Month: October 2020

Our Funk Fest At Home boxes are now SOLD OUT (more details on those can be found here), but that’s not the only way you can get involved! Funk Fest has never been just about Abbeydale Brewery and our Funk Dungeon – the spirit of the festival has always been one of collaboration, mutual support, and encouraging conversation around sour beers and mixed fermentation in general. We’re very lucky to have so many outstanding producers of these styles of beer surrounding us, and we’d love you to join in the conversation.

So, with that in mind, local retailers and other breweries too are getting involved, and supplying the “guest” beers for our little at-home festival! Whichever mixed ferm beverage you choose to crack open for the occasion, feel free to join in using #FunkFestAtHome and #FunkFestFringe on Twitter and Instagram over the festival weekend of 30th October-1st November, and be sure to send us your photos and reviews on Facebook too!

We expect this list to keep changing as we get closer to the festivities, so keep your eyes peeled and we’ll be sure to keep this regularly updated. Here’s what we know so far!

 

Hop Hideout have put together a cider box with virtual orchard tour! The tour will be at 4pm on Sunday 1^st November with Ross Cider. You can pre-order your box now here.

Beer Central have lots of exciting new sours to release, so watch out for them coming soon! Sean and the team will be recommending something new from innovative UK producers alongside traditional Belgian examples of the style.

Archer Road Beer Stop and The Green Shop are both offering 10% off sour and mixed fermentation beers in the run up to the festival, from 23^rd October to 1^st November.

Craft & Berry will have 20% off sour beers online (using code FUNKFEST20) and in-store, between the 26th and 31st October

Turner’s Bottle & Tap are offering 10% off their range of sour beer in can over the festival weekend, from 29^th October to 1^st November.

Walkley Beer Co have some great sours available and will also be joining us to launch our Little Earth Project collaboration, Through the Sticks.

And look out for new releases from Wilderness Brewery and Woodman’s Wild Ale, both of whom have supplied their incredible beers to our festival in the past and have some great things in the pipeline. We’d also recommend seeking out beers from Little Earth Project, who are joining our virtual tasting of our Through The Sticks collaboration on Friday 30th October, and London Beer Factory, who have helped us create three amazing beers which launch over the festival weekend. And a final shout out here for Yonder Brewing & Blending, who very kindly helped us to source the bottles for our festival tasting sets!

 

We’re also hoping to support a Funk Fest Fringe which we’d initially planned during the two weeks surrounding the festival but are now extending out to whenever venues are able to do so (whilst of course remaining mindful of the ever changing situation – so apologies that this information is currently a little vague, please consider it a work in progress!), featuring the following venues:

London Beer Factory’s The Barrel Project hope to host the London launch of our three collaboration beers, live brewed during Funk Fest 2019!

We’re in the process of finalising (well, as final as final can be in the current circumstances) plans with Wigan Central, Broken Seal Tap Room (Stevenage), The Stoneworks (Peterborough), Walkley Beer Co, Boozehound, Jabeerwocky, Bar Stewards, The WIsewood and The Raven.

Plus the team over at Sheffield Hopcast will be recording a special episode of their podcast focused around sour and mixed ferm beers to be released in early November, so be sure to give that a listen!

Finally, The Crow Inn had planned a Berliner Weisse event, featuring a special beer from ourselves and different flavours of syrup made by the Rutland Arms kitchen for you to choose your perfect combination! This is currently on hold due to Tier 3 restrictions but we’ll let you know as soon as we can regarding a re-arranged date.

 

If you’re a retailer or venue that would like to be involved, it’s not too late! Get in touch with anything you’d like to do to help us spread the mixed ferm word, we’d love to have you! 

 

Christie (Brewer) here shedding some light on what’s gone into, and how we made the most recent release in our Deliverance DIPA series. Weird day in the beer world today but hopefully by the time this goes live the trade can still buy it and online shop customers can still get their orders in.

Firstly, the premise: so as the name suggests it’s an Australian hopped DIPA. Hop-wise we’ve exclusively used Galaxy and Vic Secret hops, Galaxy’s there for the fruit and Vic Secret’s there for the sharper citrus ‘make this still taste like beer vibe‘.

No bittering hops in this one as the late hopback additions of Vic Secret have plenty of potential bitterness so we’ve still got some bite to the beer.

The dry hop additions were on day 2 (Vic Secret) and day 3 (Galaxy) of fermentation so we’ve got a little bit of bio transformation from the hops giving you some of that ripe pulpy goodness (and haze).

Yeast wise, for this style of beer Lallemand’s London ESB is our go to, we get swift fermentations, it finishes a little sweet and the lag phase (time it takes the start kicking off) is practically non-existant.

With the malt we brewed this one pretty differently to the way we’ve made oat heavy beers in the past. We always use rolled porridge oats rather than malted oats as we find they are much more effective at giving you the protein heavy porridge vibes that you’d expect from oats. As you can imagine though, the density of porridge isn’t particularly workable so the dreaded stuck mash is always a worry. To avoid that this time we made our own oat milk by mashing in the oats on their own at a lower temperature partially breaking down the Beta Glucan which makes it set like glue. We then blasted this on its own into the copper to hold while we dug out the mash tun, mashed in again with all the barley and wheat and then brought to the boil together. We’ve used oat milk that we have bought for a few beers in the past, but we wanted a much bigger volume for this beer (and also it really hurts your fingers opening hundreds of cartons of oat milk…!)

I wanted to get a slightly more orangey hue from the wort as well, so we gave it an extra long boil to get the colour via the Maillard reaction, without the addition of more biscuity malts.

With lots of lipids from the oat milk, haze from the hops, orangey colour and soft carbonation, the aesthetic intention is for it to pour and look not dissimilar to mango juice.

So to cut a long story short, we made our own oat milk, then boiled it up with the wort giving us the super protein heavy, sweet and dense base to then inundate with juicy Australian hops. Heavy hitting but not too boozy, please enjoy responsibly.

Christie xx