Last year the new people behind Burton Bridge Brewery launched the first in a of a series of beers based on the legendary Stairway To Heaven recipe called Stairway To Simcoe. Each is a variation on the original brew and is accompanied by a striking reinterpretation of the pump clip.
“Stairway To Heaven is a good starting base for our experiments, a nice beer that lends itself to showcasing other hops,” reveals Head Brewer Al Wall.
Stairway To Heaven was first brewed at Burton Bridge Brewery in 2000 for a pub called The Vine in Wednesbury. The now happily retired Head Brewer Bruce Wilkinson explains how they came to be approached.
“The Landlord was a great Led Zeppelin fan and he had had breweries brewing a 5% pale beer for him. After he’d fallen out with the third brewery producing it, he rang us and asked if we’d do it,” recalls Bruce. “He wanted two barrels a week, so we said we’d need to sell it out to free trade and we came to an agreement to pay a royalty on each barrel of Stairway that we sold.
“I struggled a bit with the recipe as no one would tell me much apart from it was a pale 5% beer with a traditional hoppy aroma. I brewed it with pale malt, 25kg sugar and we used Northdown hops with a soft bitterness and we late copper hopped it with Fuggles and Goldings.
“We then found out why he kept changing breweries, he wasn’t very good at paying! He had this etched window in his pub with the Stairway To Heaven logo, this became the pump clip. He went bust owing us some money, so we stopped paying the royalties and around that time Geoff (Mumford) found out the trademark had fallen through, so we registered it.”
Stairway To Heaven went on to become one of the most popular Burton Bridge Brewery beers.
“It is difficult to say how many beers we will do,” wonder Al when questioned about the long term future of the Stairway To … series. “It depends on what hops we want to trial or what we find interesting. The first one was done using Simcoe as that is our brewer John Travis’s favourite hop. The second was Nelson Sauvin, which was to trial an entirely different type of hop. Stairway To Centennial was selected after conversation with Ben at Charles Faram and going forward we will be leaning on them quite a bit for help selecting the right flavours and or combinations of hops. We have talked about doing one with Strata, another with Citra (or Citra & Mosaic) and another with Styrian Dragon. They won’t all be showcases for single hops, they may have supporting hops to help if a single variety would be too flat or uninteresting.”
So far, the three beers have proved very popular, Stairway To Simcoe winning the Best Beer on the Burton Ale Trail last September.
“They have been selling really well!” exclaims Brewery Manager Emma Cole. “Nathan and Terry in sales keep requesting more of them. We will keep doing them as long as there is demand and really popular ones might end up getting repeated. I’m looking forward to getting them in bottles in a few months and they have been really popular in mini casks too.”
At the time of writing the Nelson Sauvin variant is on at Burton Bridge Inn and Centennial is on the bar at The Spirit Vaults in Melbourne, We are also promised that another in the series will be available at the forthcoming Burton & South Derbyshire CAMRA Beer Festival, so if you are sure that all that glitters is gold, make sure you go and buy one.
