pale and hoppy Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog

That Type of Cask Ale…. You Know the One

You know, the type that’s very pale but still has a bit of body… It’s not just about hops… But it’s definitely got hops. Yeah, you could call it balanced, but there’s a problem with that…

On our recent trip up North, without really trying, we stumbled upon a few examples of this which might, we’re beginning to think, be our favourite very specific, hard-to-pin-down type of beer.

Manchester Bitter in a pint glass at the Marble Arch.

Marble’s Manchester Bitter — currently tasting good in both bottle and on cask, by the way — is a pretty good example. It’s not like a bunch of flowers being shoved in your face but nor is it a miserable old bowl of soggy cornflakes. It’s somewhere in between. It tastes zesty, fruity, fresh and very bitter, but it’s not ‘Like drinking bloody grapefruit juice.’ Which leaves space for the actual flavour of malt — the bread-nuts-cracker chewiness that isn’t just a backdrop or a base but a pleasure in its own right.

So, that’s actually balanced, right, in a positive sense? The constituent ingredients are each allowed to express themselves fully, with none overpowering the rest.

We did a bad doodle that might or might not help:

Golden Ales, 1: extravagantly hoppy, 2: boring and flaccid, 3: balanced, shining bright.

Number 1 is your grapefruit beer — a delight in its own way but ultimately one-dimensional. Number 2 is what we think of when we read ‘golden ale’ these days — it might be yellow but only in a sense of the absence of brown; it’s sweet, bland, balanced like an empty see-saw. And number 3 is what we’re into right now — a nice bit of engineering, but nothing flamboyant.

In Liverpool, we had Okell’s IPA (4.5% ABV) which we’d put into this category, though we suspect they think it’s a Number 1 – ‘Said to be hoppier than a hopping mad hopi’. And, in Manchester, at the Piccadilly Tap, Northern Monk Brew Co’s True North (3.7%) struck us as another example, as satisfying as a fresh roll ten minutes out of the oven. Down in Cornwall, Penzance Brewing Co Potion No. 9 fits the bill. (St Austell Proper Job, while hardly over-the-top, is biased towards hops over malt.)

We’re not arguing that this is a distinct style that needs a name or anything but it’s a thing we know when we encounter it.

Any others spring to mind?

Pale but… not so interesting

At some point between when we started taking an interest in beer and now, the niche ‘golden ales’ had found in the market got taken over ‘pale and hoppy’ ones.

A few weeks ago, we had a bottle of Summer Lightning for the first time in a while and, although we enjoyed it, we were taken aback at how sweet and yeasty it tasted. It was one of our first loves and, in our minds, was a super-hoppy, crisp, clean beer. Not so. The same day, Neil Chantrell of Coach House Brewing, said almost exactly the same thing on Twitter.

Exmoor Gold was even more of a shock when we drank it at the George Inn at Middlezoy a fortnight ago: like golden syrup and, sadly, not that enjoyable. We dumped it: “It’s not you, it’s us; we’ve moved on, but you’ve stayed the same.”

We don’t think either beer has changed, though. It’s just that we’ve come to expect a certain lightness and much more bitterness from yellow-golden ales. At the George, our second pint, Glastonbury Ales Mystery Tor, hit the spot: tropical fruit and almost-but-not-quite puckering bitterness were present and correct.

Where does this leave the previous generation of golden ales? Should they change to keep up? And will the same fate befall the current crop of pale and hoppy beers in ten years time?