Grounds for hop-timism

It certainly seemed so, when I looked down to see dusty green crumbs covering the table and, worse, my jumper.

I looked like I’d been in an explosion in a herb-packaging factory. My hands were sticky and slick, and when I washed them the soap turned to a vivid yellow-green foam that looked not of this world.

There was a good excuse for it though, and it’s not as if I was the only one in such a state. Marston’s was launching its new range of pale ales, one a month, for one month only, the same basic 4% ABV beer brewed using one single hop — the trick being that the hop changes every month, while everything else about the beer stays the same.

In this way, the brewer can really explore the wide variety of hop characters from around the world, and the difference they make to beer.

So here we were: Marston’s brewers and executives, hop merchant Paul Corbett and a variety of writers and curious friends from the beer world, rubbing different hops in our palms to release their heady, suggestive essential oils, and then tasting the first three beers in the series to see what difference those oils make.

Hop character does vary surprisingly widely, and it’s only when you taste or smell things side by side that you really start to appreciate their full extent. We were encouraged to supply adjectives for each variety, and a celebrity they reminded us of, and if the evening wasn’t weird enough already, that’s when it started to get quite strange.

Fruity, citrusy, resiny New World hops evoked the spirit of Felicity Kendal, while earthy, spicy East Kent Goldings had some people showing their age with reminiscences of David Bellamy.

Rupert Ponsonby, of drinks PR company R&R Teamwork, urged us all to develop a new language for the flavour of beer, stretching ourselves beyond ‘hoppy’ and ‘malty’ to develop descriptions that actually mean something to ordinary drinkers.
Marston’s is not the first brewer to try such an experiment of course. Steve Wellington was tinkering with a similar idea at the Museum Brewery in Burton-on-Trent in the 1990s, and more recently Barnsley microbrewer Acorn is currently into its fifth year of making consecutive monthly IPAs, once again with a standard recipe in which the only thing that’s different is the single variety of hop used.

Not only has the idea already been done by a microbrewer, the pumpclips for the Marston’s beers have a distinctly ‘micro’ look to them — and you have to study them quite hard to spot the Marston’s name.

I don’t have a problem with that — they look cool, and make you want to try the beer.

And Marston’s is not the first of the larger, more traditional breweries to borrow the ideas, look and feel of the burgeoning microbrewery scene.

Last year Thwaites launched a new range of limited-edition beers that looked and tasted a million miles away from its established, conventional range.

Just recently, I received a package from Coniston Brewing Company, whose flagship bland Bluebird looks to have hardly changed since the 1950s, containing an extremely contemporary-looking bottle of a full-bodied 6% IPA.
The pages of this magazine are frequently a battleground for some of the bigger regional breweries and representatives of the microbreweries to take pot shots at each other. It’s depressing to read, and to the drinker it’s largely irrelevant.

When we did new research for the Cask Report last year, we found that drinkers do want wider ranges of beers on the bar, and this variety is giving energy and contemporaneity to the ale market.

But drinkers don’t talk in terms of ‘micros’ and ‘regionals’. They talk about ‘familiar’ and ‘unfamiliar’ beers. No-one apart from the most snobbish, anally retentive beer geeks cares how big the brewery is that made the beer, they just want a mix of familiar beers they can rely on and unfamiliar beers that arouse their curiosity.

That mix of the new and traditional is what keeps them coming back to the pub.

So it’s brilliant that an increasing number of old-school breweries, instead of just moaning about microbrewers eating into their business, are looking at what those microbrewers are doing well and co-opting some of their ideas.

The micros are small and nimble enough to move on to the next thing, and the whole market starts to feel wonderfully progressive, and more people drink more beer in pubs more often. What’s not to like?