Finally!

It's 9:15 pm i'm at the brewery writing this up and the only thing i have to say is best said in a picture.....

I know its only 6.5 firkins but its a start. More info to follow to those that have asked around the 20th January. To the rest of you time to start keeping and eye out.....
Cheers JK

I though i was distracting you...

...alas i wasn't. I am actually awaiting for the completion of the below formula....

V = d2 (S - S1) g

18µ

where:
V = the velocity of precipitation
d = the floc diameter
S = the floc density
S1 = the beer density
g = gravitational constant
µ = the beer viscosity coefficien

so as you can see some days i do some really fun stuff. Right on to tax chat with HMRC.

Cheers all JK

Just to keep you distracted

I know you all want to have a pint of the first BlackBar Brewery ale. But I'm afraid that's going to be a little while off yet. I'll put up the info for the release brew when i know where and when its going till then. Here is a little bit of a rant about whats been happening.
Well there was this event known by most as christmas i prefer the Mid Winter Festival (MWF) but thats me being my awkward self. In my local village we like to make sure that the MWF meal won't sit as a spare tyre for the coming year so we have what is known as the Barrel race.  Basically a bunch of locals like to close of the main road and have a race. To make things a little more fun we make every one push some barrels.

as i'm sure you can imagine there is a lot of laughs, a few crashes and a couple of pints after wards, not surprising you get that many adults together rolling barrels down a closed main road in a small cambridgeshire village.

Next up is the fact i seem to have got myself noticed, BlackBar is listed on the quaffale site. Well I'll get on to them to inform them that there is no space between black and bar in BlackBar. Then i'm going to keep quite and getting on with brewing. I'll let the rest of the information regarding website, launch dates etc etc as soon as i have them till then.

Cheers JK

ps: my feet are cold and i need to get out and do a lot more riding this year. Look out for future blogs on riding and bikes once i have got a few brews done.

Blimey another week gone.

Well it has a been a very interesting week. I brewed the first two batches of beer, all went well, or so i thought. The extract from the mash tun was fine the boil looked good and the fermentation was crazy fast but worked. Then i put the brews on cool and started the fining tests. All went wrong at this point. I had beer that was the correct gravity and colour and flavour with the major problem of it wasn't clearing. Thus i had a problem haze. Of course my mind went mad with what could be the problem. I thought water ion issues, malt problems, malt in kettle issues, cooling problems and more. It took a few days of mad thinking before i decided to contact my old friend Mattias of compass brewery. Mattias was with me at university in Edinburgh and has been a great sounding board since i started this project. (he isn't alone in that job but more about the others another time). I send Mattias a text asking if he could answer my problem. I got a phone call later that afternoon from Mattias asking some more questions. It all ended up with me having made a little mistake. This little mistake was not checking for a good hot break. I would explain the finer details, but that would take to long. The basic answer was i had made a rookie mistake and i should do some reading. (these aren't Mattias words he is far to nicer guy to tell me that). So after a little reading around i had learnt some more that i had forgotten from university and yesterday set about brewing batch 0003. Having increased the boil length and checked many many times for the signs of a good break i cast the brew into the FV and this morning i am happy to say that the brew is fermenting.
I'll leave you with the above info and no more as i don't want to jinx myself now. (to GU i tried to get it right first time but alas i failed, got to live and learn)
Will update you on the out come when i know more........
Cheers JK