The Ormskirk Baron: thwaites

Showing posts with label thwaites. Show all posts

Thwaites Crafty Dan

Not bottle conditioned

Thwaites Crafty Dan [baron rating 4/5] - 6% copper ale,spicy zingy tropical smell,peppery spicy lime taste,lingering caramel bitter finish

Thwaites Big Ben

Not bottle conditioned

Thwaites Big Ben [baron rating 4/5] - 5.8% ruby ale,plum demerara sugar smell,balanced dandelion & burdock taste,short stewed fruit finish

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

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Thank you to @Daniel_Thwaites from Thwaites Brewery for sending this through for a baron rating!

Thwaites Triple C

Not bottle conditioned

Thwaites Triple C [baron rating 5/5] - 5.3% gold ale,fresh citrus mild resin smell,zingy citrus caramel bitter taste,dry leafy bitter finish

Listen to what Chris, Baron, Stephen & Leigh have to say about it

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Thank you to @Daniel_Thwaites from Thwaites Brewery for sending this through for a baron rating!

Looking forward to baron rating Thwaites Crafty Dan Micro Brewery ales

Thwaites have been producing some cracking ales over the past year or so, with them showing up at various beer festivals around the country.13 Guns was talk of 2012's Great British Beer Festival and Fallen Nun was very well received at this year's National Winter Ales Festival.

A gift pack from Thwaites arrived today (in a huge box, not sure the vast excess of packaging was really needed Thwaites!) branded up with the Crafty Dan Micro Brewery labelling. This is their separate 'micro brewery' allowing them to have more chance to experiment compared to when they are brewing on their normal large-scale kit.

The first three beers to come out under this new brand are detailed below, all three have clean smart distinctive branding with plenty of detail of the bottle about the type of beer the drinker will find inside and on the back of the gift box are some details of the types of food that they might pair well with:

Thwaites (Crafty Dan Micro) Brewery

13 Guns - 5.5% American IPA, Intensely hopy, rich mouth feel, malty flavours with soft tropical fruit aroma and taste. Intense piney and tropical flavours blend well with mixed spicy dishes, like curries
Big Ben - 5.8% brown ale, strong hop aroma one a sweet brown ale with a long bitter-sweet finish. Full and bittersweet flavours are a great match for grilled red meats
Triple C - 5.3% golden ale, full, smooth and balanced beer with an intense citrus hop aroma. Citrus and slightly bitter flavours balance the smoothness of a creamy cheese

Look out for 'baron ratings' of these beers soon, and a big thank you to @Daniel_Thwaites from Thwaites Brewery for sending these through to me!

Thwaites Fallen Nun

Not bottle conditioned

Thwaites Fallen Nun [baron rating 5/5] - 7.4% black ale,vineous resinous citrus smell,velvety orange dark choc taste,resinous choc finish

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

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Thank you to Ian Bearpark from Thwaites Brewery for sending this through for a baron rating!

Thwaites 13 Guns

Not bottle conditioned

Thwaites 13 Guns [baron rating 4/5] - 5.5% amber ale,sweet candied tropical smell,sweet then big resinous bitter taste,candied fruit finish

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

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Thank you to Ian Bearpark from Thwaites Brewery for sending this through for a baron rating!

Looking forward to baron rating Thwaites 13 Guns & Fallen Nun

Thwaites Brewery are one of the local ones to me, and we occasionally see their beers in Ormskirk. Ian (production manager) from Thwaites has been one of my twitter buddies for a while and he arranged for me to meet him at the Manchester Winter Ales Festival back in January. Cask Fallen Nun was the talk of the festival and so I'm chuffed to bits that he's sent through not only a bottle of that to try but also a bottle of his excellent Stone-inspired IPA:

So amazed to have received these sample bottles!

Thwaites Brewery

13 Guns - 5.5% American IPA, hops, hops, more hops... totally awesome! (Absolutely marvellous to you & I)
Fallen Nun -7.4% black IPA, dark, deep, rich and complex with a fighting burst of intense fruity hop character

Look out for 'baron ratings' of these beers soon, and a big thank you to Ian Bearpark from Thwaites Brewery for sending these through to me!

Thwaites Triple C

Not bottle conditioned

Thwaites Triple C [baron rating 4/5] - 4.4% gold ale,spicy orange smell,fresh honey tangerine spicy taste,fruity spicy finish

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 :)

Thwaites Tavern Porter

Thwaites Tavern Porter [baron rating 4/5] - 4.7% black ale,mild coffee dark choc smell,smooth roasted mildly sweet taste,smooth choc finish Baron Orm

Note: Bottled conditioned with perfect carbonation

Thwaites Indus Pale Ale

Thwaites Indus Pale Ale [baron rating 5/5] - 4.6% copper ale, spicy caramel smell,spicy marmalade citrus taste,long spicy finish Baron Orm

Note: Not bottle conditioned

Thwaites Old Dan

Thwaites Old Dan [baron rating 5/5] - 7.8% dark amber ale,boozy syrupy smell,rich liquidised fruitcake taste,lingering sweet fruity finish Baron Orm

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

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I love the label on this 'work in progress' beer, so much detail about the brewing of the beer as well as looking very cool:

Thank you to @Daniel_Thwaites from Thwaites for sending this through for a 'baron rating'!

Baron on Tour: Bushy's

Back in October I was lucky enough to meet Martin the owner of Bushy's Brewery from the Isle of Man, at the Great Northern Beer Festival. We chatted about all sorts of things (beer does that to me!) and he ended up offering to run a brewery tour for me and a few pals when I'm over on the Isle of Man next.

