Black Isle reared lamb - just in time for Easter!

These little beauties have been born and raised on our own organic farm.

They feed on natural grass pastures supplemented by the draff (spent grains from the brewery mash tun) and complete the cycle whereby we; grow barley, make beer, feed the bi-products to our stock, they then fertilise the ground and keep the weeds down so that we can grow more barley!

We are selling the lambs whole or half. They come as legs, chops, shoulder, shanks etc. ready for the freezer.

Price £10/kg.

Available from Thursday 5th April.

There is only a limited amount available. We and our family and friends will all be tucking into it this Easter so contact us now on 01463 811871 to avoid disappointment.

(Purchases can be picked up from the brewery.)

Spring into the season with a Black Isle Brewery barbeque.

Tis the season to be grilling... almost!

Click here to download:

Barbeque.pdf (275 KB)

(download)

Click here to download:

Barbeque.pdf (275 KB)

Pop along and enjoy some organic, Black Isle reared burgers, sausages and veggie treats.

What better way to thank the sun gods for shining upon the Black Isle, than to send up some lovely wafting barbeque smells.(Let's keep our fingers crossed that they're still smiling on us on Saturday!)

We look forward to seeing you here.

A Noble event...

On March 27th you'll find us hanging out at Nobles bar in the bohemian and eclectic land of Leith in Edinburgh. Nobles is a fantastic bar with a quirky style that's hard to beat, the staff are fab, the beers are local and interesting and the food? Well, where else can you get a rabbit burger? It's our kind of place.

If you go down to Nobles you can get a pint of Blonde, Goldeneye on keg or their bespoke Nobles IPA on cask. Except on March 27th. On March 27th we will be showcasing the following...

On keg:

A nitrogenated Red Kite (We've got a name for it, and if you come on the night you can join in with the fun)

Blonde

Goldeneye

Porter

Hibernator

Export Scotch (first time on draught)

Yellowhammer

Geoffrey the Tortoise

A brand new beer we're not telling you about, but it's brand new and ace.

On Cask:

Unfined Nobles IPA

One very very special unfined whisky aged Goldeneye that you will not be able to get again, not even once.

So that's at least five beers you've either not had on draught before, or in keg format before, or even just before. Oh and one more thing, we're holding the only UK tasting of Black Islay 2 that night too. We'll be running side by side tastings of the two versions to see the difference between the two, for no other reason than it's a good excuse to drink great beer.

The extremely talented kitchen team at Nobles will be making food to match the beer, and using the beer to cook with too. We'll be running raffles for merchandise, tastings, and our whole team will be kicking about. Colin and Chris are running an event the next night in Glasgow (details on that next week) so please be gentle with them and don't buy them any beer (well, may be one or two).

The evolution continues. Come and join us.

Our quite brilliant design guy is working away on a poster for the event which we'll publish as soon as it's ready. You can't rush genius.

Click here to download:

A3_Poster_STPDO_AW.pdf (337 KB)

(download)

Click here to download:

A3_Poster_STPDO_AW.pdf (337 KB)

To fine or not to fine?

Unless we are very much mistaken, the world of beer appears to be changing quite dramatically. Some well preserved myths surrounding our national drink are being given a right royal kicking, the latest being that clear beer is good beer. Should we use finings in our cask beer, or should we leave it 'au naturelle'?

We've always liked unfined beer and David used to serve unfined Black Isle brews in his pub, but such progression (or regression, depending on how you look at it) was often met with suspicion. Now however, unfined beer is of the time as the drinker becomes more open to education and flavour and more brewers are willing to take perceived 'risks'. It may seem ridiculous that getting more flavour and mouth feel from your beer could be seen as a risk, but it is.

Our friend Justin at the excellent Moor Brewery in Somerset has been vocally fighting this fight for quite some time, which has given a few other brewers, ourselves and Summer Wine to name two, the confidence to have another crack at this consumer 'challenge'.

Finings are not a dirty secret however, and they are not a new addition to cask beer production, they have been used for centuries and by the vast majority of cask producing breweries in the UK.

