the same company. You can tell because the food menus are largely the same, and the signs with pics of the food are exactly the same. Even some of the “guest ales” are the same between the different pubs owned by the same company.

To sum up my experience with Guinness, having now consumed it at several different pubs all over London, it’s not really all that different from the stuff you get in the US. It’s a great beer, yes. It *is* slightly different, and there *is* a difference between Guinness at different pubs in London, but it’s not the huge, sweeping, it’s-a-completely-different-beer type of experience that people talk about. For that, as I’m told by the locals, you really do have to go to Ireland. Someday.

The Toucan: Obsessive About Guinness

In the meantime, if you’re in London, and looking for folks who are obsessive about how the Guinness is served at their bar, check out The Toucan.

The Toucan recommended to me by a couple of locals as “the” place for Guinness in London. It’s in Soho, not a block from Soho Square. When you see the crowd outside, DO NOT be discouraged. As an American, when I first saw one of these crowds, I turned around and went to another pub. Turns out, it’s not a good indicator of how many folks are inside or how long it’ll take you to get a beer. See, in London, it’s perfectly legal for you to take your beer and step outside for a smoke, or to escape the bar’s interior, as most pubs are NOT air conditioned. Seeing the pic of the Toucan above, it looks like a good-sized pub, with a good crowd, but I was really shocked when I went inside: the entire interior of the bar is probably 10′x15′. People don’t come here for the scene, they come for the Guinness, and I figured out why upon being served my first pint.

I didn’t think too much about my first pint. It was served according to the rules and procedures I had learned myself as a bartender in the states. I took my beer and cleared away from the tiny bar to allow others to be served. I set it on the ledge to let it settle, and before I could take my first sip, the bartender walked over from behind the bar, and asked if he could “fix” my beer. I took a quick glance and didn’t really see a problem, but out of curiosity, I replied “that’d be great!” He took my beer, flopped off a bit of the foamy head, and repoured a bit back in. The result was what he was after:

The line should bisect the word “PINT” on the glass. His complaint about the beer he had just poured was “it’s falling a little low” — meaning the head was at or below the bottom of the word “PINT”.

As if that weren’t enough, after he handed it back, and while I was letting it settle again, another bartender came by with a perfectly clean cloth to wipe of a tiny bit of foam that was just starting to slip down the side of the glass. That’s obsessive.

The Guinness there was extremely good. Does being completely OCD about the beer make it better? Perhaps not, but this kind of attention to detail insures that everyone has a wonderful experience, and this is the only bar I’ve ever seen where *everyone* on the staff seemed wholeheartedly devoted to fantastic Guinness. Not good. Not great. Fantastic. And it was.

By the way, for the record, while in London I *did* see a pub patron return to the bar with his untouched beer to say “we have a problem”. All he did was point to his beer, and the publican knew what the problem was. She took back the beer. It was DUMPED. He got a new glass, and a brand new beer, filled to the proper level. My mind was blown (that was at The Lamb — see below).

Branded Houses

Some pubs in London are “branded”. Many pubs have, in large letters, or on some sign, prominently displayed, a particular brewer’s name and logo. Inside you’ll only find that brewer’s beers on cask, though they may have some other beers on tap. Usually crappy ones. Well, those and Guinness. I’ve been to maybe a dozen pubs or so, and I only saw one single pub who just plain old didn’t serve Guinness, or any other beer not brewed by the brewery that owned them.

Anyway, this whole branding thing becomes a consideration when going out to a pub — or it can become a deciding factor in what beers people drink. It’s a double-edged sword. If you don’t like Young’s beers, but that’s the closest pub to you, you might drink it because it’s the best beer you can get within stumbling distance of your place. On the other hand, maybe you used to like Green King beers, but the pub nearest you that serves it has gone downhill — you might start frequenting the Fuller’s pub nearby instead and develop a taste for that. This kind of thing makes the entire beer drinking experience in the UK quite different.

It wasn’t clear to me whether branded houses were necessarily owned by the brewery, or if the pubs just had distribution agreements with the brewers directly. A local mentioned that these places were owned directly by the breweries. Seems like a whole lot of overhead for breweries to take on, but I guess if they can dictate their presence in the market, and in addition have an iron-clad grip on quality control from the brewery all the way to the pint glass, that’s pretty compelling.