In early December I was travelling to the Isle of Man on business so I got in touch with Martin, and true to his word a brewery tour was arranged one evening for myself and five colleagues. Martin opened up especially and was there to greet us in the rain as we arrived on a rather wet and cold December evening.

He quickly ushered us into the small bar area where he cracked open some bottles of Bushy's Bitter (a great amber bitter with that classic nutty bitter taste) and then took us on a tour of the brewery. We started off in the grain room where Martin said they they only use three types of Maris Otter malt, pale, crystal & chocolate. All their malt comes from Warminster Maltings in Wiltshire. We got to taste a bit of each type of crushed malt and then he moved onto the hops.

The have to use hop pellets at Bushy's due to the equipment they have and he listed most of the hops that they use: Cascade, Challenger, First Gold, Fuggles & Styrian Goldings. They 'burtonise' their water to give it that familiar mineral content but I wonder what their beers would taste like with Manx water? Maybe a mix of the two could be used depending on the beer type?

We then moved into the brewing room where Martin explained that he started brewing in 1986 on basically a large home brew kit in the basement of the pub that he was running. They now run a 10 barrel plant getting through 8 25kg bags of malted barley a day - most of it brewed to make cask Bushy's Bitter, a 3.8% quaffer of an ale.

In 1990 they moved to their current location and their yeast was originally from Thwaites but has now mutated (in a good way) that much that it's now unique to Bushy's. Some of their strain of yeast is now stored in a yeast bank - think sperm bank for brewers. He ran through the brewing process saying how they normally do 3-4 brews a week but in preparation for the TT Race, they brew 7 or more times a week - well over a quarter of their ale consumption is done during those two racing weeks!

They bought their brewing equipment from the liquidating Phoenix Brewing in Brighton (the brewery is now a student hall of residence) and got it for a tenth of the price. It's an all-in-one brew kit, like a tower brewery just all in old big piece of stainless steel. It's not a piece of kit I've seen before. Martin mentioned that very few were made and he now knows why! (their head brewer Curly is not fond of it as it's quite restrictive in what it can do).

The beer legend Michael Jackson opened the new brewery and Martin said it was very tough trying to get anywhere in the brewing business for the first five years but things picked up each year and now they are doing just fine!

Martin then moved us through to the conditioning room where row upon row of little tanks sat there doing their job. Martin poured out some samples of Bushy's Bitter direct from the tank whilst talking about cooling the beer down to make the yeast drop down into the conical part at the bottom of the fermenting vessel. They leave the beer around 3-4 days in the tank before cooling it to kill fermentation and drop some of the yeast.

(Watch Martin pouring Bushy's Bitter & talking about yeast)

After some talk about putting beer into casks, how that tap a cask and talk of finings were we led back into the bar area for more bottles (Martin had been topping us up all the way round the tour - what a gentleman!).

He talked about the famous Bushy's Ale van which has spent some time at Beaulieu as well as where the name Bushy's came from.

See the stuffed fox in the photo? That's "Bushy" and it he was a mascot of Mount Murray Brewery when it was suggested that the brewery change name and be called Bushy's instead.

I was also able to snap martin reading a section from Enid Blyton's Bushy the Fox - complete coincidence but fantastic none the less.

I asked what their strongest beer was and Martin said that their Christmas beer 'Humbug' was 5% and 'Lovely Jubbly' was 5.2% (we got to try Humbug in the pub near the brewery and it was an excellent Xmas ale, spicy but easy to drink - I had two!). They used to brew their own lager and have all the pressurised kit to do it but haven't for a while now.

Bushy's Bitter is the only beer that they bottle and they get Thwaites in Blackburn to contract bottle it for them. It's stronger than the cask Bushy's (3.8%) being 4.5% in bottled form. It's a very nice bottled bitter (probably would score a [baron rating 4/5]) but you can't buy it here as it's all shipped back to the Isle of Man.

Martin then pulled out something rather special, some small 330ml coke bottles with some experimental brews that he had been playing with. This one was an Orval-inspired ale which was unlabelled, unfined and sat around 4.5%. It had a gentle floral aroma and good interesting taste. Martin mentioned that he was interested in doing some hand-bottling for these small batch brews as it wasn't worth sending it 'over the water' to get it professionally bottled at Thwaites.

That pretty much concluded the personal tour, and myself and all my colleagues would like to thank Martin for taking the time out of his evening to open up, show us round, feed us drinks and entertain us for a good couple of hours - Martin, you are a star!

Looking forward to 'baron rating' Thwaites Old Dan ale very soon!

Thwaites got in touch recently asking if I would like to try their 'work in progress' ale called 'Old Dan'. It's a 7.8% bottled conditioned chestnut rich ale brewed as a modern take on the Old Dan recipe. The label design is excellent made to look like aged paper with typewriter font as well as all sorts of brewing info.

It's very refreshing to see a reasonably large brewer like Thwaites trying (and sharing) their new ideas, another good example of this is their new Signature Range of seasonal beers for 2011. Great looking pumpclips, some pretty bold ABVs and some pretty interesting recipes.

Look out for a 'baron rating' for this Thwaites beer soon, and a big thank you to @Daniel_Thwaites for sending it through to me!

Waitrose October ale & beer offers - part 2 (13th October - 3rd November 2010)

Waitrose have an amazing second batch of ale offers for October, their PR staff informed me ahead of time what this month's offers are:

Beer Showcase - Buy 2 for £3 on the following beers: