Tag Archives: hops

Hopostrophes

Table from a Institute of Brewing Journal, 1983.

By Bailey

I once wrote the language style guide for a large organisation but I didn’t get chance to come up with advice on writing about hops. Now seems like a good time to put that right. As usual with questions of style (grammar’s wishy-washy, let-it-all-hang-out cousin) this is slightly more complicated than it ought to be.

1. The names of hop varieties should be capitalised. Most older varieties are named after places or people (Goldings, Fuggles) and many newer ones are trademarks, and so ought to be capitalised. For consistency, it makes sense to capitalise all of them, all of the time.

2. Older hop varieties named after people or places tend, historically, to be written as if they were plurals. This might be because they were once possessives which have lost their apostrophes — should it be Golding’s, just as the variety of apple is Laxton’s Superb? Or do we accept that, as with the Nags [sic] Head, it is too late to be correcting typos? My view is that to attempt to overturn this tradition would be churlish. So, Fuggles and Goldings it is.

3. Except, of course, in the case of Whitbread Golding Variety (WGV) which is definitely not Whitbread Goldings Variety.

4. American hops which have been around for a long while cause confusion: should they be given names which echo Goldings and Fuggles? The Journal of the Institute of Brewing referred, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, to Clusters (with S, an old variety) and Cascade (without, relatively modern). They also suggest Super Styrians, perhaps because they were seen as part of the same family as Styrian Goldings. That seems a good example to follow.

5. New hops varieties are rarely, if ever, pluralised: writing Sorachi Aces, Citras, Mosaics and Danas seems outright barbarous.

6. Hops from non-English speaking countries which are commonly referred to using, e.g., German or Czech names should not be pluralised as if they were English words: ‘Saazs’ seems silly (zeems zilly). Hallertau is a variety in its own right; but sub-varieties from the Hallertau region are, e.g., Hallertauer Magnum.

7. A general rule, then: don’t stick an S on the end of the name of a hop variety unless it is Fuggles, Goldings, Super Styrians or Clusters.

The brewer added generous amounts of Cascade in the first batch. By the time of the second brew, the recipe had been revised, and on that occasion used equally generous amounts of Goldings and Clusters, with a touch of Citra.

Book Review: For the Love of Hops

Malt and hops only advertisement.

It would be a shame if any beer lovers were to miss out on Stan Hieronymus’s latest book, For the Love of Hops, because it resembles a technical manual for brewers.

We have another book in the series, on the subject of yeast, which we’ve found a little heavy going. FORTLOH (yes, that’s what we’re going to call it), though it certainly has all the details on, say, 4-mercapto-4-methylpentan-2-one you might expect, is quite the opposite. In fact, it’s almost a page turner, as the hard facts are woven into vivid reportage from hop fields around the world, laced with Van Klompesque profundities from brewers, and peppered with revelatory statements that bring the pint in your hand into sharper focus.

And ‘the love hops’, in this case, doesn’t necessarily mean that Randallizing, chest-bumping, BRING ON THE BURN!!! fanboy tendency: there is plenty of talk of balance and much insight into ‘classical’ European brewing techniques. The much-maligned ‘boring old’ Fuggle — too English for its own good — is given plenty of attention, and put into context as a kind of ‘stud’ from which many hipper hop varieties are descended.

For the Love of Hops front cover.

If you do brew, however, you will no doubt finish the book resolved to make changes in your technique. Where other brewing guides make assertions based on ‘thirty years’ experience’ or ‘common sense’, Hieronymus has dug out the results of industry experiments, so that he can suggest, with some confidence, that a mixture of post-boil hopping and dry-hopping will give the most bang for your buck in terms of aroma. Some mind-bending conclusions about how we perceive bitterness and ‘hoppiness’ are reached.

Throughout, there are reassuring references to trusted names (Martyn Cornell, Evan Rail), and a care with words which means, as far as we can see, that nothing is stated with more certainty than it deserves.

We like to include a balancing ‘on the downside’ paragraph but it’s an effort in this case. Perhaps the process of growing hops is a touch mysticised — the rustic Hop People with their queer ways, oneness with the plant, green-fingers and folk wisdom, and so on — but that’s arguably balanced by the demystification of other parts of the process.

