What A Year.. Exciting Things Are Happening!

Well what a year it has been. Before we get started, grab yourself a beer, this is gonna be a long read!

We are almost at the end of another year. We have gone from being pretty much a one man band in a 6bbl brewery to opening our first pub being the Dog House in Caerleon & employing 5 people within the brewery and pub.

Now we are growing again but with a fresh start for 2019.

We have recently appointed Lee Dunning as our new finance director who comes to the business as a very keen home brewer himself. Lee comes from a background in engineering as well as owning a property investment business with both residental and commercial properties around South Wales. With looking for a new market to invest into, Lee saw the opportunity to invest into Mad Dog.

Some of you may recall back in September/October that i was considering calling it a day? This was based on the brewery being at a point where it could no longer survive in its current size and needed investment to move on to the next phase. However, with the investment from Lee we are now very proud to announce that our brewery is increasing capacity to 12 bbl. We have very recently also installed two very large conical fermentation tanks to make a total of 4 new tanks in the brewery this year taking us up to a total of 6 tanks in the brewery.

We have also taken the decision to change the way in which we package our beer. Research into our market has helped us make these decisions as cask beer becomes harder to sell. Landlords want to keep buying at cheap rates because there is an over saturation of the market. They have the choice. Anyway, we will be producing less cask beer and focus more on keg beer. For this we have upgraded our equipment so that we can package into Keykegs and will also use Kegstar for those customers that are not equipped to serve via Keykeg.

From January our core beers are changing! Yes we will be keeping the majority of them but we will be increasing the amount of hops used in Third Eye Blind and Now In a Minute. We have sadly made the decision to remove Bohemian Hipster and replace it with Marmalade IPA which has been a huge hit when it has been brewed as a special. So when it comes to packaging well....

Third Eye Blind 3.8% – Cask, 30L keg, 440ml cans.. YES CANS!!

Marmalade IPA 4.5% - Cask, 30L Keg, 440ml cans

Now In a Minute 4.2% - Cask, 30L keg, 500ml bottle

Stouty McStoutFace 4.5% - Cask, 30L keg, 500ml bottle

We have also decided to give Now In a Minute a face lift with the hops we use to brew it. Out with the old Magnum, Cascade and Chinook and in with Fusion, Olicana and Jester. These hops will give this beer the flavour and aroma burst it so needs.

As many of you know, most of our beers are vegan friendly. We will be taking this one step further with our core beers to make them gluten free as well. No comprimise on flavour or quality. In actual fact you will not know any difference. It just means for those that have gluten allergies, they will soon be able to enjoy our beer too! Available at the sametime as our can launch!

Along with the canning of Third Eye Blind and Marmalade IPA we will also be canning the first of 24 ‘one off’ specials for 2019 which will be our DDH IPA ‘Pupa Don’t Preach’ which will be a super hot 7% abv.

You will be able to get all of our cans at our official can launch at Craft Beer Rising in London in February as well as many other selected stores and online retailers at the same time.

Talking of Craft Beer Rising, we already have many food & beer festivals arranged for 2019 including Tom Kerridges Pub in the Park in Bath.

We have an awesome team here at the brewery. Stuart Watkins our head brewer will hopefully soon have an apprentice who he will train to become just as awesome as he is at not only brewing beer but operating the brew house efficiently at the same time as creating some truly kick ass beers. We also have Samantha who is my tea maker. Only joking! Sam who is our new business development manager will be working alongside myself in helping to get our beer in the furthest corners of the UK and the rest of the world as well as setting up our events and attending them too! If you see her, go and say hello. She likes Oreo biscuits and Belgian triples ;).

Anyway, it has been an extremely stressful time for myself over the last year which almost became a final decision the close the brewery. With such a dedicated and passionate bunch of guys we have here and of course Lee’s investment we will be around for a long time yet.

We have a great future ahead of us, one i feel so excited about to the point i have not felt this excited since first starting the brewery almost 5 years ago in my home kitchen.

Please follow our journey with us. Join us at our events, drink the beer and just be awesome!

Here’s to a very exciting 2019! Happy Christmas & New Year everybody and thank you for all of the support you have given Mad Dog and myself. You legends....

Alex..

Mad Dog Founder & MD.

The future of Mad Dog Brewing Co...

Well believe me this is one post that is quite different that i almost wrote just last week.

Let's just say the past few months for the brewery have been extremely difficult financially, mentally and physically. Things are now changing for the good..

