Beer Has Style

The British Guild of Beer Writers annual seminar took place the Meantime's Old Brewery last night. The seminar theme was 'beer styles' and Meantime CEO, Alastair Hook, Beer Academy Supremo, George Philiskirk and the newly appointed London Ale Taster, Steve Williams (pictured), all gave their own, and highly individual, perspectives on the topic.

Alastair argued that the brewing industry needed to learn from the example of the new world wine makers who used grape varietal styles to demystify wine and open a dialogue with the consumer.

George and Steve took a more pragmatic line, focusing rather on the dangers of  the over-rigid application of a burgeoning number of beer styles that threatened to confuse rather than enlighten the consumer.

The Q&A session at the end of the seminar showed that the issue is more contentious than one might initially assume, and  - like most things where beer writers are concerned - there were strongly held opinions both in favour of beer styles being a necessary mechanism to grow the beer market and those who preferred the status quo.

Tanks In - Outing Over

Like a scene from Toy Story 3 the big boys' toys - or brewery vessels as we usually call them  - have arrived at their new home and found found new toys waiting for them, and this time it's all better than before.

Don't they look all shiny and happy after yesterday's traumatic trip down the Woolwich Road?

Meantime Moving - Bulletin Report

Meantime Brewing - Moving Out from Meantime Brewing on Vimeo.

August 10th was another big day in the saga that is the Meantime Move. Today tanks started leaving the building in order to make the move to their new home in the slightly posher suburb of SE10.

A specialist team of riggers was on site early doors to move as many tanks as possible, taking three at a time on their flat bed lorry. As our video shows. they don't hang around. The first wave of 12 tanks have now gone leaving a further 17 to move later in the month, once they have been emptied of beer and the initial tanks have been reinstalled in their new home.

The End Of The Beginning

Many brewers might think that the last brew at a brewery was a sad affair. Not Ben Cash. When he got up this morning - which he does at the ungodly hour of 4 AM - he thought to himself. "This is the last time I will ever brew on this brewhouse. I know, I will put on one of my wife's skirts and dress up like an accident at a PostIt Note factory."

Ben, no doubt is looking forward to brewing at the new all spangly and shiny, easy to keep clean, fully automated, decently lit, warm, dry, dust free, state-of-the-art new brewhouse currently being road tested only a mile and a quarter away, but for some others who have been with Meantime throughout it's turbulent 10 year history July 23rd 2010 will go down as, to employ an old cliche, the end of an era.

We don't know as yet where the old workhorse brewhouse will end up. We do know it has served us well for a decade during which it will have produced close to 5000 brews. Some of these ended up winning medals and others have been enjoyed as far apart as Brazil and Brisbane.

Meantime is moving towards a new stage in its history. Everyone is looking forward to bigger, brighter, more professional, less chaotic future, where it is not freezing in winter and sweltering in summer, but down in the Union on a Friday night there will be plenty of moist-eyed nostalgia, beery reminiscence and fishy tales of brewing at in the old days at Penhall Road.

And why not? After all, it was not one of the world's prettiest breweries, but it did make some of the world's best beers.

Tanks For The Memory

As an unmemorable World Cup fades into the past, life at the Blackwall Lane brewery construction site is now focused, once more, on completion of the largest new brewery investment in London since Guinness built their Park Royal plant in 1933.

Sine our last bulletin more vessels have arrived, including new 200 Hl fermenters and maturation vessels, and a lattice of stainless steel pipe-work continues to snake ever more intricately around the newly painted walls of the brewhouse.

Pipes in a brewery invariably end in valves and given the size of the brewery there are only two methods of managing the large numbers of valves needed. You can either train octopuses to brew, or  - since no textbooks actually recommend this - you can automate the brewhouse.

Accordingly the pipe-work has to be matched by control systems, so a parallel network of cabling is being installed and linked into the computer system that will control the whole brewhouse. The octopuses will therefore be kept purely for backup purposes.

Taking The Eye Off Football

The Guardian newspaper's online section wanted to run a piece on the World Cup and the beer being drunk by football fans before the competition closed.

They thought that given the majority of the beer drunk during the tournament was fizzy industrial rubbish they wanted to feature something that wasn’t. So they came to Meantime and produced a very intelligent piece.

It seems like they forgot something though. Apart from the introduction, how many references to the World Cup can you count?

http://gu.com/p/2t8yn/tw

Will World Cup Derail Meantime Brewery Fitout?

Worried directors of the Meantime Brewing Company headed down to the new Blackwall Lane site recently to assess the situation when the World Cup threw up the worst of all possible fixtures for the company. The England-Germany clash on June 27th.

The brewhouse vessels are now in, and two teams of welders - 8 Britons and 8 Germans- are working away feverishly between fixtures to weld and fit no less than 10 miles of stainless steel pipe work that are needed to connect all the vessels in this fully automated brewery.

So far rivalries have been fairly friendly with health and safety compliant fire resistant national flags indicating the areas of strict demarcation between the various working areas. Competition between the teams so far has been confined to the two camps respective radio station choices.

The Meantime board are concerned that all this could change on June27th. Meantime Brewmaster, Alastair Hook, explains the company dilemma. "If England win we get our beer mains, gas and steam working in time for the commissioning date of 12th July. If Germany win we will get the brewhouse up and running, but naturally neither will work without the other. The best result for Meantime and its thirsty customers would be a match postponement until the end of July’."