BREWING
Although the brewery has access to water from a borehole it has opted to use municipal supply. The borehole water is too hard for brewing and would require RO treatment to be suitable. The energy consumed and wastewater produced would not t well within the sustainable model – and the municipal water is as soft as kitten fur. Jeremy uses two mashing regimes. For his British Lager which is based on the German Helles style, he uses a two- step temperature programmed mash with stands at 63 ° C and 72 ° C. For his Pilsner which is more in the Czech style he uses an exotic programme/ decoction mash, or perhaps procoction (someone should trademark that term now, before it really takes off). The mash starts in the same way
Fuggles can be used to make com- parable beers to those found in the beer halls of Bavaria, while retaining a unique English character. Especially for a lightly-hopped style like Helles, where hops take a back seat to the clean malt pro le and bitterness is restrained. For the Lager he uses Whitbread Golding Variety and East Kent Goldings and for the Pilsner, generous amounts of the modern variety Jester. Fermentation is undertaken at 8-9 ° C and as at Mad Squirrel 1bar top pressure is maintained at the end to retain natural carbonation. At the end of fermentation, beers are transferred to dish-bottomed cylindrical conditioning tanks and after a VDK rest at 5 ° C, chilled to -5 ° C for the 21-day lagering. 20% of production is sold un ltered and for the remainder ltration is via two lenticular lters. Beers are currently kegged in-house on a Malek Twin II 1- RF kegger. So far, it’s so good for Utopian. The brewery is so busy Jeremy has already recruited another German-trained brewer to work alongside him. The Great British drinking public seemed to have wholeheartedly embraced the concept of a British lager. The German-trained brewer’s view Both Jeremy and Matthias have been brewing in the UK for nearly four years. Their experience in the UK is very much
the pace of growth in number of brewer- ies is far slower and it would be decades before he could be in control of a brewery or its beer. The UK offered an opportunity to have greater in uence sooner – and you don’t get any more in uence than starting up a brand-new brewery and designing each beer from scratch. The Utopian Brewery is on a farm specialising in Ruby Red Devon cows near the hamlet of Bow which is about six miles outside Exeter. In recognition of the beautiful location of the brewery Utopian has set out to brew according to sustain- able but commercially sensible principles. A key part of that sustainability is limiting the food miles of its beers. This means that Jeremy was set the chal- lenge of making excellent lager without access to continental malt and noble European hops. One slight compromise is the Frohberg-type lager yeast from NCYC which is pitched vessel-to-ves- sel for up to eight generations. That said, I’m not sure it’s possible to give micro-organisms nationalities (unless you can clearly identify their lederhosen under the microscope). Malt is supplied by Bairds and Jeremy uses dextrin malt, which is produced to be under-modi ed, along with the company’s standard lager malt. This is designed to mimic the less-well modi ed malt typical in Germany.
as the Helles with a temperature- programmed mash heated in the
MCV from 63 ° C to 72 ° C, but for the nal temperature raise a third of the mash is pumped to the kettle and boiled for 10 minutes before being returned to the MCV. Using English hops to produce beer which evolved around the use of classic European varieties like Mittelfruh and Saaz would probably be top of the list of concerns most brew- ers would have about Utopian’s lager meets sustainability approach. Jeremy argues that when used correctly, hops like Goldings and
At the end of fermentation Utopia’s beers are transferred to dish bottomed cylindrical conditioning tanks and after a VDK rest at 5°C, chilled to -5°C for the 21-day lagering.
november 2019 I BREWER AND DISTILLER INTERNATIONAL ● 35
i bd.org.uk
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