Old dogs, new tricks

When wandering around Morrisons I was surprised to see a couple of Newcastle Brown brand extensions on the shelves.

I must admit I'm not a fan of Newky Brown, it does somehow seem to cause bad hangovers and after a particularly painful morning I even started believing the stories about a special hospital ward in the North East for Newky Brown drinkers.

But dedicated researcher that I am I bought a bottle of "Newcastle Nocurnal" and "Newcastle Winter IPA".

Both beers were brown and both tasted like Newcastle Brown. The Nocturnal seemed milder in taste, more like "Newky Brown lite" which I really can't recommend. The Winter IPA was hoppier than the parent brand, and did taste better than the original. But having said that unless I'm desperate I won't be buying either of these beers again. 

And now for something completely different

As someone who drinks in the ways of righteousness it's not often I drink lager. I mean, when there's decent stuff to drink why would I? Of course this isn't always the case so I sometimes have to settle for lager, but I recently had one of the rare occasions when I bought some out of choice not necessity.

Having delivered an order to Nobel Green Wines I was perusing their excellent beer selection when Hacker-Pschorr Oktoberfest Märzen caught my eye. Stronger lagers are better than the bog standard variety, and I've got a bit of history with Hacker-Pschorr.

Back when I was a fresh faced 17 year old I went on my first CAMRA event. It was a trip to a company in New Haw that was importing Hacker-Pschorr beers. Draught lager was freely distributed, and gratefully guzzled by the assembled visitors. It must be something of a rarity having CAMRA trips to go and drink keg lager but everyone seemed quite happy with it, which is perhaps why I've always taken with a pinch of salt comments from those that claim CAMRA is made up of blinkered dogmatists.

However, the real starts of the show were the bottled beers, cloudy wheat beer and Oktoberfest Märzen. We were limited to a bottle between two of these, though orders of crates were soon placed so a more thorough appraisal could take place. I preferred the wheat beer and since then wheat beer has become much more common, to the extent that several brands are now on sale in my local supermarkets. I wasn't quite as taken with the Märzen, and lagers like this are certainly seldom seen.

So I couldn't resist adding a bottle to my basket when I saw it, and I eagerly awaited the time to drink it. To get into the occasion I poured it into my pewter tankard from Munich, though as this stopped me seeing the colour it was perhaps not my best plan. So I put a bit in a glass as well and got so see that it's pale brown. The beer had enough alcohol to make it interesting (5.8% ABV) but there was still an unmistakable lageryiness to it, being a bit thin for the strength and having a touch of vegetable about it. It seems my 17 year old self was right: wheat beer's better.

Inside an old oast house

Dave at work loves hops. His dedication is such that he took holiday from his work as a brewer to go hop picking.

The other day he brought in some old pictures of the oast house on the hop farm he works at:

Not that the pictures are that old,

A pocket of hops is being filled here

being taken in 2008. The building dates from 1911, that year again.

It's an amazing looking place, and as well as the hops they grow commercially they have a small garden of old varieties, some which Dave will be putting to good use on a home brew scale.

Assessing hop quality

On my recent tour of Botanix I got to see how to assess hops by hand.

The hops I use at work mainly come in whatever vacuum packs the suppliers choose to send me so assessing hops for quality is not something I normally do. Keen to make the most of the visit I' d done a bit of cramming before hand, reading the chapter on hops in the Handbook of Brewing. It always helps when you're trying to learn things if you've some idea what's going on in the first place. And it helps even more when you're trying to write up what you've seen!

We were shown sample of the British aroma hops East Kent Goldings*. The samples come in neatly cut blocks extracted from hop pockets or bales and wrapped in thick blue paper. The block should first be gently pressed on the uncut side and have a slight springiness. A sample that's too hard could be over-pressed which causes the lupulin glands to rupture or it may have a high moisture content. Next looking at the cut side the lupulin can be seen, if the colour is too dark it can indicate drying at too high a temperature causing lower oil content and relatively poor storage ability.

