Reinventing Irish Red Ale

Irish red, as a beer style, is a relatively new concept. Ale in Ireland has been considered the poor cousin of Stout for a very long time and has suffered more from brewery consolidations and dumbing down of beer flavour than any other kind of beer.

If you ever discuss Irish Red with TheBeerNut, you will be given a detailed explanation of why the style doesn’t actually exist. He will tell you how it is just a degenerate form of English Bitter and challenge you to tell the difference between keg Bass and Smithwicks, or John Smiths Smooth Flow and Kilkenny.

For the most part I agree with him. Irish Red is the ale you have left when you reduce the hops as much as possible, replace the crystal malt with small amounts of roasted barley and add caramel for colour. All you have to do now is serve it on nitrogen and bobs your uncle; bland red beer.

When Michael Jackson came over and wrote about Irish beer, this process was already complete. He found a country with Stout, Lager and bland red beer, which he called Irish Red. No one had ever called it that before. Smithwicks, the most common example, was simply called “ale”.

I actually think this was a disaster for beer in Ireland. Michael Jackson, The Beer Hunter, had given these bland, flavourless beers the legitimacy of their own style name. The blandness of these beers was now set in stone as a valid characteristic of a distinct style of beer. When Irish Microbreweries came along they felt they had to make an Irish Red. I mean, other than Stout, what else do we have left of our native beer culture? The fact that it’s not actually a native beer style at all, but the result of a giant company making the blandest beer possible, for as cheap as possible, did not matter. Michael Jackson has given us a beer style and damn it, the Irish Micros are going to brew it!

The BJCP, that renowned repository of beer categories, has most certainly done it’s part to legitimise this style. This is not surprising, as Mr. Jackson had a lot of influence on the way beer is perceived in America and to be fair, the Irish Micros are brewing the stuff, so we have a feedback of commercial examples reinforcing the existence of the style.

The BJCP guide for Irish Red talks about a beer which is “An easy-drinking pint. Malt-focused with an initial sweetness and a roasted dryness in the finish” and the numbers for the style look like this:

Vital Statistics:
OG: 1.044 – 1.060
FG: 1.010 – 1.014
IBUs: 17 – 28
SRM: 9 – 18
ABV: 4.0 – 6.0%

Now I find this very interesting. The commercial examples in Ireland do not necessarily fit these numbers. Smithwicks (brewed by Diagio), by far the most commonly found example, is 3.8% Vol. when purchased on tap and I have never seen an example, even from a microbrewery, which exceeds 4.4% Vol. So where did the 6% come from? This is a case of American Micros brewing Irish Red, pushing the boundaries of the ABV and the BJCP reacting to that.

So why can’t we do the same? I mean, this style isn’t going anywhere. People will always talk about Irish Red, so why not make it our own and change it into a decent beer? I’m talking to the home brewers now, as I think we are (or at least should be) the grass roots of beer styles, but any commercial brewers reading are more than welcome to join in.

I’m not saying we should copy the Americans and simply jack up the ABV, in fact I think that would be a mistake as Irish Red is supposed to be a session beer, but I do think we could make the style more interesting. Let’s look at what is good about Irish Red, keep that and change the rest.

Colour. Red is a good colour for an ale and it’s in the name, so let’s keep it.

Malt Focussed. The better examples, like O’Hara’s Red or Rebel Red, definitely have more interesting grists than the industrial ones, with crystal malts playing a large part. If we use top quality ale malt, a mix of crystal malts and maybe a touch of roasted malts for spice, we are firmly in nice beer territory.

Alcohol content. 3.8% – 4.8% is where I would put Irish Red. Anything more and we start to move out of what the Irish beer drinker would consider a session beer.

Low to no hop flavour and aroma. This is a malt focused beer and that is fine. I really like hop flavour and aroma, but that doesn’t mean it has to be up front in every beer. Let the hops take a back seat in this one.

Now let’s look at what I think we should change.