The Lamb, and A Look Inside the Cellar

The Lamb - A Young's House

Not all pubs are branded houses, and some of them serve great beer. But I think my best experiences at pubs in London happened to be at branded houses. One was a Young’s house called The Lamb. This place is renowned by locals, in part because there are very few tourists there, and very few suit-and-tie types. The Lamb really is just a bunch of locals, and some excellent beer, and all of the good stuff was on cask. I had almost every beer Young’s makes that night, all on cask.

The Lamb is like a good number of other pubs in the city which are described as “Victorian” pubs, which usually means that there is a very large amount of ornate wood and glass work in the bar. This is pretty stuff, and lends to the sort of “authentic” London pub feel.

I got into a conversation with a publican at The Lamb, and we got to talking about the differences between how beer is stored, cared for, and served in the US vs. London. There are lots and lots of them. First, there are three different sized kegs, which I had no idea about. There are 9-gallon “firkin” kegs, 18-gallon kegs, and the more common 11-gallon (50 liter) kegs. In the US, all US brewers as far as I know use standard “half barrel” kegs: 15.5 gallons. Of course, if a bar in the US serves a foreign beer on tap they might get a different sized keg, but generally kegs are 15.5 gallons.

Another enormous difference is attributed to the serving temperature. In the UK, beer– especially cask “real ale” is served at cellar temperature — about 54F (12C). I didn’t really understand how enormous a difference this makes in the cellar itself until my new publican friend invited me into the cellar to see their operation. Here’s the thing: what we call a “cellar” in the US is really a walk-in refrigerator. What they call a cellar in the UK is, in fact, the ENTIRE cellar level of the building. See, when you’re only cooling a basement to 12C in an area that’s only barely above that even in the summer months, you can cool the entire cellar pretty cheaply and use the entire cellar as a refrigerator. However, in the US, it would be prohibitively expensive to cool an entire cellar to 34F (1C), which is the temperature that most US mass-produced beers are served at (unless you can get them colder!)

There’s SO MUCH room when you can use the whole cellar. See that white thing sitting on the floor? That’s a vessel that holds line-cleaning fluid. Since you can pretty much leave it there all the time and change it without wrenching your back climbing on top of the kegs, you can clean the lines more often. In fact, The Lamb cleans the lines between every single keg! I was floored by this. I thought the guy was pulling my leg, until another pub, unsolicited, told me they do the same thing! I assure you, Americans, this is not the case in US bars. At least not in the vast majority of cases.

Another difference is more specific to the kegs themselves:

There’s a bung there. It’s made of plastic. After a keg is delivered, it’s allowed to chill and settle for a few days. Then, a few days before serving, they insert a plastic pin in that hole called a “spile”. This first plastic pin is called a ’soft spile’, and it allows some beer and gas to escape. At some point (and I’m not clear how they know when to do this), they take out the soft spile and put in a wooden one called a ‘hard spile’ which completely plugs the hole. This is all a part of the conditioning that takes place, and I believe it’s specific to cask ale — I don’t believe any of this takes place for plain old kegged beer served on tap, pushed by CO2.

Too. Much. Writing.

I had such a great time in London and I got to see lots and lots of pubs, and the people I spoke with were amazingly candid and friendly about their operations. I could write a book about London pubs, and would happily do it, but I can’t do it here on the blog. If I think of an interesting topic that would make a good blog post, I’ll post more, but until then, we’ll get back to homebrewing beer, drinking beer, and the regularly scheduled program, as it were

Everyone I talk to who knows I brew my own beer eventually asks me if it’s hard to get started, if it’s expensive, etc. So here’s a post that’ll discuss it at a little more length. The short answer is “it’s not hard, it’s not expensive, and yes, even you can do it”.

Home Brewing is Not Hard

There’s hard, and then there’s expensive. In brewing, the two aren’t necessarily related. In other words, you don’t necessarily have to spend all kinds of money to get an easy-to-use system. Likewise, spending money on stuff can sometimes make your brewing life much harder than it was before you bought the fancy equipment. I can’t tell you how many batches it took us to finally make friends with our pump!

You don’t need fancy equipment. Most of what you need is probably around your house, or available at the local Home Labyrinth. If you’re not completely broke, home brew starter kits are available. At time of writing, morebeer.com has a starter kit for $69, and northernbrewer.com has one for $75. There is absolutely no reason you can’t make fantastic beer with either of them. Seriously, none. They even include instructions.

