I've just tasted the best draught American beer that you can buy in the UK.

If it were the product of a West Coast brewpub, said establishment would enter into brewing folklore and be rammed whenever this beer was tapped.

If it were bottled once-yearly, fans would drive all night to queue all morning for the chance of buying a case.

It's riven with sticky, dirty citric hops. Not polished and effortless and fragrant hops. Big, fat, in-your-face, on your gums and down your throat hops. An aroma and flavour that sticks in you like actual resin would.

It's an American Pale in style. It's overflowing with American hops. But it's brewed in Derbyshire. Now, strictly speaking, you may say that it's not actually an American beer. But I'd say it is American in attitude, approach and execution.

It's not going to get the wider recognition that it deserves. Brewed infrequently, distributed narrowly, it's a here-today-gone-later-today beer. Which is just the way I like it. As good as any limited-release US hop bomb, without the hype and overwrought expectation...

Reader, I drank it. A quiet lunchtime I had: my pint and I, the landlord and the chef, were alone present. When I got back from the pub, I went into the chatrooms of the internet, where an old pal was surfing, and I said -

"Mr X, I have drank That American Style beer this morning."

Mr X said only -

"Have you, Scoop? Well, for sure!"

(and before anyone asks; no, it wasn't from Thornbridge. We do have other great breweries in the county, you know). >

The right kind of bitterness. Not the kind that we associate with toxic substances, nothing bordering on the taste sensation of denatonium. It's about the bite, the edge, the sudden sharp finish or the lingering itch.

It's all about the alpha acids again. The thermal isomerisation of the humulones produces the intensely-bitter iso-alpha acids; they're modified by the residual sugars present in beer to balance out the bitterness.

But how bitter do you want your beer to be? International Bitterness Units (IBU) provide a guide, with a classic English bitter rating around 25-35 IBUs on a scale where 100 IBUs is regarded as the threshold of taste. Not that such limits hold back extreme beers by experimental brewers - Brewdog, Pitstop and Mikkeller have all sought to produce beers with a theoretical bitterness way in excess of what the palate can discern.

Perhaps that's good PR but bordering on developing a denatonium approach to brewing. As Brooklyn brewmaster Garratt Oliver says, "It’s a fairly idiotic pursuit, like a chef saying, ‘This is the saltiest dish'. Anyone can toss hops in a pot, but can you make it beautiful?” >

Think about the first time you lifted a beer to your nose and felt its bouquet pervade your nostrils. Or when you've held hop flowers in your hands, rubbed them between your fingers and released their sticky scent. When you've walked into a brewery and the air was filled with flowers and fruits. The sheer joy of hop aroma.

It's a volatile commodity, though. The essential oils in a hop cone have a hydrocarbon fraction comprised mainly of the aromatic monoterpene, myrcene. Broken down by the boiling wort in a process called thermal isomerisation, only a minority percentage of those oils remain present.

So the aroma profile of beer is bolstered by adding hops towards the end of the brewing process. That could be either directly into the copper (late hopping), infusing the hot wort as it travels to the cooler (via a hop back) or adding them direct to the fermenter or barrel (dry hopping).

The result can be a harmonious gathering of ripe citric fruits or summer meadow flowers. Or it could be a big fat nose-stinging-oh-my-god-I'm-having-a-nose-bleed mess. Sometimes brewers can be heavy-handed, albeit with the best intentions. I like a beer's aroma to be alluring - a fleeting glimpse of bra strap rather than a flash of boobs. Subtle aroma isn't yet an endangered species in craft brewing and I'm hoping that it'll stay that way. >

WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS CAPITAL LETTERS.

Usually, I resent being told how to drink a beer. Best served at 7.5º from a steel-rimmed chalice held in your left hand? Screw you. One to be enjoyed slowly and responsibly? Fuck off - if I want to chug it whilst hanging out of a train window I'll damn well do so. So when a bottle goes all shouty capital letters at me as to how and when to drink the contents, I'm tempted to pass. But this time, the instruction is dead-on.

You see, Blind Pig is a fat, fresh IPA. And Russian River want you to enjoy that freshness. In fact, they demand it. The label bears a Bottled On date and strict instructions:

KEEP COLD, DRINK FRESH, DO NOT AGE!

CONSUME BLIND PIG FRESH, OR NOT AT ALL!

RESPECT HOPS, CONSUME THIS IPA FRESH!

My bottle was born just over two months ago. It was passed to me four days ago. So it would be mercilessly rude of me to leave it any longer.

Truth be told, I spent a couple of minutes with my nostril stuck over the open bottle. Just to feel hops leaking into me. It pours clean gold with a little-finger-thick head of brilliant-white bubbles. Yes, there's viscous grapefruit but it's undercut with peach, overlayed with pine, sustained by a sweet malt.

It zings. It's bitter and resinous but still.... restrained. Calculated. Measured. A hop load evenly spread. A multiple orgasm of a beer rather than an overblown moneyshot of hop eruption.

HOPPY BEERS ARE NOT MEANT TO BE AGED!

Amen to that.



Thanks to Phil Lowry for the beer. >

Newark; CAMRA Festival, May 2009.

