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Scotland’s newest maltings - A look at Bairds at Arbroath
By: Mark Kinsman
01/05/2011
Bairds Malt’s new malting facility on the East Coast of Scotland at Arbroath has now been running at full capacity for over a year. The completed project is an epitome of close collaboration between the customer and their contracting partners. The result is a malting facility based on cutting-edge design and equipped with state-ofthe- art plant components.
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A vintage year for malt whisky … at Balblair north of the Moray Firth
By: Frank Robson
01/05/2011
On Speyside you can find the Whisky Trail to guide you round the forty four distilleries in the area. However once you progress over the Moray Firth north of Inverness the number of distilleries on the mainland is only six and the trail you are encouraged to follow is the Pictish Trail.
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Eliminate diatomaceous earth … but keep the filter
By: Andrew Fratianni, Joerg Kress
01/05/2011
Recently, an acquaintance told me: “When I first started in the brewing industry thirty years ago, we spoke about eliminating diatomaceous earth from the process. I never thought that we would still be using it today.” It was not too many years before he started his career that brewers resisted replacing asbestos as a filter aid.
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Crouch Vale – tuning in to the modern market
By: Roger Putman
01/05/2011
Recently we looked at Rudgate and Hobsons, both winners of CAMRA’s Champion Beer of Britain trophy. Crouch Vale’s Brewers Gold won that accolade twice in two years – 2005 and again in 2006, both of them during the period of moving to a brand new brewery on the other side of town.
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Hops – the spice in beer: A novel way to quantify the quality of hop-bitterness
By: Jens Eiken
01/05/2011
When buying hops or choosing a hop variety, there are more things to consider than just the alpha acids content. During the last 25 years the world average alpha acid dosage per hectolitre has dropped by more than 45%(1), which is mainly attributed to a change in consumer behaviour asking for less bitter beers. Nevertheless, one wonders if pure focus on bitter units and lower cost alpha acids with little attention to bitterness quality is at least partly responsible for this trend.
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The riverside brewery - Nepal’s Gorkha Brewery expands
01/05/2011
Nepal and beer is a pretty exotic combination at first hearing. On the southern slopes of the Himalayas, beer is still a long way away from being a universally popular beverage. It was not until the late 20th century that packaged beer was actually introduced into Nepal. Per capita consumption among the almost 30 million Nepalese is in the region of 1.5 litres each and not an inconsiderable proportion of that goes down the throats of the numerous trekking tourists, who visit the country to enjoy its spectacular scenery and the country’s cultural and spiritual diversity.
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The city of Perth in Scotland is an enigma
By: Brian Eaton
01/05/2011
Perth is known to its inhabitants, to its visitors and to the whole of Scotland as ‘the Fair City’. Road signs direct you to the City Centre and its website is www.perthcity.co.uk, but Perth is no longer a city. It was one until 1975 when local government in Scotland was reorganised and removed its status. This is in spite of Perth having been a Royal Burgh, granted by Charter by King William the Lion in the year 1210. There has been a campaign to reinstate its ancient city status throughout 2010, the 800th year of its Royal Burgh Charter.
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Moscow Brewing Co is Russia’s No.7 brewer – thanks to KHS technology
By: Natalia Nikashina, Ulrich Steinert
01/05/2011
The Russian beer market grew steadily up to 2007 but sales have stalled and currently chalk up 90mhl with a per capita consumption of 65 litres. These figures do not exactly suggest that setting up a new brewery in Russia at present could prove to be a successful enterprise. Yet, the Moscow Brewing Company refused to be intimidated and at the end of 2008, started up production at a new brewery in Mytishchi just outside Moscow. And not wanting to do things by halves, commissioned three new KHS filling lines.
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Brewing in wine country - Beer in the Hunter Valley
By: Gary Blomeley
01/05/2011
The Hunter Valley region is well known as one of the major wine producing areas of Australia with a great many iconic wine brands originating from it. Less well known is the fact that in the heart of the wine region is a small brewery producing interesting hand-crafted beers of both traditional and innovative beer styles.
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Surrey’s last hop garden
By: Steve Curtis
01/05/2011
One of the unexpected pleasures in recent months was being able to deliver the trophies for the English Hop Awards to their respective winning growers. Not only would this save the IBD courier costs, it would get me re-acquainted with hop growers and see whole hop cones rather than the more familiar pellets and hop products I had become used to. I was however surprised to be setting out in a south and west direction from London towards Hampton Farm Estates, close to Guildford in Surrey, to deliver the Wigan Cup for the best sample of Fuggle hop from the previous year’s harvest. Studies as a young brewer had focused on Kent and East Sussex or Herefordshire and Worcestershire as being the only major growing regions in England and I had thought that the industry had disappeared from other areas.
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Africa – endless possibilities: The 13th Africa Section Convention at Lake Victoria, Uganda
01/05/2011
I shall never again complain about the potholes in the roads of Burton on Trent. The ‘African massage’ we got skirting Lake Victoria on the road from Entebbe airport really toned us up for sitting in a darkened lecture room for four days! This experience was only surpassed when the short trip to the African culture evening was undertaken on the double pillion of a hundred motorcycles – you would not get away with such honking motorised bedlam elsewhere – but this was Africa – vibrant and risk-taking. I can only apologise to Brent Jordan for clutching him in places he probably did not want to be clutched!
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4000 US Craft Brewers in good shape - Report from their 28th conference in San Francisco
By: Roger Putman
01/05/2011
I arrived, somewhat frazzled from the London flight, just in time for the opening reception and with most of the 4000 delegates seemingly crammed into the lobby of the Hilton Hotel in downtown San Francisco, the noise of meeting and greeting was deafening. Doyen John McDonald of Boulevard in Kansas City said later on the podium that he called the annual visit ‘his family reunion’ so amongst the beards, ponytails, woolly hats, tattoos, striking logos and bizarre company names, there were gentlemen in suits with greying hair as the founding fathers celebrate up to 30 years in the business.
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Ziemann at Mytischi
By: Martina Herrmann
01/05/2011
In 2005 a group of investors purchased 14 hectares of land in front of the gates of Moscow with the idea of building a highly automated plant with state-of-the-art brewhouse technology. Ziemann was to be its turnkey partner and within three years, a brewery with an annual capacity of around 2.4mhl of beer was built at Mytischi.