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There's no time like the present

15/4/2020

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In fact, I've come to understand there's not been a time like this for something like 100 years. The Covid-19 pandemic has seen the word "unprecedented" is being used in the media at an unprecedented frequency. And now with all the bars and restaurants closed, close to zero beer has left our brewery for the past month.
See, as a brewery with a part-time sole-operator (me), putting beer into bottles doesn't represent a time-efficient pursuit. And so keg has been the choice vessel for the past few years - and I've been seriously moving it! With an ever-growing number of local taps bearing our own laser-crafted timber decals I've been kicking some real goals.

No one saw this coming.

And now I've gone from filling the fermenter with back-to-back brews to wondering when I'll get to brew next. However, I'm not sitting still. There are oak barrels to blend, package and refill and an online store to build with the question of rebranding to consider...
In the meantime, AusPost are holding things up. I ordered some equipment to build a counter-pressure filler and paid for express post. That was 3 weeks ago and there's still no sign of the package from Melbourne...
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Air & Sunlight

11/8/2016

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We take the most important things for granted - until we no longer have them.

Looking back at the past couple of years, we didn't make building a brewery a terribly easy task by denying ourselves some of the most fundamental elements to life: air and sunlight. Strangely, for whatever reason, these weren't at the top of the list when selecting a site - and in retrospect, can now say that had we chosen more wisely, we may have been capable of tolerating more time working on site. Or at least, we'd have left the site at the end of a long day feeling like returning the next day wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.
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And yet, this environment is a daily reality for far too many Australian workers, who arrive to work before the sun is in the sky and spend all day under fluorescent lights in airless cool rooms, surrounded by the loud whirring of machinery - only to leave with an hour or two of sunshine left in the day. I don't know how they do it.

​This week we returned to the dark, empty, cavernous shell of the old site to finalise clean-up. It was at this final point that we realised the magnitude of our error as the oppression took hold. The reverberation of the room was so thick and uncomfortable we struggled to comprehend one another's speech. We finished scrubbing the remaining life from the floor and sprayed the place down with bleach, vowing to never deprive ourselves so spectacularly ever again.
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Leaving the swamp

13/6/2016

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(I'm a part-time teacher and currently supposed to be writing student reports. Must be time to update the blog...)

This entry is entitled "Leaving the swamp", as this represents in a number of ways our current position. Firstly, yes, we'll be leaving Invermay a.k.a The Swamp (a very real title with the extreme weather and flood threat this week), but so far 2016 is proving a ripper-year in terms of the growth of our customer base and subsequently the movement of stock and increase of cashflow is seeing us in a more certain financial position as we're no longer swamped by debts! 

Relocating

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​So, having only been brewing on our own brewhouse in the current premises for the past 10 months we've now found ourselves being required to relocate. When we were first delivered the news a few months back it came as a major blow. I'm generally a pretty careful fella. So when it was time to sign the lease I made sure there was a 3 year option to give some security for the dosh we'd spent setting the place up. However, it had escaped my attention that somewhere in the fine-print it reads that should we wish to pursue the option we needed to provide written notice 1 month in advance... and as there'd been a change of landlord with a new vision for the building, our space was required. Here's to a lesson learned the hard way!
Having found a new premises with some real potential we're finding the frustration and anger subsiding to make way for feelings of hope and excitement. Adding to the excitement is the knowledge that the current brew in the fermenter is the final brew conducted in the swamp: and nonetheless amidst a one-in-one-hundred year flood! ​​

