How Beer is Brewed must be the most common chapter in books about beer. But, as most books are aimed at beginners, these chapters are often highly simplified.

Just how elementary these introductions are was brought home to me earlier this year, when I joined Peter Scholey of Ridgeway Brewing for a day at the coal face.

Experiencing at first hand the twists and the turns of the process, and the skills that the experienced brewer uses to deal with these, I was made more aware than ever that brewing is never as straightforward as it is often made out to be.

Ridgeway Brewing does not have a permanent home. Peter brews using other people’s equipment, helping fellow brewers prosper by paying rent for his time in their premises.

But all breweries are different: they come in various sizes and have little operating quirks, so Peter’s skills are called upon more than they would be in one regular brewery.

By drawing on the local brewer’s knowledge of his equipment and combining this with his own years of experience, Peter adapts and innovates to arrive at the beer he desires.

On the day of my visit, Peter is brewing at Cotswold Brewing, on the border of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. Founder Rick Keene is a former colleague of Peter’s so the working relationship, and the trust that accompanies it, go back a long way.

Rick (pictured above, loading the malt) now specializes in supplying genuinely characterful, properly conditioned lagers to the local pub industry. His brewery is housed in a barn, constructed from the local distinctive yellow stone, on a working arable farm.

Wet July Morning

When I arrive at around 11 on a wet July morning, the brew is already in progress. Rick launched the mash, according to Peter’s instructions, at 8 am, but Peter is still nowhere to be seen.

Shortly afterwards he arrives in his old red post-bus van and I soon realize that my day here is not going to be spent as just a spectator. He’s been to collect coloured malts and yeast from a regional brewery and now I help him carry in the sacks and tubs.

The brew in question is to be Insanely Bad Elf. It’s part of a series of Christmas ales that Peter brews primarily for export to the USA. With varying degrees of strength, the series also includes Bad Elf, Seriously Bad Elf and Criminally Bad Elf.

Insanely Bad Elf, as its name implies, is the extreme offering. Peter calls it an ‘imperial red ale’ and the target ABV is 11.2%.

Such a strength immediately focuses the brewers’ minds. In order to generate enough fermentable sugar for yeast to achieve such a high alcohol content, a vast amount of malt is going to be needed.

Furthermore, because of the size of Cotwold’s mash tun (roughly 10 barrels), to acquire the quantity of beer Peter is going to need (40 barrels) the process will have to be spread over two days, and there will need to be two mashes on each of those days.

Cotswold operates a reverse osmosis plant, which means that all the minerals are stripped out of the water supply prior to brewing and then the exact mineral content required is added back.

Peter is looking for what he describes as a ‘straightforward pale ale’ liquor, which involves adding three parts gypsum to two parts calcium chloride.

Peter has chosen to shun pale ale malt in favour of pilsner malt. This is to avoid making the beer too dark. He will adjust the colour by adding crystal and amber malts, but the first mash of day one, comprised solely of pilsner malt, has already had its session in the mash tun by the time he arrives.

He’ll therefore add all the coloured malts to the second mash of the day and combine the two in the copper, which is big enough to take two mashes.

Minimum Sparging

The run off from the mash is sticky and very sweet. Sparging the malt is kept to a minimum, to avoid watering down the wort, which means that it’s not a very efficient way of mashing.

The grains could easily be sparged more, and even at this point could produce a mash with a gravity capable of generating a 5% beer, but that’s no good to Peter today. He's aiming for something much stronger. The residual sugars will be enjoyed by the cows instead as they chew on the spent grain.

But, sweet as the wort is, it’s still not going to have enough fermentable sugars to produce a beer of 11%. Sugar will be needed.

Peter (pictured left) knows how much to add by checking the gravity of the wort using a spectrometer, a telescope-like device that uses a sample of wort to produce a mark on a scale. After working through a few sums, he slowly feeds the required amount of sugar into the copper.

Calculating the amount of hops to include calls for a degree of – if not a degree in – mathematics. Peter has decided that he wants the finished beer to have around 50 units of bitterness. He plans to use Perle hop pellets for bittering, and then introduce some assorted whole leaf hops in the hop back for some late aroma.

To be sure of adding the right amount of hops, he launches into a complex equation that involves factoring in the quantity of beer, the number of bitterness units required, the alpha acid content (the level of bitterness) of the hops and the degree of isomerization of hops in a beer of this gravity (i.e. how much bitterness is likely to come out of the hops).

So it’s not just a question of tossing in a bucketful and hoping for the best. The air is filled with the lemony, piney scent of the green pellets as he slits open a vacuum pack of Perle, weighs them out and hurls them into the copper.

An hour or so later, at the end of the boil, the copper is emptied back into the vacant mash tun, which Peter has configured to operate as a hop back.

A bed of WGV, Challenger and Savinksi Golding hops has been spread on the floor of the vessel and the hopped wort sits on these for 20 minutes before being run off. It is then recirculated back through the hops on its way to finally being collected and sent, via a heat exchanger, to the fermentation vessels.

End of Part One

After the boil is over, I decide to call it a day, leaving Peter and Rick still hard at it. Apart from lacking the technical know-how, I don’t have the stamina for brewing. I’ve been here 11 hours and only seen part of the picture.

The next day batch two gets underway. Peter has tasted the hopped wort from day one and decided that it needs more bitterness, so he’s adjusting the hop ratios. Otherwise, it's another long day of mashing and boiling, just like the day before.

The result of this second day’s brewing is split evenly between two fermenting vessels, joining the output of day one. This means that an equal mix of the wort from each day is in each tank.

The yeast used is a former Brakspear yeast, where Peter used to be head brewer, so he knows its capabilities. Even so, raising the alcohol level to 11.2% is not going to be straightforward and he estimates that it’s going to take a couple of weeks at least.

In the end it takes a few days longer than that, largely because Peter has maintained a relatively low fermentation temperature. Any warmer and the level of esters would have risen too high and resulted in unpleasant ‘nail varnish’ notes.

Fermentation over, the beer is loaded into a tanker and heads for Hepworth’s in Sussex, where it is filtered and bottled. Some weeks later, Peter kindly delivers me a case of the finished beer.

It’s a beer I want to try more than I have any beer for some time. After all, I was part of its story, even if in only a tiny way.

Copper in colour, the beer is sweet and full-bodied. It has a smooth, silky texture and I spot hints of aniseed and liquorice in the modest bitterness.

There’s a boiled-sweet character, too, and estery notes of cherry and sticky dates emerge as the beer warms. Cherry and plum notes linger in the sweet, warming finish that has only the gentlest bitterness.

Insanely Bad Elf is an extremely polished barley wine that does a wonderful job of keeping out the winter chills. Even more impressive is the fact that it’s the result not of a simple mechanical method of brewing but of years of experience.

The fabled brewer’s rule of thumb has been put to good use in its brewing, which has been flexible and adaptive to meet both the aims of the brew and the capabilities of the equipment.

Rick knows how his brewhouse works and Peter nonchalantly knows which parts of the rule book he can tear up in order to achieve his desired result. Together, they achieve what, to a layman like me, seems like a minor miracle.


Note: Technical terms used in this feature are explained in our Dictionary of Beer.