The instructions may or may not use some fancy lingo, but the basic steps in brewing beer are all things you’re familiar with already:

1. Make oatmeal
2. Drain the liquid from it
3. Boil it
4. Add hops, and boil s’more
5. Cool, transfer to a bucket (or something), add yeast, and let it sit for a few weeks.

There you are. Brewing in 5 easy steps. The concepts are all cooking concepts. Things need to be at certain temperatures, for a certain amount of time. That’s all cooking is, too: heat, and time.

So, $75, maybe another $20-30 for ingredients (depending on what kind of beer you brew), and you’re all set to brew 5 gallons of your own beer.

Wait. That’s not quite right. For $75, you’re ready to make as many 5-gallon batches of beer as you want! Which brings us to…

Home Brewing is Not Expensive

In fact, home brewing is less expensive than buying beer in the store. Let’s prove that:

I live in NJ. Where I live, unless you buy Bud, Miller, or Coors, a 6-pack is $9. So, $1.50 per 12 ounces of frosty goodness. That’s 12.5 cents per ounce.

Now let’s say you spend $100 on ingredients and equipment to make a 5-gallon batch of beer. How does that work out?

5 gallons at $100 = $20 per gallon. That comes to about 15.65 cents per ounce, or about $1.87 per bottle and $11.25 for a 6-pack. But here’s the thing: that includes your one time $75 equipment purchase! If your spouse got you the kit for your birthday, it’s nothing. What’s the cost per ounce then?

5 gallons at $25 (ingredients) = $5 per gallon. That comes out to about 48 cents per 12-ounce bottle, or $2.88 per 6-pack.

So now the question is, if you bought your equipment yourself for $75, how much beer do you have to drink before this stuff pays for itself?

Well, we’re working with $9 vs. $3 per six pack (I’ve purposely put home brewing at a disadvantage in the equation for the sake of round numbers). That’s a savings of $6 for every 72 ounces you brew yourself. 72/6 = 12. So you have to brew 12 6-packs. How many gallons is that? 6.75. Your equipment pays for itself before you’re halfway through drinking your second batch of home brew.

It sounds so good it must be wrong. Let’s try it another way. Let’s add up the costs for the equipment kit, and 3 5-gallon batches of beer:

$75 for equipment

$75 for ingredients to make 15 gallons of beer.

That’s $150 to make 15 gallons of beer (and note, there are ingredient kits that’ll have you making beer for under $20, but I digress). All told, you’re looking at $10 per gallon, and it comes to $5.63 per 6-pack. Let’s call it $6 per 6-pack, for a savings of $3 per 6-pack. At a $3 savings, you now need to brew 25 6-packs to break even. How many gallons is that? 14 gallons, or less than three batches of beer. If you only brewed once per month, your equipment would easily pay for itself by Labor Day.

It’s a Hobby!

This has been a good exercise. There are things that could add to your initial expenses. You might spring for a shiny new pot to boil in if you don’t have one already. There are things that could cut your costs too — go to a deli to get those buckets (that’s what their pickles are shipped in) instead of paying for the kit, and save bottles from parties so you don’t have to buy them.

Another thing that might justify the cost is that it’s a hobby, and people really should have hobbies, and no matter what your hobby is, it’ll cost money. Hobbies are good for your mental health, and brewing is a great hobby to get friends or the spouse involved in. Matt and I brew year round, and the wives won’t have anything to do with that, but in the summer, they’re out there with us. My wife and I brewed our first batch of beer together with Matt leading us along. It was great fun.

As time goes on, you’ll likely want to buy or build fancier equipment. Check out a book called “Brew Ware”, which has great ideas on how to save money by repurposing stuff around your house for use in your home brewery. Otherwise, northernbrewer.com and morebeer.com likely have anything you could ever dream of adding to your brewery.

Really, home brewing is as hard or easy as you want to make it. On the ingredient end of things, if you decide to study chemistry to understand your mash better, and microbiology to understand your yeast better, more power to you — but it’s not necessary to make awesome beer.There are also people who culture their own yeast (Matt’s starting to do this for the Bamf operation), grow their own hops (I might go this route this year), get deeply obsessed with things like kernel sizes of various brands of grain… It’s all pretty unnecessary. You can make awesome beer without this amazing depth of knowledge.