Bittering. The BJCP has this style at 17 – 28 IBU and I think the 28 is probably higher than any example I have ever encountered. This is where the style falls down, in my opinion. The industrial examples have little bittering but then they have little malt character either, so they are reasonably balanced in their blandness. When the Irish micros make an Irish Red, they go to the trouble of using decent malts, but keep the bittering at, more or less, the same level as the industrial examples. I think this is a mistake, creating an unbalanced beer. I would like to see Irish Red around the 30 - 35 IBU mark, but all or most of that coming from an early hop addition, thus keeping the hop flavour and aroma down. I don’t think this will result in a bitter beer, just a balanced one, which displays the malts to their best affect.

Yeast. None of the industrial examples have any yeast character and few of the micros have much going on in that department either. I see no reason for this. As long as the yeast is appropriate, why not let it out to play? WYyeast 1084 Irish Ale produces nice fruity esters at higher temperatures and I see no reason why estery English or Scottish ale yeast shouldn’t be used too. I’m not saying that it should be in every example, but why stifle the yeast just because the big industrial brewers do?

Nitrogen. Not many home brewers use this but I still feel I should mention it. Why go to the trouble of making a nice flavourful beer and then kill it off with Nitrogen? Serve on co2 and let the flavours out.

I think there is a lot of potential to turn Irish Red into a nice style. All we have to do is stand up and claim it as our own. Let’s redefine Irish Red as something we can be proud of.

Bag in a ball, in a box for beer? Actually, it's quite clever.

While surfing around the websites of beverage packaging companies (what, you don't do that?) I came across an interesting packaging solution for beer.

The KeyKeg is a disposable keg, consisting of a plastic ball, with an inner food grade bag to contain the beer. The whole thing is packed in a cardboard shell for staking, etc. It’s made from 100% recyclable materials and the idea is that the brewery sends them out and doesn’t have to worry about getting them back.

What I find most interesting about this is the way the beer is dispensed. You get a basic coupler, which looks pretty similar to other commercial couplers and you hook this up to a beer out line and a gas in line. Once hooked up to the KeyKeg, gas is pumped in through the gas line, increasing the pressure in the keg, thus forcing beer out, up the beer line, to the tap at the bar.

So how is this different from a normal keg? Well, this is the clever bit. You see the gas does not go into the same space as the beer; it goes into the space between the plastic ball and the inner plastic bag, which contains the beer. Because the beer never comes into contact with the gas which is pumped into the keg, you can use any gas you like. Compressed air is suggested by the manufacturer, meaning you could simply hook up an air pump rather than a gas bottle, if you so choose.



The fact the no co2 is added to the beer at dispense time rang a bell with me which, unsurprisingly, the American manufacturers appear to have missed: Real Ale. If you ferment your beer normally in the brewery, cap the fermentor to build up the desired level of carbonation, then package it in a KeyKeg, it’s real ale according to the CAMRA definition. While this is quite doable with a normal keg, as soon as you start pushing the beer by adding co2 top pressure, CAMRA steps in and shouts “Extraneous carbon dioxide!” which makes the beer “fake” in some way. With the KeyKeg however, the beer never comes into contact with the gas. Effectively the bit of the keg devoted to liquid just gets smaller.

Where this really comes into it’s own is with shelf life. Where a traditional cask allows air in, thus staling the beer within a few days, beer dispensed from one of these, will last weeks.

I wonder how CAMRA would feel about this. It seems to tick all the boxes for their definition of real ale, but extends shelf life considerably. I'll bet there would still be opposition.

The Irish Pub. Let's talk about the Elephant at the bar: Price.

We have all heard the doom and gloom reports about falling pub sales and the inevitable pub closures which follow. Various factors have been blamed; the smoking ban, the economy, cheaper alternatives in off-licences, cross border shopping, etc. but not a lot of constructive ideas have been suggested.

The reaction of the drinks industry representative bodies has been downright amusing. They saw an economy in recession, so in December 2008 they announced a 12 month price freeze. Yes, in their wisdom, the Licensed Vintners Association (LVA) and the Vintners Federation of Ireland (VFI) joined forces and told their cash strapped customers that they had no intention of jacking up the price on them, for now. As it turned out, this was contrary to a high court ruling concerning alleged price fixing in the late 90’s (the little scamps) so they withdrew it in July 09, but it shows the mentality. When other industries are looking at cutting their prices, the Irish publican expects applause for not raising them.

