Brewing Process

OUR BREWING PROCESS

MILLING

Best quality English barley is soaked in water to germinate and then kiln dried to produce malt - the first stage in producing the sugars needed for fermentation.

Selected malts are then gently ground through the rollers of our ancient mill to produce grist. The Malts are carefully blended to provide the correct flavour for each type of beer.

MASHING

Grist is infused (like tea) in hot liquor (water) in a large vessel called a mash tun. In this process the starch in the malt is converted into fermentable sugars.

When all the fermentable sugars have been converted, the mash bed is sparged with hot liquor (water) to extract the sugar rich liquid known as wort.

BOILING

The sugar-rich wort runs from the mash tun into the Copper ready for boiling and the addition of hops. Our beers contain only the finest quality full-leaf hops, almost all English, an essential ingredient in preserving the beer and providing aroma and dry flavours.

These carefully blended hops are added to the wort in the copper- the different varieties of hops give the beers their distinctive aromas and dry (bitter) taste.

FILTERING

The hopped wort is filtered through the hop back to remove spent hops and to help in the cooling process. The wort is then drawn down from the hop back vessel to the chiller where the hot liquid runs over cold water pipes, cooling it, before passing to the fermentation vessels, at a temperature at which our yeast thrives.

The wort is transferred into our fermentation vessels and yeast is introduced. Fermentation lasts 3 to 4 days, converting the fermentable sugars to produce our legendary beer.