Brew #100

Somehow in the blink of an eye that has been the last 18 months, we have managed to brew beer at our home in Kirkbymoorside 100 times. Amidst the chaos of running a brewery with (for the most part) two people, 100 brew days can apparently slip by at incredible speed. Brewing beer is but a small part of the job. Between delivering, sales, cleaning, packaging, maintenance, accounting, social media, designing pump clips, attending and hosting events, cleaning, general office work, and invoicing (did I mention CLEANING?!), the brewing side of it almost seems like a reward for the hard work! This for us works incredibly well. We really do love making beer. Yes, it’s physically demanding work, things often go awry, or things break in the middle of the day, and we’re often in for a much longer day than planned, but it’s always worth it. You get out what you put in, and each time we brew we put all our effort in to making the best beer we possibly can. At the end of the process, we have BEER, that we made, and that feeling will never get old. A good example would be today’s brew. Our century. The big three digits. We kicked off nice and early as oft we do, brewing up something special to mark the occasion. At the very start of the day (mashing in), our auger* decided it wasn’t playing ball, and so Luke** and I had the wonderful job of adding the grain by hand, which is a fairly big job when this was one of our biggest grain bills to date. Though a bit of a time delay, and slightly exhausting, we got it sorted in the end. All for the love of the beer.

For brew #100 we decided to treat ourselves (and yourselves!) to another big hoppy IPA. We’ve been on a mission this year to up our game with our hoppy beers, in terms of clarity of flavour, process, and hop intensity. Every time we brew a beer of this style we look at what we’ve done before and try and improve. Not to take anything away from preceding beers, but we think it’s working! The beer will feature the Citra hop in all it’s glory. Used today as a whirlpool addition, and then again as a dry hop, we want this beer to sing the citrus song of one of our favourite hops. Alongside Ekuanot, which will back it up nicely. The name of this beer is one of our favourite phrases. It gets thrown around when we face any kind of adversity, have a tap takeover induced hangover, or just fancy shouting it out. It’s a proper in-joke, but we like it.

100 brews in the bag. Many more to come. WE GO AGAIN!

*The gadget that scoops up the grain and mixes it with brewing liquor (water). ** Our first recruit in the brewhouse. If you read our blog, have been to an event of ours since April, you know him already.