This weekend, we found ourselves at the Southampton Arms in North London with one of the friends who introduced us to it not long after it opened.

Although it’s more-or-less his local, he actually isn’t remotely interested in beer. In lieu of Becks or Staropramen, he drinks Camden Helles, but under protest.

Nonetheless, he also dutifully tried every hoppy ale that we brought back to the table, screwing up his face in disgust at each one.

His verdict, at the end of the night, was damning. Where we’d detected elderflower, citrus, grape, and so on, he picked up only one thing.

“All these beers… all these weird beers you drink… they just smell of cheap hairspray!”

In a funny way, we know exactly what he means.

Detail from "Sausage truck" by Tuppus (Flickr, Creative Commons)

At some point in the last twenty years, the concept of the ‘premium sausage’ emerged: a banger with fewer additives, better quality meat and stronger flavours.

The problem with premium sausages? They’re sometimes too meaty — they lack a cohesive texture — and just don’t taste like sausages.

Yes, some really cheap sausages are downright nasty, made entirely of salty breadcrumbs dyed pink, but, really, the point of sausages is to make good use of offal and fat. They’re supposed to be full of crappy but delicious meat, fat, flavourings and, yes, breadcrumbs.

How does this relate to beer? After much experimenting, we have to conclude that we can’t taste the difference between whole leaf hops, pellets, extracts and oils, at least not in normal pub-going conditions; refusing to use sugar in beer on purity grounds seems to be missing a trick; and one of our favourite bottled lagers, Svyturys Ekstra Draft, uses rice in its grist, and we’re sure there are others.

Maybe more beers made lovingly but with cheaper ingredients would help to bring the price down? As long as brewers were transparent about it, we wouldn’t mind at all.

Hopping in Kent, 1875, from the British Library, via Wikipedia.

From East London (1901) by Walter Besant:

They ran through Wapping and along Thames Street, which is empty on Saturday afternoon; they ran across London Bridge, they poured into London Bridge Station. One of the girls knew the name of the station they wanted; it was in Kent. They took tickets, and they went off.

They had gone hopping.

Thousands of Londoners in the season go hopping. I  wish I could dwell upon the delights of the work. Unfortunately, like the summer, it is too soon over. While it lasts the hoppers sleep in barns, they work in the open, they breathe fresh air, they get good pay, they enjoy every evening a singsong and a free-and easy. The beer flows like a rivulet; everybody is thirsty, everybody is cheerful, everybody is friendly.

When it was over Liz returned, browned and refreshed and strengthened, but fearful of the consequences, because she had deserted her work. But she was fortunate. They took her back into the factory and so she went on as before.

First, John Keeling, Head Brewer at Fuller’s, on Twitter.

And then this video review from the Real Ale Guide.

Brewers (and packacing designers): pack it in!

Boak

Acorn Brewery’s experiments with IPAs using single varieites of New Zealand hops continue with number four in the series, which uses Nelson Sauvin.

I was excited about this one, hoping it would give me that elderflower kick I love so much.

Unfortunately, in this particular brew, I found the bitterness just too intense. Is that to do with the hop variety or the amount they used? I guess it must be quite difficult to reformulate the recipe each time to maintain the right ratio of hop bitterness to hop flavour.

I’m still loving the concept though, and looking forward to the next one.

Boak

We’ve not done a lot of homebrewing recently — we’ve either been out and about at weekends or too tired.

And, when we have brewed in the last year or so, the results haven’t been as brilliant as we would have liked. We’re getting to be quite finicky and are past the stage of being pleasantly surprised our beer is vaguely drinkable. We can buy drinkable beers easily and cheaply: we want our beers to be astounding.

We’re not trying to make wacky or extreme beers, and maybe that’s why its become a challenge. There’s nowhere to hide in something as simple as an altbier or best bitter — malt, hops and subtle yeast leave you very exposed.

The trouble is, it can be really difficult to nail down what’s wrong, particularly when it’s not so much an off flavour as the absolute absence of a key flavour. And, as you address some problems, others emerge. For example, we’ve been concentrating on improving the malt flavour by experimenting with lower temperatures, decoctions etc., so it’s disappointing then to taste the latest batch; note that, yes, there are lovely malt flavours; but be disappointed to find that they are overwhelmed by a ‘homebrew’ flavour that means we still wouldn’t want to drink several in a single sitting.

There are so many variables to play with — where do you start?

We’ve been inspired by enthusiastic hop-related posting at the Thornbridge Brewer’s Blog, Reluctant Scooper and Geoff’s website to get brewing again in earnest and, like Geoff, we’re going to do more single hop brews to try to learn a bit more about the differences between varieties.

The beer was fantastic — quenching, herbal and dry, with perhaps just a hint of banana in the aroma — but, on this showing, we’d be hard pressed to identify Motueka hops if we came across them again without a bloody great big sign telling us they were there. We tend to hop from beer to beer if there are several on offer but went back for more of this, Tandleman-style, which must say something.

For more single hop action check out Geoff’s fascinating homebrewing experiments.

Update 17/03/10 — of course we meant “a single variety of hop” rather than “a single hop”. How crap would that beer be?

It’s quite common for even decent beers to contain hop extract as well as hops to add a bit of pep, but is it going too far to use nothing but?

It makes us feel a bit uneasy.

A hop flower (from Wikimedia Commons, photographed by LuckyStar).

York Brewery occasionally produce beers using only a single varieties of hop. Their latest effort, Perle (4%), uses only that famous German ‘noble’ hop. The pump clip is adorned with German flags, and it’s hard not to suspect that the beer was inspired by a trip to Duesseldorf.

The fact that only one type of hop is used meant that we were able to focus on and appreciate its coppery, dry flavour and retrospectively recognise it as one we’d come across in various German beers. We’re learning, one hop at a time.

York are to be applauded for this kind of thought-provoking experiment. But don’t get the idea it was a purely intellectual exercise: hops aside, it’s a really tasty beer.