So what are finings and what are they for? Over to our Beermaker-in-chief, Sir Colin of Stronge.

"Finings are used to make cask beer clear, there are many different types of finings, but by far the most commonly used in beer production are Isinglass finings. Beer, given time will clear naturally but with the demands of the pub cellar for time and beer turn-over, the use of finings rose to allow this to happen more quickly and thus beer to take up less time and space on the cellar floor. Finings are usually added in cask.

Now for the geeky part. Ahem, science part.

"Prepared Isinglass forms a colourless jelly like liquid which is composed mostly of collagen which is a highly ordered helical polymer of positively charged particles which attract negatively charged yeast particles and beer proteins to gather together and drop out of suspension in the liquid (for the laymen, it pulls bits and stuff to the bottom of the cask)"

All hugely fascinating, but what are the benefits/downsides, Captain Colin?

"Well, for the publican this is a boon as it means the customer, who is concerned with appearance as much as they are with taste, gets what they desire, a perfectly clear pint of ale. However, this preoccupation with clarity comes at a cost. The finings remove yeast but also some floating hop compounds and oil held in the beer proteins, which are taste molecules which can improve the flavour, mouth feel and overall character of the beer. The clarity is not an indicator of quality as is assumed. In many countries clarity is an indicator that something has gone wrong with the brew and is lacking in flavour compounds which are expected to precipitate as haze in the final product. In the UK an obsession with the clarity of beer somehow lost this view around the time glass replaced traditional metal or clay tankards and the draw of the aesthetically pleasing qualities of a clear pint of ale began to outweigh the vastly more pleasing improvements in flavour brought by a correctly served beer which can carry a haze. In recent times brewers have moved more towards centrifuging beers as a way of meeting the customer in the middle, so that yeast and potential haze forming compounds are reduced in the final product and use of finings is minimised. This is an enormously costly undertaking and available only to larger breweries"

So there you go, a brief education on the origins and usage of finings. Interesting stuff, no?

Recently we conducted some taste tests in the Stockbridge Tap in Edinburgh, putting our core beers on the bar in two formats, fined and unfined. In both cases the unfined proved infinitely more popular. Happily the next fined/unfined test the Tap are running is for Moor's 'Revival'.

Still unconvinced? Go and seek out an unfined beer, ignore your predisposed objection to hazy ale and taste with your mouth not with your eyes. You'll be rewarded, we promise.

If you want to help push for unfined beer through SIBA, Justin presents his case most eloquently Here  .

Evolution not Revolution. Exciting times ahead.

From Ground to Glass

Barley drying out in the store. Lots of rain really helped speed things up

Whilst someone remembers, we thought a quick update on our barley situation might be a nice idea. After all, it's raining outside.

 Barley being extracted from the beer store.  

A month or so ago our finally dried barley was collected and shipped off site to be processed. It has now been steeped and turned in to yummy pale malt ready to brew a super huge amount of ace organic beer. This is all very exciting as this will be our first full brews with all our own malt.

We're hoping the malt will arrive in time for the Imperial Pale Ale brew schedule, so that will be a double whammy of palate wetting excitement.

Pivo in a half shell, Tortoise power!

This isn't one of those.

This new beer is called Geoffrey the Tortoise, and is named after Geoffrey the Tortoise. It may not be sophisticated, but at least it's a fairly straight forward story to follow.

Over the Christmas period our MD, David, was given a seven year old African Tortoise who was subsequently named Geoffrey. A popular African name, apparently. At around the same time, our Head Brewer, Colin was entertaining the idea of brewing a new beer for a bit of fun.

That is where the link between the two ends, and ends quite abruptly. We'd love to say that Geoff (as he is known to friends and colleagues) helped with the brewing, or went for a wander and found Colin in his office, or something else highly unlikely and probably contrived. None of those things would be true though. We simply named the new beer after the tortoise, and the tortoise is called Geoffrey.