New Brewdog; I am assaulted by hops, in a tent.

Then, I leave for the Lincoln CAMRA fest

"In a little while I'll be gone / The moment's already passed
Yeah it's gone / And I'm not here This isn't happening"

Lincoln; CAMRA Festival, May 2009.

I am sludged by brown beer, in a drill hall.

"This isn't happening / I'm not here / I'm not here"

Derby; my dining room table, December 2009.

Bottles bludgeon old wounds.

Strobe lights and blown speakers? Almost.

Opening the bottle and squatting three feet away, still there's a hop relentless assault. Reminds me initially of Nanny State. Make those memories go away...



No apologies to be found. No quarter asked. No quarter given. Relentless pine, discordant bitterness. Daft grapefruit. Yet - once you've puckered up, buttercup, those hops seep into your soul and you're grateful for the transfer.

It may yet be overdrawn in the hop account, though BrewDog didn't forget to settle the malt bill. Self-redeeming. Just.

---

The lyrics came from something Michael Stipe said to me. I rang him and said, "I cannot cope with this." And he said, "Pull the shutters down and keep saying, 'I'm not here, this is not happening'".

Thom Yorke

---

...Within the first couple bars of “How to Disappear Completely,” I knew I was in deep shit...

...There’s a specific satisfaction when a sad song comes on amid your own heartbreak...

...it does take me back to the hotel room in Samoa: cool linoleum under my feet, a glass of sickly-sweet liquor on the nightstand, and the inescapable awareness that I had lost something huge...

Dan Clem

(from the ever-excellent McSweeney's)

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... it just completely messes you up.

The idea came from a conversation with Scott from Hamilton's Tavern (killer beer bar in San Diego). He suggested a 4.5% session double IPA. We just made the concept a little crazier, a little more BrewDog.

James Watt

Brewdog blog

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“The hoppiest beer?” Garrett asked. “It’s a fairly idiotic pursuit, like a chef saying, ‘This is the saltiest dish.’ Anyone can toss hops in a pot, but can you make it beautiful?”

New York Times

---

I fear that hops will always break my heart. Tease my palate. Dance on my grave. Rarely be lost.

(and Never Be Found) >

(this should have been posted live from the Harlequin last Thursday: #technologyfail)

If this posting works, I'll eat my foot cheese. At the bar in the Harlequin, blogging live and wishing my thumbs were thinner. 5AM Saint starts with a now-familiar nasal hop slap; here's hoping it's not going to push in one overwrought dimension. My eyeballs are still itching on the first sip, but this is more than a one-hop pony. There's a deep set caramel malty backbone, even though the palate profile still wears those tart grapefruit hops on its sleeve (and on its lapels and all down its front).

By the end of this first pint, I've a mouth full of dry and dusty hop. I'm missing a finish. That backbone seems to have wilted under severe hop strain. After a second pint, my mouth is dryer than a dryed-up dry thing. The third pint is actually unpleasant, hops now relentless.

Balance in beer is wholly over-rated. But let's not make over-hopping as offensive as a predelection for crystal malt. >

I've been at a wedding this afternoon. Free champers and wine tempered the presence of Mansfield Smooth on the bar. To be honest, spending three hours previous imbibing a gutfull of Thornbridge Jaipur at the Old Poets Corner, Ashover, helped tremendously. But now I'm back, from outer space, and I want to be lost in hops. Ladeez and gintelmin, I give you - Struise Mikkeller.



OOOOOHHH MIIIII GODDDDDD. My tabs are laughing so much they have fallen off and wandered into a crap Sony advert. Frankly, I've had this beer next to me for ten minutes and I don't want to dare taste it. The aroma is just spellbinding. Remember as a kid how you'd drag your almost-skateboarding scrapy knees down to the ice cream van? Imagine if they'd been piping out huge fecking whirls of vanilla and HOPS HOPS HOPS into a tight malt pipe.


A sip gives a velvet feel soon perverted into a hop shag. If Heston Blumenthal brewed beer, here's where he'd end up. Cream - HOP - lemon - HOP - baked vanilla - HOP - leaking yeast - HOP - dwarves taking turns to do handstands - HOP. (and before you start- yes, that is a bottle of Thornbridge Bracia in the background. It's what I have knocking around the kitchen on a regular basis. Because I'm a beer cnut. Get over it)

Sense out of me? You may as well go shag a pillow. This is a field of hops ploughed thoroughly with an earthy mien. I want to die now and wake up in eternity, face down in a bucket of this stuff. It's a Terminator of beers; never stops, doesn't understand the concept. I have a thumbful of this beer left and the only thing that's stopping me throwing myself out of the window for the lack of more of it is that I live in a bungalow.
I have to leave now. I have an appointment to satiate my ravaged taste buds. Except that I've just messed my pants in excitement and drank the exquisite dregs in one.

Bugger.

I now have to go find a beer that's OK enough to see me through clear until midnight. Thornbridge something will suffice. In the meantime, anyone who hasn't discovered the sheer bliss that is Hem, do try to keep up. Some of us have to go and drink great beer and go one-two-three-two-two-three.
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