The equipment part of the equation can be as complex as you want as well. There are folks with all kinds of fancy electronics, heating elements, pumps, computers, etc. I’m a geek, but I kind of like the fact that brewing is my one break from geeking out (at least as far as computers are involved). When Matt first taught me to brew, we were using a coleman cooler for our mash tun. It was probably the same cooler his mom bought him for our fishing trips when we were in middle school, so… free to us.  Our sparge consisted of us taking turns ladling hot water over an upside down bowl sitting on top of the mash, so that equipment was around the house already. Our chiller was a counterflow chiller Matt made by putting some copper tubing through a garden hose. There are instructions on the web and in books on how to do that, and if you want to go even simpler than that, you can still just sit the whole thing in a tub full of ice for a while to cool it down.

Nowadays, we have added a pump, and a Shirron chiller, both of which we love. We’ve replaced our Coleman cooler with a converted (legally obtained) beer keg, and added another keg for a boiler, and yet another for heating sparge water (the “hot liquor tank”, or HLT). We also brew in 10-gallon batches now, and we do it outside on one of those cajun cooker propane burners. So, our equipment costs went up, but we brew, on average, 10 gallons every 3 weeks until we have no more vessels to ferment in, and our efficiency is greater than it would be in a plastic bucket setup, so our savings per batch is higher.

In the end, we still consider it a hobby, but it’s progressing, like most hobbies do, whether it’s model planes or stained glass. You get better equipment, you do more different things with it, you spend time and energy to learn more about it, you spend more money. At least the outcome of our hobby helps justify the cost in real dollars in addition to being incredibly satisfying.

Here are the notes I took during the brew day:

Strike at 11:02am. Nailed target temp of 152ºF. Outside temp is ~40ºF. Wind is pretty slight. Noticed we now have steam in our new blichmann thermometer on our mash tun

12:35 – final runnings read ~5.75º Brix. We were short on the amount in the boiler. Good thing we added a little extra water.

NOTE AFTER THE FACT: we could’ve added water to the boiler, but the gravity of the runoff was still quite high. Why not grab those extra sugars!?

12:41 – just took pre-boil gravity reading (had to wait for sample to cool and stuff) – 10.5º Brix. Roughly 1.042 I think. Target post-boil is 1.057, so this is probably pretty close. We have 13 gallons in the boiler, on the button.

2:33 all done – post-boil gravity is 14º Brix ~1.056, but we haven’t used a conversion calculator yet – that’s just stupid ‘brix * 4′ guesstimation.

So, all in all, a really fast brew day considering it’s a 10-gallon batch. There are a couple of things we’ve done to help speed up the brew day:

1. Batch sparge. We have zero problems with efficiency using this method. Even better than the fact that it’s fast is that it’s about as simple as you can possibly get. We have the whirligig attachments, all the necessary stuff, and we used fly sparging for eons, but I brewed a batch of ESB by myself one time, and didn’t tell Matt I batch sparged until after he raved about the beer. MUAHAHAHA. That got him to agree to try it on our next batch, and now we’re both hooked.
2. Burner. We bought one of those square “Bayou Classic” burners. We bought it as much for stability as anything else, but it’s also higher output than our old one, which also was bad because it had raised edges, and the keggle didn’t fit on it properly, forcing us to put a grate over the whole thing for the keggle to sit on. Lower output, greater distance from flame = more time on the burner (and more money on propane).
3. Pump. We’ve made good friends with our March pump. I still hold that it’s not an ideal brewing pump, because it has an exposed housing that needs protection from drips, and it’s not self-priming. The benefits of the March, though, are cost (it’s cheap), and its heat capacity (you can pass 212ºF liquid through it, no problem). The builder who gets all of these things in one pump will become the new de facto standard home brewing pump. Anyway, moving liquid with a pump is really fast, and reduces the need to move things around into position for gravity-based transfers.
4. Chiller. We have used the Shirron plate chiller for a couple years now, and we just cannot fathom the idea that there’s enough of a benefit to using the Therminator over the Shirron to warrant anything close to the $100 price jump to move to the Therminator. We move 10 gallons of beer through the Shirron in probably 10 minutes, and it’s perfect pitching temperature, and we don’t ever turn our garden hose all the way up.
5. 1/2″ copper. Stuff does move a little faster here than with our old 3/8″ tubing. We’re looking to propagate 1/2″ tubing throughout the system – there are still little pockets of 3/8″ in there.

