slainte! & wee-wee in the sea-sea
Feb 02, 2026
What's Up?
Well let's just say it is important to weigh up the positives!
+ took beer to a good number of pubs this week
+ the Alton's Pride is really on spectacular form
+ we are back having Satisfaction, Winter Sunset and Sundown in stock
+ this year's 4% Winter Sunset [batch 2] is such a winner
+ the humans who work at Planday are helpful and the system is quite robust
+ we bought a bright beer tank at auction for a decent price
+ we have been reflooring our cold cask store
Whilst staying grounded with the negatives!
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lots of places but not lots of beer
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Shop off-sales dead
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Taproom muted
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Personnel shenanigans - but let's just say the comments on Planday above help make this more of a positive than a negative!
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We have been reflooring our cold cask store (yes, I know!)
Overall it's been a bit of a tough slog of a week - cashflow is rubbish and the whole week had that sort of last-week in January feel to it - you know, where the weather sucks and everyone's Christmas credit card bill have landed and it still isn't quite payday - because it was! Here is looking only up from here!
What's On?
What? I'm trying to draw your attention to Winter Sunset by making it bigger??? Who - me???
What's About?
Ok the subject line doesn't exactly smack of maturity... maybe year 1 or year 2 in primary school parlance... but actually it is because we are sort of in year 2 timewise [not yet maturity wise] that I thought it was worth writing about.
Most beer is of course not vegan. This is due to the widespread use of isinglass as finings to get the yeast to flocculate and clear beer. Isinglass is derived from fish bladders of Sturgeon (I'd prefer the caviar!), Cod (salt and vinegar on mine please) and Hake (not a usual choice for me on a menu). Hence the wee-wee in the sea-sea...
Now as a Scot there are several levels of hypocrisy in me trying to make you think this might not be so delicious...
exhibit A = haggis,
exhibt B = beers
for reason
i) I don't sweat about this in most beers,
ii) Triple fff have historically used many, many gallons of finings in their beer. So this is not about a criticism of isinglass otherwise we're basically criticising ourselves...
What it is worth saying is that we have been vegan for many-many months now. We started experimenting in 2024 and went full time over to vegan finings (silicate from dandelions and other fauna as I understand it) mid-2025.
We started for lots of reasons - we'd had some cloudy beer from isinglass that either hadn't performed within its date range or we had to assume had been washed out in filling were the main ones. In this period where we had a few beers not dropping crystal bright it wasn't just the isinglass as it didn't drop bright with the vegan finings either. We analysed the beer and within the mystery that is beer it seemed that the most likely culprit was us being slightly early on crash or off on measurements and fermentation was ongoing. Mistakes happen, nothing new there - but we gained from it as it made us test everything to the n-th degree with internal and external labs.
At the moment [hopefully the QC we do means this cannot jinx it, but it is beer so you never know!) the vegan finings are giving us the brightest beer we've probably ever had.
Oh, and instead of around a pint of isinglass going into a cask less around a shot glass of vegan finings goes in☑️.
The vegan finings compact the sediment much tighter ☑️.
They clear the beer from the top much faster ☑️.
They can withstand up to 15 moves (about the same as isinglass)☑️. Brewers get scared of the much, much more expensive containers of vegan finings versus isinglass but fail to do the maths that because the dosage is around 1/13th of isinglass and given they have much longer shelf lives the vegan finings are the same price☑️.
Vegan finings can give you a bigger customer base ☑️.
Personally given the choice of some fish bladded or dandelion I'm going flowers but each to their own☑️.
Every brewery has the odd issue with beer clarity from time to time - nature does not do "the same" and consistency is super hard [look at how thin Guiness is at the moment if you want any proof of this!] - but what we know from what is a long sample size is that vegan finings work really well - better than isinglass for us - and nothing gets packaged until we have evidence of that working in two sets of four samples taken 12 hours and 1 hour before packaging... human error can still creep in, weird stuff can happen with beer but we're delighted with our choice of shot of flowery stuff in each cask versus a pint of fish bladder extract.
Haggis anyone? It was Burns Night last week!
Wish you a fabulous weekend and let me know what we can bring you next week! It is vegan. Ok, it has been for a long time. But now you know maybe a chance to buy loads of it?! 😉 Some Alton's Pride might just be coming home with me so as I can do some thorough testing myself ahead of your order (s!) next week!
Bring on February. Slainte!
Xen [omnivore but enjoys vegan beer!]
P.S.