What is true however, is that we have new beer. It is a 4.8% pale ale, it is hopped with Cascade, Pilgrim and Nelson Sauvin then dry hopped with New Zealand's finest just to make sure. It has the fantastic aroma you'd expect from the Nelson with the prerequisite bitterness in the finish you'd hope for in a proper pale ale. The word 'moreish' was heavily used during our tasting session.

We haven't bottled it, so if you'd like to try Geoffrey you'll have go to a pub and be sociable. To account for all tastes it is both keg and cask with a healthy smattering around Edinburgh, Glasgow and Newcastle over the next two weeks.

As for Geoff, he is settling in to his new home nicely. Only today he saught solace by the Aga only to be sat on by one of the dogs and then almost trodden on when Mike was frying eggs.

Watch Geoffrey in action as he scales the mountainous hearth and heads for the fire.

Happy New Beer!

As it turned out 2011 was a great year for great beer, but 2011 was so last year!

We're determind to make 2012 the new 2011 and to prove it we've bought a calender, some brewing shoes and cake (we have to eat too).

Whilst scrabbling around under cupboards, conditioning tanks and the occasional sheep looking for beer recipe books it suddenly dawned on us that we have a world class brewing team, may be they'd have some idea's? This is what Head Brewer Colin has cobbled together... 

1. Hops hops and just to make sure, some hops

Our first new brew of 2012 (Which should be mashed in by the end of the week) is an Imperial Pale Ale. The aim is for a 6.8 - 7.3% big beast of hop led yumminess. True to our roots this will be full of flavour but balanced and a bit too moreish for a beer of that strength.

2. Back to the beginning. Again.

Anyone who tried the original Export Scotch Ale should be pretty excited at the prospect of a second batch, which is this time being brewed on the big kit. The first run (which produced about 750 bottles despite the bottle numbering going up to 1400+) of this 7.9% gem was made in our old brewery with mains water.

The new brewery uses water from our borehole and gives the beers a whole new character and we're anticipating the effect on this already brilliant beer to be, well, brilliant. No doubt Colin will sneak in a tweak or two, and you can expect a whisky aged version. Don't be surprised if it ends up in red wine casks either.

3. Too Black, Too Stronge

Last year Colin brewed Black Stout, his first recipe for Black Isle. The beer was big, rich and suitably coloured. It was aged in organic Bruichladdich whisky casks and released for Christmas as Black Islay, a literal description and a word play on the reference to folk from the Black Isle. Well a new Black Stout "Too Black" will be on the agenda this year weighing in at tax man delighting 8.8% before it even gets a whiff of whisky. Whether this ends up in Rum casks too is merely a rumour we've just started and has absolutely zero foundation in fact. Yet.

4. Fields of Barley

The world doesn't have enough great Barley Wines, so we felt it was time to add to this small number. Expect a very big beer with a very high abv. The plan is to get it mashed in and through the brewing process early in the year, then lay it down for a while. This won't end up in whisky, wine, rum, baby food or anything else. Honest.

5. The Return of the Mad Chef

In June last year Tim Anderson, winner of the 2011 Masterchef competition, came to visit us and make a beer.

We let him loose on a recipe and the old brewery and he came up with a smoked weizenbock with chilli which we called Red Hot Chilli Bock. There is a good chance that the beer will be rebrewed on the new kit and given the Colin treatment. That however is immaterial as Tim is coming up to visit us again in May and he's already conconcted another brewer baffling idea which we shall launch at our Summer Shindig. Colin now has to make it work in practice...

Sometimes it makes sense to do things for marketing reasons or purely financial reasons but in this case it's because we had such a good laugh for three days the last time we wanted a good excuse to do it again. Tim also has a tendency to cook breakfast without being asked. We like that too.

6. To be or not to be that is a surprise

Despite last year being a great year for great beer one thing stood out like fox in a chicken coup and that was the UK government attack on microbrewers via the duty rise for high abv beers. However, you have to look for positives so Col is developing a recipe for a 2.7%er. We won't reveal the style, this one is a surprise!

