Wednesday 1 June 2016

New red beer

We're known, wrongly in my opinion, for just being brewers of pale and hoppy beers and our other brews scarcely get a mention in dispatches.  OK, I'd be the first to admit that we do major on the 4%-5% extra-pale hop-forward brews, principally because I like that style of beer the best, but I reckon some of our dark brews are just as good as the pales but get overlooked, criminally so on occasion.

Well, with that in mind, it's time for another "non-pale" brew to be created and so I've gone for a style which we've not really persisted with in the past, having created just a couple in 3 years, so it's definitely time "hoppy red", or "American red", or whatever you want to call it, gets - to use current trendy parlance - a "reboot"....

"American" red is a very different beast from "Irish" red; the US version is usually bitter-sweet and hoppy with a generally pretty repulsive tongue-curling burnt sweetness from crystal malt which, for some reason, yanks seem to love.  Irish red has this same rancid treacle toffee sweetness but almost no hops or bitterness meaning it tastes even more sickly-sweet and unbalanced...  and let's not even get into "Flemish" red which, although I absolutely adore it, would probably make most UK drinkers think they were on the Sarsons!

So, here's our latest red brew "Red Mist", but is it really American in style?  Well, in my opinion no, it isn't!  There's no crystal malt in the recipe - actually, there's never been any in the brewery full stop as Gazza loathes it - so we've made up the colour by some specialist German malts and the clever trick of "sparging over" some roasted barley to wash out colour but as little flavour as possible...

It's a red ale, but not as you probably know it... hopped with the bolshy, robust Columbus and fruity Chinook, this is a red different from most of it's peers; just like the brewery, really.








No comments:

Post a Comment