14 October 2010

Canberra's other commercial brewers - The Stricklands

| johnboy
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Chris Shanahan has a solid write up of the new commercial brewer in town, the masonic Stricklands with their “1842” based on a recipe found in an ancestors family bible.

About ten years ago the Stricklands found the recipe, written in German, in the spine of their grandmother’s bible. Later, they had it translated and asked brewing consultant Brian Watson if he could brew from it.

Watson modified the recipe with the Stricklands and Denis Coldabella, brewer at Southern Bay Brewing Company, Victoria. Coldabella then trialled and tested a few small batches with the Stricklands before producing the first 5,000 litre commercial brew.

I’ve had it at All Bar and it seemed up to scratch.

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johnboy said :

I meant more that you haven’t really stuck by the recipe if sending it out for testing and tweaks.

Ah. Good point. If you’re so vehement about sticking to the original recipe why ask whether you need to change it? In fact, they say on their website that the commercial brewery who brewed it for them did their own tweaking too.

Bizarre.

RiotACT doesn’t like carons, an inverted circumflex, and so Plzen (with a little squiggle over the n) comes out Plze?.

Why is this Johnboy? Is it just the slavic languages RiotACT doesn’t like or will I have trouble writing French stuff like cafés or the Welsh name Siân?

If it ain’t ASCII we just don’t want to know.

johnboy said :

And if the old recipe was so important why were they focus grouping it amongst the ladies of their lives?

Assuming most beer drinkers are men (a pretty fair assumption) you can double your market if you can get the ladies on to it.

Was in New York the year before last and visited a bar called Spitzer’s Corner (http://www.spitzerscorner.com/) they had maybe 40 or 50 different beers on tap and a bunch more in the bottle. And the place was absolutely packed with at least half of the crowd made up of 25-40yr professional New York women downing pints of ales and lagers of all sorts of colours and types. A glorious thing. Why can’t we have that here? (yes, I know NYC is a bigger place than Canberra but it was pretty cool to see so many women enjoying stouts and red ales and hefeweizens)

I meant more that you haven’t really stuck by the recipe if sending it out for testing and tweaks.

davesact said :

Was 1842 a particularly good year for beer recipes?

1842 was the year that Joseph Groll, for which Grolsch is named, developed Pilsner Urquell which was probably not named Pilsner Urquell then. As far as anyone can tell it was the first pale, sparklingly clear lager.

It was pale because the water in Plze? (in Bohemia – there was no Czech republic then) is incredibly soft and so the enzymes in the mash tun can happily chew up the complex carbs and turn them into simple, fermentable sugars without the brewer having to increase the acidity of the water by adding burnt, roast malts (which would turn the beer dark). Other water sources, like the Liffey in Dublin and the Thames in London, fed from chalk hills would produce very hard, limey water that needed a pH adjustment and the way to do this was to add darker malts – hence London porters and Irish stouts.

It has been suggested (no reference here but I’m sure I can find one) became very popular because around about the same time that Pilsner Urquell was developed, or a bit later, cheap glassware started to be produced. Until this time the general public would drink beer in ceramic mugs and couldn’t see, the potentially, cloudy beer they were drinking. Cheap glassware for the masses allowed people to appreciate the aesthetic of pale, clear lagers.

And so we can thank Joseph Groll and Pilsner Urquell for inspiring everything from Heineken to VB to Stricklands 1842.

Beer History lesson for today is over. Class dismissed 🙂

beer recipe found in a bible? was it something like:

get water.

find jesus.

ask for miracle, noting to jesus that wine is so passe, but pilsner..? now we’re cooking.

acquire appropriate pint glasses and kegging equipment.

assemble masses.

(then before jesus skives off again, ask him if he knows anywhere to get good chips…)

Thoroughly Smashed3:05 pm 14 Oct 10

On more than one occasion Chris Shanahan has reviewed a world class beer and panned it, essentially for having too much flavour. And then he’ll give 5/5 to one of the world’s many nondescript, flavourless lagers that you’d never identify if it had no label.

p1 said :

See, religion isn’t all bad.

The Trappists certainly do make some damn good beer and cheese.

sirocco said :

http://www.stricklandsbeergroup.com.au/

awesome… (*sarc*)

another tasteless “premium pilsner”

haven’t we got enough of those already? (Bluetongue, Bluebottle, Boag’s, Cascade, Toohey’s Pils, Coopers 42)

An unfortunate commercial reality of brewing in Australia, it seems, but with any luck it might be successful enough to give them the opportunity to experiment a little.

Was 1842 a particularly good year for beer recipes?

Woody Mann-Caruso2:54 pm 14 Oct 10

Wish they’d make up their minds. Was it in the spine of his grandmother’s bible or his great-great-great-great grandfather’s journal? Why was the recipe in German rather than Czech, the language of Bohemia? Why would a Bohemian brewer’s assistant develop a recipe flavoured with ‘[fruity] hop varieties that are normally found only in [India Pale Ales]‘, a style for which demand was only just developing in England at the time? Or was the beer not brewed ‘strictly according to the original recipe using modern techniques’ after all?

And if the old recipe was so important why were they focus grouping it amongst the ladies of their lives?

http://www.stricklandsbeergroup.com.au/

awesome… (*sarc*)

another tasteless “premium pilsner”

haven’t we got enough of those already? (Bluetongue, Bluebottle, Boag’s, Cascade, Toohey’s Pils, Coopers 42)

See, religion isn’t all bad.

Woody Mann-Caruso11:57 am 14 Oct 10

“1842? based on a recipe found in an ancestors family bible

Colour me skeptical.

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