ACB Suffolk Monthly Meeting
Date: 2nd March 2024
Location: The Dove, St. Helen’s Street, Ipswich

Attendees: Nick Davis, Jim Pettifor, Dave Beaton, Dave Caiels, Nik Leng, Steve Plampton, Kev Warnes, Guy Gallington.

The various attendees straggled in to the Dove at various times from 11.15 onwards, and by the time folks had sorted out their pre-meeting beer, soothed their lungs with noxious substances and made their choices for lunch we got on with the serious stuff at around 12am.

Beer Challenge
As ever, we kicked off with the beer challenge…this quarters challenge is “Bitter”…no ordinary or best or other classification…just plain “Bitter”. Jim P kindly took on the role of steward and served up seven beers for us to judge. We all agreed that the standard was very high and the presentation of the beers in terms of appearance and conditioning was nothing short of exceptional.

Once the judges had reported their scores Eurovision style, a quick bit of arithmetic from Jim revealed the winners.

In third place was Steve Plampton, in second place was Woodfordes Wherry (Jim slipped this commercial offering in as a ringer!!) but winning congratulations go to Ipswich Brewing Club member Guy Gallington. Guy has only recently joined the club, but already has presented a number of excellent beers for our consumption, and recently picked up a Gold Medal at the Scottish National Competition with an English Porter that we encouraged him to enter, after sampling it at one of our mid-week meetings.

A short break was had to empty bladders, inhale more smoke and grab another beer from the bar, before lunch was served. Thai Red Curry beat Chilli Con-Carne by 5 orders to 3.

Burnt Mill Pintle Challenge

Jim P updated us on talks he had been having with Sophie over at Burnt Mill. In short, the intention is for us to hold the Suffolk June meeting at the Walnut pub in Stowmarket. Burnt Mill will provide us with the recipe for Pintle, a Pale Ale brewed with Cascade, Citra and Kazbek hops. We will brew the beers and bring them along to the June meeting which will be attended by one of the brewers from Burnt Mill who will judge the beers that we have brewed and also give us a talk about Burnt Mill itself.

Jim will post the recipe on the website so that it is visible to club members who wish to brew the beer.

More details will come later when we have confirmed with the venue and Burnt Mill that they will be in attendance.

ACB Homebrew Competition 2024

With us being unable to secure the Briarbank in early July as originally planned, due to various weddings and other events, along with Reading Amateur Brewers holding a comp in mid June, the decision has been made to seek an alternative date later in the year. The Welsh National has recently been announced for mid-September and NAB will hold their comp in mid-October, so we are going to target mid-November. The comp will be focusing on American styles. Nick will contact the Briarbank to ensure that there are no brave brides who have scheduled weddings in the wintery depths of November!!!

We will also consider running some sort of festival along side the competition so that brewers and non-brewers alike can sample some of the competition entries.

More to come on this as we get closer to the date.

Long-Tail Competition

Over on our slack channels, Dom Anthony has been organizing a “long-tail” 3 way competition. This will be a 3-way regional challenge (Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk) with 8 brewers on each team. The challenge is for brewers to do a “project style” beer where they spend several months refining and improving their beer, or perhaps brew a beer that requires long term ageing.

The styles have already been chosen (Baltic Porter, Imperial Stout, Lambic, Barley Wine, Belgian Strong Ale, Winter Seasonal Beer, Double IPA, Specialty Wood Aged) and I believe that the Essex team have already chosen which beers they will each be brewing. Ipswich and Norfolk need to confirm who will be brewing what.

The intention is that beers will be swapped sometime around March next year, so folks have plenty of time to put their best beer forward.

Hook Norton Brewery Tour

You may well have seen today’s comment by Colin Miller on slack but just to reiterate this (as Steve P did give us an update at the meeting)…

The dates of the tour are Tuesday 1^st October to Thursday 3^rd October with the tour itself taking place on the 2^nd. The intention is to travel down on the 1^st and stay overnight for two nights. Colin is looking in to hotels to get an idea of pricing, based on the numbers who have expressed an interest in going.

