Showering in Famous Brewing Water

Burton-on-Trent and Pilsen are epicentres of brewing past and present. Burton is Beer Town. Its world renown comes from the eponymous ales, the pale ales and India pale ales it produced 150 years ago. Pilsen is the home of pilsners and pale lager and it’s the style which has become the most aped and consumed beer style in the world. Pale ales, IPAs and pilsners are all very important styles to the beer world, but one thing, above all others, made these towns ideal for brewing these particular styles: the water.

Pale ales benefited from the mineral-rich hard waters of Burton, giving them a snappy, dry quality, and the pilsners of Pilsen had a soft and smooth body thanks to the mineral-free soft waters. The difference between hard and soft water is the volume of minerals in each, primarily calcium and magnesium (in Burton’s case there are also significant levels of gypsum and sulphates which give the famous eggy aroma of Burton Snatch); soft water has very lower levels of these minerals, whereas hard water has much higher levels. Both are good for brewing in their own ways but hard water has minerals which can actively help out the brewing process (calcium helps balance acidity, magnesium is used by yeast in the production of enzymes to help with fermentation, sulphates give a dry, sharp flavour which can compliment hops).

This is naturally very interesting, of course, and the beers are delicious and all that, but there’s a more pressing question: what are these famous waters like to shower in?

Picture this: it’s the morning after a night out and I roll from my bed, head spinning, mouth dry, stomach rolling. I smell and I need a wash. I’m currently in Burton. The bathroom is lovely and big with a wide shower head. I climb in, turn it on, adjust the temperature and stand under it for a few minutes, trying to wash away the stinking hangover. I grab the shower gel – my usual variety – and I pour the typical amount and lather up. Only the lather isn’t coming, instead it’s just leaving little scummy bubbles on my skin which don’t wash away easily. I pour some more shower gel and it still happens. I turn to my shampoo – my usual variety – and again it doesn’t do much, leaving my hair feeling strangely dry, despite having water pour onto it constantly for 10 minutes. I persevere and eventually clean myself to a near-acceptable level. Leaving the shower my skin feels a little dirty still, a little dry. I’m unsatisfied and my hangover feels worse.

Now picture this: it’s the morning after a night out and I roll from my bed, head spinning, mouth dry, stomach rolling. I smell and I need a wash. I’m currently in Pilsen. The bathroom is small with a handheld shower head. I climb in to the shower box, turn on the water, adjust the temperature and hold it over me for a few minutes, trying to wash away the stinking hangover. I grab the shower gel – my usual variety – and I pour the typical amount and lather up. Within moments the lather is overflowing magnificently, with bubbles everywhere, lavishly covering me. I wash them off and then try again and there are even more bubbles this time, like a white foam eruption. I turn to my shampoo – my usual variety – and seconds later I have a white perm of thick creamy lather on my head which feels wonderful. Leaving the shower my skin feels ultra clean and soft. I’m very satisfied and my hangover has washed away.

For shower lovers, I can’t recommend Pilsen highly enough. The sheer, generous volumes of bubbles are simply wonderful. The problem with hard water is that the minerals and ions in it don’t react kindly with the chemicals in the soap and rather than bubbling up they just create a sticky scum which isn’t easy to wash away. Soft water showering is a treat; hard water isn't. Thankfully both are good in their own ways for brewing and for that we should all be very grateful.

There we have it: front line beer reporting on the topics which really matter.

I’ve now done bathing in beer and showering in brewing water. Next I need to swim in it and then enjoy a beer Jacuzzi… can anyone help me out?

In writing this post I used this and this as well as the link above, to help me out. This post is also interesting as it gives a list of water profiles from notable brewing areas. Photos from here and here (I spent about 20 minutes looking for an appropriate image to use for this post and these are the best I could find... you get a lot of filthy results when searching for innocent showering images).

Burton-on-Trent: Beer Town

“In the middle of the nineteenth century the name of Burton-on-Trent was world famous. Burton was the greatest brewing town the world has ever seen,” writes Pete Brown in Hops and Glory. It’s also the spiritual home of India Pale Ale, probably the most prominent beer style in the world right now, owing to its unsubtle ubiquity in the American craft beer scene. Choosing to visit Burton as our second Twissup (following Sheffield) was a no-brainer – this place is the heart of British brewing history and I wanted to see it for myself.

Burton is a strange town. It’s almost entirely dominated by Molson Coors but there’s a sense that no one actually mentions these huge Apollo-like (to steal from Pete Brown’s description) silver beer-making tanks, as if they refuse to mention them because by talking about them they’d have to recognise that they are there. Aware of the long beer history, the town feels like it’s lost something. Those huge, looming tanks scream of the high output production of the big brands in the Molson Coors catalogue, not of the breweries of centuries ago, but look a little deeper and their marks still remain.

‘Beer Town’ is an accurate description of Burton and you can’t open your eyes without a reminder: The Malthouse, The Grain Store, Coopers Square Shopping Centre, beer-related street names, old signs, Bass stones in the ground; beer is everywhere. Maybe we were looking for it, maybe we weren’t, but it was around every corner. And that heady, sweet aroma of wort mixes with the air and hangs over the town like a delicious fog.

Knowing the history I was like an excited school boy going on a trip to the museum to see the dinosaur skeletons. Burton is a near-mythical beer town which now sits in the shadow of Molson Coors. But Molson Coors being there isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it’s a good thing as it means that Burton is still an important beer landmark in Britain as a very significant volume of beer is produced there (Burton currently produces 15% of beer in Britain), including Carling, Britain’s biggest selling lager for 30 years. Marstons are also there, as are a number of smaller breweries – Burton Bridge, Black Hole, Burton Old Cottage, Tower Brewery and of course White Shield. Beer is very much still at the heart of Burton.

