Good Chemistry Brewing is 5, 6 AND 7!
IT’S (nearly!) OUR BIRTHDAY!
And of course we’re having a party (two, actually!), and releasing not one, not two, but THREE brand new limited edition one-off beers!
Get Friday 12th AND Saturday 13th August in your diary now, as we’ll be releasing our brand new birthday beers with a big bash up at The Good Measure on Friday night to kick-start the weekend, and a party on Saturday at the Taproom in awesome East Bristol!
The new beers are super-special too. Because we couldn’t celebrate with you in 2020 or 2021 we’ve retrospectively brewed beers for those anniversaries this year!
So please welcome our 5th birthday beer, 50 HERTZ, a zesty 5% Sichuan peppercorn Saison brewed with lemongrass for extra zing! That tingling sensation you get on your tongue from Sichuan pepper? Studies reckon it’s consistent with 50Hz.
Our 6th birthday beer is a 6% NEIPA, an absolute juice-bomb of US hops called SIX STATES.
And for this year, our 7th birthday, we’ve gone all-out with a 7% Doppelbock, rich, indulgent and delicious, named SEVEN GOATS after the Brothers Grimm fairytale!
All three will be pouring at The Good Measure on Friday night and through the weekend, and at the taproom on Saturday. At the tap we’ve got Basement 17 Tacos bringing their amazing Mexican flavours plus Private Britton behind the decks spinning all our favourite guilty pleasures. The beers will also be released across Bristol that weekend too, so wherever you are in our amazing city you can join the party!
AND you can get the beers in can on our webshop if you’re not able to come and hang out with us (or even if you are!). There’s a Six-Mix case with two of each, a 12-pack with four of each beer in, and of course they’ll go into our mixed cases in due course too. But the birthday specials are available to pre-order right now – and they’ll be shipped in time for you to celebrate with us on Sat 13th. Check ’em out right HERE!
Our brilliant brewers Dan and Oli, lead by Bob, have put together three incredible new brews for this.
We started out knowing we wanted to create a 5%, a 6% and a 7% beer to represent the birthdays we’re celebrating, and Dan and Oli came up with a few different options for each, which the rest of us then got input into. The three we’ve landed on all showcase different facets of brewing technique, different flavours and ingredients, and the kind of different styles that we’ve become known for. One of our values as a business is “openness, accessibility and inclusivity” and a way that that manifests itself is in our brewing of many different styles of beer – there should be something for very nearly everyone across our range. Because wouldn’t it be boring if we all liked the same beers!
SEVEN GOATS: 7% Doppelbock – this one is named after the Brothers Grimm fairytale The Wolf and The Seven Baby Goats (look it up if you can’t remember it – it’s pretty full-on!!), as ‘bock’ is the German word for ‘goat’.
We absolutely had to celebrate malt in our birthday line-up, because without the great base that the malted barley provides what would beer be! And this gives us a great reason to brew a Doppelbock! This is a rich, strong German-style beer. Most of the malt used is Munich malt, which gives a sweet, bready, biscuity flavour. The rest of the malt is our base malt Golden Promise, Imperial malt, Aromatic malt and Double Roasted Crystal malt. These all bring slightly different flavours of brown sugar, raisin, caramel and berries. True to the style we fermented it with lager yeast to give the beer a clean base to really show off all the flavours from the malts.
SIX STATES: 6% New England IPA – packed full of American hops, this hazy, juicy NEIPA is bursting with tropical flavours and aromas. Our brewers have done a deep dive into the style, as you would expect, and pulled together all the key elements which make a New England IPA what it is. Starting with the grist, we’ve employed rolled oats and malted wheat for full body and that all-important haze. Maltodextrin added at the end of the boil boosts the thickness without the over-sweetness of lactose. For the hops, we started with the Cryo Pop blend from Yakima Chief in the whirlpool. The yeast is our house strain, of British origin, which produces fruity esters during fermentation, but is also capable of biotransformation of hop oils.
And with this being a New England IPA, we’ve added more hops to the fermenter. Mosaic, Citra and Galaxy are added at the start of fermentation. Hops added at this point help with creating a stable haze in the beer, as well as deploying the expected hop flavour and aroma.
This style is all about maintaining that juicy hop aroma and flavour, so part way through fermentation we seal the tank with a spunding valve so nothing escapes! And at the end of fermentation we complete the beer with a big, final dry-hop bringing us up to nearly 15g Hops per Litre of beer!
50 HERTZ: 5% Sichuan Saison – named for the tingle on your tongue that Sichuan pepper gives, our summery saison is full of zest from the pepper and lemongrass additions. Bright, light and rustic, we love a saison here at GCB, with Fresh Start our second ever brew back in 2015, followed by Field Work and Business Casual, both of which received a re-brew when we got the canning line in 2020. The Sichuan pepper we used in this beer, from our friends at The Spicery on nearby Feeder Road, links back to another one of our beers, Wild Forest, which contained the very closely related wild forest pepper from Vietnam.
The yeast we’ve used is the strain from the Dupont Brewery in Belgium, brewers of the amazing Saison Dupont. It produces earthy and fruity flavours and gives the beer a refreshing dry finish.
Get your pre-order in now on our Webshop!
So that’s our birthday beers! We really hope you like the sound of them, and will celebrate with us however you can – whether at The Good Measure on Friday 12th, the taproom in St Philips on Saturday 13th, at one of the other venues pouring the beers (keep an eye on social media for which pubs will have the beers), or at home with the cans if you can’t make it out in person.
As ever, Bob and I are so thankful for your continued support. The first couple of years, when it was just the two of us establishing the brewery, were really tough, and the covid years were an incredible challenge. But we’re not only still here, we have a fantastically strong team around us (including at our award-winning Redland pub), are growing all the time, and solidifying our position as one of the best breweries in Bristol. We can’t wait to see you to celebrate our success together – cheers!
Kelly & Bob
And Dan No1, Liam, Lorin, Dan the Brew, Oli, Ruth and Colin our manager at TGM
Pre-order your beers NOW on our Webshop here
Check out the Birthday playlist on Spotify here
And head to facebook for the details of our parties here!
2016: We hosted a 1st birthday party in the middle of August in awesome East Bristol. Our regular record-spinner Lonely Tourist played live, Bob’s Mum made a cake with our beer, and we brewed a special small batch blackcurrant sour with fruit from our garden. It was incredible to celebrate where we’d come from and what we’d achieved so far, just the two of us in 12 months since we first got the keys for the warehouse we now lovingly call GCHQ.
2017: For our second birthday we launched four varieties of Disco Fizz, Archdeacon of Pop played records and of course there was cake from Bob’s Mum!
2018: Our third birthday was a brilliant party, we got in a load of beers from breweries we love and Honest Burger brought their truck and cooked up a feast! (Read all about it here!)
2019: In 2019 we had a low-key fourth birthday as we were planning a big party for our fifth the following year. Obviously that didn’t happen, and nor did last year, so now here we are celebrating seven years since we got the keys to GCHQ.
