Visiting WharfeBank Brewery

Yesterday morning we attended the official opening of WharfeBank Brewery. Despite only being a recent addition to Yorkshire’s brewing fraternity they’re causing a ripple already with their full-bodied ruby beer CamFell Flame winning Beer of the Festival at the Leeds Beer Festival this year.

We timed our arrival perfectly to coincide with that morning’s mashing in, which unleashed great malt-scented clouds of steam up into the rafters; no matter how many times you smell it, it always takes me by surprise at how wonderfully comforting it all is. Tony Jenkins, working tirelessly throughout the day, took us through the process, the equipment itself, and the genesis of their core beers.

WharfeBank currently brew three core ales: Tether Blond (4.1%abv), Slingers Gold (3.9%abv) and the aforementioned CamFell Flame (4.4%abv). Seeing the hops piled high in the cold storeroom, I remark that there seems to be a lean towards high-alpha hops (which I’m happy to see), and Tony concedes that the recipes have been formulated to simply give new twists on traditional tastes. This seems like simplicity itself, but as an ethos it’s a good one.

Taste-wise, the beers are certainly very good. CamFell remains my personal favourite of the stable, full of gently roasted flavours and an ever-so-subtle coffee aftertaste. It’s a surprisingly light beer for one with such a deep, rounded flavour, and is dangerously sessionable. Sessionable seems to be a pre-requisite, as Tether Blond is refreshing; super-pale and loaded with fragrant citrus notes. Slingers Gold continues that citrusy freshness on the nose but is smoother and fuller in the body.

WharfeBank is the baby of Martin Kellaway, an ex-cricketer who dived into the world of brewing whilst working with Caledonian and Fuller’s. He also owned the Fox & Newt Brewpub for a while as a tenant landlord and began crafting beers on their on-site kit. After gaining some investment through local grants and supporters, WharfeBank was born.

He should be proud; the brewery itself is all excitingly shiny and new, and the staff were only too-happy-to-help. The opening itself was a success; plenty of people there, some wonderful locally-sourced barbecue to go with the beer, and I’m sure that when Lib Dem MP and all-round-good guy Greg Mulholland formally declared WharfeBank open, the team breathed a collective sigh of relief.

Leeds-wise ,Wharfebank’s beers are currently available at The Grove, and will be available in Wetherspoon’s shortly. If you are a pub who wants to get WharfBank’s wares on the bar, then jump over to their website (linky above) for details. Special thanks to Tony Jenkins and Dhiraj Pujari.

Five Towns Brewery - Homebrewer to Brewer

Five Towns is a brewery that deserves your attention. Why? Because Malcolm Bastow, who essentially is Five Towns, works full time. As in, in another job. Not in any old dull job either – as a Nurse. Any man who works for our health service whilst knocking out quality beers deserves a medal as far as I’m concerned, and it was whilst enjoying a pint of his at this year’s Leeds Beer Festival that I mused on how he fit it all in. So I asked him, dropping him an email, as you do. Many months later, he responded, but given his schedule, I’m honoured that he took the time at all. It’s been a pleasure to speak with Malcolm, and here’s what he had to say.

Leigh: Can you tell me a little about how Five Towns started?

Malcolm: Probably like many other brewers, I started making home-brewed beer in the mid eighties - 'John Bull' kits from Boots. In the early Nineties I discovered M&D Homebrew in Wakefield, and they introduced me to partial or full mash brews. I bought the necessary equipment and started full mash brewing and never looked back. I continued to brew 9 gallons of real ale about twice per month. I started thinking seriously about commercial brewing around 2001, finally making the decision to contact Dave Porter Brewing Consultants in 2006. From that point, it took a couple of years to sort out the planning permission sort out a loan etc before ‘going live’ in September 2008.
What - or who - is you inspiration to brew? What, would be Timothy Taylors' Landlord and almost every Rosters/Outlaw beer I drank! Who, would be Dave James - ex Fernandes Brewery, now East Coast Brewery. Dave set up Fernandes brewery below the Home Brew shop in Wakefield and opened the Brewery Tap; which was at the time the best outlet for real ale in Wakefield. I was still home-brewing whilst watching Dave take the plunge.

