Looking forward to hosting Ales By Mail's live twitter tasting featuring Okell's ales

On Wednesday evening at 8pm I'll be hosting the next live twitter tasting for Ales By Mail. They got in touch a couple of weeks ago and asked if I was familar with Okell's and would I like to run the session.I am quite familiar with Okell's, the Isle of Man's largest brewery as I've been to the IOM a number of times, and make a point of hunting out some cask pints of Olaf or MPA (two fantastically tasty sub-4% ales). My initial pick of Okell's bottled range was Aile & 1907 but supply issues of 1907 meant that we've gone with my backup plan of their IPA.

Nice clean branded bottles and a lovely pint glass!

Okell's Brewery

• IPA - 4.5% "extremely light-coloured beer with a surprising full-bodied taste. The sweetness is offset by a very strong hopping rate. That gives the finished beer an overall roundness with very spicy, lemony notes and a fine dry finish to counteract the initial sweetness"
• Aile - 4.7% smoked porter, "Aile is the Manx Celtic word for Fire and this crafted Okell's beer has delicate, smokey aromas derived from the careful addition of peated malt. This malt is made from selected barley that uses burning peat during the malting process"

If you've taken advantage of the free bottle codes then I'm looking forward to you joining me at 8pm on Wednesday night as we walk through the two beers, I plan to start with the lighter IPA and then move into the slightly stronger in alcohol but much stronger in taste Aile.

If you've got them in the fridge (I have), make sure to take them both out around 15 minutes before we start, you want the IPA to be coldish and refreshing but not so cold that the subtle balanced of flavours is lost, make sure the Aile comes out at the same time as you want that to be a bit warmer to really let those peated smokey aromas open up.

See you on Twitter at 8pm Wednesday, please use the hashtag #beerybits so that we can all follow along and see what everyone is posting. Oh and make sure you are following @AlesByMail as not only will they be joining in but they might be running some competitions as well! Also you might like to follow @OkellsAles which is the account for Dr. Mike Cowbourne, head brewer at Okells who will be joining us online for the evening.

Thanks to Chrissie Saunders from Ales By Mail for asking if I would like to host the tasting session and sending through the bottles and glassware.

A baron's trip to the National Winter Ales Festival

I really enjoyed visiting the National Winter Ales Festival last year but I wasn't able to go on trade day (the Wednesday) and so went at the weekend. By the time I got there most of the stuff I wanted to try was gone but it was still an excellent festival.

This year I was invited by Thwaites to come for the trade afternoon and so jumped at the chance for a ticket! The afternoon was booked off work, the train caught from Burscough Bridge on the direct train to Manchester Piccadilly and then a brisk walk planted me in The Marble Arch to meet a few other festival goers and to get a quick pint (of Pint) in before we caught the bus up to the venue.

Doors opened promptly at 2:30 and through good queue management a glass was in hand pretty quickly so off to choose my first beer before meeting Ian Bearpark, Brewery & Distribution Director for Thwaites at 3pm. I headed straight to RedWillow's section and chose a half of Heartless, a lovely smooth stout with a good chocolate edge to it.



I then wandered around the festival looking for the Thwaites stand but couldn't find it, finally bumped into Ian at the same bar from which I got the RedWillow, they didn't have a stand which came as a surprise to both of us. Ian then proceeded to walk me through their cask offerings at the festival:

Big Ben - 4.5% brown ale (used to be called Shuttle) a solid brown ale but brewed to be less sweet than Newcastle Brown Ale. It was a very sessionable beer, dark amber in colour which was quite light in it's taste and body but had some nice caramel and fruity notes to it.

13 Guns - 5.5% American IPA, to quote Ian he "chucked it all in" (with regards to the generous use of American hops). This beer was quite something and I can see why it got so much talk at GBBF. Ian mentioned that he is a massive fan of Stone beers and you can kind of see that when you try 13 Guns - it was a rich copper colour with a big citrus hoppy resinous quality to it. It also had that chewy aspect that you sometimes get with big malty but hoppy ales and had a wonderful sticky resinous finish. I don't often get the chance to drink IPAs on cask (it's normally bottles at home) so it was great to try such a beast of a beer.

