American Mild

Two assistant brewers ago here at the Portsmouth Brewery, JT (who now happens to brews for Smuttynose), said ,"Man I love the IPA but after 3 of them I cant stand up out of my stool with out stumbling." Right there the Portsmouth brewery's American Mild was born. It is a mild ale, meaning low in alcohol only 4% abv and with 20 IBU's. But it is hopped with many different American IPA style hops, in the kettle, hop back and even dry hopped in the Fermenter so it smells and tastes like an IPA. Great beer for sitting and having a few with friends.

Cheers,
Tyler

Back on the East coast

Hey all I did make it back from San Diego. The CBC taught/reawakened so many topics for me. From yeast handling all the way to food and beer pairings. I am going to use all this new information and integrate into the Portsmouth Brewery and make the beers better then they already are.

The sun was nice but I am excited to be back here on the east coast. The people are a little more real here, but hey that’s just my opinion. The beers are all super hopped over there too. Which was great for the first few beers I tried, then though out the stay they all just tasted super resiny and coated the tongue to the point you couldn’t taste any of the malts. A little out of balance, but some times done very well. I am not mentioning any names because I don’t want to try to sell you any west coast beers, because that is just mean since you can't get 2/3 of them here.

I did make it up to Carlsbad to the Pizza Port and there saw a line up of brewers drank bottles including, Smutty Winter, Smutty Farmhouse, and Portsmouth Brewery's Kate the Great. So that’s where all the beers go, shipped to the west coast!

Any who, its good to be back and brewing again. It felt odd to not be brewing for 5 days strait.

Cheers,
Tyler

Shorts come to Portsmouth!.... Too!

So, it looks like Tyler arrived safely in San Diego.....and had to change into his shorts. Lucky guy! As luck would have it our weather here on the Seacoast has been quite favorable for wearing shorts as well! In fact I think it might even hit 70 degrees today. Needless to say it is quite hot in the brewery and I, too, am in my shorts!! With all this beauteous weather heading our way we'll be looking at some crisp refreshing beers to come along in the not to distant future. One of my favorites is our Lupes Wild Thang which utilizes he nutty character of wild rice and the cherry-like character of Sterling hops. We'll be playing around with a few Hefeweizens as well as our Weizenheimer and Thaizenheimer. The latter being our Thai influenced wheat beer with the addition of Kaffir lime leaves, ginger and lemongrass. YUM!! But we still have to deal with the reality that is New England. It could snow tomorrow! and we'd have to be ready for anything so that is why we have our Scotch ale in the wings just getting better as we wind our way thru spring. That's all for now. Cheers! Tod

CBC!

I just landed in San Diego for the Craft Brewers Conference. First thing I did was run into a bathroom and put on shorts for the first time this year. I will give full details of the conference when I get back.

Please warm up NH for me for when I return.

Cheers,

Tyler

Cellar News

Greetings from the cellar here at the Portsmouth Brewery. As we head into Spring we are gearing up for some nice weather which always conjures up good beer. As we posted earlier we have pulled our Cream ale off our line-up and replaced it with our Dirty Blonde. The Dirty Blonde has the same grist and hop profiles, respectively, yet we changed the yeast to decrease production time by a week. This is good for us as Tyler pointed out, however, the flavor profile has changed a wee bit. What we are finding is the Blonde has a more crisp flavor profile and the hops seem to jump into the back of the swallow. With warm weather the "Quaffability" of the Blonde is quite remarkable. We hope you will enjoy this change. There are a few tweaks we have planned and should increase the pleasure of drinking this light golden ale. Cheers! Tod

So a Dirty Blonde goes on Tap at a Bar.......

What’s the punch line you ask? There isn't one! HA!
The Cream Ale has been retired for a while to be replaced with the Dirty Blonde Ale. I have had a few people already tell me, "I think I liked the Cream better." The honest truth is that our Dirty Blonde is the same Grist and Hop profile as the Cream, but fermented out with a different yeast strain. I feel it gives the beer a crisper finish and comes of a little lighter on the palette then the Cream. Perfect for a summer beer. The new yeast strain ferments out the beer in 2 weeks vs. the 3 weeks that the Cream ale took to finish. You are thinking one week what is that going to do? But with the upcoming summer rush about to hit where 7bbls goes in 20 days, one week is going to be huge for us here in the brewery. But I digress.
So when tasting the Dirty Blonde for the first time don’t automatically try to compare it to the Cream. Take a sip and enjoy the beer on its own, because I am sure that you will.

Oh ya

I forgot to mention that our Belgian Double is going on today. It tastes great!.

Cheers,
Tyler

Kate's Volume

To answer your question about why we can't make more Kate then we already do. Here at the Portsmouth Brewery we are a 7bbl Brewhouse, some brewpubs are 10bbl even 15bbl capacity. Us, being smaller allows for more flexibility and creativity to create a wide variety of beers from our blond ale all the way to the complex Kate RIS. But this small size limits the max volume we can make of one type of beer as well. Our biggest Fermenter (we have 2 of them) is 14bbl in capacity. These are designated for our more popular beers to ferment out in so we can keep up with the demand; Blonde Ale, IPA to name the few stand-bys that are always on. To be able to fit our specialty brews into these takes a few months of planning making sure we have enough back up in our serving tanks and in our horizontal condition vessel to allow us to use the big double Fermenter to make a specialty beer. So after all this planning we can finally brew a double batch of Kate. But since Kate is a RIS we use an insane amount of grain and only run off 5bbl of wort. This gets our original gravity to 26 oP and what allows the Kate to be 11% abv. So this means that with a double batch we get a total of 10bbl of beer to serve. So 10bbl is the most that we can make with our current fermentation space we have now.

