– Festival of Britain(s beers)
We’ve had a summertime American Beer Festival along with an autumnal Europtoberfest, so we thought it was high time we dedicated ourselves to showcasing the very best that Britain has to offer. We try and offer the best British beer all year round with our cask lines and a dedicated UK keg font, however we think we can do better, we’ll be aiming to have a complete British tap takeover (barring one or 2 branded fonts). The festival will be kicking off on Monday 26th March with a very special ‘Meet the Brewer’ event hosted by a very special guest (to be announced soon), who will also be helping us curate our selection of beers for the festival.
We wanted to give you an opportunity to get involved with the festival from the outset by providing some suggestions of beers you think are worthy of being included in a celebration of the beers of Britain, cask, keg or bottle. So speak now or forever hold your peace, or at least until next year.
– Perfect winter warmers
We have couple of special super-limited beers on the bar today.
Firstly, available for a very limited period is Thornbridge Bracia aged for 3 years in Pedro Ximinez casks. Thornbridge’s multi award winning, much lauded beer, the brainchild of their recently departed head brewer Steffano Cossi. The strong, dark, old ale/stout is a triumph in it’s bottle conditioned form, but we have one of a few casks of a barrel aged version, the choice of barrel was the famous Pedro Ximinez sherry casks. The PX sherry is famed for it’s deep almost treacle sweetness, with lots of dark and stewed fruit flavours along with deep oak flavours from the wood combine with the ale to give a complex and very refined finish to the beer. Definitely one to try while it’s here, just sip at a third and enjoy.
Also while we’re on the subject of big beers, we have one firkin of Moor Beer‘s ‘Sloe Walker’, another prize winning beer given a twist, a seasonal version of Old Freddy Walker, with sloes surprisingly enough. After a days foraging, a whole bunch of sloes are cleaned, frozen and pricked then weighed out and distributed among 10 casks, the beer is then racked over the top and left to mature for several months. The result gives a subtle acidity counterbalancing the bold flavours of the beer, it’s recommended you leave it to warm up a little to allow the flavours to really come out.
Words by Jonathan Heyes
– Saison Liaison – Part 2 / By William France
Last Thursday we had the pleasure of launching our collaborative birthday beer, “Anniversary: Saison DuPort”, a traditional farmhouse ale, dangerously drinkable at 6%. Collaborating with some of the countries most progressive brewers the temptation is to go for hops, hops and more hops, we decided to go for traditional and subtle instead, staying pretty true to style and letting the yeast do the talking.
So what’s in store for the Saison now? …..It will surface at Port Street a few times before the year is out, on keg & cask, please keep an eye out for it.
Also, the word on the street is that it’s going to be in some of the UK’s finest purveyors of the malt based beverage that is beer.The Sparrow in Bradford, Cask Pub & Kitchen in London, Mr Foley’s in Leeds, The Evening Star in Brighton and the Free Trade Inn in Newcastle have all said they would take our creation. These amazing places share our love of beer and we are so proud to have it winging it’s way to them.
The beer is also being bottled and aged, allowing the yeast to carry on doing it’s thing, we’ll maybe crack some of these on our next anniversary.
Big thanks go first of all to the brewers Summer Wine Brewery, Red Willow, Quantum, Magic Rock and Darkstar.
Not only but also, our pumpclip design and production by Alex Humphreys (Illustration), Kunstkammer (Graphic Design), Savwo (Print and ink dribbling).
Word by William France
– Saison Liaison by Jonathan Heyes
Who would’ve thunk it? It’s nye on 12 months since PSBH came in to being, it’s been an exciting year in lots of ways, not least the opportunity it’s given us to work with some fantastic brewers. Occasionally they’ve been kind enough to let us come down to the brewery and ‘help out’, this usually involves us getting in their way, offering useless suggestions, doing any menial tasks thrown at us but hopefully learning a lot along the way.
So as a celebration of our first year we decided to put together a little brew day of our own, lacking in a brewery as we are, we asked Andy and James at Summer Wine if they’d be prepared to host, we invited some of our favourite brewers down to lend a hand, Toby from Red Willow, Jay from Quantum, Mark from Darkstar, Magic Rock and of course some of us. In the weeks running up to the brew day a flurry of emails were exchanged discussing styles, methods, malt, hops, yeast strains and the like, an agreement was struck that it should be a Saison, one of a few emergent styles during our first year of business. Maybe we’d throw in a few spices here and there but keep it pretty classic.
Brewday finally arrived and we made our way at ungodly o’ clock to Honley via Huddersfield on a beautiful crisp, cold winter’s morning and were treated to a hazy, orange bloom of a sunset creeping reluctantly up over the Pennines. First things first on arrival a pre brew brew, which gave us the chance to have a peruse of the malts and hops to be used in the brew. We settled on a mixture of pale, caramalt, wheat and a little crystal rye to add a subtle spice and colour to the wort. Hops would be a mixture of more subtle euro-style hops including Aramis, Saaz, Liberty and Sterling just enough to augment the spice character of the yeast, which was provided by Mark from Darkstar, who alas couldn’t make the trip up to join us, so his yeast had to stand in for him.
The brew day continued pretty smoothly with most of the brewers standing around drinking cups of tea issuing commands to us lower caste brew monkeys. A fantastic lunch was laid on by Andy from SWB and we got down to the really important stuff, naming the beer, this is where we started to hit a few speed bumps. We spent most of the rest of the day in heated debate, my own favourite suggestion I’ve been reduced to using for this humble blog, I’m sure you’ll agree it’s clearly a stroke of genius, the others were less convinced, not that I’m bitter about it. Eventually we settled on just calling it ‘Anniversary’, hopefully the first of a series, with the subtitle of Saison DuPort, thanks to Rich Magic Rock for coming in with a last minute blinder.
Anyway I’ve prattled on quite long enough, we’ll be launching the beer on Thursday 2nd February as part of a Birthday Party we’ll be having, you’re all invited, so come along and have a little try.
Words by J. Heyes / Pictures by J. Krause