With respects to the clone beer challenge Hook Norton have set us a slightly different challenge than what we would normally have. The clone beer is “Old Hooky” ( I think that is what Steve P said!!)…the idea is that we buy the beer ourselves, drink it, and use our tasting skills to determine what the make up of the beer is in terms of its fermentables and hop schedule, and then brew our own version. The head brewer will then judge the beers that we take and only then will reveal the recipe to us.

No doubt more information will follow on this matter from Colin.

Humberdoucy Brewery Tour

The Ipswich boys are having a day out visiting Humberdoucy Brewery out in Bacton near Stowmarket next weekend. Humberdoucy is run by an ex Ipswich Homebrew Club member who also used to run a homebrew shop on Norwich Road. Will be good to catch up with him after a few years.

Vineyard Tour

Again the lads from Ipswich are looking into doing a mid-summer visit to a local vineyard. We’ve raised ideas of such an event in the past within our mid-week group, but have baulked at some of the remote locations potentially requiring doing extreme things like cycling for several miles to get there (and more importantly, cycling several miles back again half cut!!!).

Recently though Dave Beaton has made us aware of a more travel friendly vineyard that we could visit. Dave is exploring further and no doubt more details will be forthcoming in future weeks.

Cambridge Meetings

Steve P, warned that if any of us are considering attending one of the Cambridge meetings that it is advisable to take plenty of beer as the meetings are usually very well attended. Advised to make contact with Peter Jones if you plan to attend.

The Cambridge group may in the future organise one of their meetings in/around Norwich to allow Ray Ashworth to attend. Ray, as many of us will know, was the founder of Woodfordes Brewery and was a regular attendee of ACB meetings across the county. However it is not easy for him to travel to meetings these days so Cambridge may hold one of their meetings closer to Ray’s home to facilitate him attending.

Crisps Malts

Steve P, has reported that Chris Ridout (John Innes Institute) will only be growing Hanna and Chevalier malts going forward, Plumage Archer will no longer be grown due to its similarity to Maris Otter. Just one hectare of each will be grown for Crisps.

Books

A coupe of books were passed around that Jim and Nick had bought along that they felt were of potential interest to other brewers…

Cask by Des de Moor…https://desdemoor.co.uk/cask/

Guile Brews by Peter Symons…https://prstemp.wixsite.com/tritun-books

Tasting Beer by Randy Mosher… Tasting Beer, 2nd Edition:

Any Other Beers

Finally…we rounded off the day with a varied selection of beers from our attendees…

1. A 4% Brakspear Bitter Clone by Kev Warnes
2. An attempt to brew a colorless beer by Kev Warnes. Taking 10 litres of the Brakspear Bitter clone, Kev boiled this up with a bag of activated charcoal. Despite removing all the aroma, bitterness and some of the flavour, the beer remained steadfastly amber in colour!!!
3. A 4.4% Red Ale by Dave Caiels
4. A 5.6% Festbier by Jim Pettifor
5. A smoked amber lager by Jim Pettifor using base malt smoked with Hickory
6. A 5.6& Belgian Single by Nick Davis
7. A 7.7% Baltic Porter by Nick Davis
8. A bottle of Lacons Audit ale from their Heritage range at 8%…with a best before date of sometime in 2021 this beer displayed oxidation effects and was rich in sherry notes and bloody beautiful as a result!!
9. An 11% (ish) Winter ale like Barley Wine from Steve Plampton.

This wrapped up the meeting….and a few of the attendees….a few of us stayed for an extra beer from the bar and then a smaller group then headed off to the Spread Eagle to sample beers from the Grain Brewery including “ThreeOneSix”, “Chevalier 47” and Red Nelson.

Finally after talking football nonsense for a while, Dave Caiels and myself said our good byes at around 8pm and I headed off home via the kebab shop.