7. To Berlin and beyond.

Jocktoberfest, our now annual beer, music and bratwurst festival will feature a very new beer from us. Last year we brewed a new wheat beer but this year the traditional German guns are coming out.

Colin did tell us what style it is but it's such an obscure sounding project we thought we'd leave it until nearer the time. It's a double pilsner with a twist, we think?

8. And if that wasn't enough...

We will also be collaborating with some other UK breweries we admire plus making a very special beer for our friends in Sweden, with some friends from Sweden.

We also have one other very different project which we will release on to the world in the next couple of months. Stay tuned.

Of course during all this fun we will be ensuring that we have plenty of the core range and that the quality is kept high and consistent. We have every intention of brewing all the beers in that list, but if they don't all make it to bar or bottle the reason is because we won't compromise what we do. 

If you have a great idea for a Black Isle beer, please keep it to yourself until next year. We have our work cut out already!

Happy New Beer folks, let's make 2012 the year of UK beer!

Our Year in Beer

Well as years go 2011 has been a cracker. Our industry is in the throws of a hugely exciting time for well crafted beer, which we have seen reflected in our growth over the past 12 months. We are 50% up on last year and we have seen some hugely exciting developments.

Below, in no particular order, are our top Black Isle Brewing Co. moments of 2011.

Our beer went foreign!

Every ambitious company wants to see a demand increase, and we saw it this year as we began to export our beers to lands afar.

Sweden were the first to cotton on to the Black Isle magic and since that initial order back at the start of the year, we have sent beer to Finland, Italy, Switzerland and yet more to Sweden. What started out as bottle orders have now seen our expansion in to the foreign draught beer market with 60 kegs of Goldeneye selling out in a week in Sweden and Yellowhammer hitting the Italian shores.

It's all very exciting and we hope to be able to announce further export markets early in 2012.

We officially moved!

...from one side of the farm to the other.

The dog isn't dead, just resting

The new brewery had been completed for a while, but new equipment always takes time to bed in and anyone who has owned a bottling line will know exactly what we mean by 'teething problems'. Still, in May we finally shifted the offices and shop from the old site to the new one.

Come dn say hello, it's really very lovely.

We employed people!

There was a sudden realisation early on in the year that we had a brand spanking new £1 million brewery and that we needed to make more beer, sell more beer and distribute more beer. All of those things require people, so we went out and found some.

First came Chris Mair, former Sales Manager for our erstwhile neighbours, BrewDog. Chris came in as our Sales and Marketing manager at the beginning of May and immediately began annoying everybody by phoning the brewery every five minutes.

As the orders increased we took on Kevin Hodge as our full time van driver/problem fixer and all round useful bloke, Kev's background is in pub management so we figured he knew how to handle a keg. Turns out he is pretty handy at drinking them too.

We were very proud to annouce the arrival in early September of Colin Stronge as our Head Brewer/Brewery Production Manager. Colin came from the fabulous Marble Brewery in Manchester and he has made an instant impact. His little tweaks have turned good beers in to great beers and great beers in to amazing beers. It seems Colin and his partner Vik have also adapted well to Black Isle life too. They now have a spaniel (it's a requirement in the terms of employment) and Colin was recently seen milking a cow and chasing a sheep up a country lane.

Last but by no means least after his stirling efforts at Jocktoberfest we asked Richard Irvine to join our team up at the brewery. Richard has a background of running small businesses and his excellent work with the online shop has proved he is worth his weight in gold. We haven't got any gold though, so we gave him a turnip instead.

We held Festivals!

In early June we held the first of what we hope will become an annual event, the Summer Shindig.

The weekend was a brilliant success. We had over 1000 folk through the doors (well, gate) with a field full of campers and a superb atmosphere. We were genuinely surprised at how respectful everyone was, picking up litter and leaving the place in such a state you would never have known there had been a massive party at all. You're all most welcome back in 2012.

Following on from the Shindig we launched Jocktoberfest which was held over the 9th, 10th and 11th of September.

