Is this the way to Amarillo?

Just a short post this, because I don’t have a great deal to report.

Last Monday we brewed again – this time we made an American Amber Ale. This is basically like a pale ale but with more body and more caramel richness. But being an American ale, it’s hopped with American hop varieties – in our case Centennial and Amarillo. As I talked about in a previous post, American hops lend a citrus, herbal and spicy quality to beer. Especially Amarillo, which is described as “flowery, spicy and citrus-like with a distinct orange bouquet”. Om nom nom.

The Hines Test

Brewers and the beer drinking public seem to have an obsession with beer clarity. These days beer just has to be “bright”, otherwise it is considered faulty.

In fact having totally clear beer does not make any difference to the beer’s flavour or aroma. Nor does it make it unsafe to drink. But “the first taste is with the eyes” as they say, so at Cheshire Peaks we take every step to ensure our beer is as clear as possible.

Our mate Dave is obsessed with torches (flashlights to our American cousins). (Perhaps more so even than we are with beer clarity :-) So when he is sampling our beer, a torch is usually whipped out of his pocket and shone directly up through the bottom of the glass. This is a cruel cruel way to treat a beer (and a brewer!) – every single fleck in the beer is illuminated like a beacon and any haze makes the torch beam look like a searchlight (especially with Dave’s 130 lumen monsters - it practically cooks the beer as well!).

It’s fun to do, but the Hines Test can make even the clearest of commercial beers appear to have something of a haze. I prefer to hold my glass up at arms length and look at a point light source behind it (such as the room lights).

What affects beer clarity anyway? This is a massive topic in brewing, but in summary clarity can be reduced by:

• Proteins. Sometimes proteins precipitate out at low temperatures, leading to a “chill haze” which disappears as the beer warms up again.
• Starch from the malt that has not been converted to fermentable sugar.
• Yeast – yeast can fail to “flocculate” (clump together) and drop out after fermentation
• Other particles, such as bits of grain husk or hop

So how do we go about making sure our beer is clear? That’s a huge topic, and probably one for another post!

Hop bitterness

This is a follow on article from the recent All about hops article.

So back to hops…

The bitterness from hops is created from chemicals referred to as alpha acids (humulone, cohumulone and adhumulone if you must know). These reside in the soft resin part of the hop flower. Try rubbing some hops in your hands and you will soon learn about their resinous nature. Alpha acids are not naturally bitter to taste, but boiling isomerises these chemicals to produce the bitter tasting compounds found in beer.

Each hop variety has a different proportion of alpha acids, which means some varieties will make beer a lot more bitter than others. The German Saaz variety has very low alpha acids (~3%, used for flavouring German lagers); the classic English Fuggle is middling (~5%, used for bitterness and flavour in English ales), and some new world hops (such as Chinook) are just stupid (up to 14%, used by American hop-heads).

The bitterness in beer is measured using the aptly named International Bitterness Unit (IBU). The bigger the number, the more bitter the beer. Beers tend to start at maybe 20 IBU (very low bitterness) and can go up to 80-100 IBU (turns your face inside out).

Here are some example IBUs of commercial beers (these may not be totally accurate, but are given just for interest):

• Banks Mild  25 IBU
• Theakston’s Old Peculier  29 IBU
• Marston’s Pedigree 35 IBU
• Black Sheep Riggwelter  39 IBU
• American IPA  ~ 60-70 IBU
• Imperial (or Double) IPA  ~100+ IBU

Bramling and Competition

Andy and I brewed again last week. This time we brewed the Bramling Cross hops experiment that I referred to in a previous post. This beer is made purely with English hops called Bramling Cross. We’ve added plenty for bitterness, flavour and aroma, and we’ll be dry-hopping too once fermentation finishes completely.

On the same night we racked and kegged our “special bitter” that I also talked about in that previous post. We were extremely happy with how it tasted – rich and malty but also with a strong English hop flavour. It’s going to be delicious. I had joked that we should call it “Quarry Bank Bitter” (since it was based on Sam Smith’s Museum Ale, ha ha). But we’re trying to avoid too many puns or jokes in our names, so we’ve settled on “Shining Tor” – another Cheshire Peak (just up near the Cat and Fiddle on the way over to Buxton).

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned before, but our friend Andy Bowers (a different Andy) has also started all-grain brewing in the last few months, and recently we’ve been sampling some of his creations. He started with a rather excellent rich and dark oatmeal stout, followed by a sweet and strong porter. He then used our recipe for Knutsford Brown Ale to create his own Mobberley Brown Ale (“Because it’s close to Knutsford”). It wasn’t just close to Knutsford, it was very similar indeed – a fantastic rich, sweet, malty beer that is hugely quaffable. So, the competition is hotting up – we’d better keep on our toes!

Shining Tor. (Photo: Thanks to http://www.walksinthepeakdistrict.co.uk/)