The Flood

As you will read, this was a week of events we never want to experience again. It started on a Tuesday: what was to be a regular brew day kicked off to a brilliant start, achieving excellent efficiency in the mash to fill the kettle to capacity with some of the maltiest, tastiest wort imaginable. 10 mins into the boil (50 mins to go) and we have a visit from our neighbour, announcing that they were evacuating as per advice from the authorities, as the waters were rising and the steam boiler was to be shut down.
Crap. What now? 1300L of hot, tasty wort and many, many more litres of muddy water threatening to bury the place in faeces (yes, literally. Launceston has the only mixed stormwater / sewage lines remaining in Australia: due to our history as also being the first city in Australia and third in the world to have underground sewers. Get a decent amount of rain with a little flash-flooding and Invermay / "The Swamp" starts getting real organic). I re-prioritise and turn my attention to grabbing anything of value and hoisting it as high as possible. Several hours passed and I've had enough, happy to be jumping in the car and heading for home, leaving the chaos behind.
30 mins later and I get a call from Bill from Not For Horses (our malthouse partner - sharing the building) asking if he can get a ride in: his car is being serviced and there's some stuff he needs to shift at the malthouse.
As we arrived at the plant, a couple of cops pull up and query why we're returning to the area. A few mins later and we're inside, back at work lifting stuff. About an hour went by before the next cop turned up; pretty stoked at finding himself standing in a brewery! However, the excitement was short-lived as he delivered the certain news that "this place is going to go under. They're expecting the level to rise half a metre over the wall". Our hearts immediately sank.
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The following day was spent with eyes glued to the media, watching, waiting to learn our fate. With Invermay still on notice, the plant remained shut down: the wort waiting, still steaming hot in the well-insulated milk vat-come-kettle.
Thursday finally came and we were out of the woods. Believe it or not, the wort was still steaming-hot in the kettle! It returned to the boil and the process completed in good time with brilliant results - no harm done! And still time in the day to return the many hoisted items back to ground!
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Who is Ella Brown?

1/6/2015

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Last year I discovered brown ale. Only last year. Why oh why have I left it this long to discover such a beautiful thing?!!
To be honest, the title of the style just isn't sexy. Dirty old dressing gowns, grandpa slippers, dirt and poo are all brown and definitely not appealing. But having strolled into the local bottle-o to find nothing jumped out at me from the crowded fridge display, I reluctantly settled for a Brooklyn Brown Ale...

Paradigm shift.
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If you haven't had Rogue's Hazelnut Brown Nectar, get up out of your seat immediately and hunt it down. Now. (It's really that good)
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Ella Brown: Single hopped with Ella, features a rich caramel malt profile. Tasty, tasty.
I began targeting brown ales, searching for new takes on this gorgeous style. It was at this time I discovered Rogue Ales from Portland, US and their rather incredible, delicious Hazelnut Brown Nectar. At this point I decided to craft my own brown ale recipe...

Welcome to the world, Ella Brown.

Single-hopped with generous proportions of Ella, this is a malt-driven brown ale with loads of Amber and Dark Crystal malts with a heaping helping of Roast Barley on a solid foundation of Traditional Ale malt.


The warmth of these flavours and luscious rich red/brown colour immediately drew my mind back to the days of cassette and tape technology. At the time, I had recently watched Dave Grohl's Sound City documentary, which recounts the story of the Seattle recording studio responsible for capturing so many hit records from so many amazing bands and artists from the 70's through the 90's and it's sad demise as digital technology took over. For the uninitiated, there is an art to capturing a great performance on old analogue technology: planning ahead is key. Selecting the right microphones, placing them in exactly the right place and positioning the instrument in the right place in the room are just a few variables requiring careful attention.
In contrast, we're all-too-familiar with the studio magic performed by high-tech digital wizardry, employing high-powered computers with clever software capable of taking a model with a great body and tuneless voice and turning them into a singing sensation. I know you know what I'm talking about.

So, this beer is our toast to the truly-talented music legends of a past era, who often 
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A minute to breathe

11/1/2015

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Part 1: Lame Excuses

Those of you who've been following our progress will note the absence of blogs over the past few months - I must apologise, all time and energy has been sunk into the brewery construction and the creation of our festival bar which will be put to first use THIS WEEKEND at Esk Beerfest!

The past few months have been exhausting. Between my fatherly duties, winding up with teaching for the holidays (writing reports - need I say more), playing the odd wedding here and there with the Jam Plan and mixing sound / drumming at Door of Hope, I can't believe I've still been able to progress with the brewery. We're actually not too far from gaining our Excise Licence and starting production.

