Category Archives: Craft Brewing

Making Beer, Cider and Wine and other alcoholic beverages on a small scale.

New Brewery for Oxford

Shotover Brewery Logo

A new craft micro brewery called the Shotover Brewing Company is due to
open soon in converted stables in Horspath just outside Oxford. The
owner and head brewer Ed Murray has been craft brewing for over twenty years
and has made the decision to turn his interest into a commercial venture.
It is anticipated that beer will be on sale by the end of November.

There are photos of stables being converted into the brewery on their facebook group and their main web site is at www.shotoverbrewing.com.

I am hoping that one of the Shotover beers will be at the Brewery Tap‘s Winter ‘Beer, Cider & Sausage’ festival on Friday 4th December – Sunday 6th December. This festival promises 30 different cask ales, 5 real ciders. The Big Boys Blues Band will be playing live on the Sunday from 4pm.

Note to any publicans reading this… I don’t intend to only mention the Brewery Tap and the Stocks. There are many other good pubs in Abingdon including Nags Head, Spread Eagle, White Horse, Cross Keys, Punchbowl, Plough, Broad Face. If you have any news, information on guest beers, festivals, etc, then please let me know and I’ll post it here.

October 9, 2009Permalink Leave a comment

A New Abingdon Brewery?

Abingdon may get its very own micro brewery soon. Since the Morland brewery was bought by Greene King in 1999 and subsequently closed down and converted into flats, Abingdon has been without a commercial brewery.

Loose Cannon Brewery have applied for planning permission on the Ashville Trading Estate 6 Suffolk Way, Abingdon, OX14 5JX for Change of Use from B1/B8 to Class B2 for use as a micro brewery.
Continue reading →

July 7, 2009Permalink 1 Comment

Hop Harvesting, European Beer Festival

I have just made a blog post on the Oxford Brewer’s Group blog about hop harvesting

Also, at the weekend I was in Copenhagen visiting the European Beer Festival. This was an amazing event with lots of interesting things. Expect some blog entries from me about this over the next few days.

And thirdly… last week we released the Camra Good Beer Guide 2009 mobile edition to coincide with the launch of the book. You can find more information about this on the Camra web site.

September 15, 2008Permalink Leave a comment

Cider Making – Strange gravity

I am making some cider at the moment. I have approximately 10 gallons (50 litres) brewing away. The juice was part of a bulk order from the nearby Millets farm which was split amongst members of our Oxford Brewing Group.

There is no recipe to speak of… basically I made some dried wine yeast (10 teaspoons) into a starter with a little brown sugar boiled in water and cooled. Pitched it into the apple juice in the containers I collected the juice in (food grade 5 gallon plastic). The next day it was fermenting out of the top and all over the floor… so I took it outside for a few days until it had calmed down.

Continue reading →

October 7, 2007Permalink Leave a comment

Experimental Double Batch Brew

After reading an article in the Craft Brewing Association‘s magazine Brewer’s Contact which indicated that beer that is sparged too much may have some off tastes, I decided to try a bit of an experiment.

The plan was to collect two seperate runnings from the sparge, dilute the first runnings to match the second, and then treat both runnings the same in terms of hops, boiling, etc. Then to compare the tastes. Continue reading →

June 1, 2007Permalink 1 Comment