Month: February 2018

Over the past couple of years, our passion for ageing beer with wild yeast and bacteria has grown, along with the number of beers in our cellar – the affectionately titled Funk Dungeon. And towards the end of last year we were finally ready to start releasing some of those beers into the trade – more on those and the project as a whole in this blog post.

We are also really excited to increasingly have access to and be able to taste the work of other breweries and producers doing the same, and the fact that so many are keen to share knowledge, ideas and advice means that it’s a fantastic community to be a part of.

We feel that now is the perfect time to showcase some of not just our sour and mixed fermentation beers, but also those from other great producers of this type of beer from around the UK. So we will be rolling up the shutters of the brewery once more for you to come and drink 30 rotating lines of the best mixed fermentation beer the UK has to offer.

More information and ticket details will be released soon, but for now get August 25-26 in your diaries! In keeping with the theme we’ll also have music from funk and soul DJs, there’ll be street food on offer and tank beer for those who fancy also sampling the more classic side of Abbeydale’s beery offerings.

We are currently in talks with some incredible breweries including Little Earth Project, Chorlton Brewing Co, Thornbridge and Fyne Ales to get hold of some of their tasty treats, with beers and breweries to be formally announced in due course.

For us, this side project is a great way to experiment with flavours and processes that don’t normally suit the rest of the volume we produce, and offers something genuinely exciting for the progression of our brewery as a whole. It’s been a challenging learning curve with the unexpected never far away, but we’re really proud of how the project is developing and have received some great feedback on the beers released so far. Our Bretted Tangerine Pale and chuckleberry sour “Chuckle Vison” in particular have gone down really well, and we have some crackers coming up including a bretted Scotch Ale brewed to an 1868 recipe and a Berliner weisse which has undergone primary fermentation in barrel.

For all updates be sure to follow the brewery on Facebook and our dedicated @abbeydalefunk twitter page.

Cheers!

Jim

The Hanging Bat are well known for showcasing the finest beers from around the world, with a recent focus on introducing new breweries to their avid drinkers. Our beers are making it further and further afield these days, particularly since the introduction of cans to our beery offerings, and word is starting to spread. So when Hanging Bat Manager Adam got in touch wanting to learn more about our beers by hosting us for a full tap takeover and collaboration brew, we absolutely jumped at the chance. And last week our brewer Scott, office manager Laura and sales rep Janie headed up north to show Scotland exactly what we’re all about!

If you haven’t been to the Hanging Bat, make it top of your “to visit” list for your next trip to Edinburgh. It’s a frankly fantastic bar, with 14 keg lines and 6 cask, plus an astonishing bottle selection showcasing an excellent selection of rare Lambic beers amongst other tasty treats. Delicious BBQ food is on offer too and they brew their own beers on site (more on that in a moment). You NEED to go.

Anyway, back to the beers! For our tap takeover, we totally filled up the keg board with many of our weird and wonderful concoctions, along with four casks to showcase our core range. And it was a pretty stunning line up, even if we do say so ourselves!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The evening was a great success, with our beer going down well across the board. The crowd were really interested in our brews and especially our new souring project, and the vegetarian friendly “You Scratch My Back” pork scratching stout seemed to blow a few minds! Shout out to the staff behind the bar who really took the time to get to know our beers and were a wonderful group to spend the night chatting beer with!

But that’s only half the story. We were also there to concoct something special on their 50l kit with brewer Johnny! A Baltic porter with blackberries and Buckfast steeped bourbon barrel oak chips, to be precise. And somewhere along the line, Johnny and Scott decided that what they really wanted to do was mash in at 10pm and go for the longest mash in Hanging Bat history!

The beer was held at 66.6°C overnight and fourteen hours later we were back to finish off the brew, to be greeted by a thick, sweet and chocolatey wort, a real liquid cuddle and a very tasty breakfast.

Onto the boil where Magnum hops were added for bittering, with East Kent Goldings and 1.6kg of foraged Edinburgh blackberries (a real labour of love went into picking those!) added five minutes before flame out. The Buckfast chips are to be added later. It’s aiming to be a big boozy beast, so Edinburgh folk keep your eyes peeled for “Bucked Up”!

A massive thank you to Adam, Johnny, and the rest of the team at the Hanging Bat for hosting us, and to all the lovely folk that came down to try our brews, including another first – a schooner of Moonshine!

Cheers,

Laura