Hop Headed - 4.2% Pale Ale
Hop Headed is our fifth trial hop beer of the year, using CF319. A simple malt bill of pale ale, plus torrified wheat and oats (to boost body & foam retention) support a layering of Olicana in the boil and CF319 as a dry hop. I’ve also used a yeast that attenuates a little further than our core range, resulting in a fairly dry beer with low bitterness and a refreshing lemony flavour. As it’s being released between our green hop beers there isn’t as much of this one available – I’d definitely like to brew with this hop again in the future, but for now get it while you can!
One of the most common questions brewers get asked is, ‘What happens to all of the ingredients once you’ve finished with them?’ And it’s a good point – once they’ve been steeped in water to create wort and it’s safely in the fermenter, we’ve still got three hundred-odd kilos of grain and five to ten kg of hops left over after every brew day, plus the fact that the 500g of yeast we start fermentation with grows exponentially…
The short answer is – animal feed! While we’re aiming to extract as much of the sugar from malt as possible, in reality this is at best around 70% effective. This means there is plenty of nutrition remaining in the grain, as well as the hops (although they have to be sprinkled on sparingly, as they’re still very bitter!) and yeast slurry. Our spent ingredients are collected weekly and used as pig feed – not only does this solve an issue for us by getting rid of the waste but supports another element of the local economy and maximises the usefulness of the ingredients.
Increasingly, sustainability is becoming a more and more important part of brewing. One of the key ways we approach this is the USP of the brewery – we only use UK grown hops, and being right in the middle of hop growing country (and on a farm!) means they have to travel as short a distance as possible to get to us. When the majority of beers in the craft sector are using hops from America and New Zealand, that adds up to a lot of air miles saved. It’s part of the reason for brewing this series of beers – supporting innovation in hop growing in the UK should lead to a wider range of hop characters available, and hopefully long-term more breweries will use them instead of their overseas counterparts.
Water usage is another big issue for breweries – while a large scale, fully optimised brewery probably only uses two pints of water for every pint of beer produced, smaller operations may use as many as six or seven. Part of this is simply being able to invest in more expensive equipment, but there are still things we can do. In the heat exchanger, water used to cool the wort after boiling is heated up itself during the process – this is then used for cleaning, which saves water as well as the energy required to heat it. We also monitor the pH of rinse water after cleaning, primarily to confirm the vessels are free of cleaning solution but also to minimise the amount of water we use while guaranteeing that.
The next big innovation in brewing sustainability seems like it will be in carbon dioxide capture. Kegged beer uses CO2 pressure to reach the bar and many small pack products are carbonated to a specific level – many breweries buy this in while at the same time, it’s floating into the atmosphere from their fermentation tanks. In practice it’s very difficult (and expensive) to purify and clean up the CO2 from fermentation to the point where it is suitable to be reused in a product, however progress is being made all the time towards making this technology more affordable, and it’s already far more common than it was a decade ago.
While producing beer is fairly energy intensive and produces a number of waste products, there are a lot of ways breweries can minimise their environmental impact. It’s a big focus for us at The Hop Shed (even down to optimising delivery routes to limit emissions), so we’ll keep doing everything we can to that end going forward!
