Burton Ale- Our first UK collaboration on the Union.
For our first UK collaboration using the Union, we thought we’d ask our old friends from the London-based Kernel Brewery to visit. It didn’t take long to decide what to brew together – 13 years ago, Evin, the founder of the Kernel brewery, had travelled north to spend a couple of days with us here. We’d brewed a ‘Burton ale’ together on the original brewery at Thornbridge Hall, on a beautiful sunny day, producing approximately 30 casks. Evin couldn’t remember trying it, plus what could be better to make other than a Burton ale using a Burton union system?
Burton ales were an old family of beers that went out of fashion long ago, although they are the beers that made Burton famous, long before IPAs became popular. Burtons were typically strong, dark ales, without the roasted, burnt flavours of a stout, but with a sweet, fruity taste. It continued to be one of the three most popular beers on the bar right up until the 1950s, particularly in London, according to renowned beer historian, Martyn Cornell. A typical price list in the 1930s in a pub would show Mild, Bitter, Burton ale and Stout available; perhaps a Porter too.
However, as always in the world of beer, times and tastes change with the wind. This style of beer died a death quite suddenly and by the 1970s, they had all but disappeared on draught in pubs. Fullers replaced their Burton ale with a new beer called ‘ESB’ in 1971. In my opinion, there are many beers still brewed today that resemble what previous generations of drinkers would recognise as a Burton ale, including Marston’s Owd Rodger, Adnams’ Tally Ho, Theakstons’ Old Peculier and JW Lees Moonraker (it’s worth noting at this point that Ind Coope’s Draught Burton Ale, or DBA, released in 1976, was not a true Burton ale in the traditional sense, but rather a cask version of Double Diamond, an IPA that was to be found on keg at the time).
As well as Burton, many breweries in London brewed the Burton ale style. Courage, Barclay Perkins, Fullers and Youngs all made several different strengths of Burton ale. Evin and I had developed our Burton Ale using recipes we’d found from these London breweries, chiefly from the 1930s, as a nod to Kernel’s London roots. All our emails from back then have long been deleted, but luckily I found the recipe we used hiding in an old brewery folder, stored in the rafters of Thornbridge Hall.
The malt grist is fairly simple – pale and mild ale malts combine with crystal malts to bring a rich sweetness, a little black malt added at the end of mashing to emulate the rather heavy addition of caramel. Lashings of Goldings hops added at the start and end of boil, along with hefty blocks of my favourite brewing sugar, the dark and toffee-like ‘Invert No.3’. These days we have to make our own, using Invert no.2 (the brewing sugar we use in the Union IPA) and a pail of treacle-like cane molasses. Evin and Chris from the Kernel joined us for the first cask brew and helped get the beer in the union the day after, with a few pints sunk in Sheffield on the evening between.
The whole brew was cast into our Burton union set down behind the taproom and we fermented it with our British yeast strain to really get the fruity, bittersweet flavour. Five days later, the Burton ale was dropped into the bottom troughs and run into the racking tank. It tasted very much like how I remembered it from the first time we brewed it - malty sweet, warming but not too heavy, perhaps with a softer finish than the original. It’s a very comforting, dark ruby red beer with lots of fruitiness reminiscent of raisins and plums. While we took the sensible decision to lower the ABV from the original 7.2% to 5.5% for the cask brews, the bottle version will be back up at 7.2%, bottled conditioned and in 500ml amber bottles of course. I know what I’ll be drinking on Christmas day this year!
Written By Dominic Driscoll, Production Manager