Diageo to sell 50% of Dublin’s Guinness brewery
Diageo, the world’s largest producer of alcoholic drinks, today admitted it will sell half of Guinness’ historic home in Dublin and cut 250 jobs as part of a £520 million investment plan.
The company said it will continue to brew the Irish stout at St James’s Gate, situated on the banks of the River Liffey, but will close properties around the brewery as well as shutting two smaller production plants in Kilkenny and Dundalk. The company will build a new brewery close to Dublin, which will open in 2013.
Diageo pledged to keep open the St James’s Gate site, where Arthur Guinness started brewing in 1759. The company will also continue to run the Guinness Storehouse museum, one of Dublin’s biggest tourist attractions.
Hop prices are insane, and many varieties are getting very scarce. We’ve heard it time and time again over the past few months. Luckily our local homebrew shop, HDYB, has secured a good cache of hops and through their smart rationing policies, they should be able to give you the variety you seek in some form, either pellet, plug, or whole. In case you don’t know the policy: Maximum of 4oz per customer, only 3oz of any one variety. If you find yourself in there for anything, its probably worth making use of this and buying 4oz of hops, even if you don’t need them.
I am fortunate enough to be sitting on my own cache of 8-9 lbs of hops, which should only require occasional augmentation from Joe & Marlana. Many I have not come up with a gameplan for yet. I think next year will be one of significant experimentation and reformulation of recipes - many of my favorites that use Columbus, Simcoe, and Magnum hops will require substitution or retirement until the current crunch is over. I have several that I am pretty excited about using (and using up):
Summit hops (1 lb whole)- Citrusy, and 16.5%AA. I think these will go great with some Amarillo, Centennial, and maybe some Pacific Gem. Some homebrewers have said they didn’t know whether to brew with these or smoke them, they were so “aromatic”.
Mt. Rainier (8 oz pellets) - Herbal, slightly minty and some say has a licorice taste and aroma. Time to crank out some new dark beer (porter or stout) recipes for this one. These came from an informal hop swap with Ric at Stewart’s, and I traded him 8oz or 16oz of Sorachi Ace whole hops for them (I can’t really remember how much). The american brown he brewed with the Mt. Rainiers was outstanding.
Warrior - (~8 oz pellets) - Strong bittering hop and good replacement for my Magnum usage due to its low cohumulone content. I’ve had these since our big club buy from NCMS two years ago, but have never managed to work my way through all of them. I even gave about 8oz to Joe & Marlana at one time.
Horizon - (~5 oz pellets) - English dual-use hop with nice aroma and bittering qualities. I’ve only used it once before, when Mike Castagno and I brewed a split batch of english brown ale with it back in early 2006. I’ve been meaning to get back to these hops for quite a while.
I am also eyeing (with significant salivation) a new high %AA variety over at Puterbaugh Farms, Bravo, which sounds like it is a super-centennial. At almost $30/lb, it’s not cheap - but it IS whole hops instead of pellets, and sounds like it could be awesome in an IPA (probably with some Summit, Amarillo and Centennial). If they are still available after Xmas, I may have to sweet-talk the wife into letting me get some.
My recent brewing activities have got me re-energized about brewing next year, and I am looking forward to the next time I fire up the propane burner. I hope to do several more cooperative brews with other folks next year (Brian and Heidi & David jump to mind), and need to do a better job preparing for the local competitions - some have gone by with me having nothing to submit.
I’ve brewed the last two weekends, and it has been great - I can’t really explain the long hiatus (1 1/2 months) other than I was busy with other things… But last weekend I brewed 10 gallons of my black honey ale (w/ 4 lb buckwheat honey), and yesterday was a 5 gallon batch of Queen’s Darkness IS (8 oz of molassas). The Queen’s Darkness came in at around 1.084 OG, and the Black Honey is something on the order of 1.065-1.068 (will back calculate when I keg it).
I repitched about 1/2 of yeast from the honey ale into the stout, and had signs fermentation within 2 hours. It is rocking this morning. I also used the product from American Hop Plugs yesterday, which How Do You Brew? is currently carrying, and I must say - I really liked them. I will definitely look at buying and using more hop plugs in the future. They are expensive ($3/oz), but the convenience of dropping hops into the kettle in 1/2oz plugs is really nice… and they smell very fresh. Joe and Marlana have lots of Hop Plugs inventory, so if you are a “whole hop” fan as I am, I would strongly encourage you all to check them out as a viable alternative. Its amazing that those little plugs expand so much in the kettle.
My next brew will probably be “Homegrown Ale 2007″ or an American Pale / IPA. I’m itching to use my Summit hops in something, and I’ve got 2 lbs of Amarillo hops to play with. With all the dark stuff I’ve brewed recently, something on the lighter end of the color spectrum is probably a good idea too.
Gardai in Dublin are on the lookout for 36,000 pints of beer stolen from the Guinness brewery.
More than 400 kegs were stolen in what is likely to be the largest carry-out of drink this Christmas.
A man drove a truck into the yard on Wednesday, and left with a trailer containing 180 Guinness kegs, 180 Budweiser kegs, and 90 Carslberg kegs. Police estimated the haul to be worth at least 64,000 euros (£46,000), at wholesale prices.
