About half an hour’s drive out of Auckland along State Highway no 16 is the lovely rural area of Riverhead. The area has plenty of farmland, vineyards and fruit producers.  We came across a great little brewbar and restaurant which had an incredible range of quality beers called Hallertau.  They produced beers using the traditional artisan processes with nothing other than water, yeast, hops and barley and rainwater. The brewers produce four regular beers and a range of seasonable brews, we were lucky enough to try a few of them including the Copper Tart or No 3 beer which as the name suggests is a red ale with a very tasty caramel and chocolaty taste. Delicious. Their Statesman Beer or No 2 was a very rich pale ale which had a fairly bitey hops kick. They also did a nice Kolsch style beer called Luxe or No 1 which had some delightful fruity aromas and aftertastes and plenty of character. The venue had great food, there was a as they called it grazing menu in the bar area with a range of tasty treats and more of a restaurant style menu in the main part of the complex.  The beer has been recognised by many leading critics in New Zealand and due to the small quantities produced is pretty hard to get outside the brewery but several places around Auckland are stocking it as a boutique craft brew.

for more info www.hallertau.co.nz

We had a wonderful afternoon visiting the Tui brewery and headquarters in Mangatainoka New Zealand, which is a short drive from Palmerston North on the North Island. What an awesome little set up the guys have, it is fantastic.  Set amongst farmland the historic Tui tower can be seen for miles so there’s no problem finding it.  There’s an amazing welcoming centre complete with bar and giftshop, plenty of outdoor seating and a huge expanse of grass to enjoy a beer or meal. The bar features some pretty interesting drops of beer too, not only do they serve the Tui we have come to love on our Beer tour of New Zealand but they also stock a couple of beers not sold anywhere else- so it’s pretty special.  Tui offer tours of the brewery which is amazing, seeing how they produce beer from the freshest of ingredients. The friendly staff not only show you behind the scenes of the brewing process they end the tour as all good tours should end finishes with a taste of their tasty brews you even get to take home a Tui glass- how good is that!

For more information: http://www.tui.co.nz/default.asp

Coopers is one of Australia’s great brewers and now you can make their magnificent beers at home with this great microbrew kit we found in the USA. The kit comes with everything you need to make beer.  There’s the brew tub, all the plumbing, spoons thermometers the lot. All you need to do is mix the supplied ingredients add some water then wait for the brew to bubble away and turn into beer. Then when ready bottle it in the bottles supplied and keep for a little while and before you know it, you will be drinking your very own Coopers Beer. Doesn’t sound too hard does it- well there’s an easy to follow DVD and book just to make it easier. This kit is a great kit for people starting out brewing and is sure to start what will be a rewarding and fun hobby making beer at a fraction of the price of the packaged stuff.   For more details

For more details

The Hops Cone

Many beers contain hops, they do two very important things to the beer, firstly give it some flavor, hops add a bit of bitterness to the beer and give it a fruity and herbal aroma. The hops also acts as a natural preservative helping the beer keep longer. The hops are actually female flower pods which look like cones from the hop plant called Humulus Lupulus. The plant is a close relation to the Cannabis hemp plant and grows on what is called a bine which is a bit like a vine but has hairs to aid its climbing. The plants grow very fast with it’s shoots growing up to several inches a day. One of the most popular strains of hops are grown in the Hallertau Valley in Germany, other large produces are the USA, the Czech Republic and China. Hops are added to the beer in different ways but we will touch on that in a later story along with a story on some of the popular types of hops – Hallertau, Saaz, Tettnag and Splat .

Cascade Spicy Ghost Kit

Cascade the famous beer from Hobart, Tasmania now a subsidiary of the Foster’s Group has launched a wonderful range of premium brewing kits, where you can make some pretty tasty beer in your own home. One of our favorites is the Spicy Ghost Draught which has a real zesty spicy taste. The kits make 23 litres and all you need to do is add water and a kilo of sugars to the supplied can of extracts and yeast and a few weeks later you will be drinking a great beer. Cascade has a great range of beers to choose including a Chocolate Mahogany Porter, a pale ale and Golden Harvest Lager all which bring back some of the tastes of the Brewery’s long heritage dating back to 1824.

