Cask Ale Week Events

It's Cask Ale Week this week and our pubs are fully embracing it with some lovely Beer & Food events. The Barley Mow in the Dings is making a Bristol Stout and Beef Stew on Thursday, you can get some stew and a pint for £6. All week we have an offer on Bristol Stout, our cask stout that looks like a keg stout but tastes so much better. Available in the Barley Mow, the Grain Barge, the Tobacco Factory & the Windmill, buy 3 Bristol Stouts and get your 4th one free!

The Grain Barge has also been making beery food with some delicious Stout & Chocolate Brownies. We have gone beer & chocolate mad, as we also have a Chocolate & Beer Tasting on Thursday night at 8pm. Spaces are filling fast for this, so give them a ring on 0117 929 9347 to book a seat.

Chocolate & Beer Tasting

On Thursday Evening we will be joining forces with Lisa from The Chocolate Tart for a fabulous fun-filled feast of fantastic Chocolate paired with beautiful beer brewed by us in Bristol & in Belgium. Lisa has picked some of the finest chocolate in the world to work wonders with the beers.

The event is on the Grain Barge at 8pm on Thursday 1st April, which is the designated FemALE Day, part of Cask Ale Week when we encourage people to try the nations favourite alcoholic beverage. This time last year only 16% of women had tried Cask Ale, but a year later nearly 30% have given it a go, with over 40% continuing to drink it regularly.

We are only charging £8 and you have the opportunity to try 6 different chocolates with 6 different beers, including 2 beers that are making their public debut!

Chocolate and beer may appear an odd combination to many people but they share a number of attributes. They both need to balance bitterness and sweetness, bitterness from hops in beer and cocoa beans in chocolate, sweetness from sugar in chocolate and malted barley in beer. The big warming alcohol feel in a mouthful of beer is matched as chocolate melts in the mouth, the carbonation in beer will accentuate the flavours and clean the palate ready for the next mouthful of chocolate, the tastes and textures compliment each other.

Beer, Cheese & Bread Matching

This weekend we are going to the Love Food Festival at The Brunel Passenger Shed at Temple Meads Station to do a tasting with two of our favourite food people Mark's Bread & Trethowan's Dairy. Last night we had the arduous task of deciding on our pairings for the event and we were very pleased with the results. One pairing in particular took me by surprise and I'm looking forward to sharing it with everyone at the weekend.

4 delicious cheeses, 4 unusual breads & 4 great beers working in heavenly harmony, I'm salivating already.

The tastings are on Saturday & Sunday afternoons at 3pm. I'm not going to reveal the pairings until after the weekend, although some more details may appear on Twitter. See you there!

Homebrew Competition

There are just a couple of weeks left until all our Homebrew Competition entries need to be in. We have received a couple of early entries that needed to be drunk fresh, so we have had our first couple of tastes of what Bristol Home Brewers have to offer. Quite impressive, but we are sure there is much more to come...

If you haven't already pick up an entry form from the Grain Barge, Barley Mow, Windmill, Tobacco Factory, Brewer's Droop or Highbury Vaults or email sales@bristolbeerfactory.co.uk and bring us 2 bottles of your finest.

This is what the Evening Post think of the competition.

The Grand Final is on April 20th at the opening of our new Visitor's Centre, when the favourite 5 beers will be judged by an esteemed panel of hopheads to compete for Champion HomeBrew of Bristol.

Thursday April 1st is the last day we will accept entries...

Happy Brewing!

Beer & Chocolate Tasting

Contact Andrew sales@bristolbeerfactory.co.uk or The Grain Barge gb@bristolbeerfactory.co.uk
for more info.

The Green Green Malt

There is a lot of love around for the Hop at the moment, one brewery has recently announced their 'Top of the Hops' and lots of beer bloggers are confirmed 'hop heads', but the hop is nothing without the balance that Malt gives it. So lets hear it for Malt, the undervalued backbone of your beer.

There are only 4 traditional Maltings left in the country and fairly spread out they are too. We are very lucky therefore to have Warminster Maltings just a few miles down the road, keeping our 'Beer Miles' down and supplying us with the king of malt, Maris Otter. All of our beers at the BBF use Maris Otter in the recipe.