The latest idea, this one from the Drinks Industry Group of Ireland (DIGI), which both the LVA and the VFI are lining up behind, is for excise duty to be slashed by 20%. This suggestion comes on the back of a survey by the same body which shows a familiar trend of falling sales.

“The overall picture is one of a sector suffering a period of sharp decline, with a large majority (70%) of all licensed premises surveyed reporting a decrease in net sales over the past five years.”


They point out, quite rightly, that Ireland has some of the highest alcohol tax rates in the Europe and that reducing this might help, but I wonder who they see it helping and how? If duty were lowered by 20%, what would they do with the price drop? Would they pass it on to the customer in order to stimulate growth or do they simply see it as a way of extracting more money from the dwindling number of punters, without raising prices? (Not that I can see it happening at all. Our government has a very similar mentality to the Irish publican and will most certainly not entertain the notion of lowering any kind of tax.)

What I don’t understand is why the Irish drinks industry thinks it should be treated differently to other industries. Yes, the drinks industry employs a lot of people and yes, business is not what it once was, but do they think that they are the only industry which can make these claims? Why, when other industries are looking for new strategies, ways of cutting costs, new ways of attracting business, does the Irish drinks industry expect the government to solve it’s problems?

Due to our Byzantine alcohol laws, which date back to before the formation of the state, the overall number of full (pub and off sales) licences is fixed. Licences are issued by the courts and they simply will not issue a new licence unless an old one is extinguished. This has led to a trade in licences and a limited number of outlets.

When our economy was booming, the price of a pint went up. This is true of almost everything during the period, but the law of supply and demand went to work on the artificially limited number of pubs, resulting in the average price of a pint of stout rising by 51.2% between 1993 and 2003, while the consumer price index for the same period only rose by 35.7% (there was no increase in duty on beer during the period, in case you were wondering).

But things have changed now and those prices are starting to look a bit steep (I paid €6.40 for a bottle of Budvar last Saturday. That is the last beer I will be buying in that particular establishment).

Irish publicans need to realise that they are in a changing business environment and that they must adapt if they are going to survive. Just as they could raise their prices with gay abandon when there was lots of money in the economy and little competition, they now have to drop them if they want to tempt people away from their sitting rooms and cans of beer. The government is not going to subsidise the Irish pub with a drop in alcohol duty, no matter how powerful the publican lobby is. Our elected representatives are looking at the huge black hole where the public finances are supposed to be and all they are interested in is filling it. They want more tax revenue, not less.

There must be many innovative ways a publican can attract people though the door and maybe there is scope for cutting costs too but one thing I am sure of, because it comes down to one of the basic laws of business; the law of supply and demand: demand is down, supply is as high as ever, prices must fall.

The Irish publican needs to bite the bullet and lower his margins. Simple as that.

The Sparkler: One paddy's take on this divisive device.

The sparkler debate is something I have observed with mild puzzlement for years. British real ale drinkers seem to feel very strongly about it, but whether they are in favour of it or against it seems largely to depend on their point of origin. The northern beer enthusiast tends to fall into the pro sparkler camp, while the southern ale aficionado will most likely consider it to be an abomination. There are logical arguments for and against the use of a sparkler, but I think the fact that there is a geographical divide tells us that there is more tradition and emotion at work here than logic.

Before I go any further, I think, as this is an Irish blog, I had better give an overview of cask conditioned ale and explain exactly what a sparkler is and what it does. If you are familiar with how real ale is served and what role the sparkler plays, feel free to skip ahead.

Cask conditioned ale is a traditional British way of packaging and serving beer. The beer is served at cellar temperature (12C-14C) and rather than being pushed to a tap at the bar by pressurised carbon dioxide, as with keg beer, real ale is drawn up using a hand pump, know as a beer engine.

To package beer in a cask, you can either take beer which has not quite finished fermenting and fill the cask with it, or you can take finished beer, add sugar to it and fill the cask with that. Either way, the yeast in the unfiltered, unpasteurised beer will continue to ferment in the sealed cask, consuming the remaining sugars and carbonating the beer with natural carbon dioxide. The cask is then sent out to the pub, where it is allowed to rest and condition until it is ready for serving.

