Last week we started the brewing clock on Cliff Quay again. The first brew went through the brewery on Tuesday the 3rd. Apart from a schoolboy error on my behalf which lost us about an hour it all went remarkably well. 10 barrels of Cliff Quay bitter were starting to ferment by 6 PM. There had been some delays the week before as we waited for the boiler inspector to visit, and some trepidation before he passed the boiler fit to work for another year. A huge sigh of relief when he passed everything off. There was another small delay while we waited for the fridge engineer to check over the water cooling plant, but then Tuesday finally dawned. I got into the brewery early to heat the liquor up the rest of the way for the brew and everything was nice and hot by 10 O’ clock. With The Brewer from Earl Soham over we mashed in. The system that came with the plant is different from what we are both used to though I have used the same sort of pump for moving spent grains in the past. However with the aid of a long stick everything went fine. A nice gentle run off in to the copper and with a heating coils on as soon as the wort started running and we were ready to boil only a few minutes after the copper was full. The boil was ferocious and at last we had the smell of hops wafting through the soggy Ipswich air. My schoolboy error was to try and improvise a hop strainer from a sieve, all that happened was that the heat exchanger blocked. However a quick back flush and we ran the brew into the Fv and pitched the yeast. It seems that we got a good yield but we wont really know this for sure until we put everything into cask this week.

 See you soon.  Cheers!

 Jeremy

After three attempts at delivery my Christmas present arrived on the Friday before Christmas. The plant was brought in from storage and delivered in two loads to Cliff Quay. Tannington Transport did a great job in getting it to us, and made short work of offloading it all. We have positioned it roughly as it should be and I have spent a few hours trying to work out how to put the Meccano set back together. Having played the giant Meccano game before I spent a day at the Church End Brewery where the plant was originally installed taking photo’s and notes and how things went together. These have already proved invaluable, as I was puzzling what a strange clamp arrangement was for. A quick check on the photos revealed it to be for supporting the fermenting vessels outlets.

The shutdown of all Industry for Christmas has put a brake on activity for a few days but next week will see the welder on site as the reassembly of the vessels, the connection of the steam and other utilities and at that point we can start thinking of brewing before too long.

The most difficult part of starting the brewery will be thinking of names for the new beers. We will be brewing a 3.4-3.5 % beer which will be called Cliff Quay Bitter (or CQB for short) and a pale hoppy 4.2 % which I am not sure what to call yet. A nautical theme is our aim. Any suggestions please email via the website. A polypin of the beer if we pick your suggestion is the prize, along with a guided tour of the brewery. Sorry we can’t use it if it is too crude, though if it makes you laugh, send it anyway.

Here is to a happy New Year to everybody and lots of brewing on the Quay.

Cheers ~ Jeremy ~ Heavens is it 2009 already!

Pictures here

Firstly apologies for the lack of blog recently. It has been somewhat busy for us here on the Quay of late, as we have just opened the pub only 10 days ago. What with interviewing and recruiting staff, trips to buy fresh supplies and standing behind the bar there has not been much time to sit down and write up our progress in the brewery, let alone sleep!

However I have grabbed a few minutes to tell you where we have got to.

Finally things are taking shape. By the end of this week we will have an electricity supply to the Brewery which will make things a lot easier and warmer. Prior to having the lights reconnected we had to stop work when it got dark and make the most of the daylight by keeping the big roller shutter doors open. There is a great view out of the brewery onto the docks and the River Orwell, but when that wind blows down the River, all the way from the Urals, it gets very cold working down here. Poor Matthew has been slaving away laying the drains and painting the walls, working hard just to stop himself freezing to death.

The view over the river could cause some problems. It has been suggested already that I will spend far too much time looking at the view rather than brewing! I merely think that it will allow me to have something to contemplate whilst the copper is boiling.

Anyway back to the brewery. We have cleared out all the rubbish and filled in the hole from the old cask conveyor. It was about big enough to swallow a mini so it needed filling in! (Some would say that would be a good use for a mini….). The next job was to lay the drains. First Matthew had to dig out the concrete to lay the channel. With a nice easy top skin we thought this was going to be a breeze. Hmm… the next layer was somewhat tougher and it took three days to dig it all out. One of the advantages of being in the docks is the close proximity of everything you could need. So a big thanks to the guys at Speedyhire  for the concrete saw and the breaker.

The Brewer from Earl Soham  or “Earl of Soham” as he sometimes likes to be called managed to do a deal on a million gallons of just the right sort of masonry paint , so we now have gleaming clean walls. Before painting they were washed down (as it says on the tin) and a whole heap of grot removed.

We found, through a contact that used to work at the old Tolly Brewery a good local electrical company, Clinton Templeman. We used them to check the electrical safety of the pub first (and the quality of the first pint!), a job that took longer than we had hoped for (and no doubt will cost much more than we dare think about!) However this week with the aid of a cortinary wire to suspend it we have a new power feed into the building. The electrician did offer me the chance to be the first to tight rope walk across the wire, but I am afraid I declined the offer as I had left my balance pole at home!

So now we have light and even heat. Hopefully this week will see the arrival of the plant from its store. On the Friday that the pub opened we went across to the store with our gas and steam engineer so that he could inspect what we had. It pi**ed down all the time we were there and I can report there are no leaks in the store roof.

I have been a star of stage and screen again recently (well Ok I was on BBC Radio Suffolk) plugging the new brewery and the pub.

Really excited that we may see some brewing plant at the docks! There will be lots of photo’s of it arriving and being offloaded so watch this space for more news!!

 

Cheers ~ Jeremy

Welcome. Here’s a bit of history before we start. We are located in the back of the old Tolly Cobbold Brewery on Cliff Quay in Ipswich. The site has a long history of brewing stretching back to the 1746 when the Cobbold Family moved their brewing operations there from Harwich. The brewery has a long history including a substantial rebuild in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. In 1990 brewing in the main plant stopped and was transferred to a small (55 barrel) plant in a old keg racking hall at the rear of the premises. After being owned by Ridley’s and then Greene King brewing stopped in 2002.

Wind forward to July 2007 when John Bjornson and myself where drinking of all things Greene King IPA in the Railway in Framlingham. I was moaning that I wanted out of my present job where I spent far too much time sitting in dull meetings and chasing fanciful ideas. We covered a lot of ground that night and talked of brewing in Ipswich as there was no brewing taking place there then. In August John had done a bit of digging and found out who owned the old Tolly brewery and that the micro brewery plant was still in situ. After a lot of persuading we finally managed to get view the plant. After a serious amount of frustration we came up with a cunning plan to install a small plant ten barrel plant in the loading dock and cold room area. In addition we would also take on the lease of the Brewery Tap (the former Tolly Cobbold Office building).

So, The Brewery tap should shortly be open for business. The brewery will be a little longer, we have started work but there is plenty more to do. What will be brewing?

To start with good quality cask ales, I have plans for a stout, and maybe a few different beers too. We hope to use as much as we can local ingredients as Ipswich has always had a significant link with barley and maltings. It is in the heart of barley country and significant amounts of malt pass the brewery on the way out of the country as export from the Ipswich Docks.

Yes we hope to be open for tours but we have to build the thing first!

The New Brewer