Cascade also have a really informative website for homebrewers which is well worth a look.

http://www.cascadehomebrew.com.au

Yeast

Yeast has been used for thousands of years to brew beer, but it wasn’t until the mid 1850′s when French scientist Louis Pasteur discovered that yeast converted sugars to produce alcohol, before then brewers must have just thought the production of alcohol was magic. The yeast used in beer really changes the taste and the length the beer takes to brew. There are thousands of strains and the big breweries are very protective of their yeast cultures, with many cultivating them for hundreds of years. As there is natural yeast in the air it is very easy to contaminate your yeast with other strains. There are two main types of brewers yeast, top fermenting and bottom fermenting- the difference is where the yeast ferments, bottom fermenting tends to ferment at the bottom of the barrel were the other at the top making a foamy top on the wort. Bottom fermenters are usually used to produce lager style beers while many of the darker or higher alcohol beers tend to use the top fermenters which usually brew the beer a bit sweeter or fruitier

Last week we featured the Mr Brew Beer Kit, and by all accounts plenty of our readers took up the great offer and bought one of the kits. Well now you are going to need somewhere to put your brew, because it only takes about 2 weeks before you need to bottle. Here’s a cheap and easy way, with the Mr Beer Deluxe Bottling System. There are eight one litre PET plastic bottles, caps and even lables everything you need for a batch of Mr Beer, you just cant go wrong. Before you know it you will be driniking your very own beer…How cool is that!

Purchase Here

How’s this for a great micro brew kit, its got everything you need and it looks so cool! The clever fermentation chamber is shaped like a old wooden barrel and would look great on any bar. The kit has everything you need to brew your first beer, you just need to mix the ingredients and ad water. Then in only 2 weeks you can be drinking your first brew. The kit is reusable you just need to purchase a new starter kit. It’s a great way to drink good quality beer at a fraction of the cost and best of all it’s something you have made your self- what a way to impress your friends. This item can only be shipped within the USA but other regions should get down to their local brew shop and see what type of kits they have- they are sure to have something great to get you started. Happy Brewing!

Check it out here

If you have been following our home brew series you would have guessed we are about to talk about bottling this week. Your standard home brew kit will produce enough beer to fill approx 48 330ml bottles often known as the stubbie or longneck. We chose this size for two reasons, 1. it is pretty easy to get suitable bottles around this size and 2. it a nice size to drink out of if the need be. In Australia a few years back most home brewers liked to use the 750ml size king brown, these have fallen out of favor as the king browns sold by Australian breweries has switched to twist tops.

What you are looking for when you are collecting your bottles is the type of bottle that needs to be opened with a bottle opener, various imported beers still use this type of bottle and this is what you need to get a good seal with your crown seal caps. If you use a twist top type bottle there is always a chance of breaking the bottle when sealing or opening it and you end up wasting your beer.

If you bought a standard brew kit you may have got a simple capper that has a wooden handle on it, while these work ok they can be a bit tiresome constantly hammering the things on to the bottle. The best type of capper is one where you can put you bottle in a device with its cap, pull its handle and you instantly have a capped bottle. These are quite cheap for what they are and speed up you bottling dramatically. More recently some home brew companies like Coopers have been supplying plastic P.E.T bottles in their kits due to lack of crown seal bottles on the market. Personally I like the feel of a glass bottle so I don’t mind paying extra for a nice imported beer so I get to keep the empty.

The other option is to use the swing top variety of bottle, these are generally known as Grolsch bottles after the brewery that uses them, Grolsch can be a bit pricey but it’s a nice tasty excuse to buy them. Many home brew shops also now sell swing top bottles as well as the rubber washers that seal the bottles. Perhaps you know someone with a restaurant that can collect them for you making this method of bottling rather cheap.

One last thing is about the reason why beer bottles are brown or green. Beer can be affected by sunlight and if you leave your beer in the sun it can become known as skunked beer as it tastes like a skunk. Many modern breweries use ingredients and processes that avoid this from happening so they can put their beer in a clear bottle. If you use clear bottles it worth keeping this in mind and always keep you beer in dark place prior to putting in the fridge and drinking.

Example of Crown Seals

Example of a advanced capper

Last week we gave you the low down on the beer in a can or no boil home brew kits. These are a pretty popular way to brew and are what is included in the basic home brew kit you may have picked up at K-Mart etc. Even if you have never brewed before you may even recognize one of these cans from the supermarket shelf, but what many beginners don’t realize at first is that there are even more advanced kits to get you brewing a bit more like the big boys.

To move on from the basic brew kit you want to add a large pot to your brew making arsenal, as we are now adding an extra step to start of the brew making process. You may even pick one up at your local home brew shop and you probably should head down there to pick up all your beer ingredients.

The home brew shop will be able to help you move on from the no boil “hopped wort” beer kit to the slightly more complex extract kits and even on to brewing up a full mash beer from grain and hops.

The benefits of the more advanced kits are that not only do you get more of a choice in the final flavor of the beer, is that with boiling the wort you kill off any undesirable microbes that may be in the wort that could lead to a bad beer. Also many home brewers who have advanced to this stage never go back, while the extra process is a bit more time consuming and messy, the results of a more commercial quality beer generally speak for themselves.

