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Artificial Intelligence is let loose in the brewery

Hopman as designed by MidJourney A.I.

We have had a fun project in the fermenter this week, a beer designed by machines, and brewed by humans.

Using the Open AI artificial-intelligence chatbot, Chat GPT, I asked it to produce a 5% IPA recipe using the Mutineers equipment. The results were interesting. The recipe it suggested looks like a good malt bill; combining Pale, Munich, Crystal and Carapils to create a golden coloured beer that will have a good body and toffee flavours, but it went a bit off the rails when adding hops. The bitterness of a beer is measured in International Bittering Units (IBU’s), and an IPA usually sits between 50-70 (for reference, Brewdog’s Punk IPA is 40 IBU). ChatGPT suggested a 160 IBU beer, which frankly would be horrific! So we adjusted it down to 65 IBU. The hops used were Amarillo, Simcoe and Centennial. It also suggested we add only ¼ of the yeast required, which would have been a mistake as well.

The beer is called Open A.I.P.A. and is a 5% IPA.

The beer is now conditioning in casks, and will head out the door in a few weeks, possibly to a pub near you!

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Adopt a Beer

The perfect gift for beer lovers from local businesses.

We have teamed up with the fine people at The Cockpit Micropub in Chislehurst, and Ticketlab, to bring you our Adopt a Beer scheme. 

As a gift idea for the beer lover in your life (or even for yourself!) you can be part of the Adopt a Beer scheme, which will produce a delicious fruity casked Pale Ale, using Simcoe and Mosaic hops, which you will be invited to drink when it is ready at The Cockpit. The beer will be brewed on 27th December, with pints ready at the end of January.

As part of the adoption process you will be given a limited edition Mutineers stainless steel pint cup, beer mats, and be provided with regular updates about the beer that you have adopted, taking you through all the stages from grain to glass! You will learn about Mutineers Brewery, which is based in Bromley, the brewing process from beginning to end, receive a copy of the recipe if you want to make your own at home, and once the beer is ready to be poured, you will be given a voucher for two pints of the Pale Ale which will be on cask at The Cockpit.

To become part of this scheme, visit the Cockpit Micropub, Royal Parade, Chislehurst BR7 6NR, and buy the Adopt a Beer box for £25, which contains the cup, beer mats, and all the information you need to start getting updates about the adoption.

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Second Lockdown

Here we are again, back at home for lockdown 2.0. The first lockdown meant getting back to basics; brewing lots of experiments in the kitchen on the the old home brew kit, testing out some new ideas I have wanted to try for ages, but didn’t want to risk on the bigger setup. Some of these came out brilliantly, like the Raider, a take on the German lemon radler beer (but without the lemonade), Haymarket Riot best bitter, and the A.W.O.L. (American Wheat, Original Lockdown) wheat beer, which are both beers that will be brewed in larger quantities next year. Others didn’t work quite as well, but lessons were learnt from these. 

For this lockdown, life doesn’t feel as constrained. Cask beer orders have been coming in from The Broken Drum (Bexley), Orpington Liberal Club (Orpington) and The Bitter End (Bromley), and beer will still be packaged in bottles and 5L mini-kegs for others who may be interested (I know that One Inn the Wood (Petts Wood) are selling mini kegs again). 

The only new brew I have planned for the next few weeks is a milk, oatmeal & vanilla stout, which will be brewed this week at the request of Orpington Liberal Club. Other than that, there are enough orders in to keep everyones favourite Mutineers beers flowing. 

Keep an eye on you local pub, make sure they are ok, and if you want them to stock a Mutineers beer, let them know.

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Beer Mats

Mutineers Beer Mats

I get contacted a lot by beer mat collectors asking how they can get hold of a set of our mats. The mats were created as promotional material for the pubs and bars that sell our beer, and we would like to encourage people to visit those venues and enjoy the drinks they have on offer. The beer mats we had printed are of a high quality, and therefore were not cheap, and we would like to continue supplying the beer mats we have to the venues stocking our beer.

If you are unable to visit any of our stockists listed on our home page, we can post you two sets of beer mats (8 mats in total), but ask for a £5 donation towards this via paypal.me/mutineersbrewery  I will send the mats to the delivery address you include with the payment.

If you do plan on visiting any of the places that sell our beer to have a drink and get some beer mats, it is worth contacting them in advance to make sure they have some beer mats in stock.