Once the pub cellarman judges the time is right, he taps a wooden peg, known as a spile, into a special spot on the cask, venting some of the gas, in order to get the carbonation level just right. A tap is then attached to another part of the cask, so that the beer can be tested and checked for clarity, before finally fitting the line for the beer engine. Because the beer is now exposed to air, it will go off if it is not served within the next few days.

Cask conditioning was once the way beer was served in Ireland too, but a certain large brewery, which is now part of an even larger multinational, used it's market dominance and marketing prowess to persuade people that beer that has been pasteurised, had high pressure nitrogen gas forced into it and is then served from a keg under a nitrogen/carbon dioxide mix, is superior to the natural, living product they had been drinking (they now want us to believe that it is actually the same product generations of Irish people have been drinking, despite the fact that the process was only invented in the mid 20th century). The reason for the brewery to do this is that the shelf life of the product is extended and there is no cellarman skill required to tap a keg.

So what is a sparkler then?A sparkler (seen in action above. Photo shamelessly pinched from wikipedia) is a small piece of metal (or sometimes plastic) which attaches to the spout of a beer engine. It has several small holes in it, so that when the beer is pumped up from the cask, it is forced through the small holes, which causes gas to come out of solution. The settling process and creamy head which results will look rather familiar to stout drinkers and forces me to conjecture that, in the past, Ireland fell into the pro sparkler camp, as this is what the nitrogen keg process appears to be trying to mimic. Without the use of a sparkler the same beer will have little or no head.

My experience of sparklers has been pretty limited up until now. I did encounter them a few years a go when I was attending a course run by Brewlab in Sunderland, but I wasn't as familiar with cask beer as I am now and most of the real ale I have consumed since has been of the sparkler free southern persuasion. My recent trip to Liverpool for a meeting of the EBCU landed me back in sparkler territory and the difference was striking.

The creamy head and settling process put me in mind of nitrogenated stout, of which I am not a fan (I would rather a bottle, thank you) and the experience of drinking the resultant bitter was somewhat muted in flavour. I'm not saying that the beer was ruined in the same way as nitrogenation would have done (smooth flow * shudder*), just that the edge had been taken off it. I like my hops and the sharp bitterness I normally enjoy in cask bitter had been partially suppressed by the creamy head, which was enough to put me off.

So is that me in the anti sparkler camp now? Well, not really and here is why; bitter was not the only thing I drank while in Liverpool.

I have a soft spot for mild and have always liked porter (I'm an Irish beer geek, I have to know my stout). What I found was that the darker, more malt focused beers came out quite well. Where I sometimes find cask stout a little lifeless, the sparkler seemed to flesh it out quite nicely, but without the impenetrable cap of flavour killing nitrogen a nitro keg would have put on it. Fullers London Porter, which I have always enjoyed in the bottle, was delicious from a cask with sparkler, as was Wapping Stout. The milds fared well too, with the sparkler just adding a little something extra without killing any flavour.

So in conclusion, I think the sparkler can be a good thing, but only in the right beer. Hoppy bitter beers end up a little dull, which is a shame, but more malt forward beers seem to shine when the sparkler puts a creamy head on top. I think that more in depth investigation of this phenomenon is in order.

For more detail on our Liverpool trip and the beers experienced, have a look at TheBeerNut's Blog.

Brewery sacks worker for drink driving.

While trawling the internet for beer related news I came across this incident from Tasmania. One Nick Kolodjashnij was caught driving with a blood alcohol level of 0.154, three times the legal limit. The police charged him and frankly I haven't been able to find out what kind of punishment he is likely to get in Tasmania but I don't think that it will be a stern talking to. So far, so ordinary. Drink driving is an ongoing problem in a lot of the world and this is just one more idiot who had to learn the hard way.

The twist is that Mr. Kolodjashnij is an employee of James Boag brewery (a subsidiary of Australian megaswill giant Lion Nathan, itself a subsidiary of Kirin, which is a member of the Mitsubishi group). When he told them what had happened to him, they sacked him. Apparently he had violated the company's “responsible drinking policy,” which includes a bit about prohibiting employees from drink driving, including out-of-work hours and in non-work vehicles.

Now, Nick doesn't have a leg to stand on here and frankly I don't have a lot of sympathy for him. He signed the company's “responsible drinking policy,” so he knew the potential consequences to his job. He knew he was over the limit and he knew that by driving while impaired he was risking, not only his own life but that of other road users as well. He chose to drink and he chose to drive when he was in no fit state to do so. Actions; consequences.

