Green Hop Golden – 4.1% Golden Ale Harvest Moon – 3.8% Cold Pale Green Hop Pale – 4.5% Pale Ale
As always, the seasonals come thick and fast going into Autumn as it’s harvest time on the farm, which means green hop season. I wrote a blog about it last year, but in brief – the bines are cut, fed into the picking machine to remove the cones, and these are diverted into sacks so we can add them to the boiling kettle within an hour or so of picking. Being so close to the picking shed, there’s a chance it could be the shortest distance hops have to travel from field to beer in the world!
Our first green hop this year is a reimagining of an old favourite. We’ve used Goldings in our early edition for the last few years, and I’ve been really impressed with how the hop works in this format, so we’re going back to the well again, this time with a base recipe designed by our apprentice Tommy. Smaller amounts of the hop were added with 15, 10 and 5 minutes of the boil remaining, as well as the bigger addition once the heat has been turned off; this gives the flavour-active compounds in the hops different opportunities for expression, which hopefully results in a more complex beer.
Sandwiched between the two green hop beers we have a smaller batch of Harvest Moon, a cold pale ale. I had my first go at a cold IPA last year (Hop To It!) and it was really well received, so before the year was out, I wanted to have a go at brewing something similar. Harvest Moon has less bitterness than its predecessor and a lower hopping rate in the kettle; but then we went big on the dry hop, adding loads of Emperor and Olicana to layer bold orangey and apricot flavours on the clean base.
The second green hop hasn’t actually been decided as I write this – the nature of a live plant being somewhat unpredictable, we’re not exactly sure what’s going to be picked on the day we’ve scheduled the brew for! Every hop variety matures at a different rate, and so the aim when planting is to have some ready to harvest each week from the end of August to end of September. Even then, the rate of development is highly dependent on a number of factors (a key one this year being the weather), and it’s not until quite late in the growth cycle that the cones begin produce the oils that give us aroma & flavour in brewing – it’s down to the skill of the farmer to decide when the optimum time to harvest is.
As a general rule, the traditional varieties tend to mature earlier, meaning the more subtle hops tend to be harvested first and the bolder flavours towards the end of the season. This is why brewing two different green hop beers each year is exciting for us – it gives us a chance to showcase both a variety on which the British brewing industry was built, and the direction of modern innovation. I’m hoping to use a variety we haven’t tried as a green hop since I started working here in the pale, so keep an eye out for it being released in the first full week of October!