So, in conclusion… how do those ratings systems work? ‘Five thumbs up’, or whatever. Buy it.

Living Beer and the Rhetoric of Whole Food

Wholefood store scanned from a 1970s cookery book.

We haven’t drawn any firm conclusions on this subject yet, but see what you make of these quotations. (Our emphasis throughout.)

“For this reason ‘whole’ corn meal, which contains the germ, will have a greater life-containing, life-giving quality than the ‘degermed’ cornmeal found in supermarkets. Whole cornmeal is a “live” food — it spoils when the oil in the germ becomes rancid. Degermed cornmeal is a ‘dead’ food, as it lacks the germ (of life). Hence, it can be kept on grocery shelves for months without spoiling, though like all milled grains it does become stale.” Edward Espe Brown, Tassajara Bread Book, 1970.

“…’natural foods’ now threaten to replace ‘gourmet cooking’ as the main topic of food conversations… More than just a revival of old familiar food fads, this is part of the general concern now felt about the deterioration of our environment. Boredom with too much smooth, bland, overprocessed and sweet food has helped to attract not only the expected faddists, hypochondriacs and axe-grinders, but at least a proportion of scientists, especially nutritionists and conservationists.” ‘From Cranks to Nuts’, The Times, 7 August 1971.

“We opted at first for a high strength bitter brewed just from malt, hops, yeast and water. As well as being more wholesome this would also be simpler to produce.” Martin Sykes recalling the founding of the Selby Brewery in 1972, Called to the Bar, 1991.

“…the adulterated sludge that is glorified under the name of keg.” Michael Hardman, CAMRA’s What’s Brewing?, June 1972.

“The first distinction that must be made by the discerning drinker of draught beer is between keg, top-pressure, and traditional (the Real Thing)… traditional beer is alive while keg ber, like most bottled beer, is dead.” Richard Boston, ‘The Quick and the Dead’, The Guardian, 25 August 1973.

“British brewers are practically free to tamper with their beer as much as they want, unlike their colleagues in West Germany, who are forbidden by law to use any ingredient other than malt, hops and water… Fortunately, many brewers in Britain have kept faithful to nature, and beer brewed and served naturally can be found in nearly every corner of the country.” Michael Hardman, Beer Naturally, 1978.

“‘Real ale’ is the popular name for traditional beer brewed for centuries in Britain from malted barley and hops, with hundreds of regional variations in recipe and taste… Many brewers, big and small, use adjuncts in the brewing process. Flaked maize, potato starch, pasta flour, rice grits, malt and hop extracts will probably do you no harm but they are detrimental to the flavour of the beer.” CAMRA Good Beer Guide, 1978.

Poor, faithful old sugar, written out of history…

Hop Smoke Tickling the Brain

Detail from the label of Oakham's Green Devil IPA.

We’re as tired of the fetishisation of hops as much as the next blogger but, despite that, the two beers that have made us sit up and take notice lately have both been showcases for bold hopping.

A couple of weeks ago, we spent a happy afternoon in the back room of the Star Inn, Crowlas, helping Darren ‘Beer Today’ Norbury work through his stash of free beer. The stand out of that session was Oakham’s Green Devil IPA (6%).

When we opened it, a wisp of vapour appeared at the neck, and then the aroma hit us, like smelling salts. If it had been a cartoon, there’d have been green tendrils in the air, curling their way into our noses and throats. Dave, who Darren mentions in his post, isn’t totally convinced by either super hoppy beers or by ‘tasting’ as a pursuit, but even he couldn’t stop himself exclaiming, wide-eyed: “Nettles! Freshly cut grass! Herbs!”

Those cartoon pong trails made a second appearance at the beer festival at the First and Last in Sennen, near Land’s End, last weekend, when we bought our first pints of Moor Nor’Hop (4.1%). Even with a gale blowing; in typical headless festival condition; and from a plastic cup, the fantastic aroma of the beer reached us long before we lifted it to our lips. Can we measure aroma by height? Nor’Hop’s was a towering 75cm or so.

