Crown Brewery

There is a lot of stuff on the web at moment that started with twitter, I’m not sure twitter was responsible here I think was just good old BEER and a couple of chance meetings over said drink. The last meeting was at Thornbridge brewery’s new brewery opening which involved far to much Jaipur, then some Summer Lightning and train to Sheffield were we found our selves with time to kill so ( yes you guessed it ) we went for another beer, a Duvel. The result was we had to brew together, a few tweets later we had a date 1/10/09 and we decided on either a Double or a Porter, as the date got closer I found a supply of Damsons so it was set Damson Porter.

The brew day came we mashed in.

We decided to simply squidge the 20lbs of damsons up and put them straight in to the copper to boil. I had decided on Bramling Cross for the hop additions so in went 1kg, when we got close to finishing the collection from the mash we started talking about strength i thought we might get 5.5 to 6% abv Zak suggested if we could get about about 6.6% we could have a Double Damson Porter so I cut the collection a little short and we decided on a long boil after 30 min we added another 1kg of Bramling Cross, Zak dug the mash, I ordered some lunch and we went up to the bar for our steak and Stannington Stout pies.

after we had filled our self’s with food and beer ( small samples of course ) we went back down to see to the brew.

The wort had boiled for two hours with a total of 3kg’s Bramling X we added another 2kg’s and let it rest. The original gravity reading was taken and goal was achieved 1075 and with a little hop sparge we got it down to 1070 and in went the yeast, S-033 was pitched and left to ferment.

Thanks to Zak for coming, the beer has just about fermented now and its going to be quite well balanced strong, sweet, bitter, hoppy and fruity.