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As I'm sure many of  you can appreciate, sometimes brewing full time just isn't enough. The days, evenings and weekends may keep production levels up but I've still been lagging behind with the amount of hop varieties now out there to try.

As the lovely Lisa is also keen to increase her brewing knowledge we've been doing some mini-home brews with different hops and hop combinations.

One hop we used was Endavour, a new English variety with the grapefruit flavoured American hop Cascade as its mother. We've been making four to five gallon batches of wort and boiling up on the hob a gallon or so of each hop or hop combination we want to try.  My first attempt at using Endeavour was very disappointing. I'd kept the hopping quite modest and very little flavour came through into the beer. I wasn't sure if this was down to the hop or problems with weighing out on a few grammes on kitchen scales though so I gave it another go with the hopping rate cranked up to 60g for a 4 to 5 litre batch.

This time I got what I was after: a definite black currant smell, tongue coating bitterness, and a citrussy taste but still English in character. Great stuff actually, though hop heads note the flavour intensity is still not up there with modern American varieties, being more at the Bramling Cross or Bobek level. I was impressed with how my second attempt at using Endeavour turned out and it's definitely a hop I'd like to use at work.