Wharfedale Brewery
I think I should make it my mission in life to visit hallowed
ground at least once a year, my pilgrimage was to the Wharfdale
Brewery, tucked away between Rylstone and Hetton. I spoke
to Adam Witek, who is Head Brewer there, and he kindly talked
me through the brewing process in great detail...
Brewing Process
We take in malt, which is essentially barley that's
been grown...well you remember those school experiments
where you had a kidney bean and you dropped it on blotting
paper and it started to shoot? Well that's what you
do to make malt. They take barley from the field, it's
dried, then they grow it very slightly, so you get a
very short shoot and a couple of rootlets. Just a couple
of millimetres and when that happens they then dry it
off and kiln it. In other words they heat it in an oven.
That produces the darker colours and the different types
which you can get.
The reason why they malt it, is that barley's very hard,
it's like small stones, so when you malt it, it then
becomes what's called the endosperm where the starch
reserves are for the plant to grow, they actually become
sugars. And that's what's important to us, sugar - remember
that as we'll come back to that later.
So we get malt in, malted barley, and it's been ground,
it's been crushed for us - we haven't got a milll here
- and it arrives here in bags. We have pale ale malt,
which is our basic malt that we use, then we have a
variety of other type of malts and materials to add
to that to make our recipe. There's amber malt in there,
there's crystal malt, (crystal malt tastes of toffee,
caramel type of taste) chocolate malt, (actually does
taste of chocolate) amber malt (tastes of coffee, essentially,
but with a dry nose.) So by having a different amount
of each type, you can alter the flavour you get at the
end of your beermaking process. So that's the malt side.
We have hops also, crushed flowerheads from the hop
plant, but hops don't have flowers they have what's
called green cones. Inflorescence bracta it's actually
called, and if you imagine this is like a cone, very
much like a pine cone but it's been compressed down,
dried and pressed. The important part to us is not all
the green material, but right in the centre, this yellowy
material. Have a sniff of that...This is actually, Northdown
hops, and we use Goldings for later on when we want
to get the flavour. Now, when you rub hops, now have
a smell... it's intense isn't it? It's that intense
oil and resin that we want to get out of it. So this
green material is largely pointless to us. This yellow
stuff called the lupin gland, that's what we need to
extract.
The other very important raw material we have is water.
It comes from a deep bore hole just to the side of the
brewery here. It's approximately 54 metres deep, the
water table is between 21 and 26 metres down. It's very
deep. It goes right beyond the shale into the bedrock
here, and it's obviously been there for thousands, perhaps
millions of years. It's naturally filtered through the
limestone. We could not have better water. It's untreated,
the only other thing we do, it's not really a filter,
we take the water up as it is, but we have what's called
a particle bug just in case anything does come up with
the water. So thats it.
Lets go into the brewing process itself. This is the
first part of the brewing process. In here, what looks
like a hot tub, the copper clad vessel called the mash
tun, very much like mashing tea, we're going to be adding
the crushed malt to water. We empty the bags of crushed
malt into this hopper, then there's a tube fitted with
a pipe, like so, and hot water comes from a tank which
is the bore-hole water, heated up. We let the malt fall
down the chute, and within the pipe is a smaller pipe
which squirts and sprays the hot water onto the malt
as it falls down, so that as it enters the mash tun
its a kind of porridge consistency. The water has to
be warm for the enzymes in the malt to actually break
down the sugars and starches into more sugars.
By malting the barley we've only gone so far down the
process. We want to extract as much sugar as possible
later on for the yeast to make it into alcohol. So we've
mashed it all in we've mixed the barley and the water
together, we've allowed it to stand for between an hour
and an hour and a half. Then we drain it off and pump
it into the vessel over in the corner, called the copper.
Here we collect all the extracted sugary solution from
the mash tun and, using these heating elements inside,
we boil it for about 90 minutes. At three different
stages we add hops, charges of hops, to add the bitterness,
and the hop aroma to our beers.
more>>>
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| continued...Hops are
an interesting plant variety, very closely related
to cannabis. It's part of the same family, so you
have resins, and the resins give you the bitterness,
and the hop oil gives you the aroma. But hops aren't
addictive. Hops were originally used as a preservative.
They allowed brewers to brew beer in the autumn and
the spring, .... and it would help the beer keep over
that summer period. Hops have a natural antibiotic
action to them too.
After boiling, we then pass it through a cooler, and
you can see there's a sequence of plates all pressed
together there, if you can imagine that hot liquid
comes down one side of the plate and cold water from
the bore hole will go up another side, so every alternate
plate has got hot water in it, and every other has
got cold water. What we're doing is, as cold water's
coming up from the borehole, its cooling down the
hot liquid from there to go into the fermenter. But
we're heating up the cold water for the next days
brew, too.
Providing we're brewing on a routine basis, we actually
generate our own hot water for the next days brews.
From there, the liquid goes into one of our fermenters.
The reason why we have to cool it down first is...obviously
yeast is a living organism, it won't tolerate high
temperatures. So we cool the sugary solution down
to 20 degress C, then we allow a full 7 days fermentation,
where the yeast is added to the sweetwort, and we
allow it to ferment. The yeast first grows, it multiplies,
then it starts to convert the sugars into alcohol.
We do it nice and slowly, over 7 days, 3 to5 for the
main fermentation, then another 2 or 3 to get it cool
and allow the yeast to settle out.
Once it's finished fermenting, we then transfer it
to one of our conditioning tanks outside, where it
stays for 1 or 2 days, again, for the flavours to
modify, before we rack it or .... clean cask. We have
a chemical cask washer that sprays detergent and water
into the cask to ensure that everything is spotlessly
clean.
It is a small unit; people are sometimes surprised
that we can send out so much beer with so little space
here. You have to remember it's a traditional craft
industry. People used to do this in their kitchens,
or whatever. Calrlsberg ? ...he started off using
his mother's washing bin. So you're essentially doing
this the way people have for hundreds of years !
I've tried to keep it really simple, keep all the
traditional values, and don't use anything that I
don't need to use. Thats about it really.
"And its obviously working, you're winning
awards and selling plenty beer...?"
We're doing very well indeed, thank you.
"How long's the whole process from start
to finish?"
Brewing takes approx 10 hours, fermentation 6 or 7
days, conditioning in the cask takes 1 to 2 days,
so within 7 to 8 days from start of brewing to getting
the beer out. Hopefully the landlord will give it
between 3 and 5 days in the cellar to condition it
in the cask, hence the name 'cask conditioned' beer.
You put what's called a porous plug, like a piece
of wood, into the top of the cask, and that allows
the yeast to work again within the cask.
To produce further flavour changes you add exta ingredients
at the end. Then it's fine to serve. Once we've separated
the grains out from the mash tun, the grains remaining
that we simply cant do anything else with, we bag
them up and they go to local farmers.
"You're quite eco friendly and green?"
Yes, we are. The detergent and spillages that we have
go down the drain, they go into two septic tanks which
are like interceptor and digestor tanks for want of
a better word, so it breaks down some of the detergents
and sugars, then it goes into a reed bed. So we then
use the grown reeds to purify the effluent before
it goes into the watercourse. The key term nowadays
is to have minimal environmental impact, and we do
look at that. The water and the energy that we use,
how much material we use. Trying to act sensibly and
hopefully with my knowledge of bigger breweries, bring
it into a small scale and just make sure that we operate
economicaly and in an eco-friendly manner.
THE WHARFEDALE BREWERY
Coonlands Laithe
Rylstone Nr SKIPTON
North Yorkshire BD23 6LY
Tel 01756 730 555
website: http://www.follyale.com/index.html
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