Part 2: Wait - so you have beer, but no brewery?

"Hang on!" I hear you say... "if your brewery isn't operational yet, how can you have beer to sell?!" Well, our good mates at Morrison's Brewery have stepped in to fill a couple of contract brews for us, producing a couple of our recipes to allow us to begin trading (hey, a few more bucks would be sweet right now!). 1000L of our quaffable Aus Pale Ale "The Fifty Eight" and 500L of our hoppy "Stompbox IPA" will be hitting a craft beer bar near you (assuming you're living in Tas).

Part 3: Excitement and Bragging

Let me tell you a little about our current recipes.

You're gonna love em.

The Fifty-Eight is a straight-up-and-down ale in the Australian tradition - well, not the current tradition held by the "Australian" (internationally-owned) mega-swilleries who've been watering-down beer according the wishes of their accountants and money-hungry shareholders over the past century, but a more romantic notion of how our beer should taste today. Single-hopped with balanced early and late additions of Pride of Ringwood, The Fifty-Eight keeps it real with a malt base of Australian Traditional, a bucket of Wheat Malt and a smattering of Crystal.


Our Stompbox IPA gets me very excited - I LOVE HOPS. IMHO, I think the Americans have this style down, so in our own take on an American IPA, we a total of 7.3 grams per litre of Citra, 3 grams per litre of Amarillo and bittered it with Tassie's own Ella hops (an additional 0.56g / l as an early addition). If you've done your math correctly, you'll have calculated 10.86 g/l of hops! Mmmmm.....

Part 4: Thanks-es

At this point, I'd like to say a massive THANKS to a few folks. Firstly, Paul Morrison from Morrison's Brewery for accepting an extra couple of contracts from us right in the his peak season (trust me - he really didn't need the extra work!). Also, my good mate Bill Armstrong for his help and fine company on this venture and his hospitality as a room-mate (we're sharing our premises with his hand-crafted malt house, Not for Horses). Mark Edmunds certainly deserves a mention here - I'm truly grateful for his generosity and motivated, can-do attitude (combined with TIG welding skills).

Finally, the biggest thanks of all goes to my beautiful wife who's been playing it single-parent-style more than any married woman should and generally picking up my slack around the house. Any parent who gets to the end of the day thinking "gee, I really didn't get anything done" but managed not to throttle their kids can rest assured that they've actually put in a decent effort.
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Melancholy and the Infinite Pumpkin Ale

29/7/2014

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Inspiration strikes

Cleaning the kitchen is my job and I do a fine job - most nights. One particular clean-up following a family get-together over a roast dinner I was scrubbing at the baking dish and marveling at how the amber colour from the roast pumpkin (which had caramelised and crusted onto the edges of the dish) continued to run into the dishwater. I started thinking about beer and wondered if I could utilise the colour from the caramelised roast pumpkin in a pumpkin ale.
Now, we Aussies can be forgiven for hearing "pumpkin" and "beer" in the same sentence and thinking that to be a strange concept, but I assure you, the yanks have been brewing pumpkin ale for many years.

The giant pumpkin fermenter

Now, I don't quite recall how I stumbled across this page , but somewhat bemused at this bloke's commitment to utilising his giant pumpkins in his beer, I shared the page with my friends - and my wife, who tends to love these kind of off-beat ideas and often succeeds in motivating me to try them - as is exactly what happened in this case.  

I tried to combat her promptings with excuses like "where am I going to get a pumpkin that size?", but as it happened, she'd recently made a friend who happened to have grown giant pumpkins and had no plans for them other than to feed them to their pigs. 

So, we took a drive out to Longford and collected one (thanks Ed & Christine).

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The Recipe

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It seems that most folks who brew a pumpkin ale are looking to introduce the pumpkin pie flavours and spices. I was after more of a roast pumpkin experience, such as the pumpkin from the roast meal that particular afternoon. I decided the beer should take the form of an amber ale, representing roast pumpkin in colour. The beer would be malt-driven with enough bittering from the hops to bring balance and perhaps a faint aroma, but the pumpkin should be the star.