Let's reflect.

As some may already know i started the brewery in August 2014 after constructing my own brew kit and brewing just one firkin (40 litres) at a time. In January 2015 i moved into a small industrial unit and had the money to invest in a 100 litre brew kit which then allowed me to brew 2 firkins at a time. 

It was a very hard slog brewing 7 days a week and brewing twice a day. Who'd believe that for me to complete a pallet of casks for wholesale it would take 9 brews to do this instead of today's less than 1 complete brew! 

Anyway, demand got great that i sought finance in the way of a loan from the Welsh Assembly Government to help me with expanding the brewery to a new brew house and have a new brewery installed. This saw brewing capacity go from 100 litres to 1000 litres by December 2015.

Since then i have continued to grow the brewery employing more staff and buying more tanks as well as new equipment for the brewery whilst even to this very day paying myself very little or nothing at all.

Fast forward to this year where i have been faced with many challenges such as finding the right person to fit a sales role, opening our first ever pub in Caerleon, employing 6 brand new staff as well as customers we supplied with beer either going bust or simply just not paying up and going into hiding. 

This past two months has been more than just a roller coaster of emotions as well as thoughts as to where to take the brewery. Taking on so much single hand is no job for any human being and this is what i have tried to do. It came to a point that just last week i had almost decided to call it day with Mad Dog and completely walk away from the industry too. Yeh let's face it, for any business there is a level of stress and sleepless nights. Heck, i can't even remember where i went to bed at a suitable hour and slept all night! Well, let's face it, for anybody who has experience with the beer industry, it is very challenging to say the least.

Over the past few months i have gained a new friend who coincidentally has a passion for business and an even bigger passion for good quality beer. After many discussions to say the least, it was decided between us both to form a joint partnership for the brewery. This is to share the more important decisions and hopefully half the stress as well as investing in the brewery with a solid plan for the coming future for the business.

I would like to Welcome Lee Dunning as not only a new director to the brewery but as somebody who genuinely has a real passion for beer and is keen to get stuck in as much as the rest of the team.

We have a stack of plans which i will tell all about come the end of this year. But for now, Well, we will be starting by doubling the size of the brewery from 6BBL to 12BBL which will allow us to brew a maximum of 47BBL (10,340 litres in laymens terms) a week if required.

From feeling very low to finding the point to push on and battle against the worst can be extremley hard when all you can see is mist in your eyes. I'm not one for just giving up. 

We have a fantastic team of people here at the brewery. I am extremely proud of every single crew member we have. 

Anyway, i've rambled on too much. Very exciting things are about to happen with the brewery in the way we do things. Watch this space!

Alex

Mad Dog Founder & MD.

So How Did We Make ‘Let’s Try Apple Pie’?

Welcome to the first blog post from Mad Dog Brewing Co. We hope that you get to enjoy some of the upcoming posts as much as we enjoy writing them.
As ever, if you have any questions about this article, or if you have any recommendations for topics that you’d like to see covered in future editions, then please feel free to contact us.

For the first article, I thought that I’d speak about our recent beer ‘Let’s Try Apple Pie’ – after all, it’s one which seems to have prompted the most questions and sparked a lot of interest since first being announced. We appreciate that it may not be a beer which everyone likes, but it certainly seems to be one which everyone wants to try at least once. We’ve lost count of the number of times that someone has said “I don’t normally like Sour beers...” or “I wasn’t sure if I was going to like it at first...” only for them to order a second glass, or ask for bottles to take home.

The idea for ‘Let's Try Apple Pie’ came after several discussions between Al and me, about making a sour beer. It would be the first one produced on the current 6BBL equipment so we felt that it needed to be something memorable. We couldn’t decide what kind of fruit to use, or whether to use fruit at all!?! Though, in keeping with many of our other one-off beers we knew that we had to source any ‘special’ ingredients locally, and the beer had to be a bit different.
Each time we named a type of fruit, we came up with a different beer style which we thought it would be better suited to. Or that a recipe idea just wasn’t different enough.

The initial concept came from a comment of “I wonder if we could make an Apple flavoured beer?” (In all honesty, it was after a couple of Ciders and the thought was actually “I wonder if we could make a Cider flavoured beer...?”). We must have had the thought of sour beers in mind, because we quickly linked the ideas of ‘Cider flavoured’ and soured beers. 

