#heritage hops

Gungnir 3.9% Ernest Single Hop Golden Ale - Tasting Notes

Brewday - Ernest Single Hop Golden Ale

Catching up on some blog posts as I’ve been rather lax over the last month, so loads more incoming, including a write up for this very beer in a few days.

Having discovered the amazing English heritage hop Ernest last year I wanted to put something together that would really showcase it. Unfortunately the first beer I did seemed to have picked up a wild Yeast infection so wasn't really much of a showcase. So that leads me to today's Brewday, a Golden Ale with 80% Golden Promise, 10% Torrified Wheat and 10% Crisp Cara Gold. I thought I'd stick as many gold things in as possible, lol. But excited to see what this specialist super light crystal will bring to the beer. Mash at 66c and sparge at 72c with 20g of Ernest for 60 minute bittering followed by two charges of 40g at 15 minutes and 7 minutes. I'm sticking to a more traditional hopping schedule for this beer but going to go all out with 100g dry hop later. I really want to capture the wonderful fruity citrus aroma of the Ernest. I was pleased to find some T90 from Hukins Hops which will make dry hopping so much easier. I may have had to buy 250g but that just means bigger dry hop and some left over for later. It'll be good to get acquainted with the hop as I've just planted a Rhizome. Fermenting with NBS Classic English Ale Yeast.

Ended up a little below target at 3.9% but I'm all for the lower ABV beers at the moment, they still give a great taste and you can drink more! Which I'm sure everyone else is doing in lockdown as well.

Homegrown Hops New Addition

Now is the perfect time to get your hop rhizomes in the ground ready for the 2021 season, there’s still chance to get a plant and join the homegrown hops club. It may take 3-4 years for a full good harvest but it’s definitely worth it! I got my plants from A Plus Hops.

Sucellus - 6.8% NOEIPA - Tasting Notes

What happens when you take a NEIPA malt base with lots of whirlpool hopping but use heritage English Hops Ernest and Keyworth Early? Well you get a NOEIPA, a New Old English India Pale Ale! Light aromas of apricots, pineapple and passion fruit. Smooth and soft mouthfeel with a gentle sweetness from the honey malt. Hop profile is paired back but aromatic and with the same fruity flavours as on the nose but with a hint of citrus that cleans the pallet. None of the flavours are strong like an American beer but neither are they anything like an earthly floral traditional English beer. I've never tasted anything quite like it before. It took a few weeks of conditioning for the flavours to really come through but I think I do have something quite unique here. I would maybe lower the amount of honey malt next time as there is a quite strange sweetness to the beer despite finishing at 1.010 and I’d be interested to use these hops in a more conventional way and maybe single hop them.

No chance of that now though as they have sold out from my supplier, they’re only a small specialist hop growing farm, but they do have quite a few interesting heritage varieties so are well worth checking out, follow this link to A Bushel of Hops. English Heritage hops seem the way to go, good job I bought myself an Ernest rhizome! Next experiment is to try a single hop Keyworth Midseason, as A+ Hops supply this one as a rhizome as well and if it’s as interesting as Keyworth Early I might get a plant for that one as well. 

With regards of the name for this beer, Sucellus is a Celtic god associated with agriculture and wine. Only 11 inscriptions to Sucellus are known, one of which was found in my home City of York. He was also popular with the Gallo-Roman religion and I thought that he would be a good representative for a blending of heritage and modern brewing practices.

You can get the full recipe for this beer over on Brewers Friend.

Brewday - Sucellus NOEIPA

NOEIPA I hear you frantically googling, is this some new style all the cool kids know about and not me? Well you heard it here first as I’ve made up the style myself, lol. New Old England India Pale Ale!

Basically it's a NEIPA malt bill but with English heritage hops, although not too many as I want to avoid oxidation and also these hops are only available in leaf, which can make large volumes tricky. 

So the base is 42.1% Golden Promise, 26.3% Pilsner, 14.6% Pale Wheat, 5.6% Light Melanoidin, 5.4% Flaked Oats, 3.4% Acid Malt and 2.8% Honey Malt. I added 3g of Calcium Chloride to try and bring out a more silky mouthfeel along with my usual small Acid addition for our hard water and some campden to remove chlorine, but other than that this is the most adventurous I get with water treatments.

With 45g of East Kent Goldings for a full 60 minutes just for a bit of IBU, around 26. Then whirlpooling at 75c with 75g Keyworth Early and 75g Ernest to extract maximum flavour with minimal bitterness and without those essential hop oils boiling off.

I must say the Ernest smelt incredible when I opened the bag, grapefruit, citrus, not like an English hop at all let alone a heritage variety. Keyworth was a little more earthy and dank, let's hope I can pull this beer off as I'm really excited for these flavours.

The remaining 25g of each will go for a normal dry hop once fermentation has died down so I can lower the temperature to about 20c for optimum hop infusion over 3 days.

And finally just to make this brew even more complex I'm fermenting at 35c with some Hornindal Kveik which I dried last year. Also I didn’t have a good English yeast to hand so this was the best fix for that. Gotta love a hot ferment with Kveik though, it took just 3 days to get down to 1.012 from an OG of 1.062! I was just 1 litre off on my volumes for this brew, no.3 with the Brewzilla, so hopefully I’ve got all my calculations adjusted so I can be even more on point with no.4.

All this year I've been experimenting with English Hops, mainly new experimental varieties, GP75 being one of my favourites, but none have quite matched the pungency of American hops, until now! And guess what? They're not new experimental ones they're heritage English ones. The combination of Ernest and Keyworth Early in the sample I took at day 3 are incredible. Fruity, grapefruit, clean and tangy. I think I may have created a new style worthy of repetition here. My final gravity was 1.010 so a healthy 6.8%. Dry hopping was done in 3 days and after a brief crash cool I bottled up this weekend. So just a few weeks to go till I can test it out and report back. Thanks to A Bushel of Hops for putting me onto these hops, I'll definitely be trying more in the future and recommend you do to. I was so enamoured with Ernest that I managed to find a rhizome on Aplus Hops, which has since disappeared from their website, so I’m assuming I was lucky and it sold out. Although I won’t count my chickens until my pre order arrives.