Nor’Hop is also unfined, making it the first such beer we’ve consumed in the wild. Its cloudiness didn’t put us off and might have contributed to a sense we had of its ‘juiciness’; but we think it would probably have tasted just as nice clear. Once we’d found it, we stuck with it, and drank nothing else until it was time to get a bus home through the fog.

Don’t Say ‘Local’: Name the Farm

In a recent discussion about the design of restaurant menus with an expert, we were interested to hear that using such sweeping terms as ‘local beef’ is now considered a real no-no. Does local mean it was reared in a nearby field? In the same county? Or does it mean it was reared in Argentina but processed on an industrial estate no more than one hundred miles away?

The smart thing these days, apparently, is to be super-specific: ‘Beef from Red Ruby Devon cows reared by Bob Johnson at West Dunham’.

Most people don’t know what a Red Ruby Devon cow is. They’ve never heard of Bob Johnson or West Dunham. For all they know, Bob could be utterly incompetent, West Dunham a total hole, and his cows diseased bags-of-bones. Nonetheless, the idea is that customers will feel the restaurant is hiding nothing, that it is proud of its ingredients and has a relationship with its supplier. A warm glow will ensue.

The same principle probably applies to beer labelling. We cringe at ‘made with the choicest hops and finest malt’ and its only slightly better, trendier cousin ‘crafted with citrus hops’. Those are evasive, sneaky descriptors with little real content.

‘Made with 2012 West Dunham hops, grown by Bob Johnson in Devon, and Snodsbury malted barley from Timpkins of Steeple Bumpleigh’ is far better. Even a punter to whom specific hop and malt varieties mean nothing will gain a sense of transparency from a description like that. It makes local mean something.

Non-Conformist Brewing

In trying to understand what’s happening with British brewing at the moment, we found ourselves wondering if a meaningful distinction is between those brewers who conform and those who don’t.

Some brewers look at what’s going on around them and do more-or-less the same as the next guy. (Let’s put them in category A.)

Other brewers (let’s put them in category B) set out to do something different.

An example of this would be the golden Summer Lightning (launched in 1987, or thereabouts). At that time, category A brewers were making bitter, best bitter and maybe mild. That’s what everyone made and it was a safe market. Summer Lightning, however, was daringly lager-like in colour and, in its paleness, gave hops chance to shine against a clean malt background.

Brownness had come to be a dividing line between ‘chemical fizz’ and good, honest English ale, but Summer Lightning crossed that line, and did very well as a result.

The same period, the eighties and early nineties,  saw the emergence of the hop experimentalists who took the risk of using ‘weird tasting’ hops from the US, New Zealand and elsewhere in their brews.* They were ahead of their time, perhaps, in commercial terms, but set a generation of British beer geeks and future brewers on a path of which the current obsession with tropical fruit, citrus and mango ‘notes’ is the end point.

Twenty years later, though, the landscape looks different. When all around you are brewing IPA with US and New Zealand hops, and you also brew an IPA with US and New Zealand hops; when you make mad-strong imperial stout, just like the brewery down the road… which category are you in?

We find ourselves looking at those mad fools experimenting with wild yeast in the UK with interest.

* There was nothing new about using US hops, of course, but making a virtue of it, and making their aroma the star, was a new idea. We also recognise that there are shades in between the two categories, and that, in the early eighties, brewing cask ale of any description was pretty out there, compared to the big boys. Sigh. Nothing’s ever simple, is it?

Fashionable hops

Hops

  1. One of our friends: “So what exactly are hops? Are they the thing that makes up the main body of the beer? Are they a cereal or something?”
  2. Mark ‘Bottled Beer Year’ Dexter on beer labelling: “Hop varieties listed as an enhancement are great. But on their own – they leave too many clueless.”
  3. Another friend drinking our Citra pale ale: “What’s Citra? Is that a type of beer?”
  4. Description of Penzance Brewing Company’s Trink pale ale in the programme for a local beer festival: “…featuring the ever-so-now Citra hop”.
  5. Another brewer on Twitter: “We’ve given in and brewed a beer with Citra now everyone else has stopped going on about it.”
  6. Numerous beer geeks: “Needs more hops.”

Lots of people don’t know what hops are or what they contribute to beer.

Many others don’t understand that different hop varieties, in different proportions, added at different times in the process, affect the flavour of the finished beer.