But Burton is a strange town. I can’t put my finger on it. It feels too quiet, too empty, yet there’s a lot of stuff there. The handsome old buildings sit next to modern, shiny-fronted bars and loudly-coloured shops; the stores usually found out of town are in the middle of town; there’s a vaguely unsettling mix of new and old which feels confused, almost like it’s stuck in a strange time warp, moving at two different speeds, entwining. But at the same time it’s a wonderful town. The sights and smells of brewing beer, the pubs, the reminders of the beer history, it’s all there.

The pub we started in, and the pub I liked the most, was the Cooper’s Tavern. A backstreet boozer with beery knick-knacks all around and a bar with a line-up of beer served on stillage, including Bass. This is where we set the meeting point for the visit and I don’t think they knew what hit them: over 25 beer drinkers in there from 11.00am on a sleepy Saturday morning.

About a mile out of town, Molson Coors have their own malting where they turn barley into malt ready to make their beer. This is the fourth largest malting in the UK and to tour it was to experience a fascinating mix of beer, science and industry. At different stages you get the aroma equivalent of a cuddle: fresh bread. A little later you get the aroma equivalent of a dead frog: the sulphorous and famous ‘Burton Snatch’. The maltings was a great insight to a side of beer production that we rarely see and it felt like a privilege to be allowed in and shown around (even if it did feel like a school trip for grown-ups).

One of the other reasons for visiting Beer Town was to see the reopened National Brewery Centre in the heart of what was once the Bass brewery. It was also here that we planned the highlight of the day: a tour around the White Shield Brewery with Steve Wellington. It’s a handsome old building, remarkably small, rusting in the most charming of ways; I can imagine it creak and groan as it brews, the sounds of a well-used brewhouse ready to retire. But an aging brewhouse is exactly what it is and a new brewery with four-times the capacity is being built opposite. This, to Steve, is a wonderful thing and he is filled with the enthusiasm of a boy on Christmas day. Steve has one of those voices – soft, calm, interesting – that lulls and inspires at the same time and I could listen to him talk for hours. The sadness of him leaving us was only replaced by the happiness at seeing a pint of Brewery Tap beer and a buffet. Brewery Tap is 4.5% and hopped with Centennials. It was the beer I enjoyed the most over the whole day and I could’ve happily finished a couple more, but by the time that had gone we had cask White Shield and P2 to drink, two beer institutions that cannot be eschewed for the modern. White Shield is a seriously good beer; bready at its base, spicy at its finish, each mouthful is as interesting as the last. It’s not an IPA in the modern US-inspired style and it won’t explode in your face with fiery hops, but it’s a wonderful beer. And the P2, with its luscious chocolate body and berry sweetness, was a rare treat. I’m sure there was probably more to see in the museum, but by this stage we’d kicked on a gear and were ‘on the beer’, so no time for any of that history guff.

Burton Bridge Brewery was a few minutes walk away. We arrived and a grumpy-looking Bruce met us, saying that he’d been waiting ages (a mis-communication from the Comms Director). He had the look of a child that had been woken early and then left alone for half an hour before getting attention, but that’s probably unfair because we had made him come into work on a Saturday to show a group of people around his office. It’s a quaint little brewery behind the pub and the beers are pretty good, although it was with the Golden Delicious that I put one and one together and worked out what Burton Snatch actually was – that aroma (eggs, arse) given off from the famous sulphate-rich local water (some think that it’s a good thing in a beer – not me).

A couple more pubs, some more beers, a slice of orange in a pint, more White Shield, more P2, a midnight curry in which everyone forgot their order as it was arriving and then a night in the Town House with unnervingly wonky floors, finished off the trip.

It’s a great town and a must-visit place for any beer lover. The best thing is that most of the beers we had over the day were brewed within a mile radius of where we drank them, some brewed within throwing distance. Burton is called Beer Town for a very good reason; it may have changed in many ways, but beer is still at its heart.

This is a very late post about the Burton Twissup. I wrote it the day after I got back but have only just got around to posting it. Cheers for the hospitality of Molson Coors – we couldn’t have done it without them. If you are up for a challenge then try and name everyone who attended in the picture above.

Now it’s time to think about the next Twissup. We need cities which are easy for people to get to en masse, where there is a good selection of pubs and at least one brewery or beer-related attraction for us to look around; ideally someone needs some local knowledge of the place and it needs to be affordable. I’ve been thinking and so far I’ve got the following:

London – plenty of breweries, no shortage of excellent pubs and we could probably organise some good activities

Manchester – Marble and a pub crawl

Sheffield – let’s go back there, it was great!

Dublin – Guinness, craft beer and craic

Scotland – somewhere?!

Brussels – Cantillon, chocolate and lots of bars

Amsterdam – drugs and hookers (it doesn’t always have to be about beer, right?)

A different event will be in the diary from the end of August/beginning of September and we’re planning on doing some hop picking in Kent followed by a few pubs.

Any other suggests for places and when can people go? We can probably get a trip in around October/November?

FABPOW! P2 Stout with Strawberries and Clotted Cream

A chance meeting: the National Brewery Centre, a buffet with strawberries and thick clotted cream for dessert, cask P2 on at the bar. The thinking: strawberries covered in dark chocolate with a dollop of rich cream. The beer: smooth, roasty cocoa, silky, a hint of blackberries, a cakey sweetness, an incredible thing. The combination: tongue-covering creamy richness, a burst of strawberry juice; the beer swathes through, becomes more chocolatey, blends with the cream, feels totally luscious and a little bit sexy. A perfect chance combination, a brilliant FABPOW!

(The picture looks a little sorry for itself, I know. The trouble is I ate a bowlful, realised how delicious it was, told everyone else who also had a bowlful and then there were only two strawberries left.)