Hi welcome to real beer revolution my name is Mike and today
we're at The Old Potters Inn, in Greyton brewing the Rooinek Amber Ale.
So we're here with Trevor whose owner and part time brewer.
So tell me about the story behind Old Potters, you guys have been going a year now?
Yeah we had our first birthday in November
it's difficult to know when a brewery starts or when your relationship with your wife starts, I'm not sure what the
initiating event is but for a brewery I suppose
the moment of consummation is the license and happened in November, so we've been going for a year
But prior to that there's always a backstory of three years sitting in licensing offices and getting pieces of paper from
departments of agriculture farms and fishery and
as you can imagine there's a whole long
rigmarole to getting a license. This is a
1850 monument
so that that in itself the building took a fair amount of time so
three years prior to that we'd started and two years prior to that we bought the property so in total its you know the
story is about a good 5-7 years old
I think there was a story of every brewery in South Africa, a lot of thinking
before you eventually see the light of day.
And we're here obviously about the amber ale today the Rooinek so how long did this recipe take to develop?
You know we kind of started playing with it
a good two years ago and started refining it and playing with our a malts and our our hops and a lot of it is
serendipitous development, you kind of start with a recipe in mind and
certain hops are not available at certain times of the year as
are certain malts not available at certain times
And and so I would say it's taken a good 1.5 - 2 years to arrive at this particular recipe
We've gone with
SAB malts, very controversially, I know it's not trendy to say you like SAB malts
but they're 30 kilometers down the road from us, all of the barley is grown in the surrounding area as you would have seen Mike when you drove in
you would have seen all the barley fields that have just recently been harvested and are going to the malting house in Caledon
So to us, it makes sense to have a local product. That's
processed locally and we're finding very acceptable
extractions we haven't found any bodies or tractor bits in our malt. We haven't had any problems with our milling so we're happy.
And also we changed our hops quite a lot. We started off with a lot of imported hops and now we're going
predominantly with SAB hops, there's a fantastic service in George, from there
SAB, AB InBev team that give us tremendous service.
It's a very malt forward beer, I mean there's a lot of a
lot of caramel on the nose and a little bit of the tropical
aromas from
the passion from the Southern Passion but
it's a very malt forward beer. We wanted it to be mainly malt, we've got four beers
we wanted one to be about the malt, which would be this one.
We wanted want to be about the hops which would be our IPA.
We wanted one to be about the yeast which is the Saison.
And then we wanted one to be well balanced the the Pale Ale. So yeah this one
we've gone for a very malty, caramel, toffee
wild honey kind of flavour. You can see the colour there, it's a fantastic red
for the Rooinek and that
It matches the bits on your ears Mike!
The name is what drew me to this beer to brew today
you know the Rooinek, I get the Rooinek!
But what was a story behind the name is there a character in particular that drew you to this name?
Before we got our licensure you started serving beer for free. I don't know if that's legal or not
I hope you don't have any SARS guys watching.
As I was serving beers I was struck by the one being a very kind of
balanced Pale Ale
and then the other one was the Saison
which I thought was a peasant beer and the name Plaas Jappie came to mind
and I thought if we got the Plaas Jappie then the pale ale
must be the antithesis to that, the city slicker and then when I saw the amber coming out like that
I thought this has to be the Rooinek, so it's not like there was a
particular
Story as to how that happened. It was know to fit in with our range of names. Yeah, okay, and you're keeping yourself busy,
obviously brewings not your only
passion or your only line of work?
A lot of brewers in South Africa have got a day job. There's guys in IT and funding the
Kind of
The folly through through a day job, and my day job is a kidney dialysis
I treat people with kidney failure, and I put them on dialysis machines
and I then try and arrange transplants for them and and look after them
I don't do the actual transplanting, but I look after them, after the transplant and so that
helps pay for a bag of grain here
and a vaccum packed bit of hops there. As we say in Afrikaans its Neirtjies en Biertjies (Kidneys and Beers).
And you've also started off a festival here, a beer festival in in Greyton.
So we started the first time was last year
I turned 50 and I didn't want a birthday party so I said to my wife
let's just have a little small beer festival,
and we invited a few of our local friends, to highlight Brewers in the in the area
people like running Hoenenklip and
and Old Harbor house and of course Folk and Goed and
There's also obviously Eric of Triggerfish
And then I started learning about the others the Mountain Brewing Company and Red Sky so before we knew it we had a few Cape Town Brewers that were
interested, Greg Casey from Afro Carribean and obviously our good friend Stef from Little Wolf, we can't leave him out of anything
so it was mainly meant to focus on the Overberg, but it's spread a little bit wider
I was proud that it was small and intimate and I was proud that the actual Brewers were there on the day they weren't
corporate
people who didn't really know what they're serving
so you've got a Brew festival for brewers made by brewers
and I would like to develop that a little bit more this year
Highlight a lot on the home brewing scene which is thriving in the Western Cape, Helderberg and the South Yeasters
I'd like them to have a stand, I'd there to be an actual brew on the day and once again
I wanted to Brewers themselves to be there and
Actually, also have a festival beer as well that isn't available anywhere else except at the festival. So when and when and where is
It it's gonna be the first Saturday of April. Hopefully every year forever. And in Greyton?
