Bluffer's Guide
Cheltenham's own brewery
Battledown Brewery LLP The Keynsham Works, Keynsham Street, Cheltenham, GL52 6EJ
Bluffers Guide
How to sound like a brewing expert! A bluffer’s guide to the brewing process.
Our process starts with water, pure and simple, then we do our best to complicate that with some very old and peculiar words. For each gyle we charge the Hot Liquor Tun with liquor, and, if anything needs adding in the way of minerals etc, this is usually when it’s done. We’re lucky with ours, we don’t add anything, well hardly anything, - we’ve got to have some secrets. Some brewers burtonise the liquor, we don't. The liquor is heated up to the strike temperature. This is usually done overnight as watching this is as exciting as watching a kettle boil, well very similar really, only bigger, much bigger.
A carefully measured amount of various barley malts is crushed and any adjuncts added, this grist is moved to the Mash Tun, where it is doughed-in with the hot liquor from the tun. The goods, are steeped, (the first runnings being added back to the top of the grain bed until they start to run clear) then sparged for an hour using more liquor to extract the sweet wort. This hot wort is pumped into the copper via the valentine and underback, and heated to a slow boil; bittering hops being added in various quantities at various times over the next two hours and aroma hops added towards the end of the boil. The boil continues until the required gravity (O.G.) is achieved, at which point the wort is rapidly cooled and, leaving the trub behind, moved into the fermenter where the yeast is pitched. Then, for about a week, we do virtually nothing, play cards, listen to the Archers that sort of thing. That’s about it! We might prime the casks with a small amount of brewing sugar, then we rack the green beer and bung the firkins or kilderkins and do nothing for another week or so, then, when we feel like it, we deliver them to the pub. The rest is up to you.