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Christmas Stout

Rebel without a Claus

We wanted to make a Christmas special for you this year, and are acutely aware that we haven’t offered up a stout for you yet. We partnered up with our friends over at Marlix Brewery, Mark & Alex, and have produced a Mincemeat Stout for you. On a dark and windy night in November, we made this deliciously sweet smooth black liquid which is crammed full of Mincemeat ( a good couple of kilograms, it smelt amazing!), lactose sugar to give it a milky smoothness, and a load of oats to give it the thick texture it deserved.

We named the beer ‘Rebel without a Claus’ following our mutineer based naming convention, but giving it a Christmas twist.

The beer will only be available at One Inn the Wood in Petts Wood on Cask from this Thursday (12th Dec), or in bottles from the Lock & Barrel, Bromley. Hurry, this is a one off, and once it is gone, it is gone!

Available at Lock & Barrel, Bromley.
Mark, Alex, Joe and Rob during the Brew.
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Greta Green Hop

It is green hop season again! We have collected all the hop cones we could find from our gardens, and crammed them into the kettle. We have never used this many hops before, and are excited to see how it turns out! We ended up with a ratio of about 1kg Hops per 9 Gallon cask, which is about 8 times the volume of hops that we would normally use.

This year’s Green Hop is the ‘Greta Green Hop’, named after Miss Thunberg, the Climate Activist. Anyone who can piss off Arron Banks, Vladimir Putin, Piers Morgan, Jeremy Clarkson and Donald Trump, whilst being nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize is worthy of a beer named after them… even if they can’t drink it for another 2 years.

Greta Green Hop can be found at the Orpington Liberal Club Beer Festival, and Petts Woods Real Ale Micropub; One in the Wood.

Mutineers Brewery

Rob, Riley & Bathers with their home grown crop of hops

Mutineers Brewery

Splitting the Hop cones from the stems.

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Where do we get our beer names from?

We have been asked in the past why our beers are called what they are. We like to link the names to people or things that create disruption and chaos. For example:

Sorachi Kidd – Named after Captain William Kidd, the Scottish Pirate and Privateer, and a bane to the East India Trading company.

Fili Buster – An act of defiance by a member of parliament to frustrate and delay proceedings by continuously talking, and holding the fool until the time to discuss a bill has passed.

Radio Fresh – Named after the Syrian FM Radio station which was told by ISIS to stop playing music. In response they played out random sounds (Big Ben, farmyard animals, and explosions) in place of the music. Then when ordered to stop using female presenters, masked the woman using synthesisers to sound like men.

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Radio Fresh

We have just bottled and casked our latest new offering; Radio Fresh. A hoppy pale ale that has a great aroma and punchy taste.

The beer is named after the Syrian radio station, whose founder was recently killed due to their defiance of Extremists. The station was ordered to stop playing music by a faction of IS, and in response they played bird sounds, the bells of Big Ben and the sounds of farmyard animals as a sarcastic gesture in the place of music. They were later ordered to take all women off the air, their reaction was to keep the female presenters, and put their voices through voice distorters to sound like men. Our kind of modern day Mutineer!

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Who are we?

We are the Mutineers. Three friends who like drinking good beer.

Simply drinking good beer wasn’t enough for us, so we branched out, and learnt to make great beer too. Our beers are the product of an ongoing search to find balance and bold tastes from the four key elements; Water, Grain, Hops and Yeast.

 

 

Our head brewer is Rob, a man who has swum with sharks, scaled mountains, dived through sunken ships, broken himself on the slopes of Val d’Isere, surfed off the cost of four continents, plummeted 15000ft to Earth, survived earthquakes, bush fires and a coup d’etat.

 

 

 

Bathers (rhymes with ‘gathers’) is one of our brewers at Mutineers. He came from the wild north of Wales, where the tempest storms of his youth grounded him with a pragmatic outlook. His skills in cartography know no bounds, tested only by his wife’s superior sense of direction. Living his life in an old smugglers den on the borders of Kent, Bathers is our wild man from the woods.

 

 

Lee is a man who if you met him at a party would explain how he used to be employed to deliver ransom packages to pirates in international waters for the safe release of life and cargo.  These are just the parts of his career he is allowed to tell you about. He is our Digital Druid, our Physics formulator, and one of our brewers!

 

 

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Pay it forward.

When we first started out, when we were learning the process, and figuring out the best process for us to use, we experimented with recipes created by others. Using the knowledge of others in invaluable, and saved us a lot of time, effort, materials and frustration. It is time to pay that forward.

We have published our recipes online here, for anyone use. Obviously we would like it if we could supply the beer to you, however, we are also open to conversations about how you got on with our process.

Love beer? Brew beer!