Warminster Maltings began life in 1855, it's construction from re-cycled parts of other maltings dotted across the town has endured for over 150 years, as has the process that is largely unaltered in all that time. The fields around Warminster are full of Maris Otter barley that once harvested makes its way to Warminster Maltings where it is steeped in water from their own well. The 'green' malt is then spread on the traditional floors, and the correct temperature is reached to enforce germination. The 'green malt' is kiln dried and milled ready for us to brew No.7, Red or anything else that takes our fancy. It really is a very 'green' process.

The huge increase in the number of small breweries have helped the traditional Maltings to fight back after they became a very endangered species during the 60's. The ability to produce specialist malts with great flavour has helped the improvement in beer quality and experimentation that you are now seeing from brewers all over the world. Against the backdrop of falling beer sales across the country, small independant breweries have fought back and are growing their market share year on year. The partnership with the likes of Warminster Maltings continues to make this possible.

Bottles

Bottle Range

‘OB’ or Our Beers is a new Craft bottle range from the BBF. It is the essence of everything that small scale local brewing is about. We want to brew delicious full-flavoured beers that we want to drink. These beers are about creativity, investigation and experimentation, taking what we enjoy the most out of our ales & pushing that to the limit. This is our chance to try new hop varieties, to see what happens when we introduce hops at unusual stages of the brewing process, to try different and exciting styles of beer or to just vary one of our current brews. We will be experimenting with different yeast strains, types of malt and hop varieties from all over the world.

We are hoping to be able to release a small number of casks into the trade for each brew but the majority will be bottle conditioned sold in a few of our favourite places. Primarily the Grain Barge will be the outlet with the majority of this range. They will also be available from our online shop at http//www.bristolbeerfactory.co.uk and through the new Bristol Beer Factory Visitor Centre on North St.

Our first experimental brews off the production line include a 6.7% American style IPA of which we have tried two different versions, both any hopheads dream! Imperial Stout we call Black 77 at 7.7%, and a German style Wheat Beer. Dry-hopped versions of Red and Sunrise and of course our National Champion Milk Stout that has been bottle-conditioned for the first time.

These ideas are the things we talk about doing at the brewery, how we feel we can push the boundaries of what we do and introduce the type of beers we want to brew and drink. We know that some of these new beers may not be to everyone’s taste, and we will always continue to brew our award winning core brands, it is just exciting to brew beers that might encourage other people to try full-flavoured, alternative styles of beer.

But if it doesn’t, we don’t mind, they are ‘Our Beers’ after all!

Love Food Tasting

At the end of March the Love Food Festival takes over Brunel's Old Station at Temple Meads Station, Bristol. In conjunction with Mark's Bread and Trethowan's Dairy we will be hosting Beer, Cheese & Bread Tastings on both Saturday 27th & Sunday 28th.

We have been working through some possible pairings this week, with some classic taste combinations such as our lovely citrussy hopped Sunrise with Gorwydd Caerphilly and Sourdough bread as well as the more unusual Dorstone Goats Cheese, Rye bread and Milk Stout...

a little sampling in a couple of weeks time and we will be ready to rock... see you there!

Twitter Tasting

To celebrate Milk Stout's first cask brew of the year we are hosting a Twitter Tasting of our favourite beer. Milk Stout is a delicious full-bodied stout with a beautiful chocolate sweetness, it is the 2009 CAMRA National Champion Stout and will be available throughout Bristol this March from the cask.

On Friday March 19th we are having a Milk Stout Twitter Tasting at 5.15pm.

What on earth does that mean?

If you haven't discovered Twitter yet, then here's your chance... log on to http://www.twitter.com/ and set yourself up...

follow us at @brisbeerfactory

We will be tasting the beer at the brewery comparing the cask and bottled versions and tweeting our thoughts, as well as lots of info about the beer.

You can come and join us at the brewery if you wish or just follow our tweets and add your own with the hashtag #stouttaste.

Get your work mates involved and finish a Friday afternoon with a sociable beer with us, your friends or colleagues. You could go to your local pub that serves Milk Stout from the cask or just get yourself a bottle.

If you have any Twitter Tasting questions why not send us a tweet or email sales@bristolbeerfactory.co.uk

March Pint Pot

This months news!