Due to popular demand the brewery blog has moved to here:

swissbob

Over the next few months we'll be knocking out quite a few batches of the various recipes. As we can't drink it all and sending it down the drain would be a crime (no really, this is Switzerland)

I'm looking for some mature beer tasters to help fine tune the recipes and maintain consistency. Logistics determine that the beer tasters would need to be reasonably local to ZH / SG / SZ as the beer would have to be collected from Rapperswil-Jona or possibly Zurich.

It's almost...

swissbob

Tomorrow (Saturday 27/10/2007) is a big step in the direction of the brewery. This will be the first end to end batch control brew of SA1 3K Bitter (real ale) with the recipe developed at the Bier Factory. SA refers to the name of the brewery - can't release the name until the registration goes through, website coming shortly.

First, the technical details:

• 30L Mash Tun (stainless steal, based on the Weck Cooker)
• 30L Brew Kettle (same as above)
• 30L Primary fermentation vessel

...

swissbob

It's a bitch but I learned the hard way about the importance of getting the carbonation right in a couple of batches of recent ales. Bottles are actually harder than a keg. At leastwith a keg you can fit a pressure gauge and even set a pressure relief valve to monitor it for you. In bottles, the best you can do is guess. And I got it badly wrong. It could be worse, at least I avoided self-opening bottles which is good because exploding glass could put someone's eye out.


The...

swissbob

CAMRA’s (Campaign to Save Real Ale) official definition of Real Ale is, “beer brewed from traditional ingredients, matured by secondary fermentation in the container from which it is dispensed, and served without the use of extraneous carbon dioxide.”

It’s an awkward definition that, like Germany’s Reinheitsgebot, can be quite restrictive.

However, the term “traditional ingredients” is designed, like the Reinheitsgebot, to prevent artificial preservatives or cheap adjuncts...

swissbob