93% Base malt
5% Caramel 120L malt
2% Roasted Rye
0.8 g/L 15% Ella at 60 mins
0.56 g/L 8% Challenger at 10 mins

The procedure

I gutted the pumpkin (ensuring I cut a neat 'lid') into a large baking dish and added a couple of generous tablespoons of brown sugar to help with the caramalisation. With the 18L of mash sitting on 66C, the guts went in the oven at 180C.

About midway through the course of the 60 min mash I checked on the guts in the oven and was astonished to find it looking more like soup that baked pumpkin. It needed reducing - fast. A dished half into a saucepan and put it on a burner, and leaving the other half in the oven I made sure I opened the oven door regularly. 

At the 60 min mark, the pumpkin was about perfect. The reduction was a sticky, seedy caramel - ready for addition to the boil.
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I ladled a few spoons of wort into  the baking dish and started rubbing at the caramelised goodness with the a spoon. All the colour started leeching out into the wort - just as it did in the sink several afternoons before :) The caramel-pumpkin enriched wort was (carefully) poured back into the pot.

The fermentation

Contrary to my usual method, the wort was added to the pumpkin HOT to assist in removing any harmful bacteria which may have been present in the pumpkin. It took a full 24 hours in a cold room to drop to an acceptable 22C - the pumpkin flesh proved a pretty good thermal insulator! I pitched Denny's Favourite 50 - a second generation, as I'd harvested some from my previous brew (a big fat brown ale). OG 1.054 (from memory).
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Finishing up

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Denny's Favourite had finished its slow work within around 10 days, finishing quite high (1.018). I'd put this down to some additional fibre picked up from the fleshy fermenter.

I spent quite sometime in a huge hardware store looking for the right plumbing to install a tap into the pumpkin prior to this project, but alas, walked out empty-handed. So, the messy task of siphoning the brew into a secondary fermenter began.

The secondary was left to cold crash before bottling. As you can see from the picture, the end result wasn't so cloudy for a thick ale :-) Although this pic doesn't do it justice, the brew developed an excellent thick, finely-bubbled head with excellent retention.
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Graphically inspired

26/7/2014

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Over the past few days I've been playing around with this image of legendary drummer, Buddy Rich. Anyone familiar with drummers and big bands of this era may recognise some similarity between the KSB shield logo and the shields famously displayed on the bass drums of the likes of Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa. According to the stories told in my Jazz History classes at Uni, these legends of music hail from a time before television, when folks all went out of an evening and virtuoso big band musicians were idolised as many sports stars are these days; their income and lifestyles reflecting their fame. Crowds would flock to their shows to see them, hanging on every note and applauding every face-melting solo.
Earlier in the week I heard via the radio of a new video project produced by an Australian music film producer revealing just how little money there is in "making it" as an Australian music artist. While I'd always known this was the case, the grim financial state of the Australian live music industry as told by the artists in the video was quite astounding. This has given me a whole new appreciation for the Australian music artists I enjoy and their level of commitment to keeping on going. On a personal level, I've also found it of some comfort in confirming the choices I've made to be where I am now. I'll always love music and performance, but in my spare time!
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We exist.

17/5/2014

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kick|snare brewing pty ltd is a thing. 

A legal entity, in fact. It grows stronger by the week with every paper form completed and every piece of stainless welded. And it's hungry with an insatiable appetite for cash.
The race is on for the brewery to jump through the several hoops between here and making beer. The Federal Government want everything in place before they'll have anything to do with issuing an excise license (that's right, you gotta fight for your right to pay a crazy amount of tax) - they want all equipment in place and ready to go, including a state alcohol license. And state alcohol licensing want to see council approval issued before they come on board.
Council. There's a fun ride. Here's hoping that goes smoothly!
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    Author

    Andrew Swift is an enthusiast of original beer and original music. Long-time drummer, teacher and a more-recent father of three, Andrew is now taking up the challenge of brewing on his own commercial brewhouse, launched Jan 2015.

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Kick Snare Brewing Pty Ltd
A proudly-independent Tasmanian company
Liquor licence number 82047