I am however still a little ambivalent about one element of this case. James Boag's “responsible drinking policy” worries me.

Many of the Irish and British anti drink driving TV adverts I have seen make a point of the possibility of losing your job if you get convicted of drink driving, but I had always assumed that they were talking about people who need to drive as part of their work finding themselves with a 12 month ban. In this case however, James Boag is clearly motivated by fear of adverse publicity and it is violation of their “responsible drinking policy” which he is being sacked for, not an inability to do his job. What I am curious about is what else is in this policy? How do they define “responsible drinking” and what kind of behaviour has the potential to land an employee in hot water?

If a clause about drink driving including out-of-work hours and in non-work vehicles is enforceable, what else could he have been sacked for? For example, if he hadn't chosen to drive, but instead made a bit of a nuisance of himself, singing as he walked home through a residential area late at night and this resulted in him getting lifted and charged with drunken and disorderly, would that also have violated the policy? I could certainly see James Boag, fearful as they are of bad press, taking a dim view of it. Would they have dusted off the old “responsible drinking policy” and handed out the antipodal equivalent a the P45? What if he just got drunk and photo's of him in a bit of a state ended up on facebook or something? Would they take a dim view of that too? Would he be sacked or disciplined?

How much influence over a persons private life can an employer exert and more to the point, how much should they be allowed to exert? Can a company come up with a policy on anything they like and then enforce it?

Stepping away from alcohol for a moment, what aspects of an employees life are fair game for company policy? Assuming the company has a policy in place which is sufficiently broad to encompass it, could you be sacked for getting a divorce, for instance? Couldn't have a divorcee working in our family oriented company. What about political activism? It is difficult to know where the line should be drawn and I'm damned if I know where it actually is drawn in my own country, but I do know something that is fairly well protected in most places: religion.

Employers dare not discipline an employee for religious practice. No matter how weird or distasteful you may find the faith in question it is not considered acceptable to speak out against it and a company that tries to enforce a policy which prohibits an employees religious practice on their own time, would find itself in some serious hot water.

On an unrelated note, I have had a religious awakening. Goibniu, the ancient Irish god of smiths and brewers appeared in my mash tun and asked me to start the Reformed Temple of Goibniu. It's a happy go lucky sort of religion without any unreasonable strictures (you'll notice he asked. Most gods would have commanded, but Goibniu is way too cool for that sort of carry-on). All Goibniu asks is that you respect his gifts, put quality first and always stand your round. Religious practices include brewing beer, wine, cider, mead, etc. and communing with Goibniu (drinking beer, wine, cider, mead, etc.).

Guibniu understands that his gifts are sometimes overused and that close communion with the god is a powerful and sometimes disorienting experience, which can result in a spiritual imbalance the next day (unbelievers term this a hangover), but following Goibniu is a journey of discovery with both joy and pain along the way. The true disciple of Guibniu knows us to be lumps of crude metal on the anvil of the god. Sometimes the blows of his hammer seem harsh, but all he is trying to do is to mould us into something better.

Remember it's not just not just beering, it's a sacred religious ritual.

All-Grain Challenge: My Brew.

Here is what I cooked up for the challenge. The 3Kg of base malt would be Warminster Floormalted Maris Otter, simply because I find it to be a very nice malt and I have a 25Kg sack of the stuff. This would make a very nice beer on it's own but in a 23 litre batch, I would expect to get a gravity of no more than about 1.035 if I mashed it 100% with my system. Nothing wrong with that gravity if I was making a bitter or mild but we are trying to push the envelope here. Clearly I would need some adjunct.

As the challenge removed the possibility of using a complex malt grist I decided to cook something up without malt. The notion I had was to use my oven to get some melanoidin development in unmalted grains. I got kind of creative and this is what I came up with.

500g Flaked Rye
200g Plain White Flour
200g White Sugar
400ml Water.

I ground the flaked rye into a coarse flour in a food processor and mixed the whole lot into a dough. I then formed it into balls about the size of a walnut and baked the whole lot in the oven for an hour, at 200C. The result was a tray of what I will refer to as "rye balls" from now on, but "rocks" would also describe them just as well.

