English IPA #1

Why don't you see more IPAs that use English hops? Is it because the taste of the hops is different to American hops? Is it that they don't really suit the style? Certainly you do see more old fashioned English pale ales and traditional IPAs with English hops, but not so often in the American style IPAs. 

I love hoppy beers, so I was inspired by BrewDog's recipe book DIY dog to have a go at an American style IPA using English hops just like they had done.  

I went for a simple recipe with the focus intended to be on hop flavor and aroma. I used the most traditional English hops, Fuggles for flavour, and East Kent Goldings for aroma. My friend made a lovely fruity pale using East Kent Goldings, 

Recipe (19 litres) 

6kgs Maris Otter 

45g Fuggles - 60mins

55g Fuggles - Whirlpool (80C) 

180g East Kent Goldings - dry hop for 4 days

OG 1065

FG 1010 (7%) 

Yeast: White Labs London Ale Yeast WLP013

Quite a nice beer - but not an IPA

So how did this work out? It's a decent beer. Without prompting my friends and family have liked the beer and thought it was a belgian beer. It has a nice Fuggles flavour, but its not got much aroma to speak of despite the huge dose of hops. 

I took the beer to my local beer club for tasting - and they gave me some really useful feedback on the beer: 

The good points

* decent beer - drinkable

* good colour and body

* good fuggles flavour

The bad 

* Some off flavours (fermented too high temperature? Some yeast autolysis?) 

* Very little aroma

* Not bitter enough

How could I have improved this beer? 

So the main message is that some english hops are just not very suited to hoppy styles. One suggestion was to use Bramling Cross hops as these a much more American flavour. 

The yeast off flavours were due to the temperature i fermented at. This is because i have no  way to keep my fermenter cold, and at the time (early July 2016) it was regularly 30C during the day and pretty high 20s during the night. So i could have used a more temperature tolerant yeast like Danstar Nottingham, or a Belgian Saison yeast.

Some of the brewers thought that the yeast flavours may have masked the hop aroma - although i'm pretty sure this was down to the East Kent Goldings, as they didn't have much aroma when they were opened in the packet. 

Holiday beers

 This year I holidayed in South West France and I though I'd try out some local (well - French) beers whilst i was there. Actually where i was my selection was pretty limited (I was pretty much limited to  the supermarket E Le Clerc). I could buy countless Belgian beers, cidre and of course the wine was plentiful and very good.

However I picked out 3 beers that were made in France that I sampled over the holiday.

1. De Goudale - grand cru with Fantasia hop.

This is a strong Belgian style beer, made in France. As a Belgian beer it's lovely Smooth, blonde, great yeast taste. Unfortunately i couldn't really taste much from the hops. Fantasia hops are supposed to have a unique flavour, turns out this is cream soda and caramel which would have been hard to tell apart from the flavours already in the beer.

2. Abbey du mont Saint Eloi - Bier du Garde

Bier du garde is a genuinely French style of beer, so i was interested in how this would taste. Really disappointed in this. It basically tasted like a poor high alcohol lager. Maybe it was a bad example but i didn't like it.

3. Pietra - Biera Corsa.

This is made with Chestnuts! It had a lovely robust malty taste and rusty colour. In fact colour taste and aroma were similar to a British extra special bitter. I could taste a similar slight metallic taste which was similar to the chestnut beer I made myself last year.. Very drinkable.