Pete Drinks

This year, there seems to have been an explosion in making ‘green hop beers’ – just about every brewery you look at seems to be making a special beer with the first hops of the season, straight from the bine.

Having planted my first hop plant this spring, I wasn’t really expecting to see any hops on it this year so I was pleasantly surprised when I found it covered with a decent crop. Obviously I’d planted it to brew from, and a green hop beer seemed just the right thing.

When it came to the recipe, I knew it needed to be something fairly light to let the hops shine through. I went back to my trusty Zebedee recipe, although I tweaked up the bittering hops just a touch.

My next decision was working out how many green hops to use; as they aren’t dried, they weigh significantly more than normal dry hops – anything up to five times as much. The official advice on how many green hops to use was “lots. Lots and lots and lots”.

Green hop beer really needs to be enjoyed fresh, so that combined with the need for “lots” of green hops, I decided to make a 2.5 gallon batch instead of my regular five.

Hop Harvest

• 1800g pale malt
• 100g crystal malt
• 15g Goldings for the full boil
• 50g green Bramling Cross at 10 minutes
• 50g green Bramling Cross at flameout

Things began fairly well – my mash started out a little hot at 67 degrees, but it seemed to cope fine. A quick batch sparge, and the boiler was soon on.

The green hop addition could not have been any fresher. At 10 minutes before the end of the boil, I started harvesting them from the bine by the handful, weighing them and then throwing them straight into the boiler. Although I have listed two 50g additions, it was really constant hopping by the handful for the last ten minutes, adding up to roughly 100g of very fresh hops (and probably the odd greenfly).

It wasn’t until the wort was cooled and I was trying to run it into the fermenter that I made the horrible discovery that I’d managed to leave my hop filter in the drawer, instead of putting it back into the boiler after cleaning like I usually do. The result of this was that the tap very quickly clogged up and I was barely getting a dribble out of it.

I then expressed my disappointment at this turn of events loudly and explicitly for a few minutes.

Once I calmed down I realised that I was just going to have to break a few rules, and fit the hop strainer before I could continue. The wort was fairly cool by this stage, so that wasn’t an issue. What was more of an issue was that I had to stick my considerably hairy and not very easy-to-sanitise arm elbow-deep in the boiler to fit the damn thing.

Happily, that fixed the problem and didn’t seem to cause any lasting issues. But, note to self, check the hop filter before turning the boiler on next time.

After that, things went pretty painlessly. Once it was properly cool, I pitched with Windsor yeast and took an OG reading of 1039. A week later, at an ABV of 4.1%, it was ready to be tasted.

It’s a glorious pale golden colour in the glass, with little or no fizz to it. The nose has a digestive biscuit hint to it, and a waft of green grass. There’s also just a suggestion of overripe berries – perhaps loganberry.

In the mouth, it’s obviously very light – some gentle honey sweetness, more green leaves that lead into a more significant bitter finish than Zebedee. Those green, fresh flavours make it a very refreshing and dangerously moreish beer, and I almost regret only making 2.5 gallons of it!

Next year, I think it needs even more hops – I suspect it could happily take double the green hopping with no trouble at all. Now I just need to get a big enough crop.

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I tend to bottle all my homebrew beer, for the simple reason that as the only member of our household that actually likes beer it’s hard to drink an entire cask before the beer goes off. The massive downside of this is that bottling beer is by far the most tedious part of brewing.

Until now I’ve made do with a bit of syphon tubing with an inline tap which is ok, but bottling often becomes an operation that requires at least three hands. Sadly nature only saw fit to provide me with two, which is annoying.

So my most recent investment is this wonderful bottling stick which is simply a rigid plastic tube with a push valve on the end. Push the end down on the bottom of the bottle and the beer flows – lift it up and it stops. Suddenly I can bottle with two hands, and spill a lot less beer.

Of course, I still need to pay attention to the beer level in the bottles. My next plan is to bodge something together to automatically stop the flow when the top of the bottle is reached, and my bottling days will be less tedious – although sterilising 40 bottles will still be a painful experience.

Once they’re filled, of course, you have to make your bottles look beautiful. Having finally obtained a full set of bottles without old labels still attached – Bath Ales, I love your bottles but your labels appear to use some sort of strong nuclear force to attach themselves – and that can only mean one thing. I need some labels.

Fortunately, I was wise enough to marry someone with some artistic ability (she made me my lovely logo, after all!) and so I now have a brand.

Next I need a brewery…

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For my latest home brewing adventure, I was inspired by CAMRGB‘s “Evening of Double IPAs” earlier this year. Why not brew myself a Double IPA, I wondered.