Example of an advanced kit requiring boiling

If you want an enjoyable and interesting day out when visiting Singapore book yourself into the Tiger Brewery where you can not only learn how this tasty drop is produced but sample a little bit of it the end of the tour. For about $10 you can visit the brew house, the packaging hall and the beautiful Tiger Tavern. Located behind the Raffles Golf Course it is in easy reach of all of the island city by MRT and Bus. The brewery offers three tours most week days and is conducted in English. For most visitors other than the sample at the end the historic presentation of advertising and beer memorabilia is the highlight of the tour, there is some very cool antique beer making equipment and paraphernalia. Tiger is one of Asia’s biggest beers being brewed in both Singapore and Malaysia, it has won a whole trophy cabinet of prestigious awards for excellence over the years and is available in over 50 countries.

The brewery is located at 459 Jalan Ahmad Ibrahim Singapore 639934.

http://www.apb.com.sg/exp-breweryTour.html

Last week we introduced you to the basic home brew kit. Nearly everyone who gets into home brewing starts with one of these, if you picked up one of these new you will have along with your fermenter tub and various other doo dads, your beer in a can mix.

The beer in a can mix is the simplest way to start brewing, they are also often called a no boil kit because you don’t have to boil anything to start off your wort. Wort is the name given to the liquid and sugar mix that you will mix up in your fermenter that you add yeast into, to turn it into lovely beer, these beer in a can mix are often referred to as hopped wort.

So with a beer in a can mix or no boil kit a lot of the hard work has been done for you, traditionally you would have to boil in grain or hops to get your desired flavor but with these kits you get more time to drink your beer. Simply add the mix to your sugars and water with some yeast and your done. A slightly more advanced style involves replacing the sugars with a tin of malt extract.

Once many people have mastered the basics of home brewing they often have a desire to move onto the next step that involves mixing in grains and hops. Fortunately there are advanced kits to make the process simple that along with can of beer mix you get a big teabag full of grain that you boil together and then cool before fermenting.

Examples of a simple brew kit

Coopers Larger Beer Kit

Coopers Wheat Beer Kit

Example of a advanced brew requiring boiling

German Oktoberfest Home Brewing Ingredient Kit

Many beer connoisseurs like ourselves at one point or another get tempted to brew their own beer, it’s cheap, fun and pretty easy. Over the next few weeks we are going to cover the processes of home brewing and this week we are starting off with the beginners basic brew kit. So if you want us to dumb down home brewing read on.

The basic starters brew kit contains a big tub with an airlock, a hydrometer, a big spoon, a capper and a few other bits and pieces to make your first brew. To start off with you will put the sugars and the can of brown gooey beer mix into your sterilized tub, add water and the yeast give it a big stir and then seal the lid with the airlock in place this will start bubbling over the next few days as the yeast reacts with your mix of beer goodness and lets off CO2. After about a week you can then bottle and cap (testing with the hydrometer first will confirm its ready), when you bottle you put a bit of sugar in your bottles that the remaining yeast reacts with, this is what carbonates the beer in the bottle and they should be about ready in a week.

So there it is, pretty simple right? This is the easiest way to get into home brewing as it’s just like making cordial. There are more advanced ways to brew beer with more steps involved that we will cover in the next few weeks. These kits are available in places like K Mart and many are made by Australia’s Cooper’s brewery, they are a good start but we also recommend finding a home brew shop in your area as they will give you more choice of beers types ready to dump into to your brew tub to get brewing.

Coopers Home Brew Kit as pictured available from Amazon.com

Being a Sunday we thought we would pause for a religious moment and tell you about good old St Arnoldus or Arnulf or Arnold to his mates. St Arny is the patron saint of the hop pickers and the Belgian brewers. He was born in Flanders in Belgian around 1040 and lived to a ripe old age in those days of around 47 and was a career solder before joining the Benedictine monastery in Soissons France. He became a hermit for a few years before becoming the Abbot of the monastery before becoming the bishop. The abbey brewed beer under leadership at the monastery. Today in Brussels they have a special day in July where they remember Saint Arnoldus with a huge parade which they call the ‘Day of Beer”.

We have decided that Thursdays will be brewing day on Hoppsy. Every Thursday we will have a story which will help you brew your very own delicious beer in your spare room or shed.  If you have any tips which could help other brewers start up or improve their brews please drop us a line, we would love to hear from you! We are firstly going to talk about ingredients today’s ingredient is Malt.

Malt is made from cereal grains including wheat and barley, rice or even maize, barley is the most popular in beer productions but many brews use a combination of malts and different types of the same grain. The malting process occurs when the grain wet and is allowed to germinate quickly. It is then dried in a kiln before the plant develops too much. Sometimes grains are toasted to make darker beers adding additional colour and flavor to the brew. The malting process develops special enzymes what are required to turn the grain’s starches into sugars and also enzymes that help break down proteins that the yeast needs to do its work. For the unexperienced brewer you can purchase  what is called malt extract from your brew shop where the malts have been made into a syrip like product  where you only need to add water and yeast and additonal sugars to produce your brew.