Fallen Nun - This was the star of the show, although it didn't win any awards it was the one beer that everyone I met on the day was talking about - it's simply stunning. 7.4% black IPA, it was spicy on the nose with a big burst of fresh hops and a touch of acetone, the taste was thick & oily with a big roasted hoppy resinous bittersweet taste and a big dry resinous burnt finish. A truly stunning complex beer, I so hope that this becomes part of their bottled line-up as I think with a big of forced carbonation and a touch more chilling this would be a truly world-class bottled black IPA (think it would give Thornbridge Raven a run for it's money...)

Thwaites have gone down the route of a lot of large breweries at the moment, they have installed a mini-brewery inside the brewery to be able to experiment with some of these more adventurous ales, they have a 20 barrel brewery to 'play on' compared to their normal 360 barrel one.

It's really encouraging to see a national brewery like Thwaites producing stuff like 13 Guns and Fallen Nun, they are excellent beers that I would buy again and again, it just shows that the big boys can do 'craft' as long as they are allowed to do so.

After finishing up with Ian I managed to spend a short while with Mike from Okells Brewery who showed me their new branding on the pumpclips and talked me through two of their new beers, Olaf - a nice low ABV roasty stout and MPA (Manx Pale Ale) which was a lovely citrusy ale.

Then I generally milled about meeting folk (Chris Dixon, Jay Krause & a lovely lady from Port Street Beer House to name but a few) and supping quality beers until my internal beer-spidy sense told me it was time to go home!


A massive thank you to Ian from Thwaites for providing the trade session ticket and allowing me to sample their excellent cask ales :)

Baron on Tour: Okells Brewery

In early March I was fortunate to visit the Isle of Man with work and to be able to coordinate a trip round the island's largest brewery - Okell's Brewery just outside Douglas.

Mike Cowbourne who is the head brewer of Okells is quite a prolific tweeter and we've struck up conversation via Twitter on a number of occasions. This time he offered to show me and a number of colleagues around the brewery.

Okells is a twenty minute walk from Douglas and is round the back of a large industrial unit owned by parent company Heron & Brearley. Mike showed us in and took us straight up to the control floor. Quite a strange looking room with short stubby vessels until you realised that they are just the tops of them, they descend straight down into the floor below!

Mike started the tour by giving us quite a bit of background on who was Dr. Okells and how he started the brewery, the Okells website has an excellent summary of the historyof Okells Brewery, much better than my scrawled notes. Mike has been brewing since university, where he did a micro biology degree and then an MSc in brewing.

Okells currently brew around 80,000 barrels a year, with a lot being exported to the UK via deals with Greene King, Coors, WTBS and other wholesale roots. There are a few Okells owned pubs in the UK, Thomas Rigbys, Fly in the Loaf in Liverpool and Beer & Billet in Chester and some Market Town Taverns.

In 1994 Okells went highly computerised which provides consitency as well as giving him plenty of different  options when it comes to brewing. He has a Mash Conversion Vessel (aka lauter tun) which allow him to temperature program the mash, extracting different types of sugar at the different temperatures to give different fermentables. The lauter tun can filter and sparge, but instead of the regular sparge arm there are distributed sprayheads instead which act like a wonderful power shower.

The kettle or 'copper' has a vapour condenser on the top, which captures the steam generated in the brewing process and in turn is fed back into heating the hot water for the next brew.

They have a unique wort heater, they have a wide gap plate heater as their heat exchanger, which requires minimal downtime compared to the normal heat exchanger.




Hops were talked about next, they add hops at three stages of the brew, half way through the boil (for bitterness) and then five minutes before the end of the boil (or flame-out) which are mainly for aroma. The wort is then pumped into the whirlpool vessel where more hops are added before then being filtered out via centrifugal force as the wort leaves the whirlpool. Mike is experimenting with galaxy hops at the moment and has been playing with the hop aspects of the Okells common range to see if he can impart more aroma.

They currently brew a Saison special with regular Okells house yeast but Mike is thinking of playing with some Belgium yeast for the Saison and let if ferment for around five days but has concerns about yeast cross-contamination

We then moved to the Okells lab where he conducts various profile tests, and hot & cold break measurments to measure protiens. He also has gas chromatography machines for flavour profile.

Then it was time to move to the bar and sample some of these beers that Mike had been making us thirsty for!