And hardly anyone can actually tell the difference between one hop variety and another from the aroma and taste alone. (We certainly can’t, though we make a lucky guess now and then, and God knows we’ve tried.)

The very idea that there might be fashionable hops would surprise many.

In conclusion, we think hyper-awareness of hops is one of the biggest differences between those who simply enjoy beer and those who obsess over it, and it’s another thing to add to the list of perspective checks.

Picture by Duncan from Flickr Creative Commons.

The Many Variables That Make a Beer

Packets of hops.

When we asked how Belgian beer could be so cheap, Matthew Curtis suggested on Twitter that their tendency towards relatively conservative hopping could be part of the answer.

This got us thinking. After all, though hop aroma is not something we especially associate with Belgian beer, it is certainly not the case that Belgian beer is bland or homogenous.

Hops are great — we love them — but their amount and variety are far from being the only variables a brewer has to play with.

In fact, two beers made with simple pale malt and ‘boring’ Fuggles could end up tasting and looking completely different, and equally mindblowing, if the following variables were carefully manipulated by a skilled brewer. (Or screwed up by a lazy one.)

Sugars
Dark or clear? Unrefined? Caramelised?
Long boils to darken/caramelise sugars in the wort.

Yeast
Strain selection.
Fermentation temperature.
Blending of multiple strains.
Refinement/customisation in the lab.

Water/minerals
Mash liquor chemistry/softness.
Boil liquor chemistry/softness.

Malt
Custom/homemade malts.
Creative ‘misuse’ of specialty malts.
Belgian/German/British/US version of standard types, e.g. Pilsner malt.
Mash temperature and timing.
Extracts.

Additives
Heather (as in Williams Bros. Fraoch).
Salt (as in gose).
Spices (e.g. coriander).
Herbs.
Chocolate.
Coffee.
Lactose and other unfermentable sugars.
Soured/stale/aged beer.
M&Ms, otter spittle, Mr Kipling apple pies, and so on.

Conditioning
Temperature.
Carbonation levels.
Wood ageing.

And finally…
Hop freshness/age.
Timings of hop additions.
Extract, pellet or whole leaf?

New Variant Spingo

The sign of the Blue Anchor pub and brewery, Helston, Cornwall.

The Blue Anchor in Helston has been brewing for several hundred years. Its Spingo ales are a Cornish tradition, available in only a handful of select pubs, and something of an acquired taste.

Generally, they play to a West Country palate — sweet, brown and not too ‘light’ (hoppy). One of their range, in fact, is ‘Bragget’, with no hops at all and a good slug of honey.

Their brewer, though, has begun to feel the urge to experiment, hence Flora Daze. At 4%, it’s the weakest beer on offer; it’s also the lightest in colour, by far the hoppiest, and being launched ahead of the summer arrival of ‘foreigners’.

By the standards of many other UK breweries, it is not a remarkable beer, being similar to Harvey’s session-strength IPA or Fuller’s Chiswick, but it was certainly generating conversation amongst the chaps spoofing at the bar in the Blue Anchor: “It tastes… like a pint with a slice of lemon in it.”; “I’ll be sticking to Middle.”

As far as we could tell, they were only drinking at all because the first few pints were free. Not everyone is drawn towards the new, and the point at which a beer seems ‘extreme’ is culturally defined.

We really liked Flora Daze and hope it does well this summer, though we know that brewers have to make cask ales that will sell. The Blue Anchor Beer Festival runs until Sunday 1 April.

Ale, Cider, Meat… and hairspray?

This weekend, we found ourselves at the Southampton Arms in North London with one of the friends who introduced us to it not long after it opened.

Although it’s more-or-less his local, he actually isn’t remotely interested in beer. In lieu of Becks or Staropramen, he drinks Camden Helles, but under protest.

Nonetheless, he also dutifully tried every hoppy ale that we brought back to the table, screwing up his face in disgust at each one.

His verdict, at the end of the night, was damning. Where we’d detected elderflower, citrus, grape, and so on, he picked up only one thing.

“All these beers… all these weird beers you drink… they just smell of cheap hairspray!”

In a funny way, we know exactly what he means.