What Makes Our Beer Special: Blending

While it would be nice to romanticize blending our beer as an opportunity to sit back and have a delightful drink it’s actually a very serious step in our process to create the best, most balanced beer possible. In many breweries blending is undertaken by one master blender but we see it as a team sport. Doug leads the process, but all of the brewers, many of the staff and sometimes special guests are involved in evaluating different blends to best achieve our targets.

Blending is a definitive act where we use a variety of barrels to create a beer that matches the goal for that brand. In our shop it’s very serious business!

Our blends can be from as few as two barrels and as many as eight barrels. Our biggest tank is 5000 litres, and eight of the 400 litre barrels fills up a tank to a level where it’s got some headspace in case some additional fermentation takes place. This can lead to some pretty big batch sizes and given the geographic breadth we’re trying to reach with our beers it’s nice to have some volume to work with.

By using multiple barrels we can decide to emphasize or balance various elements of our final beers. For example, in the case of Mon Chester we found a bunch of Sicilian red wine barrels gave the beer bright fruity raspberry notes and we decided to emphasize the fruit in the blend and selected barrels accordingly. If we had a beer that was too sharp and acidic in the blend we can add a more neutral barrel to balance it out. We’ve got very specific targets in mind for acid levels and flavour profiles.

In our blending process we do also undertake some scientific analysis of the in-progress beer. Acid levels in particular are evaluated via a pH measurement and a Total Titratable Acid (TTA) measurement. In this way we’ve got both our palettes and hard numbers to verify what we taste in our beer. So, in summary, blending is both an art and a science with a goal of making you the best possible beer.