So, Matt has some pics and updates to post yet, and I have some pics as well, but I’ll post a rundown of what’s been happening:

• Matt completed the plumbing project to replace vinyl tubing with copper from inside of the kettle, to the outside of the kettle to our Shirron wort chiller (by the way, we’ve used the Shirron in a lot of batches now. Best investment ever). The hard-wiring was tested during an American Pale Ale brew we just did, and it works wonderfully. Matt has his own theories, but mine is just that forcing us to put everything in the same position every time stopped a lot of issues we were having during the final runoff into the carboy fermenters.
• Matt has a store-bought kegerator now, and he helped me complete my converted fridge kegerator. Namely, he bought me the shanks and tubing for my birthday. We are now both serving our beers on tap. More construction details later, but for now – Thanks Matt!
• We’ve brewed 10 gallons each ESB, scottish ale (80~), dry irish stout, red ale, and American pale ale in the past 2 months or so. In addition, Matt has also made a really awesome mead (which he also needs to post an update on), and has been brewing a sake for like 6 weeks or so now.
• We’ve both installed Beer Tools. So far, Matt loves it, and I hate it, but am withholding judgment until I actually read the manual.
• I got a Blichmann thru-wall thermometer for my birthday as well — it’s on the mash tun, and it works great.
• We’ve moved to heating the strike water in the mash tun and then adding the grain on top of it. We used to put the grain in the mash tun and dump the strike water on top of it. We haven’t seen any change in the outcome, but it’s a lot easier this way

Now for the beer!

Bamf Beer’s Black Asphalt Stout

First, the Black Asphalt Stout scared the crap out of us both. Everything seemed ok during fermentation, temps were great, the brew day went off without a hitch (mostly), but we both took a taste during the final gravity reading just before we transferred to the kegs, and…. ewww.

It tasted like we brewed it with 100% roasted barley, and then added black patent malt to the fermenter or something. It tasted kinda like coffee when you leave it on the burner and go out to get something real quick but get caught up talking to some chick in the garbage bag aisle and…. um… nevermind. Anyway it was bad.

So we kegged it anyway. We’re doing 10-gallon batches now, so Matt and I each get our own 5-gallon keg of whatever we brew. Matt now has a kegerator, so he brought his home and fired it up. His reports were not promising. On the day I finally got around to stopping by to try it, Matt had kicked up the CO2 on that keg, and guess what.

All of a sudden, the beer was frickin’ heavenly. So, Bamf Black Asphalt Stout is a hit. I love the stuff.

Kegerators all around!

On the kegerator front, my birthday is coming up. Matt got me shanks and bev line. I’m hoping to get the faucets and double gauge I asked for, and then I just need a nice drill bit and some gas line, and I’m in business — and if I get the 10lb CO2 canister on top of all of that, I’m rockin’! I have a spare fridge in the basement that I’ve been using primarily for beer-related activities for years. It’s now going to become a two-tap kegerator. I can serve Black Asphalt Stout and Hacker’s Knuckle ESB at the same time.

Matt got a ready-made kegerator for his birthday, and it’s really nice. Digital controls, room for 3 cornies, and small enough to not be too obtrusive in his apartment. It has a nice chrome tower and a single tap. Good times.

Still Unnamed: Scottish Ale (80~)

In addition to Black Asphalt and Hacker’s Knuckle, we also brewed an 80~ Scottish Ale that’s still fermenting and looking good. I had never brewed one of these, and was surprised by how long the yeast stayed in the primary phase. The airlocks were still bubbling vigorously 4 days after pitching. Even now, a full 7 days after pitching, they’re bubbling a few times per minute, there’s been very little obvious flocculation, and “the darkening” hasn’t happened yet.

As an aside, people will disagree with this, but it works for us: The Darkening is the thing we look for to indicate a complete fermentation. The airlock isn’t the whole story, and we don’t like sticking stuff in our beer to take hydrometer readings, so we don’t. We look at the beer. When a reddish-colored ale is fermenting, it’s cloudy and mud-colored. When it’s done, it darkens dramatically. We either rack to secondary, or we don’t. Usually we don’t. Either way, we give it a few more days and then keg. Once it’s in kegs, Matt likes to kick his full of gas right away and get to drinkin’. However, my palate seems to be really sensitive to some compound in “green beer”, so I kinda need to condition it a little longer in order to be able to make it drinkable for me. I’ve never identified the cause of this flavor.

Stay tuned!

So, now that the blog is moved over to a new host, with a new theme, and a new version of WordPress, we’ll start posting more of the pics, notes and recipes you’ve been accustomed to. Enjoy! We will!