Blackpit x Rivington Collab

Fancy spending the day with like-minded beer lovers, conjuring up a brand new brew to excite the taste buds? Don’t mind if we do!

‘Collaboration brews’ (as they are referred to in the post-craft beer revolution) are now as commonplace in the beer scene as beards on brewers. They present the perfect opportunity to share ideas & expertise and explore new concepts utilising different ingredients, techniques & brewing styles. When brewers come together because of shared ideals or common interests, there is never a shortage of ideas for new beers to be explored.

Back in late July, the Blackpit team got together with our friends at Rivington Brewing Co to create an exciting new beer to showcase at this year’s Festival of Beer. For those that are not familiar with Rivington; these guys really are experts in their craft. Based out of the family dairy farm in Lancashire, their philosophy is about brewing exciting modern styles of craft beer, without taking themselves too seriously. Their beers are ace and they’ve earned serious respect on the craft beer scene.

Our focus at Blackpit has always been on producing the best quality session ales; beers you can enjoy a few of, down the pub, with your mates or your dad! That being said, craft beer is great and we’ve always been keen to broaden our horizons and experiment with alternative styles.

So, what to brew? Firstly, we needed to design a beer to bridge the gap between Blackpit and Rivington’s brewing styles. Rivington are experts in modern ‘hop-forward’ beers and the Blackpit team were keen to experiment with a new style of Pale Ale. After a few weeks of batting ideas about, we finally came up with a recipe that both teams were really excited about… Enter Blackpit / Rivington Festival Pale!

Everything begins with water and hop-forward beer styles lend themselves to much softer water than our natural water here at Blackpit. After some research, we designed a water profile using a range of mineral supplements to ‘soften’ our water. This would allow the bold hop flavours and aromas to really shine through in the finished product. Softening our water is something we’d never tried before and has produced amazing results in subsequent brews. Cheers for the heads-up, Team Rivington!

Next came malts & hops. We settled on a base grist mix of Maris Otter and Extra Pale malts, with speciality malts including Vienna, Crystal 150 and Carapils. This beer was always going to be all about the hops and we really went to town; Columbus (USA) to bitter, Amarillo (USA), Centennial (USA) and Columbus (USA) for flavour/aroma, followed by an absolutely massive bag of Citra (USA) for the dry hop. This hop mix gave us the citrus and juicy tropical fruit flavours we were going for.

We used a different technique when adding the aroma hops by re-circulating the wort to cool it slightly before adding the hops. This stopped too much bitterness being stripped out of the hops, allowing the flavour and aroma to really shine though.

Those familiar with Blackpit’s beers will know that we normally package our beer into casks, rather than kegs. Kegs are cask’s younger (and slightly more technologically advanced!) brother. The keg is a vacuum whereby, even once tapped, the beer never comes into contact with oxygen and therefore has a much longer lifespan. The beer is carbonated and kegs are filled at -1 celsius to prevent fobbing (foaming up). We even had to add antifreeze to our water coolers to make this possible; it’s fair to say our first foray into kegging was a learning experience!

All in all, we think it worked out ok… Festival Pale was the biggest selling ‘craft’ beer at the Festival of Beer this year by quite a margin; not bad for a first attempt! Hopefully you got to try it at the Festival, if not pop into the tap room as we kept a couple of kegs back especially!

We’d like to say a big thank you to our friends at Rivington. With 6 of us in the Brewhouse all day and beers the night before, we had a great time whilst still learning new techniques and broadening our knowledge. They say many hands make light work and clearing up after the days brewing was no exception; we even had time for a quick swim in the lake to round off the day! Safe to say we can’t wait for the second ‘away’ leg once the guys have finished installing their spanking new brewhouse and tap room in the new year! To track their progress or learn more about Rivington Brewing Co, head to rivingtonbrewing.co.uk or follow them on social channels.

Duncan
Blackpit Director