Beer Review - Einstök Icelandic White Ale

Brewery: Einstök 

Location: Akureyri, Iceland - Just 60 miles south of the Arctic Circle - which provides a unique crisp clear water for their beers.

Style: White Ale

ABV: 5.2%

Appearance: Very light coloured, a truly white ale, very clear and bubbly. Looks like its going to be very refreshing.

Aroma: An exotic fruity aroma with a hint of spice.

Taste: Incredibly smooth and with a crisp refreshing finish. Hints of grapefruit and spice. Excellent after taste and overall just a very tasty satisfying beer combining the flavour of a good ale and the refreshment of a lager.

Where Can you Get It: It's available in Iceland, The UK and in the States or Florida and California. Online it's available to order from Beers Of Europe and Majestic

Price: £2.59 a bottle at Beers Of Europe: 12.99 for a case of 6 bottles from Majestic (or £9.99 if you buy two cases)

Overall Rating: 10/10

Notes: This was a beer that i was rather eager to try. I was following the Perfect Pint facebook page's world cup of beers that ran concurrently with the football world cup. During that i had noticed a bias from the follower's of the page towards English based breweries (the German contenders went out early because many users said they hadn't tried them). So i was intrigued when Einstök made it through to the semi's, so when i made an order from Beers Of Europe i was sure to add one of their brews. 

Spotlight On.......Franciscan Well Brewery.

The second in the series of spotlights on the best breweries around centres on the Franciscan Well brewery based in Cork, Ireland. I stumbled across them quite by accident as i went for an impromptu meal at Indigo Yard at Edinburgh with my Wife and found some of their beers on Tap. I tried a pint of their Friar Weisse which is a German style wheat beer - and an incredibly tasty example of one. The menu suggested that the brewers paid particular attention to the German Beer Purity Laws and from the website i see that the yeast is sourced from the Weihenstephan brewery. This all equates to a very high standard brew. The second i tried was their Rebel Red, a more typically Irish style ruby red ale which i found to have an excellently well balanced delicate flavour without the strong aftertaste you sometimes get with darker ales. These two pints were enough to make me want to find out more.

I got in contact with the brewery and asked a few questions about their set-up. Shane Long the founder of Franciscan Well was very nice and quick to get back to me and here's what he had to say.

Q1: How long have you been brewing and how did you get started? 

1998. There was a printing works behind the bar which had a manufacturing licence. when we were looking into what business would suit in order to keep the planning permission of this we came upon the idea of a micro brewery

Q2: How much do you produce and where can people get your beers?

Throughout all of Ireland both north and south and selected bars in London and Edinburgh

Q3: What brews are your most popular and have you noticed any changing trends in demands from consumers?

Our chieftain Irish pale ale and rebel red ale. The Chieftain came about from listening to what our customers wanted in a pale ale. trends are always changing and we move with them an example would be our Jameson stout which is aged in jameson whisky casks. This received a gold award at the international beer challenge last year

Q4: How do you approach the creation of a new beer? Is there a characteristic that is typical of your brews? 

Always ensure the malt base is right,  once i am happy with that we then play with various hops. As we have a bar attached we go to our customers to see what they would like us to create next

 

Q5: Do you brew for what you feel there’s a market for or do you create for your own palate?

 again this is all down to what the customer wants

Q6: Where do you see your brewery in five years time?

 in a slightly larger brewery and being able to meet the demand both domestic and export

Q7: Have you had any brewing disasters? 

no thank god

Q8: Do you have any tips for home brewers?

 think outside the box. dont be afraid to try anything we recently did a beer with rosemary and clementines

You get the impression from the website and the answers above that there is a real sense of pride in producing beers that really satisfy the customer. Their commitment to the highest standards of ingredients and a willingness to experiment should make for some interesting brews in the future. I really love how they've integrated the pub side of things to the brewery. Using that instant feedback of customers in the pub to inform their brewing, ensures that the standard is always going to be high. I'll definitely be thinking of a visit to Cork to see the place for myself in the future and i really hope they are able to expand so that more and more people can enjoy their beers.