First up with their replacement for their mild. Mild sales are down "dying with the guys that drink it" as Mike so honestly put it. It's trial name was "Olaf the Black" and it was a 3.9% dark ale with a lovely roasty and stout-like flavour and a burnt bitter finish. A lot more bitterness than a mild and would make a great session stout.

Olde Skipper is a new seasonal ale, a 4.5% fleshy fruity ale brewed with Galaxy and Cascade hops for plenty of fruity citrus aroma and flavours. Really smooth and creamy thanks to the Isle of Man respecting the use of the sparkler...

Okells Red was next, a 4.7% sweet candied sugary fruit tasting ale with a lovely dark amber/reddish tint. A really nice ale and one for the person who doesn't like bitter.

Mike then disappeared and came back with a couple of jugs full of  beer straight from the conditioning tanks - you can't get fresher than that!

Spring Ram is another new seasonal ale, a 4.5% beer brewed with Citra hops, it had a sulphour-like and big stinky hops smell and a big bitter finish compared to the taste that was a bit more mellow. We also got to try Dr. Okells IPA which was a 4.5% fresh clean citrus ale brewed with Bobek (Syrian Goldings) and Cascade - it was a creamier version (due to being cask ale) of their bottled version which we gave a [baron rating 4/5].

We then had a short chat about beer in general, he can't leave the brewery much but tries to get to GBBF if he can. He likes to keep an eye on what Thornbridge, Kernel and BrewDog are up to although he follows loads of people on twitter so gets ideas and inspirations from all over the place.

We all really enjoyed looking around Okells Brewery and I'd like to say a massive "thank you" to Mike for giving over his evening to show me around and to be so generous with the samples of ales.

You can follow Mike on Twitter or see what Okells are up to via Facebook or their blog.

Mike Cowbourne & The Ormskirk Baron

Okells Aile

Okells Aile [baron rating 4/5] - 4.7% black porter,smoky TCP/bandages smell,smooth oily peaty liquorice taste,oily peaty liquorice finish Baron Orm

Listen to what Chris and the Baron have to say about it.

Download flash to hear the audio review

Subscribe in iTunes

Note: Not bottle conditioned

Thank you to Mike from Okells Brewery for sending this through for a 'baron rating'!

Okells Mac Lir

Okells Mac Lir [baron rating 4/5] - 4.4% gold unclouded ale,mild citrus smell,sweet floral citrus taste,sugary juicy bitter finish Baron Orm

Listen to what Chris and the Baron have to say about it.

Download flash to hear the audio review

Subscribe in iTunes

Note: Not bottle conditioned

Thank you to Mike from Okells Brewery for sending this through for a 'baron rating'!

Okells 1907

Okells 1907 [baron rating 5/5] - 6.1% gold ale,tropical smell,full bodied sweet citrus taste,dry citrus medical finish Baron Orm

Listen to what Chris and the Baron have to say about it.

Download flash to hear the audio review

Subscribe in iTunes

Note: Not bottle conditioned

Thank you to Mike from Okells Brewery for sending this through for a 'baron rating'!

Okells Doctor Okell's IPA

Okells Doctor Okell's IPA [baron rating 4/5] - 4.5% copper ale,sweet citrus smell,caramel spicy citrus taste,slightly sweet buttery finish Baron Orm

Listen to what Chris and the Baron have to say about it.

Download flash to hear the audio review

Subscribe in iTunes

Note: Not bottle conditioned

Thank you to Mike from Okells Brewery for sending this through for a 'baron rating'!

Looking forward to 'baron rating' Okells ales very soon!

The Isle of Man-based Okells Brewery doesn't get much talk on twitter, probably due to the fact that their beers are so hard to get hold of "off island" so when they offered to send me a mixed case I jumped at the chance. Okells bitter is a beer that I've enjoyed on many a business trip to the isle of man so a chance to try their bottled range is a must:

Okells Brewery

• 1907 - 6.1% light & crisp,with a refreshing hint of lemon & dry, bitter finish
• Aile - 4.7% smoked Celtic porter
• Doctor Okell's IPA - 4.5% India Pale Ale
• Mac Lir - 4.4% wheat beer, light golden colour, refreshing burst of sweetness, complex dry finish

Look out for 'baron ratings' for these Okells Brewery beers soon, and a big thank you to Mike from Okells Brewery for sending these through to me!