Bluffers Guide

How to sound like a brewing expert! A bluffer's guide to the brewing process.

Our process starts with water, pure and simple, then we do our best to complicate that with some very old and peculiar words. For each gyle we charge the Hot Liquor Tun with liquor, and, if anything needs adding in the way of minerals etc, this is usually when it's done. We're lucky with ours, we don't add anything, well hardly anything, - we've got to have some secrets. Some brewers burtonise the liquor, we don't. The liquor is heated up to the strike temperature. This is usually done overnight as watching this is as exciting as watching a kettle boil, well very similar really, only bigger, much bigger.

A carefully measured amount of various barley malts (grist) is crushed in our lovely old mill (it's all grist to the mill) and any adjuncts added, this grist is moved to the Mash Tun, where it is doughed-in with the hot liquor from the tun. The goods, are steeped, (the first runnings being added back to the top of the mash until they run clear) this is then sparged for a couple of hours using more liquor to extract the sweet wort. This hot wort is pumped into the copper via the valentine and underback, and heated to a slow rolling boil; bittering, flavour and aroma hops being added in various quantities at various times over the next two hours. The boil continues until the required gravity (O.G.) is achieved, at which point the wort is rapidly cooled and, leaving the trub behind, moved into the fermenter where the yeast is pitched. Then, for about a week, we do virtually nothing, play cards, discuss the weather, listen to the Archers that sort of thing. That's about it! After a week transfer the green beer to a conditioning tank and do nothing but chill for another week, then we rack the beer, bung and shive the firkins or kilderkins and do nothing for another week or so, then, when we feel like it, we deliver them to the pub. The rest is up to you.

Look up these words in the glossary