Polytech brewery weekend course
THE Rough Rock Brewery at Otago Polytechnic’s Cromwell campus will run a weekend brewery course for enthusiasts early next year.
It will be over two weekends in late January or early February and at the end, participants will leave with 15 litres of beer that they have made. (To register, contact Melanie Kees (03) 4459900 or mkees@op.ac.nz)
The brewery started in February with four fulltime students, most of whom aspire to making their own beer commercially.
They made their first beer in May and a 500litre batch — classical styles like lager, pilsner stout, pale ale and wheat — has since been made about once a month. Each student also makes their own recipes in 23litre batches.
The beer goes out in 1.25litre plastic to the polytechnic’s beer club, which is made up mainly of staff and is sold in 20litre kegs to several bars in Dunedin and Cromwell. (One keg of stout was emptied on one day.)
Some goes to beer festivals — the next is the Dunedin Craft Beer and Food Festival early next month — and the brewery hopes to have takeaway sales in 1.25litre plastic, under the label ‘‘Otago Brew School’’, to the public by the end of the year.
The plant will eventually be moved into a new hospitality training building and cafe/restaurant nearby, where the beer will be on tap.
The brewery’s operations manager is Ben Middlemiss, who established craft breweries in Auckland, and the brewing programmes manager is Geoff Collie, who trained as a brewer at Speight’s in Dunedin and was involved in that brewery’s modernisation in 2011 and the new Emerson’s brewery in 2014.
Stout winner
The previous column recorded Christchurch brewer Cassells winning the milk stout class at the World Beer Awards in London, where more than 200 breweries from 50 countries entered 3500 brews.
The Cassells milk stout has now been announced as the best out of all the stouts and porters entered in seven classes, beating even Guinness (West Indies porter, which was entered in the strong porter class).
The stout is in sixpacks and 518ml single bottles.
Less sugar
Sweetness makes cider attractive to many as an alcoholic beverage. Sales of cider sales increased by about 8% last year, compared with 1% for beer and a decline of 1% for wine.
However, Isaac’s has produced a cider with what is probably the lowest sugar content available here. Its
Crisp Apple Cider (4.2%) has 7.6g — or less than two teaspoons in its 330ml bottle.
Almost all sugar in beer is converted to alcohol during fermentation, but an apple contains between 10g and 23g — too much to convert into sociallyacceptable alcohol.
Isaac’s range has between 13g and 33g a 330ml bottle; DB Breweries’ Monteith’s and Old Mout 919, Orchard Thieves 2331g. The higher levels are in ciders blended with berries.
Rekorderlig, imported from Sweden, has 39g to 48g in its 500ml bottle. A teaspoon of sugar is 4.2g, so that is nearly 10 teaspoons.