Tell me about your core brews.
Outwood Bound is a chestnut coloured beer with a toffee nose and strong dry bitter finish. It’s brewed with American yeast and lots of Cascade Hops. Callum's Best is a dark coloured beer brewed with Maris Otter and Chocolate malt giving a full flavour and bitter finish. This was my first full mash beer while still home brewing.
Niamh's Nemesis is a full bodied IPA with hints of grapefruit before a dry finish. It’s inspired by Punk IPA and Empress of India. Outside Edge an easy drinking, light coloured, lightly flavoured beer finished with Cascade Hops. This is based on the type of beers I brewed before going commercial.
Which is your favourite? As you will see from my favourite beers from other breweries, i'm into strong and hoppy beers at the moment. So I will have to say that Niamh's Nemesis (5.7%) and Peculiar Blue (6%) are my current favourites. Strong but remaining bitter, with loads of Cascade and Nelson Sauvin hops.
....And your favourite brews from other breweries?

· Punk IPA - Brewdog
· Jaipur - Thornbridge
· Empress of India - East Coast
· Absolution - Abbeydale
· Old Peculiar - Theakstons (from the wood) (Oh, great choice – Leigh)

So, how do you find both working full-time and brewing? Hard work at times! It's like wearing two hats - both jobs are completely different. The nursing role I have is quite stressful at times and when I first went commercial I found that stressful as well. Suddenly having a Loan to pay which relies on you selling beer gave me some sleepless nights. It was only after the first five or six brews - when I felt comfortable with the equipment and started to get the positive feedback - did the stress lessen. Although most of my spare time is spent brewing, selling and delivering real ale, I enjoy that side of my life so much that it makes it all worth while.

Where can we find your beers? I try and sell to pubs that I know are going to look after the beer, so mainly pubs in the 'Good Beer guide. Mr Foley's (Leeds), The Star Inn (Huddersfield), North Riding Hotel (Scarborough), Bonhommes (Filey), West Riding Refreshment rooms (Dewsbury), The Navigation (Mirfield), Red Shed and O'Donohues (Wakefield), Brewers Pride (Ossett), Fat Cat (Sheffield), Market House (Elsecar) take most of my beers plus the Brown Cow Brewery and Boggart distribute further afield.

...And what are you plans for 2010? It's taken me so long to respond half the years gone! I have trialled bottling Callum’s Best and Niamh's Nemesis and plan to start producing regular bottle conditioned beers by the end of the year.
Any advice for budding brewers out there? If you can produce good quality full-mash brews as a home brewer, don't be put off by the hurdles of planning permission etc. The reward of being able to drink beer you have produced in a local pub makes it all worthwhile.

What makes Malcolm’s story resonate with me is that I am an all-grain homebrewer too – and one that harbours hopes of one day making the leap into producing beer that you all can enjoy. Malcolm makes that leap look altogether less scary on the outside - although he would probably disagree! There are plenty of us out there – Boak & Bailey dabble as well, for example - and Hardknott Dave has been logging his experiences on his blog. Homebrewing is the start of many great breweries that we know today. Five Town's Beers are solid, tasty and well balanced - I can recommend both Callum’s Best and Davy Jones’s locker, and I hope you give them a try. Give homebrewing a try too – I can honestly say that I’ve learnt more about Beer by brewing it than I ever would by simply drinking it. If you fancy dipping your toe in (so to speak), then I would start at the Jim’s Beer Kit forum – as well as ICB. They are both packed with excellent advice from enthusiastic, friendly and knowledgeable brewers.

Kirkstall Brewery Remembered

Although many Loiners are still mourning the loss of Tetley’s to the city, it’s easy to overlook the fact that we actually had another major brewery operating in Leeds up until 1983. There’s not much info out there about Kirkstall Brewery, and I in fact had to glean what little info I could about it the old-fashioned way: going to the library and reading.

The brewery started life in 1793 when two enterprising young men, Henry Cooper and Joseph Musgrave bought some land by the canal to start independent malting operations. In 1833, Musgrave’s business was bought by Hunslet-born Thomas Walker, who stopped malting and turned the two buildings into one brewery. He didn’t do a very good job of it, and died bankrupt. On his death, the brewery fell into the hands of Simeon Musgrave (Joseph’s eldest son), who promptly sold it to a chap called Benjamin Dawson. Dawson & Co obviously saw potential, and bought Cooper’s malting as well. A period of expansion followed; the land became the site for the brewery as it stands today.