Again the weekend was a smash, with even more people turning out despite the threat of severely average weather. The weather behaved and we had the most excellent Saturday night, with the tagline 'Beers, bands and bratwurst' we fully intend to do it all again next time around.

Our deal with Adnams!

We like Adnams, a big regional brewer with a real social conscience and commitment to the environment. We like Adnams a lot in fact, and we were thrilled when they agreed to distribute the kegged Organic Porter across their vast network. We already have several installations in London and the number is growing. Watch this space! 

 The only way is up as they say, except geographically speaking, in which case the way forward for us is down.

The beers!

You can't be a brewery and not mention your beers in your end of year highlights. Certainly not when your new brewer has been whipping up a storm.

It would be fair to say that we've changed tack a bit on the beer front this year. Nothing showcases this more than our collaboration with Masterchef winner Tim Anderson. Tim came up with a bonkers idea for a Smoked Weizenbock with Chilli, and we let him brew it. Turns out his pallate is pretty good, because the beer was a winner. Tim then did us the great honour of matching his food to our beer and cooking for 80 people at the Caley Sample Rooms in Edinburgh.

Following on from that Colin came along and whipped up his Black Stout, at 7.4% and destined for aging in Bruichladdich organic whisky casks we managed to rack off 2 casks and 1 keg and show the beer world where Black Isle Brewing Co is heading! The aged version we called Black Islay and is available now on our online shop. Enjoy. Sensibly.

As for 2012, well we've had a few ideas and expect to see the first very early in the new year.

Other gems fro 2011 include our new website built by our friends at Gecko New Media, our new merchandise provided by our friends at Vektor, two great events at Cloisters Bar in Edinburgh and the arrival of yet more spaniels. It's been a blast and if we listed every great moment we'd be here all night.

Thank you all for your support, custom, help and any other way you may have contributed to such a great year. We're already looking at 2012 being something of a landmark year and we hope you'll join us on the journey.

If you have any memorable Black Isle Brewing Co. highlights and you want to share them, feel free to comment on the bottom of this post. We'd love to hear from you!

Have a fantastic Christmas and a very Happy New Year.

From all of us at Black Isle Brewing Co.

Black Isle hits Glasgow in Bruadar

As the world of beer continues to evolve at an exciting rate, beer lovers are seeing the benefit in the shape of some forward thinking bars. An excellent case in point is the imminent opening of Bruadar in Glasgow. Formerly the Millhouse at the foot of Byres Road this has been taken over by Fuller Thomson, the company responsible for the Holyrood 9a and Red Squirrel in Edinburgh and Dukes Corner and Drouthy Neebors in Dundee.

The new name means 'a dream' and for drinkers in Glasgow that may very well be the case. The bar will boast 20 draught beer lines to match a menu of 20 burgers and some well stocked bottle fridges.

Fans of Black Isle can expect a treat as our Blonde, Goldeneye and Porter will all feature on keg, plus a rare outing for Molly's Vanilla Porter and the Chilli Porter on cask.

Opening night is Monday December 19th, we'll be there and we hope to see you too.

Cheers

BIBC

Black Islay: Welcome to the Evolution

Well it's been a long time coming but we've finally reached a point where we can unleash our new website on you, the World. Hello!

It has most definitely been a labour of love, lots and lots of phone calls, emails, text messages, more emails, some more phone calls and a significant amount of stress.

Anyway, with Christmas coming up we thought we'd give ourselves a present, and this is it. We hope you like it, because we've built it with you in mind.

We're at pains to state that we're not finished, this is a work in progress. Expect lots of changes in the future! We've got some great ideas in the pipeline. Lot's of fun, lots of cutting edge stuff and of course, lots of brilliant beer.

Feel free to leave comments, interact with us, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook and generally become part of it all. It's quite exciting, you'll like it!

As part of this little launch, we now have on sale Black Islay, an 8.1% Bruichladdich Organic whisky aged Imperial stout. Just click Here. You might even find some other goodies on our new shop.

Enjoy!

From all of us at The Black Isle Brewing Co.

SAVE THE PLANET DRINK ORGANIC