Beeroff 4 – the good, the bad and the ugly

Beeroff 4 - all set up and ready to go

It never fails to amaze me how much you actually taste with your eyes and with your brain. There’s some experiments that show in blind taste testing people will struggle to tell the difference between red wine and white wine even though Blind taste testing is a very powerful way to assess how good your beer is. Most homebrew I make will taste different to pub beer. That’s because I’m aiming for bigger, or less common flavours, or using materials or techniques that you don’t find in beers in most pubs (and amongst these also the odd complete stinker of a beer…). That’s not because these are bad beers or bad brewers (far from it) but to be commercially viable you need to brew crowd pleasing beer.

But when you taste something on a regular basis you get used to it and it becomes a bit harder to critically assess how it stands up to the competition. Blind taste testing allows you to do this in spades.

The golden beers poured out and ready to taste

The beer off format is simple – for each category we source some commercial and homebrew beers. One person is master taster and pours these into colour coded jugs so that only one person knows which is which. After tasting each one – we comment, individually score – and then put these together to produce a winner.

Category	My beer	Position
British best bitter	Panic ale	Last (horrible)
Pale/Golden ale	Golden pumpkin	Winner
Stout/porter	Twisted stout	Winner
Belgian abbey style	Atomium (ages +3months from beeroff3)	Last
Double/Imperial IPA	Double IPA	Last

Overall it was a good night for me. I won two of the five categories – which was lucky as these were my only two decent beers. It was a shame that I had to make a panic brew for the first round. There’s a competition coming up in April which I’m going to enter these beers into, that’s how pleased I am with them.

I didn’t really have time and despite trying make something viable in a very short space of time it just ended up being a poor beer. Some beers might improve with age, at the time of writing this (6 weeks ahead) it is still foul and is about to go in the drain. I had to panic brew because when I bottled the bitter I had made I thought it had got infected in the fermenter. It may have just been the yeast at the end, but it didn’t look right. I bottled it anyway and now and 4 weeks later this tastes like a very nice beer. So a lesson there not to judge something too harshly unless it is categorically a hopeless cause,.

The stouts ready to go

Very disappointed with how much the previously excellent Belgian beer had deteriorated with ageing. Although this tastes fine on its own, it’s very poor next to a better (commercial or homebrew) version.

Less surprised that my double IPA did so badly – in fact this was the worst judged beer that I’d ever put into one of these competitions. Even I thought it was too bitter. Strangely some friends I gave a bottle to loved it so much they asked if I could send them as much as possible. Goes to show that sometimes these issues are in the taste buds of the beer holder.

Bottle tops left over from the night

Homegrown hops sprouting in springtime

After the long winter nights have passed, and the sun has returned to London the sights of spring are all around us. Daffodils, crocuses and in my garden the first spears of my hop plants. This hop plant is into its third year in the garden. This year the early growth has been really vigorous as it is now well established - so many spears! Last year there were 4 spears. Although i harvested 60g of wet hops from this plant last year, this is the year when it should really come into its own and produce a decent crop.

Its a First Gold plant - an English hedge variety which means it should spread well across a fence - and in my case I want to trail it up and over the fence to soak up the sun on the other side.

I have also put a cascade root into the garden on the opposite fence this year, so it has very slight growth so far but the prospect of having my own cascade hops to brew with was too good to turn down.

I made a beer with the green (ie fresh and un-dried) hops last year - it was okay, if a little overly herbal. I think that owed more to my poor brewing than the hops. I'll have another go in September, and by the looks of it with a bigger harvest to play with.