Chester Beer Company is launching a brand new 5.6% West Coast IPA at this year's Chester Food and Drink Festival.
The Chester Food and Drink Festival will be held between August 28 and 30 over the 2021 Summer Bank Holiday Weekend. Good weather is forecast for the festival at the Chester Roodee Racecourse so we recommend coming on Saturday to get this new beer fresh.
We've named our new Low Intervention Craft Beer Deva IPA after the Roman name for the City of Chester. We have lovingly made this beer with no additives, and no process aids using only grains and hops that would otherwise have gone to waste. We expect it to be a translucent light peach colour around the 11 mark on the colour chart.
Months of preparation and development have gone into this new beer. We brewed a tiny trial batch in June on a Spiedel Braumeister. If you come down to the festival we have kept a case of that to share with new friends and old who visit our stand. We brewed the trial batch at 5% and went into the mash tun hot to create a big mouth-feel from unfermentable sugars.
We've scaled up the recipe and gone in at a lower mash temperature to push the ABV up to 5.6%. Now, there's small batch brewers and there's small batch brewers and we are very much small batch brewers. We made 580 litres of Deva IPA and have split packaging between cask, keg and bottle.
The keg conditioned beer will be available from September 1st with a number of local bars ordering in advance: If you miss us at the festival or you want to get some more in your glass, you will find it at Beer Heroes Chester, Bluestone Bar in Boughton, the Brewery Tap in Bridge Street, and the Glynne Arms in Hawarden.
Just one 36 pint pin of this has been issued on cask and that can be found on hand-pull at Chester's Deva Tap. Tim McHale has been incredibly supportive of our brewery since we first came to market in April 2021 and so we're allowing just one cask out to see how it's received by their loyal customers after service through a sparkler.
We will be serving just 160 litres by gravity from steel casks on Chester Racecourse, and the bottles will be released in September. They will be available for order on our website, and we plan they will make a first public appearance at the Northwich Vegan Street Market on September 6.
Expect big West Coast hop aromas from the Cascade, Mosaic and Simcoe we've used in this brew. The trial brew has huge flavour, and having scaled the quantity of hops directly rather than assuming we'd get more out of the bigger commercial brew kit we're expecting this to be at least as heavy a puncher.
We bittered the brew with Magnum in the boil and have pulled back the IBU measure from 58 to 35. The IBU reduction all coming from leaving the late hops to flame out and dry hopping. To my palette the bitterness is very similar to the trial.
We expect to be situated in Outside Area 2 near Chester Race Company's White Horse pub but will let you know on Facebook if that changes at the last minute. Come and see us over the weekend, and if you can't make the Food and Drink Festival then we hope to meet you soon.