The Nags Head

The Nags Head in Glebe is one of only a handful of venues in Australia that offer cask conditioned beer and even then it's only for one night a month. For the month of November that day happened to be last Friday.
They had two beers on offer, or which I only bothered with one. they had a Pilsner (Pictured) and a Ginger Beer. Hardly what I was hoping for! Come on, you need to at least have a bitter on, and a porter is what was secretly hoping was on offer. The beers are brewed by Matt Donelan who owns and brews for the St Peter's Brewery in well St. Peter's.

The Pilsner itself was a nice beer but a little bit too fruity for a Pilsner. It was also fairly cloudy which is also way out of style. To be honest, if this was submitted in a comp it would probably be judged as an Australian Sparkling Ale. It shared a fair bit of similarity with Coopers Sparkling Ale. Anyhow it was good to catch up with the lads and have a handpulled beer again. It's been a whole 4 months since I last had one. I might brew an ale similar to this as a session beer over Xmas. It suits the Australian climate a lot better than the 4% brown session bitters which everyone in the UK blog world seem to be taking for granted right now. I'm thinking 100% Joe White Pilsner malt hopped to 20 IBU's with one of the new Australian varieties (possibly Galaxy?) and fermented out with S05. Should be nice. I will chronicle such an event.

The Dark Side of The Arts

A while ago I posted about my ventures back into the arts. My own chronicle or sorts. Basically I set up the fermentation of two cans of goop. You can refresh your memories by reading about it here. Anyhow since then the wort has played host to fornicating microorganisms which eat sugar and piss out ethanol. Then the 'green' unconditioned beer was racked of the primary yeast cake into a cube for cold conditioning. I should note that I added a packet of SAFlager 34/70 for microbiological reasons. This brought the gravity down ever so slightly and cleaned up the small amount of esters that had been produced in primary fermentation. It also added a little bit of diacetyl to round out the flavour profile. After two weeks of cold conditioning I decided that I would be packaging this beer by polypin and serving through one of my beer engines on Xmas eve. To give it a unique hop character I added 150g of whole hop flowers which I grew in my hop garden. They are Columbus hops, but tend to have more of an EKG taste to them. Hop flavour is not only varietal but environmental and as such flavours are influenced by the soil, light and other conditions weigh in on flavour - hence these hops have a marmalade flavour similar to EKG rather than a harsh pine like flavour of US grown Columbus. Anyhow I forgot about the beer at that stage and left it for a few weeks. On Wednesday evening I poured off a few schooners of this wonderful dark ruby red beer and it's the shit. I plan to transfer to a polypin tomorrow although I can't guarantee that there will be much left on Xmas eve!
I am also slowly rebuilding my all grain system. I have a new millmaster grain mill which I will post about next week and I have ordered 2kg of hops from a grower in China and 40kg of malt from Joe White malting's. Bring on a new batch in a couple of weeks when the consumables turn up.
Tonight I am off to the Nag's Head hotel for a few pints of cask conditioned Braidwood ESB. Life is good (well until I start house hunting again tomorrow!).