 The
Brewery
Take a virtual tour of our new brewhouse.
Housed in a picturesque 19th Century stone barn, in comparison
with many breweries ours is exceptionally well equipped, energy
efficient and hygienic. Most of it was designed and installed "in
house" and the stainless steel vessels were fabricated in Ventnor,
on the Isle of Wight.
 The
plant has a 15-barrel brewlength - in other words, we brew in
batches of about 4,500 pints - a piddling amount by the standards of
the big brewers - but size isn't everything! There are eight
fermenters/conditioning tanks and a racking tank. The copper (so called because they
were once made of copper) has an internal gas heater coil and a
false floor to act as a hop-back (a means of straining spent hops and trub* out of the wort*). The heating coil has the advantage that
it doesn't caramelise the beer.
* see 'brewery speak' for what all the wonderful, old-fashioned terms
mean!
 Shiny
stainless steel may be a bit clinical, but it is hygienic and easy
to clean. This is the inside of the copper. The central "funnel" is
connected to the underside of the false floor, where the heater coil
is located, and during the 1 hour "boil" the wort circulates up
through it - very impressively, too.
We use exactly the same recipe for bottled beers as we do for "trad" real ale - except that we raise the hop levels slightly to compensate for the losses in hop flavours during "cold sterile" filtration. We do NOT pasteurise our beers. Pasteurisation is an idle way to make sure beer stays sound and doesn't go "off". Essentially it entails cooking the beer to sterilise it. Unfortunately, whilst this is very effective, it doesn't half damage flavour components. Wine is never pasteurised, and nor should beer be. |