This year we are changing up the service slightly. We are transferring 7bbls of Kate into a serving tank to serve off our taps. And the remaining 3bbls we are going to bottle off before June 24th @2:27pm so there will be plenty of bottles available that day (40ish cases or so). About the limit of bottles one person can buy I will have to talk to a few people to see what the state law is and our regulations as a brewpub. But I do know that Three Floyds in Indiana has there Dark Lord Day (their RIS that isn’t as good as ours). Where they release 600 Cases (40bbls) and their limit is 6 bottles per person. But I will be getting back to this soon.

Cheers,
Tyler

Tuesday June 24th at 2:27pm!

On Tuesday June 24th at 2:27pm the stars will be aligned! Pluto will be in retrograde this phenomenon will allow Jupiter’s moon Titan to be as close to the rings of Saturn that it has even been. Since both Mercury and Venus will be on the back side of the Sun as well as Earth and Mars parting like the Red Sea to allow the Sun’s rays to warm Titan to approximately 8.05oC. This temperature increase will cause the small ice caps to melt slightly and the added gravitational pull of the newly formed water will cause particles from Saturn’s rings to create a pre-historic like atmosphere on Titan. On this day, at this time, looking NNE and up at 28o off the horizon you will see a green flash. Then you will know that Earth will no longer be the only planet with life on it in our solar system!

Oh ya Kate the Great is coming out then too.

Cheers,
Tyler

Big Changes at the Pub

Wow, I am not sure if we have had this many beers kicking/changes all at once.

The Hefewiezen has been replaced by its big brother Winter Wiezen. We used the same yeast strain as our Hefe but we bumped up the malt profile giving a slightly sweeter and slightly more ABV with the traditional clove and banana esters of a German style Hefewiezen.

Good work on the Moat Mountain Square tail stout. It has been replaced with...Drum roll please...our Le Chat Noir (Black Cat in French). This beer is the same malt and hop profile as our Black Cat stout but fermented out with a Belgian Yeast strain. This yeast gives the fruity and spicy esters off during fermentation to make this a great Belgian style stout.

The IMP IPA has gone away. But don’t worry it will be back some time soon. It has been replaced by yet another Belgian style beer, our Triple. This beer is golden in color but sneaks up on you with the ABV of around 9%. The Belgian yeast strain we used was different then the Le Chat Noir giving a hint of the bubble gum nose that you get in a lot of great Belgian beers.

So yes we are turning into a Belgian Brew house for the spring. Behind the Flemish style Sour Brune we have a Belgian Double waiting in the wings. So excited for spring to get into full swing.

Cheers,
Tyler

Saturday is a work day

Hello all,

Working on a Saturday, always a good time. There is always a brewers presents on Saturdays though so I can’t complain too much, I mean I make beer for a living!

Today I am transferring the Le Chat Noir (our Belgian Stout) so it will be ready as soon as the Moat Mountain Stout kicks. So if you are Jones-en for the Le Chat come on in and help kick the Moat. (We have one keg left as of this morning)

And yes our good old friend Bottle Rocket IPA was consumed faster then we thought. So the "rivalry" (in a brotherly love kind of way) continues by us putting on the Smuttynose IPA to let our beloved Bottle Rocket IPA mature properly. It shouldn't be too long of a wait. But we love building the suspense.

See ya in the Lapanza Lounge tonight for a pint.

Cheers,

Tyler

Moat Stout is on

Hey all, just a heads up that we did get in a couple of kegs of Moat Mountian Square Tail stout in to tide us over. This stout has a little more roasty/coffee notes then our Black Cat and is a great change of pace. Go give it a whirl.

Cheers,

Tyler

Smutty Baltic vs. Portsmouth Baltic

This post is in response to a comment I received on one of my previous blogs. The question that goes something like this, "Is Smuttynose (insert beer name here) the same as The Portsmouth Brewery (insert same beer name here)?" This question gets asked quite often. It is not a bad question by any means and l personally was a bit confused before I was working here. So here is the low down.

Peter Egelston opened the Portsmouth Brewery (PB) in 1991 right in downtown Portsmouth becoming the first New Hampshire brewpub. Making all the beer on site to serve from the taps, having no dedicated tap line to "yellow fizzy stuff". The Portsmouth Brewery (PB) took off and after handing off the head brewing responsibilities at PB he decided to open up Smuttynose brewing company in 1994 to attack the distribution side of the brewing world. Rather than just keep making the same beers that the brewpub made on a bigger scale he gave his new head brewer at Smuttynose control and freedom to make bees how he wanted. Now through out the years the head brewer position at both companies have changed hands a few times. Now the Head Brewer at the Portsmouth Brewery is Tod Mott and the Executive Brewer at Smuttynose is Dave Yarrington and they are both making there own beers.

So to answer your question the Smutty Baltic Porter is not the same as the Portsmouth Baltic Porter. Same style of beer, but not the same beer by far!

Cheers,
Tyler

WTF mang!

Oh my Gourd! The stout is out!!!!! The oatmeal is d-o-n-e, done. Sad face! Sorry for the inconvenience We should have the Le Chat Noir (Black Cat stout via a Belgian yeast strain) by Saturday. We might be able to get in Moat Mountain Square Tale Stout to get us to the weekend but we have to talk to Will up there to see if we can get some.

Cheers,
Tyler/Tod