All about hops

If you’ve read some of the previous posts on this blog, you’ll I’m sure be aware that one of the key ingredients of beer is hops. Hops are a perennial climbing vine (a member of the hemp family). The vines grow to 15 – 18 feet tall, and produce cone-shaped green flowers which are harvested in late summer and dried for use in beer-making.

But what is it about adding hops that is beneficial to beer?

• Firstly, hops impart bitterness to beer which counters the sweetness of the malt sugars. Without this bitterness, most beers would be cloyingly sweet and hard to drink in any quantity.
• Secondly, hops impart flavour and aroma to beer. There are many flavours and aromas, and they depend on the hops variety used:
  • English: herbal, earthy, fruity
  • German: floral, spicy, evergreen
  • American: citrus, herbal, spicy
  • New Zealand: fruity, citrus, floral
• Finally hops have a very important anti-septic quality that preserves the beer. This, plus the alcohol in the beer, means that beer can be stored for many months without spoiling. This is why in the middle ages everyone drank beer rather than water: water was nearly always infected and unsafe to drink so it was made into beer which was safe to drink and could be stored.

So when are hops added during beer-making? Well the answer to that is actually pretty much any time: during the boil, at the end of the boil, after fermentation, or in the cask.

To extract the bitterness from hops they have to be boiled for at least an hour. The problem with this is that in doing this all the flavour and aroma molecules are driven off. So brewers tend to add hops at several stages during the boil: at the beginning (for bitterness), towards the end (for flavour) and right at the end (for aroma). Adding hops after fermentation or to the cask is referred to as dry hopping, and obviously is done to deliver more of the most delicate flavour and aromas.

This post is getting rather long… I sense your attention drifting… go on, go get yourself a beer and I’ll post some more another day.

Museums and Bramlings

We brewed a special bitter last Monday. This is a very simple recipe, based on a recipe we found for Samuel Smith’s Museum Ale. It contains only pale ale malt and crystal malt (quite a lot, 10%). It uses the two classic English hops: fuggles (for bitterness) and goldings (for flavour and aroma).

We wanted to strip things back to their basics, just to see what we get. We are hoping for a medium strength (4.5% ABV) mid-coloured bitter, with plenty of body, some sweetness and classic English hop flavours: floral, fruity and earthy.

I suggested calling it Quarry Bank Bitter (well, it’s a local museum isn’t it?), but we’re not sure if that will stick or not.

Whilst we were brewing we were chatting about other hops varieties, and I mentioned that I had recently bought a pack of Bramling Cross hops. This is another English variety, but much less commonly used. When we looked up the flavour profile, we discovered that is it supposed to have a strong spicy and blackcurrant flavour and aroma. This has to be investigated, so our next brew will be a single-variety hopped bitter using Bramling Cross.

In planning the beer, we considered what flavours would work well with a spicy blackcurrant flavoured hop. It needs to have some darkness to it, and perhaps a slight chocolatiness to work with the sharp blackcurrant flavour. But we don’t want it dark, sweet and chocolaty like Audlem Unusual. I had also recently bought some pale chocolate malt, which as the name suggests, is a toned down version of chocolate malt. It is described as “toasty rather than roasty”, which sounds ideal.

So there it is… we’re aiming to brew it a week on Monday.

Residual Sweetness

Last night we bottled the Mow Cop Stout. It’s a long-winded process – it took two of us practically all evening to bottle and label the beer. But they do look rather good, if I say so myself!

We tasted the stout, and whilst it has not conditioned yet we could get a reasonable idea what it will be like. Surprisingly like Guinness actually – with that rich dark burnt flavour left in the mouth that you’d expect.

What surprised us though was the sweetness, or lack of it. The fermentation finished at a rather high final gravity of 1.021, which means there is a lot of unfermented “residual sugars” left behind by the yeast. This is caused by the types of sugars present in the beer. If there are a lot of large, complex, unfermentable sugars then you end up with a high final gravity (and associated lower alcohol content). And generally you’d expect the beer to taste sweet, which is great for some styles. We thought we were going to make a sweet stout (rather than a dry stout like Guinness), but in fact the sweetness and body was surprisingly like Guinness.

Why? Well I understand that it really does depend on what sort of unfermentable sugars are left in your beer. Some taste sweeter than others. In our case, the hydrometer tells us there are a lot of residual sugars, but our tongues do not. No matter – we’ve high hopes that it will be a lovely brew.

New Year plans

It seems everyone else is making new year resolutions, so we thought we’d jot down a few ideas of brews we’d like to do over the next year.

• A beer single hopped with first gold hops
• Try to find some simcoe hops and make a beer with that
• (Andy’s reaction: “hmmmm, pine-fresh loo cleaner beer!”)
• Make a beer single hopped with fuggles – to understand better our British hops heritage
• Design our own "regular bitter" and "special bitter"
• Make a clear porter (last time it tasted OK, but looked like pond water!)
• Make a summer lightning type beer for refreshing summer drinking