Hop Token

We’ve been planning a new beer for some time, but the snow at the beginning of January – followed by the requirement to rapidly replace some of our inventory – have delayed things until last week. This last Thursday, I fnally got our act together and the first batch of Hoptoken, or possibly Hop Token, is now fermenting. It’s filled the brewery with the scent of orange blossom.

Most of our beers get most of their flavours from the malt and to a lesser extent, the yeast that we use. It’s not that hops are an afterthought, but they’ve played a less important part in my recipes. This is partly down to personal taste and partly down to a historical accident.

The taste aspect down to the peripatetic nature of my career which saw me spending 5 years in Munich in my younger days, and developing a taste for Munich’s local brew – Hefeweisen Wiessbier. This is a cloudy wheatbeer notable for it’s low hopping rate. You’d hardly know that it was hopped at all. My taste in beer has been skewed towards the lower end of the bitterness scale ever since, although since returning to the UK 5 years ago I’ve gradually come to enjoy bitterer brews and even the occasional IPA.

The historical accident was that we started the brewery in the middle of a hop shortage. In fact for the first 6 months it looked like we would be making beers without hops at all. I pretty much had to beg for our first few kilos and I still get a little frisson fear whenever I talk to a hop merchant (suppose they’ve run out ?). So the first recipes I put together had relatively small amounts of hops. They also tended to use continental hops since these were the only ones I could get hold of.

Hoptoken is different. We’ve been long aware of the gap in our lineup, and the discussion on whether or not to do an IPA or something similar has been going on for months. I asked around a number of our customers and in the end we’ve settled on around 4%, blondish, and about 40 IBUs (about grapefruit levels of bitterness). This is not too extreme but it’s certainly noticeable as it will activate the bitterness sensors at the back of your throat and even in the roof of your mouth.

We had some trouble deciding what to call it. In fact, virtually every hop related name and pun has already been taken and there’s no doubt that the name we’ve finally come up with: Hoptoken, is an obscure bit of history. These were tokens given to hop pickers in Sussex and Kent when the pickers took a measured amount of hops up to the oast houses. At the end of the day (or week) the hop tokens could be exchanged for real currency and so they were marked sixpence, 1 shilling and so on, as well as the name of the hop garden. There are people out there who collect them (inevitably) and we are looking at getting something like a hop token made up for us.

So what hops are we using ? This first example revolves around Amarillo hop from North America, but it looks as if the basic recipe will work with other varieties as well. We intend to produce a few variations such as Spalter and Willamette. Obviously these will taste different so it will be an opportunity to see what impact a particular variety of hop will have on a brew.

Hoptoken Amarillo is fermenting nicely and I expect it will be available casked and bottled within the next few weeks.