Home brew update: Its now a Dunkel weizen

Today was bottling day for my latest brew. As you may recall from my last blog posts - this was based on the successful Hefeweizen brew that i made back in March. Though with some tweaks due to the availability of ingredients. These being a change of yeast from the excellent white labs Hefeweizen liquid yeast to a dry Bavarian Wheat yeast. This immediately changing the style of beer from a Hefe to a straight forward weizen. For those not really down with the terminology - that pretty much means that the finished beer will not be cloudy and have a slightly different taste. Hefe being German for yeast - as the hefeweizen is a wheat beer that has a cloudy affect as there is a yeast left in the beer after fermentation. The bavarian wheat yeast works well and produces a good wheat beer result but will not leave behind much yeast and therefore the beer will not be cloudy. Upon tasting it also appears that the banana-y taste (as it seems to me) that is prevelant in a lot of hefe's is absent from this beer, though it does have a very nice robust wheat beer flavour nontheless.

The second ingredient change was the adding of 500g of dark rye malt at the mashing stage. This was added purely because i had bought it for an idea i had to make a dark whisky tinged beer when i was experiment but was left when i realised these flavour beers werent working. The thought process was that whatever flavour was given off by this malt would be negligible in the final beer because of the small proportion of it that is the dark rye. It has however, significantly darkened the beer from a light amber to a dark brown thats more consistent with a dunkel weizen. Dunkel being German for dark and this being a style that is more suited for the winter months, a heavier more full flavoured kind of style. Which considering we'll be into August  before it has finished bottle conditioning means that it probably is quite apt. The main taste difference i can get from it at this stage is a definitely more bitter finish and a more treacley taste as opposed to the caramel tones of March's hefe.

So, where i have learned my lessons from previous brews. I have remember to take measurements of the gravity of the beer at the start and end of fermentation so am this time able to pretty accurately put an abv figure on it. My starting gravity was 1.060 and final was 1.014 which is consistent with a beer with a 5.8% abv. Not bad, stronger than previous brews and around the figure i wanted - this is probably helped by the fact i had an extra 500g of malt and also added 500g of brown sugar before fermentation.

Talking of sugar. As discussed previously i have now taken to bottle conditioning rather than in a barrel. So today was all about taking the beer from its fermentation tub straight to the vessel it'll be served from (the bottle). You add sugar to each bottle to aid carbonation. I learned today that i may have been far too generous with the sugar with previous brews. I had had to empty a load of bottles as i had beer that wasn't good enough to drink in them and needed to use the bottles for this new brew. As i opened them to empty them, a few of them were shooting out of the bottle as soon as the cap was released - obviously too much sugar had caused too much carbonation. So its a conservative half teaspoon a bottle now rather than the heaped teaspoon of before.

Lastly, previous bottling had been tedious affairs where i've had problems keeping the siphoning tube in place whilst trying to bottle by myself. Inevitably leading to shouting my wife over to help to much grumbling and complaining. Today though i found that the hole for the airlock on the second fermentation tub i'd bought (which this brew was in) was exactly the right size to hold my siphoning tube. So by removing the airlock and feeding the tube through the hole - i was able to lodge it firmly and securely into the tub and hovering at exactly the right level above the line of sediment of spent yeast at the bottom. This made the job a lot faster - i managed to bottle and cap 41 bottles in about 41 mins and it also meant i was able to maximise the amount of useable liquid in the tub.

So two weeks and i can give the full verdict on this beer. Until then i will be keeping an eye on the brew stores website for stocks of hefeweizen yeast so i can plan another proper hefeweizen brew soon too.

In other news, my wife and i have planned an October/November euro trip and i'll be hoping to sample and review some beers in Amsterdam, Lubeck, Malmo, Copenhagen, Hamburg and Osnabruck. As well as bring back some AppleKorn to enjoy......nom.

Update on todays brewing. Possibly repeating old mistakes.

Just a quick update. I have completed my second batch of my successful weizen recipe as laid out in a previous post. However, made a couple of changes based on my available ingredients.

Firstly, when i picked up my bag of Vienna Malt grains, i noticed i still had a 500g bag of Dark Crystal Malt that i had left over from my ill-fated attempts at making flavoured beers. This had been intended for us in a dark raspberry beer. As i've abandoned flavoured beers for now i decided it surely wont do any harm being incorporated into this brew. The flavour profile is that of a toffee taste would certainly add some extra depth to my beer i felt and the darker coloured malt would make it a bit less pale.

