Crafty Folks: Brewing With Brendan

January 31, 2012, by Crafty Pint

Crafty Folks: Brewing With Brendan

Once a year, Fremantle’s iconic Sail & Anchor pub holds a competition in which it challenges home brewers to try and replicate as best they can one of the beers formerly brewed at the venue. This year, the beer in question was the Seven Seas Ale, a traditional British pub ale. The prize was to spend at day at Feral in the Swan Valley brewing the beer alongside head brewer Brenda Varis, the man behind modern day Aussie classics such as the Hop Hog.

This year’s winning brewer was Tim Fenner (left above), who The Crafty Pint had the pleasure to meet while in Perth recently. He offered to tell us all about the experience, which he does below. And if you happen to be passing through Freo anytime soon, we believe his beer should be pouring through their taps right about now. Over to you, Tim…

Some background

Seven Seas Pale Ale is a quintessential British pub ale; complex and approachably rich in its malt character, restrained, herbaceous and earthy in the hops. The English Pale or Ordinary Bitter style does not enjoy the contemporary popularity of its new age American counterpart, but nevertheless it is a style that is steeped in history and a style that can be enjoyed by just about anyone.

How did this opportunity arise?

The Sail & Anchor hosted its Seven Seas competition in late 2011 to find a new recipe for their house pale ale. The idea was for home brewers to clone the English-style pale as best they could, with the winner given the opportunity to brew a commercial scale batch of their recipe to be sold on tap at the pub. I only found out about the competition very late, and sort of threw my recipe together very haphazardly, using the base ingredients that were listed on the Sail's website, but not having any idea of the specs of this particular beer. As it turned out, my last minute recipe was good enough for the judges, as a couple of weeks after the close of entries I received a call from the manager at the Sail, informing me that I'd won the competition. It was a bit of a shock to be honest.

What was it like brewing a full scale batch of your homebrew recipe?

I didn't know what to expect from the brew day. I was a little nervous about whether my recipe would easily transpose to commercial scale equipment, and of course I was concerned that something could go wrong, what with we me knowing next to nothing about the commercial brewing process. Thankfully Brendan Varis is a very experienced brewer, with a friendly, open-minded and cooperative approach to making beer.

The whole process was a huge learning experience for me; understanding how commercial equipment is used, and the processes involved in running a larger brewery, the most important of which being cleanliness and sterilisation. At the same time, I was a little surprised at the number of similarities involved, and how Feral's setup is in many ways just a massively up-scaled home brew rig. I was relieved to find that all the basic parts of the brewery operated much the same as the cheap plastic gear that I use in my kitchen at home, just with less of a margin for error.

Any mishaps along the way?

We started early, at 6am. All seemed to be going well until we began to sparge the mash [which effectively means “rinsing the malt after it’s been drained of its goodness”, if “sparge” leaves you scratching your head]. What started as a slow sparge quickly turned into one of the worst "stuck mashes" Brendan said he had seen in a long time. A "stuck mash" is when the grain grist is milled too fine to allow the natural filtration process from the mash tun into the kettle, and the grain forms solid impermeable clumps as the wort tries to flow through it. In other words, with the exception of a bacterial infection, a stuck mash is just about the worst thing that can possibly happen in the process of brewing a beer.

Thankfully, Brendan's years of industry experience and intimate knowledge of the workings of his Baskerville brewery got us through the mash process and into the kettle, a bit behind schedule and slightly below the targeted gravity level, but with an otherwise untainted batch of beer. From there on it was smooth sailing; we breezed through the hopping schedule and chilled the wort back into the fermentation tank. It all turned out ok, and we were finished just in time for a great chef-cooked lunch and a beer or two in the brewery restaurant.

Did you learn anything?

sail-and-anchor-2
The Sail & Anchor in Freo

Absolutely. It's fantastic that the Sail & Anchor have shown such strong support for local home brewers and the craft beer industry in general. I'm very grateful to Brendan as well, for being so generous with his time and knowledge at what is a very busy period for Feral. For me, I have gained a great deal of insight into the workings of a larger scale brewery, and how it relates back to my home setup. I feel very fortunate to have had the opportunity, and I can't wait to see how the beer tastes.

Anything else we need to know about the beer?

The Seven Seas Pale Ale will be on tap at the Sail & Anchor from early February. Half of the batch is to be put into normal pressurised kegs, and the other half will be cask-conditioned so that it can be run through hand pump, in the true English tradition.


Cheers, Tim. And good luck with your brewing in the future. The WA craft beer scene seemed alive and well when we were there – perhaps you’ll be joining the ranks of commercial brewers before too long!

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