After an hour in the oven they had turned into dark brown rocks. I hoped that they would break up in the mash. They didn't. They stayed exactly as they were, impervious to the hot water and enzymes. Eventually I attacked them with a nut cracker' breaking them up into chunks, which began to soften a little.

This first rest was at 62C and it lasted 30 minutes. I don't usually do a step mash, my system isn't really set up for it but in this case, I was planning on doing some decotions anyway, so I thought I should take advantage. I pulled some malt from the thickest portion of the mash and boiled it on the hob. This causes darkening and some caramelisation, as well as heating the main mash when it is returned. I did this several times, making sure to get any remaining chunks of rye ball into the decoction, so I could manually break them up before they were returned to the mash.

Several decoctions brought the temperature of the mash to 7oC where it stayed for an hour.

I sparged and began the boil as I normally would, with one small exception; the first three litres of wort out of the mash, that thick high gravity first runnings went into a pot. I then added 500g of raw cane sugar crystals and I began to boil. I boiled this wort until I had less than a litre of near toffee in the pot and then I returned it to the main boil. What I was trying to achieve her is kettle caramelisation.

The rest of the boil was fairly standard. I added 15g of Pacific Gem (17.8% Alpha Acid) at 60 minutes and some Irish Moss at 15. I chilled the wort and pitched plenty of WYeast 1968 London ESB (Fullers Yeast), from a previous batch of bitter. That particular decision would complicate matters, but that is for another post.

The OG ended up at 1.054.

The story will continue with the thrills of fermentation in another post.

Random Quote:

Here comes the hero
At temperature zero
Warming his hands on the crowd
He says "now that I've changed
I'm exactly the same"
But nobody hears cos the cheering's too loud.

Heroes
SUB-HUM-ANS

The ICB All Grain Chalenge

Over the next few posts I will be describing my All-Grain Challenge brew. The all grain challenge is an idea I came up with to see what I could produce, given a limited set of ingredients and a few other restrictions. The idea was to force myself to think outside the box, and maybe come up with something interesting.

It occurred to me that others might be interested in joining me, so I posted my idea on http://www.irishcraftbrewer.com/ and there turned out to be quite a bit of interest. Some really innovative beers have been brewed and we will be sampling each other's offerings on the 2nd of July and I am very much looking forward to it.

My post from the All-Grain Challenge sign up thread, which went up once we had the details worked out.

1st ICB All-Grain Challenge.

The concept.

Participants will brew an all grain batch within the parameters set out below and we will then taste and compare the results at one of the regular ICB tasting sessions. The tasting for this brew is provisionally the 18th of June in the Bull and Castle. But we may change this date if the participants need more time (The date may also change for other reasons). Edit: the date is now the 2nd of July.

The Challenge.

The challenge is to do a 23 litre all grain brew using 3Kg of a single base malt, no speciality malt and only one hop addition.

The Nitty Gritty.

• 
  You may use whatever base malt you like, as long as it is a single base malt and you only use 3Kg.
• 
  If you want to make a batch size other than 23 litres you must scale the amount of base malt accordingly.
• 
  You may not use any other malt.
• 
  You may use whatever adjuncts, sugars or other non malt fermentables you like.
• 
  You may use whatever hops you like, at whatever time you like, but only in one addition.
• 
  You may use whatever fruit, herbs, spices, peel or other flavourings you like, as long as they are not hop derived.
• 
  You may use whatever yeast(s) or other microbes you like.
• 
  You may use whatever mashing, boiling, or other brewing technique you like.

We ended up with 13 people signed up to the challenge, brewing everything from Wit to Nettle beer.

My offering involves maris otter, flaked rye, white flour, white sugar, decoction mashing, kettle caramelisation, wyeast 1968 London ESB, bits of oak from a whiskey barrel, a fermentation which did not go as planned, an infection, the temptation to throw the whole lot down the drain, and my eventual acceptance that while my creation did not turn out as I expected, perhaps it has a certain twisted appeal.

More on this coming soon.

Random Quotation:

"No man ever did me so much good, or enemy so much harm, but I repaid him with interest."

Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix (138BC - 78BC). General, Consul and Dictator of Rome.