In the end, I didn’t leave myself nearly enough time to get the beer ready for the event – a big beer like a Double IPA needs time to mature, after all – but my patience has limits, and I’ve finally declared the beer “ready”.

One of the challenges here was making such a strong beer. I took the old-fashioned approach of doing what’s known as a parti-gyle – or more pleasingly, a party gyle.

You mash your grains as usual, but rather than sparging and running all the resulting wort into a single container you effectively batch sparge, keeping each wort batch separated. The first batch extracts the most sugar from the grain, and this is what gets used to make the main or “big” beer. The second batch extracts less sugar (although still a decent amount), and is used to make a second “small beer”.

The other suggestion I’ve come across is that you simply extend the boil to evaporate off more water from the wort, and raise the sugar concentration that way – I have a hard enough time controlling the steam filling my kitchen as it is, so I didn’t want to take this approach.

The recipe is a little complicated as a result of the parti-gyle – two different beers, but the same grain produced them both.

• 2750g pale malt
• 220g crystal malt
• 220g amber malt
• 170g torrified wheat

Double Trouble

So, the first mash of the day was at 66 degrees, for a full 90 minutes. I managed to get 8 litres of wort from this, which was a little less than I’d hoped – the grain had absorbed slightly more water than I’d allowed for – but certainly enough to work with.

I went for a single hop approach, using only Apollo hops.

• 12g Apollo for the full boil
• 8g Apollo for the last 15 minutes
• 4g Apollo when the heat was turned off at the end of boil

After a 90 minutes boil, the OG came in at 1082 – a little under my target, as I had to add a little water to bring my volume back up. I’d got some WLP001 California Ale yeast from White Labs for this beer, as I knew I needed something that could handle the strength.

After a week in the fermenter, I racked it into a demijohn where it sat for another two weeks. At this stage, I added another 10g of Apollo hops to give it even more of a kick and left it a further week before bottling, at an ABV of 8.8%.

It’s a deep, almost port-like ruby in the glass with an open but lingering head. Right at the start of the aroma there are some citrus floral notes, but they’re quickly overtaken by a sticky sweet almost date-like smell with a distinct alcohol hit and there’s some candied orange in there too.

In the mouth, you get a sweet, fruity start which quickly yields to a serious hop bitterness although as it sits on your tongue, the sweetness and the hops have a fascinating kind of battle where neither of them quite win. Towards the end, you get raisins and a subtle citrus orange hop fruit flavour, along with a tannic dryness which still manages to leaves your lips sticky and you can feel the alcohol warmth working its way down to your belly.

The body is a little on the light side for such a big beer, but overall I’m genuinely surprised at how well this has turned out. The hop aroma is too understated to be a proper double IPA, although the bitterness is just right.

I will definitely keep a couple of bottles back for Christmas – partly to see how it matures but also because I think it’s a wonderfully Christmas flavour.

Hiccup

After taking off the wort for Double Trouble, I added another 10 litres to the mashtun at 85 degrees, as if I was just doing a normal batch sparge. 20 minutes later I took this off into a separate boiler, managing to get the full 10 litres this time around. For this beer I took a slightly more subtle hop approach.

• 8g Goldings for the full boil
• 4g Challenger for the full boil
• 4g Challenger for the last 15 minutes

After another 90 minute boil, I read the OG at 1045 and pitched with my more regular Nottingham yeast.

As with Double Trouble, this was racked into a demijohn after a week and bottled after another three. The final ABV came up as 6.2%

It’s a rich copper in the glass – lighter than it’s brother, as expected – with a thick, almost creamy head on it that lasts and lasts. On the nose there’s a hint of yeast and a green earthy smell that puts me in mind of fresh damp undergrowth. That sounds a lot stranger and more unpleasant than it is – it’s not damp or musty, it’s fresh but with some depth to it. Kavey describes it as “moss that’s been freshly rained on” which is probably a little more poetic and appetising than my take!

In the mouth you get the foaminess hinted at by the head; there’s a little caramel which is very nicely balanced by the bitterness coming through. It’s a fairly classical Best Bitter – tasty, very easy drinking and hides it’s strength well. I could easily drink pints of this although at 6.2%, perhaps not many of them.

Overall, I’m indecently pleased with both of these beers.

They were an experiment and although Double Trouble didn’t quite turn out as I planned – I need to dump a whole lot more late hops in there – it’s delicious; given that Hiccup was almost a bonus beer I couldn’t be happier.

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