Secondly, when i picked up my hops from my ingredients drawer - i noticed that annoyingly i had been sent the wrong hops when i had made an online order to the brew store a couple of months ago. Instead of Hellertauer Hersbrucker hops i'd been sent another German hop variety - Tettnang. Thankfully a little research online shows there to be very little different between the two varieties and that Tettnang is suitable for a weizen style beer. Its just a little more aromatic and spicy so again should add more depth to the flavour.

Alongside the change of yeast as documented in my last post - this was a bit of a departure from my original recipe. So to test how it should work i put all my ingredients into my brewtarget software and by adding some brown sugar i managed to get a well balanced result. A darker and stronger beer than before but hopefully style with an undeniably weizen style of finish.

Everything looks fine from the brewing process, and a original gravity reading of 1.060 is consistent with what the brewing software suggests i should expect. This should yield a pretty decent 5.5-6% abv beer after fermentation.

Home Brew Talk: Don't Run Before You Can Walk

It's been quite some time since i've updated this blog and there's a few reasons for this. Laziness figures quite highly - sometimes its just difficult to motivate yourself to write, especially when you aren't sure if anyone is actually reading it. Lack of beers to review - my wife and i have been living a bit more frugally of late to try and save a deposit for a house so i've not been buying beers to review, only drinking my home brews. Why not review the home brews, i hear that one reader think to themselves. Well, this gets to the crux of the matter - one v.successful wheat beer brew made me think i already had this brewing malarkey down and so i've been experimenting wildly with my brews and ending up with less than drinkable results.

I don't want to get into to much detail about the mistakes i've made. A general overview should give you an idea of what not to do if you try home brewing yourself.

Brew 1 - Decided to brew another one of the kits i had, a Woodforde Wherry Ale (This one came with my home brew equipment kits that i had got for Christmas). This was to be a stop gap brew until i got more ingredients to do my own brew. I decided to try and give it more depth of flavour by not only boiling the wort with some of the hops i had left from my wheat beer brew but also to leave some hopes in the fermenting tub to steep with the beer.

Mistake 1 - Steeping Hops in the fermenting tub. This became a nightmare to remove from the beer and not get leaves into the bottles. Also the steeping gave the beer a far too hoppy flavour - though i did find after a month in the bottle it did become drinkable if you had it with a touch of lemonade.

Brew 2 - Full grain brew. I decided to attempt a Belgian style beer using just grains and no malt extracts. The success of my wheat beer which had included a partial grain element - using my makeshift mashing technique of boiling in my wifes jam pot with a frying pad for a lid - led to me to assume i could get away with this kind of brew without a mash tun.

Mistake 2 - Assuming a makeshift, ineffecient mashing technique would work. My beer ended up flavourless as my mashing technique obviously failed to get as much out of the grains as would be needed to make a good beer.

Brew 3 - Flavoured Beers. Had noticed that the brew store had flavourings that you could use in beers and i thought i could have a go at that. Make some nice light flavoured beers for the summer. These would also test out the small batch technique of using demijohns to ferment in 6l batches. This was again a full grain brew and i got Raspberry and Ginger Flavourings to make a Raspberry beer, a Ginger Beer and a Raspberry and Ginger Beer.

Mistake 3 - Tried to only use whole grains so again didn't get enough flavour from the hops to have a decent base beer for the flavourings. I also was far too stingy with the flavourings so ended up with tasteless beers.

Brew 4 - Upon learning my mistakes that my mashing technique wasn't get as much out of the grains as i would hope, i went back to using this technique only as a top up to the liquid malt extracts. To this end i decided to try another approach to making a flavoured beer. Making up my Scottish Export kit and mashing some Whisky and some Peated Malt grains to make a Whisky tinged beer. This wasn't a massive disaster however, wasn't that great either.

Mistake 4 - The added whisky and peaty flavours served to get the beer a far too smoky flavour. I also think a mistake was made at bottling with too much sugar added as the beer foams up quickly and starts flowing out the bottle upon opening.

So today, its back to basics and back to my original successful wheat beer recipe. Not tinkering - apart from one enforced ingredient change. One that could have a bit impact unfortuately - the Hefeweizen liquid yeast i used first time around was unavailable at the brew store - so i will be using a dried Bavarian Wheat beer yeast instead. Fingers crossed i have something more enjoyable to drink this time.