The hops can be visually assessed for disease, though brown is not necessarily bad. I've heard a few people judge hops by how green they are, but I've not been totally convinced. For brewing it's the yellow lupulin glands, inside at the base of the cones, that we're after so 'leaf' (actually bracts) colour isn't critical. Browning of the hops can be caused by wind damage, which is superficial and can be determined by looking at the cone and seeing if the browning is only partial or throughout the whole cone. Downy and Powdery Mildew will cause the whole cone to go brown, Powdery can cause the whole cone to be so stunted it's called a "rat's turd" and Downy can be even worse! Red spider mites can also cause hops to brown, and serious aphid infection will lead to parts of the cone going black as mould grows where the honeydew is excreted.

When the block is broken apart and cones removed they can be assessed for how easily they shatter. If they shatter easily the hops may have been harvested late but if the block already contains a lot of shattered hops they may have been over dried or subjected to rough handling after kilning. Easy shattering will not necessarily affect the brewing quality, and low alpha varieties are more prone to it as they have less lupulin to stick the cones together. Seeing an excessive amount of leaf and bine definitely is a problem as it shows poorly designed or operated picking machines were used.

Next the aroma of the hops can be assessed. Though hop aroma is variety dependent, and not directly related to the aroma they will give to beer, hop aromas can still be categorised as desirable (e.g. citrus, spice, floral, pine) or undesirable (e.g. musty, cheesy, rubbery). The cones can be sniffed as they are before rubbing them between the hands to release the aroma.

Hops can be placed into one of three categories: choicest, grade one and grade two. Apparently the brewing quality of grade one hops is as good as choicest but I don't think we were told about what happens to grade two, though it was mentioned that ever the poorest hops can still be sent to the factory for extraction.

There are also a whole series of laboratory analyses that hops can be subjected to but I'll leave it there for now.











*That was how the sample was labelled so don't know if they were Early Birds or Cobbs or Eastwells or what. It's not always a satisfying business being a beer nerd.

Bricklayers Arms Kent beer festival

On Saturday I got up to the Bricklayer's Arms Kent beer festival. There were a few beers I was keen to try, including I must admit some of my own. Before I'd though I saw from a tweet that my green hop beer had sold out, and when I arrived my stout had too. It's good to see your beers are proving popular, but annoying if it means you don't get to drink them yourself. That agony is my triumph.

   

Our enjoyment of the festival was slightly marred by the fact they'd run of of programmes, so despite me being a brewer of Kent we were at a bit of a loss as to what most of the beers were like. I rattled though the available beers I had an idea were good but my friends were after something from the dark side and dark beers seemed in short supply. Heroically we struggled on but it was a bit parky so we wandered on to another pub a bit sooner than we might have otherwise.

The next festival on our list is the Wandsworth Common Halloween one and we might go a bit earlier to that one, and bring a beer list with us.

SIBA SE beer competition 2012

I briefly made it to the rescheduled SIBA SE beer competition yesterday. Driving through London is such a pleasant experience I wonder why I don't do it more often. When I finally got to the venue they'd already started announcing the results. Good job I'd got there though as we won two silvers and a bronze.

Then I had a swift half of unfined beer (it tasted fine but did have a slight haze), chatted to someone that actually noticed the Brett in my Imperial Russian Stout and then spent two hours crawling home* from South London.

* When I say home I did actually call in at The Crown first, and yes I did have a swifty, but I had beer to deliver too so really I was still working.

Go, go, Pandazilla!

With a purposeful grimace and a terrible sound
He pulls the spitting high tension wires down

My mate Rob of Mordue brewery has been kind enough to send me a bottle of Pandazilla, a beer made under his own Panda and Frog label, with his signature on the bottle and everything.

Helpless people on a subway train
Scream for God as He looks in on them

Already owning  a copy of Rob's signature I'm not easily impressed, but it's a fantastic label, so well done to the designer.

 He picks up a bus and he throws it back down
As he wades through the buildings toward the center of town

The beer is a Cascadian Dark Ale, craftily avoiding the oxymoronic term Black IPA. It's not my favourite style of beer. Maybe the cognitive dissonance of it scrambles my taste buds. But with a powerful whack of the sort of hops Darth Vader would approve of, enough dark malt taste to provide a bit of contrast and being surprising drinkable I necked the Pandazilla with great speed. Nice one Rob, maybe I should give these new fangled weirdly named whatsits a go more often.

Oh no, they say, he's got to go
Go go Pandazilla, yeah
Oh no, there goes Tokyo
Go go Pandazilla, yeah