OnTap Magazine

10 | Summer 2020 | ontapmag.co.za Send it to lucy@ontapmag.co.za and you might just see your name in print. If your story is chosen for publication, you’ll get a year’s subscription to On Tap on us! WILLIAM YELL I was preparing for the Richmond Hill Brewing Company homebrew festival in 2019 and was determined to brew a beer that would do well in the contest as well as be popular with the public. All too often beers that win in competitions are not as popular with the drinkers as they are with the judges. I stumbled upon a historic style of German beer known as Kottbusser – originally brewed in Cottbus, northeast Germany. is sounded like an interesting style – a clean fermented wheat beer featuring noble hops, honey and molasses. e only other brewery I could nd that had revived this ancient style was Grimm Brothers Brewhouse in Colorado. e farm where our brewery is situated is used for bee farming with the brewery building having honey extraction facilities, so the match of beer and honey was a natural progression. e trial brew was an immediate success and with a few changes the recipe for the competition was decided. Brewday fell the day after attending a 40th birthday and while I’ve always avoided drinking when brewing, I didn’t ever factor in the difficulty of brewing with a hangover. Well needless to say it didn’t go according to plan. While heating the brew kettle up for the boil I realised I had forgotten something and left the kettle unattended – and as you might expect, what ensued was a monster boil-over. The next major catastrophe was that I flipped the recipe page over to get the salt additions from another recipe in my logbook and then never flipped back. This resulted in a boil addition that was not according to the recipe at all. Realising the mistake, I recti ed as much as I could and kept notes of what had happened but had no idea how close to the sample batch I would get. Fortunately the fermented beer turned out well enough to take to the competition. e beer took rst place with the expert judges and the prize was to brew a commercial batch at Richmond Hill. is was really exciting but created a dilemma: should the commercial brew be the intended recipe or the recipe that actually transpired? It made sense to stick as close as possible to the winning recipe and the beer was released in cans later that year. One side e ect of the brewday errors was the higher-than- intended ABV – at almost 6% it can really sneak up on you. Since then, I have moved from homebrewer to craft brewer, with Entrepid Brewing’s Renascence Kottbusser becoming a permanent xture in the range. e beer is still brewed to the same somewhat accidental recipe of that fateful hungover brewday – minus the boil-over of course! I didn’t factor in the difficulty of brewing with a hangover GOT A BEERY TALE TO SHARE? WIN BREWDAY BLUNDERS OWNING YOUR