Kirkstall Brewery Co bought the brewery when Dawson died. I’m not sure where they came from, or who was involved, but according to Dyson & Grady’s excellent Blue Plaques of Leeds, they churned out around 26,000 barrels of beer per year. It would seem that ales of all types – from Milds to Stouts to Pales – were brewed and exported in a healthy fashion; using the waterways. In my picture you can see the arched doorways by the waterline; this would be where the hogsheads would be rolled onto barges, and then transported up the Leeds-Liverpool Canal onto Goole. Here – and this is my favourite part of the story – they were loaded onto the SS Kirkstall and SS Charante and sailed around the world. Not much information exists about either boat, but according to Dyson and Grady they sailed as far as Australia and New Zealand - quite a feat!

In 1936 Dutton’s of Blackburn took over, but sold up to Whitbread’s of London in 1954. Whitbread’s overhauled the plant, increasing capacity to 62,000 – but I believe their main line was Mackeson’s Stout by this time. Another overhaul increased capacity again to 250,000 barrels per year, but the brewery closed for good in 1983. The brewery is now a Halls of Residence for Leeds Met University – although the trained eye, it’s clear what the building once was. At least the conversion has preserved the building - I wonder how many students get the irony of being housed within a brewery? If you want to see it, the brewery sits on the Leeds-Liverpool Canal, straddling the border of Kirkstall and Bramley.

The excellent Leodis website has a number of pictures of wagons, and suggests the the nearby Bridge Inn was at one time a Kirsktall Brewery Pub. Please do head over there for some wonderful archive pictures to support this post.

I’d love to know more about Kirkstall Brewery. Sure, it has a blue plaque, but it’s hidden from view, about ten feet up in the air and off the main road outside it. Who were the Kirkstall Brewing Co? What did they brew - what beer, brewed here, ended up in Australia? If anyone can add to this story, please contact me.

The Leeds-Dortmund Connection

As a young scamp, meeting your mates in ‘town’ in the eighties and early nineties meant only one place – ‘The Fat Man with The Barrel’. We didn’t care who he was, with his mercurial grin and smiling eyes poking out from under his cap, and we cared even less. He was just ‘the’ place to meet and tower over us as we plotted how to get our underage selves into The Odeon cinema to watch Tim Burton’s Batman.

Given that I see the rotund fella most days as I travel to work, I started thinking only recently about his connection with Leeds – and how that connection is Beer.

Leeds was twinned with Dortmund in in 1969, and to celebrate ten years of partnership, we were presented with the bronze Dortmund Drayman, which was sculpted by a chap named Arthur Shulze-Engles.
In my mind, the beer connection hits home straight away. Whereas Leeds has beer, with Tetley’s in particular propping up its history, Dortmund has its Pale ale. Dortmunder Union were, as the name suggests, a cabal of smaller, local brewhouses who joined forces to brew a new, pale, pilsner-style thirst quencher for the factory workers, and became the largest exponents of the style in the process. The beer became known simply as “Dortmunder Union” and the rest is beery history. This refreshing, crisp pale ale was so popular that Dortmunder Union became Germany's largest brewery for a while. Although dwarfed by Pils sales these days in the homeland, the style has its fans and remains somewhat cultish over here.

I’ve sipped Dortmunder Union many a time at North Bar – in fact, it was a bit of a staple when I was younger and didn’t know enough to make an informed decision when faced with North’s kaleidoscopic beer list (They have DAB on tap nowadays). To me and my buddies, ‘Union’ was a clean, crisp lager sophisticate, and it certainly helped those long hot summers (that we don’t get anymore, it would seem) go by a lot faster. Purists would argue that DU is a style in itself, something that I personally don’t agree with, but I’m glad we are twinned with a city with something of interest to me- and I hope that others agree with my notion that ‘The Fat Man with the Barrel’ should stand proudly (but thirstily) side by side with our glowering Black Prince in terms of sights to see in Leeds.