In Greyton, we rent a hall
that's that's a bit bigger than our property that can accommodate 15-20 Brewers will also have a gin from
our other Greyton friends the Bryant Brothers who do Six Dogs
Lovely lovely gin, so we'll have them as well and some local wineries will be there as well.
So it'll be a little bit of everything, but I wanted to stay mainly beer focused
actually
Perfect that's coming 7th of April next year. Yeah, great. Well. Thanks very much Trevor
Thank you for having us here, and then let's go make some beer, yeah. Thank you! Cheers
Ok so here we have the grain bill for a 23 litre batch of the Rooinek and
We have 3 kilograms of pale malt one and a half kilograms of caramel amber malt
250 grams of caramel munich 3 and
250 grams of meloanoidin malt
And here we are doughing in and I like doing it very slowly so I mix a jug in at the time
Try and disperse it around the water quite nicely, and then give it a really good stir
Make sure that the grain is
coated with the water
I think this helps efficiency quite a bit
so moving on now
This is towards the end of doughing in you can see it becomes much more difficult at this stage much more
difficult to get the water
mixed in with the grain but
Yeah, if you move the mash pedal around quite a bit as I'm doing in the video there
Then you get some quite good results at the end
So here we are mashing in and it's quite a simple mash schedule on this brew
sixty-eight degrees C for 60 minutes and
77 degrees C mash out for ten minutes
And we also brewed this on a 50-liter Braumeister system, we simply doubled the recipe for that so here
we are mashing in on the Braumeiister
and while that was mashing in we had a quick look around the brewery had some nice beers enjoyed the Rooinek and
just enjoyed Greyton in general really.
There were some fantastic smells coming from inside the brewery this day, so I decided to check out what was actually going on and
they were brewing a Russian Imperial Stout
Really big beer lots of chocolaty smells in the air, I had to get a good look in there and see what was happening
Okay, so we come back to the end of the mash and we are now mashing out, and you can see the beautiful red color
Okay so we lift the mash pipe out from the Grainfather
And as we do that then all the water starts to sparge down through the grain bed and into the boil kettle
And then we're going to sparge
with
some
77 degree water and we should spark very slowly
It's nice to
Disperse that water all over the top of that
plate there
And those stainless steel marks you don't want to get water above those marks, so
spare with water and then let it drop down. And here we are lifting the
grain out of the
Braumeister
It's definitely a two-man job on this system. It's a 50 liter system, so it's much heavier
You would expect it to be much more difficult
But yeah, we're just out and sparging away
So we sparge in exactly the same way on this pouring water over that mesh
So that it cleans the grains nicely
Okay, so now this kettle is up to the boil and you can see there was quite a bit of foam on the top from
the protein so I like to just stir all that foam back into the kettle before I start my timer
There I am stirring it all back in
And our first hop addition
the 60 minute hope addition, is 16 and 1/2 grams of African Queen
If you can't get hold of Africa Queen you could substitute with Polaris at this stage
and give that a good stir, give the hops a good stir into the wort
Make sure they're all mixed in quite nicely and
I just like to give the bottom of the kettle a quick scrape at this stage as well to stop any buildup on the bottom
And once that's done
We're gonna start our 60-minute timer on the Grainfather. And here we are adding double the amount of hops into the Braumeister
Okay so with ten minutes left of the boil you can add 10 grams of Cascade, make sure we get them all in.
And again, we're going to give it really good stir
and i'll give the bottom of the kettle another scrape at this point
Okay, there's only one minutes to go now
I'm gonna throw in a whole 22 grams of Southern Passion and these are aroma hops so
We're gonna give them a nice stir in I did a bit of a mini whirlpool at this stage
Just to make sure that they were all
amalgamated nicely in there
And I give the bottom a bit of a scrape again as well
And now time is up
The heater is off so we're going to do a five-minute whirlpool on this
It's hard work, but it really does help
so we do this for five minutes and
then we let it rest for five minutes before we start pumping the
wort through the counterflow chiller and
into the fermentation bucket, and that's it we're gonna throw in our yeast, we used US-05 on this recipe
And we're gonna let it ferment away at 18 degrees
It really is as simple as that
Thanks very much for watching the video. I hope you enjoyed it as much as we enjoyed making it
We had a great time in Greyton at the Old Potter's Inn
And if you did enjoy it, please do give us a like and a share
Check out our website realbeerrevolution.co.za
And you can find us on most social medias @realbeerrevolution
Until next time
