As a tribute to the brewers of the Middle Ages we brew this beer by adding wood fired stones to the kettle to rouse the boil and intensify the malt characters of the brew.
Long before the wizardry of steam was invented, brewers used stone and wood to brew their daily beer. They built a fire to heat large stones until they were hot enough to be added to their wooden vats to create a boiling brew. Apart from the obvious heating effects, the brewing stones also caramelised the brew to create subtle but rich toffee like flavours.
We have a perfectly good boiler, but it is those intense malt flavours from caramelising the wort that we have gone to great lengths to create. To add further complexity we then added the sticky cooled stones to the fermenter to let the yeast have a real treat feeding on the “wort candy” during fermentation.
Stone & Wood Stone Beer - 2011
Vintage Evolution
We have often thought about the similarities between brewing beer and making music. A musician will take time to craft a song out of an idea, and eventually be happy with a song that they then perform over and over at gigs. In a similar process, brewing a beer that is available all year round is firstly about developing and crafting a brew towards an idea that you have for a beer, and once you have nailed the recipe and the process, it's then all about consistently recreating that beer over and over.
Brewing a beer once every year is a totally different story because you only get one shot at it, in the same way that a winemaker only gets to craft his wine once every year. You have a long time to contemplate the results of your efforts, and take those learnings and start to formulate what evolutionary steps the next year's creation will involve. So it may take a number of years of working with the ingredients, finding new ways of doing things, and dropping things that can be improved upon before you eventually arrive at the brew that you had in mind. Even then you still may not be able to resist the temptation to tweak things a little.
Our Stone Beer has another in built challenge to grapple with. The intricacies of heating stones in a fire, dropping them into the kettle and then feeding them to the yeast in the fermenter takes a while to get your head around. That's not something that you do everyday and it's certainly not something they teach you at any brewing school.
The 2011 brew of Stone Beer provided us with the opportunity to take another step forward on the evolution of our medieval brew. To make handling the hot stones a bit easier, we had the local boilermakers knock up a pretty sexy customised stainless steel basket. We also revisited the malt bill for the brew and made some changes with the selection and quantities of the grains to really give that toffee character of the beer a better opportunity to shine through with the help of a little more palate weight. To balance that full malt palate, we also made some adjustments to both the early and late hopping, using Tettnang and Hallertau.
Brewing a special beer once a year means that the anticipation builds up to a point where we're all hanging out to try the new years "vintage". Then we have a few months to enjoy it before the long wait until we get ready to have fun brewing it again next year. By then we will have had a chance digest the changes we've made, listen to some feedback from the drinkers of good beer around the country and gather our thoughts as we shape the next step along the way.
We're pretty happy with the steps we have taken along the Stone Beer journey, and this year's brew is yet another iteration of a beer that has its origins back to the Middle Ages.
The 2011 Stone Beer has more of that un-mistakable rich malt character across palate which is well balanced with a firmer spicy hop bitterness.
Alc / vol: 5.3%
We only make Stone Beer in small batches so it may not be available all year round.
