It was lager day on Wednesday at WeHomebrew Club, using a recipe found by Ian for a Pilsner Urquell Clone. For a true comparison yours truly popped out to the shops to get an example of our standard, which proved to be much harder than one would have imagined. I could find Barrels of Budvar and Firkins of Staropramen, but Pilsner Urquell proved to be a challenge. I endured many hardships, travelling across 4 time zones, defeating armies of Uruk-Hai, and finally prising the golden nectar from the hands of the Guardians of the mighty Urquell fortress in Pilsen. If truth be told I did actually find a few cans of Urquell languishing forlornly at the back of a shelf in the local Asda, but I didn’t think the club would be so grateful to hear that I only ventured as far as Cippenham.
And the feedback from the club was ‘you probably shouldn’t have bothered Ken’. I wish no disrespect or sleight to the founding fathers of Pilsner, but we were scratching our heads a bit. We used Pilsner Urquell as our reference for all our clones. We found PU to have great bready richness with a great soft rounded mouthfeel. A slightly sulphur smell and flavour – as is characteristic and a touch of ester, but also we found it with a sticky almost stodgy sweetness, not crisp as we were expecting. However, it transpires that Ian found some bottled Urquell somewhere up North, which was apparently much better, so maybe the canned Asda variety isn’t a good comparator?
We had four clones, from Ian, Joseph, Ken and Owen. In terms of colour we really all were very close, with Ian coming closest to the Mark. Ken was the only person to persist with the decoction mash as required by the recipe – taking one third of the wort/grain mix mid mash and boiling for 15 minutes – not as big a faff as expected. Owen’s, had a fresh smell, bright with some citrus notes. Ken’s came out probably the driest and a definite breadiness, and a touch of ester flavour coming through. Ian used a slightly different yeast due to availability, using ‘Cech Pils 2278’. Very clean smell, and low on esters. Joseph’s Urquell had a fine hoppy aroma with some spice, very clean, all very well balanced. All similar but clearly different. The real test for us will come from 21st March when we shall be entering our brews into Lager Than Life, lets see how we do.
As always with the Brewclub, we have a theme, but we also welcome whatever has been brewed. Alistair brought a second showing of his version of Punk IPA. Luckily in this case Alistair’s Punk IPA didn’t involve bankruptcy or leaving his fellow beer appreciators in the hole for £200m, for which we were very grateful. It was a lively fellow, having been in the bottle since mid last year I recall, and had an orangey aspect. Oddly while it was lively when opened, the fizz faded very quickly on the palate – not sure how that works. A good beer – thanks Alistair. Lee also brought another club historic favourite, his being an IPA made with his own cascade hops from last September. Coming in at about 5%, with Lee’s own toasted malt the intention had been to home toast the malt for a black IPA, but I hadnt quite got to the level of darkness required. And still yummy. Something here for another club theme – own toasted malts – perhaps?
So we had cloned Urquell, and we had cloned Punk IPA. Owen now brought in a clone of Alan. Now, we have long believed in the club, there just isn’t enough Alan for everyone, and to fill this void, Owen decided to clone Alan, or more specifically copy his Porter recipe. The curve ball on this one is the use of Challenger as the flavour hops and Goldings as the aroma, and it works. It smelled chocolately, and tasted wonderful. Thanks Owen, or as he is now known, ‘New Alan’.
And finally we shared a gift which Ken had been given by a friend from the Netherlands. Zundert is made by one of two Trappist breweries based in the Netherlands, brewed in the De Kievit brewery by the Maria Toevlucht Abbey. The website is great reading if you fancy a small diversion. https://zunderttrappist.nl/
I was agog to learn that this brewery was opened as recently in 2013, apparently with a very clear purpose of providing revenue for the monastery. They developed a recipe from scratch, starting with Zundert 8 Trippel. We were lucky enough to have been given the Zundert 10 Quadruppel which only started production in 2018. A beautiful deep ruby brown, full of stone fruit, dried prune flavour, spices, a bit of licorice, which didn’t give away its 10% potency. A rich creamy head abounded atop the liquor. The Zundert brewers set themselves apart with the locally sourced herbal adjuncts, in this case bog myrtle, which is known for its strong, pleasant scent (menthol/eucalyptus-like) and, imparts a soft, sweet, and spicy aroma. I wouldn’t know what bog myrtle looks like, but it makes me think of another club theme ‘stuff I found in the undergrowth in Burnham Beeches’. A good idea except of course that it may be disgusting, illegal, and quite possibly life threatening.
As we wrapped up for the evening we gave a toast to our host, Dave, and the Hoppy Place crew. You will likely have read that sadly the Windsor Hoppy Place outlet will close in April, and we thank them very much for being our home for the last 6 months. But we have two pieces of good news. Firstly you can still obtain great Indie Rabble beers at Hoppy Place in Maidenhead, and of course from the brewery itself under the Arches in Windsor. Secondly, we shall be back with Windsor and Eton Brewery for our club meetings. We will continue on the first Wednesday of every month, and shall be moving our time back to 7.30pm. So next meeting on Wednesday April 1st at Windsor and Eton Brewery in Windsor, 7.30pm. Theme is ‘Anything goes’.
I shall leave with a slight disagreement I have with the monks at Zundert who post that ‘monks brew to live, they don’t live to brew’. Wrong way round – surely?