However, this figure would be considerably more if Dublin pub prices were charged. The robbery occurred the same day as a special Garda operation known as Freeflow was launched to ease traffic congestion and combat drink-driving over Christmas.
BBC NEWS REPORT.
Freeflow officers manning many checkpoints across the city are expected now also to be on the look out for any large quantity of stolen drink flowing through Dublin’s traffic.
The stolen trailer has since been found at Slane Hill in County Meath. It was empty.
Scientists have found a new threat to the planet: Canadian beer drinkers.
The government-commissioned study says the old, inefficient “beer fridges” that one in three Canadian households use to store their Molson and Labatt’s contribute significantly to global warming by guzzling gas- and coal-fired electricity.
“People need to understand the impact of their lifestyles,” British environmental consultant Joanna Yarrow tells New Scientist magazine. “Clearly the environmental implications of having a frivolous luxury like a beer fridge are not hitting home. This research helps inform people — let’s hope it has an effect.”
The problem is that the beer fridges are mostly decades-old machines that began their second careers as beverage dispensers when Canadians upgraded to more energy-efficient models to store whatever Canadians eat besides doughnuts and poutine.
University of Alberta researcher Denise Young, who led the study, suggests that provincial authorities hold beer-fridge buy-backs or round-ups to eliminate the threat — methods that Americans use to get guns off the streets.
My miniscule Freshops order came today. I’m not quite sure which aspect is more insane:
The alpha acids on my WHOLE LEAF Summit hops are 16.5%
I only ordered 2.5 pounds this year, compared to 8+ last year
It cost me $75 to order 2.5 lbs, which is about as much as I spent last year.
This is probably the last order for me for quite a while. My plan is to use the store of hops in my freezer until it runs out, or I can’t take it anymore and break down again. I am bummed that there were no Columbus or Simcoe hops to be had this year - at least not when I ordered. Now it looks like Freshops has some surplus 2006 inventory of Simcoe they are selling, but still no Columbus.
But why am I whining. I haven’t brewed in over a month, and the next one may be the last of the year.
My friend Brian and I got 2nd Place in American Brown Ale Category for the brown ale we brewed 20 gallons of some months back. I thought it was a very well formulated beer that had tons of flavor, and we did formulate it to fit the ABA style guidelines, so I am pleased and not entirely suprised that it placed.
I am trying to remember if Brian and I placed for any of our other beers other than the Gnarleywine (3rd place at Malt Madness) this year - I think the IPA could easily do well if we can get some carbonated in the bottles - which may have to wait until I put the second 5 gallons on tap next year. It will most likely taste a little different since we used the Safale S56 American Ale Dry yeast instead of WLP001, but based on prior experience I don’t expect it to be too different.
It has been a decent year for competitions - Those 2 joint prizes, and 2 other second places for my belgians (Abbey Brown and TnT), and a first place for the Choking Sun Stout - Not a bad year at all!
Since you all are suffering my Tech Geek posts about my user interface for my planned computerized homebrew system so well, I thought I’d take it a step beyond my screenshots to a little “in action” action. The screen capture was encoded with the Microsoft MPEG-4 v2 codec, and I know it works with Windows Media Player v11 (what we have). If it turns out you guys can’t see it or play it, or really want a different codec, I can try again. Otherwise try saving it to your harddrive and opening it with WMP.
The video basically shows the use of design control points, resizing the various objects that are available, playing around with pipe routing and styles, and a quick demonstration of the alpha-level support, which is not 100% at this point - I make the fermenter vessel partially transparent by setting the alpha channel for one of the color properties. I used a crappy freeware video capture application, so the framerate blows… but you get what you pay for, and you guys still will get the idea on how the screen designer is gonna work.
You may not care, which is fine too.
On the homebrewing front - I haven’t really brewed much. We did a saison (10 gal) a couple weekends ago, which is ready for transfer to secondaries, and I bottled 10 gallons of Choking Sun Stout on Monday - But I haven’t really put much thought into brewing more batches, namely because I have so much beer on hand as it is. I will probably brew some Black Honey Ale and a Coffee Stout sometime soon, but no firm plans on when. To be honest, the price hikes for malt and hops have seriously got me rethinking the frequency with which I brew. I have a decent supply of base malt and hops now, so I’ll probably burn through that over the next 6 months just to reduce on-hand inventory.
So I managed to get my prototype components worked into the main application after a couple hours of playing around. I fixed several issues, and found about 20 more that need attention.
I expect that this will go on for some time - but the results should be good. As you can see, I’ve put in placeholders for a component list on the top right side, and a combobox that will display the current component and its associated icon. I will ultimately put some tabs at the top of the development area to allow flipping between the graphics screens and events designers… I need to work on getting the refresh code optimized and hiding the component properties that I don’t want to show up in the PropertyGrid too.
So much to do…. but that is a good thing, I guess.
Since you all are suffering my Tech Geek posts about my user interface for my planned computerized homebrew system so well, I thought I’d take it a step beyond my screenshots to a little “in action” action. The screen capture was encoded with the Microsoft MPEG-4 v2 codec, and I know it works with Windows Media Player v11 (what we have). If it turns out you guys can’t see it or play it, or really want a different codec, I can try again. Otherwise try saving it to your harddrive and opening it with WMP.