Now that we’d decided that the first sour beer would be Apple flavoured, we had to decide how to achieve the desired sourness and fruit flavours. We quickly ruled out fruit concentrates or additives as we aim to use only whole fruits and other natural ingredients in our beers. This led us to think about using cider yeast during production of the beer!

Thanks to our friends at Palmers Uplands Cider (located in Risca), we’d got a sample of their spent yeast so that we could run some tests. pH of the sample was 3.8, which happened to be the target pH we had in mind for the eventual beer. Microscope analysis showed some VERY active wild yeast, but most importantly for us lots of healthy Gram-positive Lactobacillus bacteria were also present. 

We got straight to work designing a recipe which would provide plenty of sweet malt and biscuit flavours ... the finished beer which we now had in mind would resemble an apple pie or apple crumble with a slightly sharp finish!
We’d decided to use a ‘kettle souring’ process during the production of the beer. This meant using the spent yeast from Palmers Upland Cider to do the initial fermentation. The ‘kettle souring’ step meant that we could monitor the pH of the wort until the target of 3.8 was achieved. It’s then boiled for a second time to stop all wild yeast and Lactobacillus activity. A compromise of having the wild yeast present at this stage was that some of the sugars present in the wort were converted to alcohol (woohoo I might hear you say), but boiling for a second time meant that this alcohol was lost to evaporation, booooo! The finished beer is 3.6% abv, but if this alcohol hadn’t been lost during the boil step then the beer would have been around 4.2%.

To our surprise, the kettle souring step took only 18 hours to reach the target pH – that was some bloody active cider yeast!! When it came to boiling the now soured wort, there were some of the worst smells coming off a beer which Alex and I had ever experienced during a brew day... a mix of sour milk, cider vinegar and wet horse blankets (aka ‘Barnyard funk’ as some readers may have heard when describing beers with wild yeasts). For a short while, we looked at each other thinking that the batch might have to go down the drain, but fortunately those awful smells didn’t last long! Soon we had the caramel, apple and biscuit aromas which we were aiming for, backed up with a little spiciness and citrus from the UK Cascade hops added during the 30 minute boil... yum!

As soon as the boil was complete, the rest of the brewing process started to resemble a normal brew day; chill to 24°C, transfer to the fermenter and pitch a normal strain of brewers yeast to finish off the fermentation. We found though that fermentation took a little longer to get started than normal. We put this down to the acidity of the wort slowing the yeast from doing its thing – normal beers would have a pH around 5 at this stage, so the ale yeast wasn’t in its optimal environment.

During the fermentation and conditioning of this beer (8 weeks in all) we’d take fairly regular samples from the tank to see how the flavours were coming along. Initially, the beer tasted like a rough scrumpy cider with a small hint of beer / malt flavours in the background. Again, we had a small fear that this batch might be heading down the drain if the flavours didn’t change, but change they did! The impression of strong scrumpy faded by week 3, and the malts were becoming much more balanced with the fruit. The previously harsh sourness had mellowed out as well, but we couldn’t help but feel that there was still something lacking from that ‘Apple crumble’ or ‘Apple pie’ which we had in mind when designing the recipe. So, the thinking caps went on again, and we started to look at other flavours which could be introduced to the beer. Using small samples from the tank, we trialled some other fruits; blackcurrants, rhubarb and blackberries – all fruits that we thought would make a great apple crumble. None of those flavours seemed to work in this beer though so we started trying various spices too; nutmeg, all-spice and cinnamon.

Cinnamon... that was the one which had enough of a punch to balance the tart apples, it was also the one which best resembled the ‘Apple pie’ we were aiming for.  To the 500 litre batch of beer, we’d added 200g of cinnamon sticks to get the desired amount of spice flavour. It’s a very strong spice, so didn’t want it to overpower the other flavours. By adding only 200g, we could let the flavours develop slowly, and when they were at the correct level we’d package the beer into 330ml bottles and 30L Ecokegs. The cinnamon sticks were soaked in 3 litres of boiled water to sanitise them, and to help extract their flavours. The mix was allowed to cool to room temperature over night before being added to the fermenter.

The finished beer we feel is has a balanced flavour of apples, spice and sweet biscuit which we’d been aiming for from the start – all backed up with an underlying sourness which we hope doesn’t distract from the intended ‘Apple Pie beer. I hope that this article demonstrates some of the process involved with the design and development of a new beer. For those of you who have tried ‘Lets Try Apple Pie’ we’d love to hear from you to get your thoughts.

Stu

Head Brewer