Crown Brewery

Its been a good year with some great projects done and some lessons learned.

Bottling has been great this year but I wish we had done more of some beers than others. Unpro IPA was a great success we bottled it all which is great because it will around for a while, also it will be great to see how it matures, but its also one of those beers that could have sold a lot of cask.

The only other beer we still have in stock is Wheat Stout 6.6% this is another beer we only bottled and I think it is now at its best at 16 months old.

the other bottles this year were Ring of Fire 10.3%, India Pale Ale 7.2% Django Reinhardt (Damson Double Porter) 6.3%, Stannington Stout 5%, Smokin Oktoberfest 5.7% Wheetie-bits 4.4% and Samuel Berry’s Pale Ale 5.1%.

Ring of Fire was a 350 bottle run ready in January and sold out by July. I have already brewed it again and will hopefully be bottling it early in 2010.

India Pale Ale was brewed with the help of Pete Brown and was matured warm in casks before bottling we still have another cask to bottle the first 190 bottles have already sold out.

Django Reinhardt was brewed with Zak Avery it turned a lovely bitter sweet porter we did 200 bottles and they sold out in a month Zak has got the last 24 at his shop. we do have three casks left as well one for The Hillsborough Hotel and two for Rotherham Camra Oakwood Beer festival.

we where a bit rubbish at sorting the labels for Smokin Oktoberfest so we still have some stock left and its still in great condition so we are now selling it as Rauchbier.

Wheetie-bits was last brewed in January 2009 so the bottles are pretty old for a 4.4% but its done well and we’ve just sold out of that as well.

Sam Berry’s and Stannington Stout are both regular cask beers so we’ve tried to keep up with demand but its been hard work and they’ve been out of stock far to much. So 2010 is going be the year for bottling the regular brews HPA, Traditional Bitter, Stannington Stout and Sam Berry’s.

2010 is also going to be a year for all the other idea’s I’ve got. The HPA13 home brew that I did went down well with the few that tried it so I’m going to try and do a full size brew and put in to 750ml bottles all nice and fancy like my marketing consultant says.

I also want to continue with the Jazz series. Basically its an easy way to name beers and I can continue to try different hops and malt combinations and if anything really special comes out then I’ll bottle it.

My main focus this year will be to increase the weekly out put of casks and this is going to take most of my time and effort. So here’s to 2010 and lots of great beery things!

Cheers everyone see you next year.

Its been far to long since my last post partly because of time and also because I know I’m not a good writer. I’ve been posting regularly on twitter which for me is the perfect blog size. I do feel quite satisfied when I have finished writing something but the process is not enjoyable. Today I have been inspired by the awards given out last night at the Beer Writers dinner from the twitter feeds I read it looks like they all had a good time. I was glad to see some of the newest blogs won some awards, Mark Dredge with his Pencil & Spoon took the New Media award for his blog and the runner up was Wool Pack Dave with his Beer and Stuff blog. Both these blogs were founded on the same day just over a year ago, I read them both maybe not every post but I don’t miss much, and deserve recognition for two very well written blogs!

I was very pleased to read that Pete Brown won the Travel Bursary for his book Hops & Glory. I’m sure that will go a long way to paying for his trip to India! Oh and of course He won Beer Writer of The Year 2009. I don’t think there was a writer in that room last night that thought any one else but Pete could possibly win and as he said him self (to everyone who would listen & and probably some people who didn’t care) “if I don’t win with Hops & Glory this year I’ll never win it”. So well done Pete cheers! If you haven’t read the book yet then you should because its very very good, it inspired me to brew a beer which you can read about here.

Right I should talk about the beer I’ve been brewing recently, after all that’s what I started the blog for. The last post I wrote was about the Damson Double Porter 6.3% (the was named Django Reinhardt by Zak to keep in with the Jazz theme) Zak Avery came to brew with brew with me, well it turned out to be very nice and a cask of the beer went down to London for the White Horse old ales festival along with a cask of India Pale Ale 7.2%(if anyone who tried them would leave a comment I would be very grateful).

I’ve also been keeping up with the Jazz series Wes Montgomery 3.7% was brewed and is available from some pubs somewhere.

I also should have blogged about Ring of Fire 2009 which was brewed late in October I had some help from a mate met on twitter chilliupnorth man Andy Mogg who also does a site called beer reviews. Andy grows a lot of chilli’s and brought 1KG of them down to Sheffield to go in to this years brew. Andy blogged about his brewday here.